MJ00LTE Letters Letters to Academe of three hundred words or fewer are encouraged.
Academe reserves the right to edit letters.
I agree with him. Having been an undergraduate philosophy major, I appreciate his point that ethical inquiry has been pushed into the margins of university education. I think it is because he ends up sermonizing rather than offering constructive ways to deal with our current curricular problems. My sense is that, for all of Bellah s intriguing ideas, it is much easier to bemoan a lack of ethics in university curricula and to disparage material preoccupations if you are sitting high on the perch at the University of California, Berkeley, than if you are teaching at any of the hundreds of good urban universities, such as my own, or at a community college. I suspect that if my students read Bellah s article, they would experience it as criticizing their desire to live more comfortably in what he calls the Age of Money and perhaps as demeaning their values.