Timothy Gutmann

This is the personal scholarship page for Timothy Gutmann. My PhD in religion is from the University of Chicago. I focus on Islamic and East Asian thought.

My research and teaching also focus on diverse traditions of educational theory and practice, the politics of belonging and the minority question, and liberalism in contemporary society.

Having taught at the UChicago and elsewhere, I am Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Southern Mississippi. I split my time between Hattiesburg and Chicago.

Intermission

April 06, 2015  /  Timothy Gutmann

Quo vadimus?

If we were social scientists, we could look at where we've been and on that basis make authoritative projections about the forthcoming.

The predictions would almost certainly be wrong. We could still get a Nobel, but we'd almost certainly be wrong. So I'm glad I, as a softy humanist type, that I never signed up for a model with such stakes.

When I started it, I wanted the blog to be

1) in an auxiliary relationship to my research,  and

2) to be a complex and funky storage unit for my otherwise unplaceable brilliances on humanistics of the everyday. The first has not substantively happened, alas, and the second would be highly questionable to say the least. 

What we ended up having in these pages here has tended to be

1) Spontaneous discourses on campus Kaffeeklatsch (usually parochially American political questions) and

2) My unrequested thoughts on middlebrow Western art. 

So, what's wrong? Were my expectations too high? Are there new goals that should be formulated based on what I have been doing that can still be challenging and worthwhile? Maybe. But, the more important question is: what's a goal that can prevent this space from becoming just another ventilation grate for frustrations that the world is not like what liberal education has us expecting it to be?

Here's one possibility, or a few possibilities ranked in descending order, like Maimonides on charity.

FIRST Post not.

SECOND If ye must post, post on what is less common to hear, to think or to know. If ye is always telling us that we must consider the nonmodern and non-Western for perspective on our own situation, focus ye on that.

THIRD If ye must post on something others have already been talking about very familiarly, think ye on why it is ye are posting it, and how it might be relevant to the stated purposes above.

Those goals set, I am not ready to tackle big issues like I mentioned in "Coming Distractions", though those are important. I will try to put together some thoughts on the Indiana religious-freedom law and what it might mean in light of my research on the minority question and the politics of intimacy and the demarcation of the public from the private. 

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Background Photo: Aasil K. Ahmad