Patrick Gilger, S.J., Author at Public Seminar

Migration

The Rise of Humanitarian Corridors

How a lay Catholic community mobilized a transnational response to wartime refugee crises

April 18, 2022 • by Patrick Gilger, S.J.

The type of global public religion that the Sant’ Egidio community offers no silver bullet for those who are internally displaced or pushed across borders. And yet, secularism and secularists cannot combat these crises alone. Although a magical solution is not at hand, a certain form of help is. The ...

Public Health

A Jesuit Went to Milan to Learn Italian

Covid-19 taught him something more

April 28, 2020 • by Patrick Gilger, S.J.

After sunset each night teenagers gather in the piazza below the windows of my fifth-floor room. They are not rowdy, not really. They are just young. And here, apparently, that means they talk and sing a bit, and then drink a bit and sing a bit more. Then they sit and laugh and ...

Feature

Public Seminar Interview with Khary Lazarre-White

Lazarre-White discusses his latest book ‘Passage’

October 11, 2017 • by Patrick Gilger, S.J.

Mr. Lazarre-White recently spoke with Public Seminar about where Passage came from, the experience of writing it, and what he hopes the novel will communicate. Copies of Passage can be found at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or at your local book retailer. *** Public Seminar: Thank you for taking some time with Public ...

Politics

21st Century Populism: Crowds, Mobs, Masses, and Publics

An NSSR Sociology Conference

April 3, 2017 • by Patrick Gilger, S.J. and Ben Weinberg

A spectre is haunting Europe — or the world, so it seems — the spectre of populism. At no time since the 1920's have such large waves of mobilization frightened, excited, and rattled so many, sparking omens of a collapsing world order. From Brexit to Trump, from Duterte to Podemos, populism ...

21st Century Populism: Crowds, Mobs, Masses, and Publics

Education

Politics of Small Things

December 13, 2016 • by Patrick Gilger, S.J.

This piece is part of the OOPS Series, "Social Interaction." Jeffrey Goldfarb’s “The Politics of Small Things” is a both an insightful work of social analysis and -- through this analysis itself -- an enactment of this-worldly hope in, as he might phrase it, these dark times. Instead of focusing on ...

Education

Deweyan Response to Hyperdemocracy

October 2, 2016 • by Patrick Gilger, S.J.

This piece is part of the OOPS Series, "Social Interaction." This past May, Andrew Sullivan -- political blogger extraordinaire -- made his much anticipated return to the land of talking heads with an essay on hyperdemocracy and the rise of tyranny. In it, he argued that the overexpansion of direct democracy ...