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A Eucharistic Pedagogy: Gospel Parables and Teachings in Simone Weil’s “On the Right Use of School Studies”

Christy Lang Hearlson read

This article examines biblical allusions in Simone Weil’s “On the Right Use of School Studies,” in which she argues that study can train our attention to God and neighbor. Focusing on Weil’s use of Jesus’ teachings that mention bread, meals, and table service, this article reveals an underlying theme of Eucharist (communion) in Weil’s essay on studying. Together with Weil’s comment that school studies are “like a sacrament,” this analysis suggests that Weil offers a “eucharistic pedagogy” shaped by her mystical theology of Eucharist, a theology itself shaped by George Herbert’s English-language poem “Love.” Throughout, the article compares Weil’s original French with its English translation, noting where the translation obscures her use of the Bible or her theology, and it also examines the Greek biblical text, since Weil read the New Testament in its Greek original. The article concludes with a critique of Weil’s educational vision, which relies on a dyadic vision of the eucharist, and suggests that a communal vision of the eucharist can support a social vision of education.

Horizons, vol. 49, no. 1 (May 30, 2022)

Christy Lang Hearlson is a professor in the Theology and Religious Studies department at Villanova University.

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The philosopher who warned us about loneliness and totalitarianism

Sean Illing & Lyndsey Stonebridge read

Sean Illing interviewing Lyndsey Stonebridge, a humanities professor at the University of Birmingham.

 

Excerpt:

Professor Stonewridge: “Karl Marx will talk about alienation. Max Weber will talk about disenchantment. Simone Weil, another brilliant woman thinker who doesn’t get nearly enough attention, will also talk about uprootedness in the same way as Hannah Arendt. But [Arendt] talks about loneliness as a distinct modern problem.”

Vox (May 8, 2022)

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A Negative Effort: Simone Weil and the Ethics of Attention in Palliative Care

Aldis H. Petriceks read

Excerpt

“. . . Attention, for Weil, is the beginning of all ethics, because one cannot know how to act toward another person if one has not first understood that person. Yet, according to Weil, we cannot understand others through sheer efforts of attention. She believes that the mind is constantly at work projecting its own imagination and valuations on itself and the world around it, and that these projections inhibit true knowledge. To translate her thoughts into the language of medicine, we could say that a clinician is always at risk of projecting their assumptions and biases, implicit and explicit, onto the patient.

But because the clinician’s mind is the source of these projections, it cannot of its own strength counter them with a truer perception of the patient’s reality. In other words, attention is not something that you create through conscious effort. A squinting of the eyes, a tightening of the muscles, a serious face: all these images of the concentrated individual leave us only more aware of ourselves. The goal is to become aware of the patient, and so we reach a clinical paradox: attention is a core component of our work in palliative care because it allows us to see others more clearly, but this attention cannot be willed in the same way as, say, the movement of one’s arm.

The resolution of this paradox is to say that attention does involve effort, but a special sort of effort. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Weil’s concept of attention is not “a ‘muscular effort’ but a ‘negative effort’ … involving … a growing receptivity of the mind” (Rozelle-Stone and Davis, Reference Rozelle-Stone and Davis 2021). It is not an action but something we position ourselves to receive, “less a moral position or specific practice and more an orientation” (Rozelle-Stone and Davis, Reference Rozelle-Stone and Davis 2021). To say that attention is a negative effort is to claim that our effort is used largely to empty ourselves of internal noise and narratives, and to allow the patient to fill in the gap. We forget about ourselves without forgetting our knowledge or our role as healers, and this new orientation consists “of suspending our thought, leaving it detached … empty … holding in our minds, within the reach of this thought, but on the lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of” (Rozelle-Stone and Davis, Reference Rozelle-Stone and Davis 2021).

When we pay this sort of attention, we undergo something similar to what poets experience in the process of composing a poem. “The poet,” Weil writes, “produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real. It is the same with the act of love. To know that this man who is hungry and thirsty really exists as much as I do — that is enough, the rest follows of itself” (Weil, Reference Weil 1997). Not only does attention help me to understand the human being toward whom I want to act ethically; attention is itself an ethical act because it grants dignity and autonomy to a person who exists independent of my own mental constructs. The more I attend to the patient, the more my own mental image of them is replaced by a truer reality, and the more I recognize — “the rest follows of itself” — my professional and moral obligations toward them (Weil, Reference Weil 1997).

An honest perception of the patient in front of me will, therefore, involve an honest recognition of what I feel and think around them; and the constant reorientation toward that patient will remind me to leave those feelings and thoughts to the side, allowing me to be morally and professionally shaped not by my own agenda but by the needs of the patient. One writer claims that “only such a move makes it possible to recognize the fundamental equality and identity of all people, which means it is also the only chance for justice” (Rose, Reference Rose 2022). Through Weil’s philosophy, then, we see that compassion, ethics, and justice in medicine “are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention” to the patient. In that case, educators in palliative care could have few greater aims than “to prepare, by training the attention, for the possibility of such an act” (Weil, Reference Weil 1997). . . .”

Palliative & Supportive Care (April 25, 2022) (published online by Cambridge University Press).

Aldis Petriceks is an MD Candidate at Harvard Medical School.

 

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Ukraine: Apparent War Crimes in Russia-Controlled Areas

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Excerpt: “(Warsaw) – Human Rights Watch has documented several cases of Russianmilitary forces committing laws-of-war violations against civilians in occupied areas of the Chernihiv, Kharkiv, and Kyiv regions of Ukraine. These include a case of repeated rape; two cases of summary execution, one of six men, the other of one man; and other cases of unlawful violence and threats against civilians between February 27 and March 14, 2022. Soldiers were also implicated in looting civilian property, including food, clothing, and firewood. Those who carried out these abuses are responsible for war crimes. . . .”

Human Rights Watch (April 2, 2022)