This book confronts growing concern about the quality of our civic discourse, the problems we do and do not take up as a people and as human beings. The most important being the survival of the planet. To get at such issues requires not only new approaches to criticism, but also a more profound sense of what it means to be a critic. Topics range from the L in scholarship, strategies for re-humanizing dehumanized people, politics in poetry and philosophy, 9/11 and the global reality in the 21st century.