If there has been a common experience of this current age of pandemic, it is the unsettling feeling of dislocation — temporal, sensory, social. It's a troubling human problem that appears to manifest in the young especially, and most acutely in teenagers and young adults who are in the most important stage of their lives for developing, understanding and exploring those very parts of life.

A recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey showed that during the pandemic, some 63% of 18- to-24-year olds have experienced anxiety or depression, with roughly a quarter also contemplating suicide.

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In a little-known speech, W. E. B. DuBois once proposed the life of Saint Francis of Assisi as a model of civilization. His was an exemplary life, DuBois pointed out, because he lived in response to the following queries: "What am I? What is this world about me? And the world and I—how shall we work and laugh together?" DuBois happily avoids the dominant modern celebration of Francis as a starry-eyed, nature-loving Romantic. Moreover, coming from a secular author turning to Francis, DuBois's speech opens up the possibility of dialogue, increasingly rare these days, between sacred and secular about the enduring longings of the human soul—longings whose cultivation is at the core of truly liberal education.

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In the Purgatorio, the middle book of his Divine Comedy, a book organized around the seven deadly sins, the great Italian poet Dante describes the envious as the "one who, when he is outdone, / fears his own loss of fame, power, honor, favor; / his sadness loves misfortune for his neighbor."

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Human trafficking is an insidious industry. It is also an enormously lucrative one. Global profits run to roughly $150 billion a year with an estimated 25 million victims trapped in modern slavery, according to Human Rights First.

The question of how to fight it is one not only of raising awareness to the reality of what is happening but of how society and law enforcement should respond to effectively reduce, if not eradicate, the benefits traffickers get from their crimes.

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T.S. Eliot once wondered: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" Eliot wrote these words before the internet, Twitter, and the explosion of digital knowledge. He was worried, rightly, about both the dissolving of knowledge into bits of information and about the vanishing of the wisdom of the ages that creates a synoptic vision of the place of humans in the universe.

It's a worry that comes to my mind as an educator and as someone who considers education a journey in seeking truth and in working toward understanding. The question now is whether universities can, or will, guide students in that search.

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