Plague Archives - Public Seminar

Higher Ed

Don’t Let Campuses Become Plague Dystopias

College and university presidents should have the courage to halt their reopening

July 30, 2020 • by Eileen Hunt Botting

In late May, the President of Notre Dame and Thomist philosopher Fr. John I. Jenkins defended his decision to reopen its campus in terms of the university’s religious and moral values, including the virtue of having soldierly “courage” in the face of death. This, he insisted, was a virtuous Aristotelian “mean” between ...

Don’t Let Campuses Become Plague Dystopias

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 ...

Public Health

What Thucydides Can Teach Us

Ancient reflections on a time of plague

April 20, 2020 • by Daniel Schillinger

Coronavirus will end the Trump presidency – or it will boost his chances of reelection. COVID-19 will provoke a revolution – or it will restore trust in liberal democratic institutions. It will make us more distant – or it will bring us closer together. Thucydides, the ancient Athenian author of the History of the Peloponnesian War, ...

History

Plague in the Age of Twitter

March 17, 2020 • by Eileen Sperry

COVID-19 has quickly become the outbreak of the digital era. SARS and H1N1 played out on the evening news, but this -- this is happening in real time, in piecemeal, in limited character counts. While epidemics have come and gone before, it feels unprecedented, at least in my lifetime as a 30-something, to ...