I’ve set aside the papers I was grading, and am watching the coffee shop again. Watching people read their papers, seeing their screens flash by various news sites. I can’t help but think of another of Latour’s comments about modern man. He says that if reading the daily paper is modern man’s form of prayer, then it is a very strange prayer indeed, with culture and news and nature being churned and tossed up over again on a daily basis. It’s an amusing analogy, but perhaps more apt than he even realized; prayer, ultimately, is a gesture of hope, of faith in something greater than yourself. What better thing to pray in and to, than that which you directly influence? And in the field of interdisciplinary studies, what you directly influence is up to you, limited only by your own ideas.
– me, CHID 390 final paper, written much later than most, and thus with much more perspective