Thomas Pfau

Thomas Pfau is the Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of English and professor of German at Duke University with a secondary appointment on the Duke Divinity School faculty.

In recent years, the humanities have been attacked on several fronts. Humanistic study, it is claimed, is not marketable; its truths do not reduce to method; its skills cannot be measured. Yet, as Thomas Pfau suggests in Minding the Modern, perhaps the humanities can neither be sold, nor automated, nor quantified, because neither can the human being herself.  What is at stake in the humanities is our commitment to specifically human ways of thinking and acting as such.

How might Pfau's argument help us think about the contemporary role of the humanities in Catholic universities like our own, in other institutions of higher learning, and in our broader political and economic order?