Jennifer Burns: belief

Transcript context

…What advice would you give in terms of reading about ideas you agree with and reading ideas do you disagree with? Even though I think the passion is important for the teaching of the ideas, like this passion is more important for the reading and understanding of them. So a lot of people have said to me, “I could never write about Ayn Rand. She makes me so angry.” I don’t get angry reading her. I am like, “Oh, there you go again,” or, “Well, that’s going to cause trouble.” And so I guess I’m approaching it with this sort of charity, but also with, I don’t have huge expectations. I’m not expecting to have the light shine on me. I’m not expecting to agree. I’m like, “I can be very clinical about it.” So that’s worked for me. It might not work for others. And then, I just try to find the humor in it. How funny is it, these different aspects of them? When teaching my students about Oliver Wendell Holmes, his dad wrote a poem about him. He called him the astronaut about how he came from outer space. He seemed like he came from outer space. I’m like, “This is his dad’s view of his son.” That’s how weird of a guy he was. And so I try to find that, keep alert for those funny kind of human touches that these are ultimately just people, people with ideas that they spent enough time polishing up and developing that we still want to read about them 100 years later. What about the dramatic formulation of that same question? Do you think there’s some ideas that are good and some of that are evil? Do you think we can draw such lines or is it more complicated like the old soul genius in line between good and evil that runs to the heart of every person?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.