Thought Work: Thinking, Action, and the Fate of the World

This anthology poses challenges central to Elizabeth Minnich’s book The Evil of Banality: On The Life and Death Importance of Thinking to outstanding thought leaders from a wide range of fields. In a time when even small acts can have consequences that spread wider and much faster than ever, when public discourse is more banal and superficial even as it is inflated by bluster and fractured by group-think, knee-jerk partisanship, and hyper-specialization, it is a book whose outstanding authors reflect with urgency on how we can and why we must think what we are doing as professionals, citizens, public actors, and, crucially also, as educators.

The book brings together a group of distinguished thought leaders in widely varied fields: philosophy, evaluation, community organizing, sociology, systems thinking, business management, sociology, leadership, humanities, public policy, ethics, and religion. Each of these authors has struggled with how to practice as well as how to teach people not only to be a success as measured by title, office, and pay, but how and why it is crucial that each and all of us learn to think well about what we are doing, its effects, how and why we are doing it. They discuss issues such as lying; the ethics of ‘fixing’ genes that will then be passed on; knowing when, even whether, to intervene in genocide; unintended effects of economic development efforts; the effects of rewards only for short-term studies; making public policy with the public.

Philosophically framed and interdisciplinary in approach, the book is written to be accessible to a general educated audience. It is designed to be thought-provoking, illuminating, and useful.