Far less import than your belief of whether god exists is what you think your belief entails. Does it direct your behaviour by rules and commandments… - Susan Neiman

Like many others, I came to philosophy to study matters of life and death, and was taught that professionalization required forgetting them. The more I learned, the more I grew convinced of the opposite: the history of philosophy was indeed animated by the questions that drew us there.

Those who cannot find [moral clarity] are likely to settle for the far more dangerous simplicity, or purity, instead.

There's no question that the right-wing campaign to ban from American classrooms anything that might cause discomfort is dangerous. Anyone should be proud to belong to a nation whose heroes include Martin Luther King Jr. and Toni Morrison, two writers whom several school boards have banned. Along with a history of profound injustice, the United States has a long history of people who fought against it. Without examples of brave men and women who worked together to make progress toward justice, we will never have the will to make more. Those who cannot acknowledge past histories of progress are doomed to cynicism or resignation. Portraying all of American history as an engine of white supremacy, or all of German history as irrevocably poisoned by antisemitism, is bound to provoke backlash, and it already has. But even if it didn't, it wouldn't be true—and isn't the demand for historical reckoning itself a demand for truth?