
Like Narcissus who died through being consumed by self-obsession, postcolonial critique is dazzled by the perverse logic of colonial value despite wanting to separate from it.

European thinkers in early modernity, John Locke chief among them, looked to Europe’s encounter with Indigenous peoples and pored over the developing body of “native information” to lay the foundation of a political order not derived from Scripture or Church Authority but from presumptively secular natural rights and reason of “the people.”

The catholicity of dreams makes them powerful but politically ambivalent. In my mind, the dreams of utopian Christianity are no different.

For Anders, the problem is not that humans have created a world of artifice. Rather, the problem is that in the modern technological environment we make products that are not measured on the basis of human needs but dramatically exceed them.

We invited Mac Loftin, Hanna Reichel, and Phil Christman, authors of recent books speaking to our present moment of crisis, to reflect on the other two books — and the state of the world.


