authors remain vital, valuable resources for those still attempting to define
better what Richard Sennett calls‘the cultural ideal and social fact of human-
ism’.^50 Sennett’s essay‘Humanism’appeared in this year’sBest American
Essaysvolume, a prominent place for an exploration of what humanism has
meant and still means today. And how we remain,‘engaged in a project still in
process. A humanism yet to be realized of making social experience more
open, engaging, and layered’.^51 Sennett considers his topic by way of Pico,
whom we encountered earlier, and other figures have also come in for
attention at the recent MLA conference.^52 There was a session for example
on Boccaccio the humanist and Petrarch’s great contemporary. Moreover, our
present crisis of the humanities in higher education also prompts many to
pay attention to the roots of modern education. For example, Renaissance
scholar Jennifer Summit has recently looked back to a Renaissance humanism
to forecast the future of the humanities today, arguing that whenever an
academicfield experiences a crisis, scholars naturally will return to‘[t]he
historical sources of their own disciplinary formation’.^53
For others, literary humanism and our Renaissance past are important
resources for democracy. For example, in his bookWhy Read, Mark Edmondson
represents the most secularized version of our subject. For him, liberal edu-
cation is‘central to the health of democracy’.^54 In fact, he describes democracy
enabled by democratic humanism in ostensibly religious terms.‘These are the
sources of my faith and hope’, he writes as he imagines a nation or world
where people have fuller self-knowledge, fuller self-determination, where self-
making is a primary objective, and I imagine that hits our ears in a kind of
multiple and maybe conflicting and agitating way.^55 It should be a world of
‘rich inter-animating individuality in tandem with aflourishing commu-
nity’.^56 This democratic humanism is close in spirit to theHumanist Maga-
zine. The magazine promotes critical enquiry and social concerns. Those two
topics were dear to our Renaissance humanists. Ironically, the Christian faith
that fuelled Renaissance humanism and profoundly shaped liberal education
is at this moment not just scuttled but met with hostility by secular humanists.
For example, the Humanist Magazine reported in its last issue that the
Harvard Chaplaincy had awarded its humanist of the year prize to the atheist
entertainer Seth MacFarlane, who will soon host the Academy Awards and is
apparently responsible for great cultural products. It should be clear that the
(^50) Richard Sennett,‘Humanism’,Hedgehog Review13/2 (Summer 2011), 21.
(^51) Sennett,‘Humanism’, 30. See also, Richard Sennett,‘Humanism’, in David Brooks (ed.),
The Best American Essays(New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), 244–54.
(^52) Author refers to MLA 2013 Annual Meeting.
(^53) Jennifer Summit,‘Renaissance Humanism and the Future of the Humanities’,Literature
Compass9/10 (October 2012), 665.
(^54) Mark Edmondson,Why Read(New York: Bloomsbury, 2005), 32.
(^55) Edmondson,Why Read, 142. (^56) Edmondson,Why Read, 143.
188 Brett Foster