Habits of the Heart

Category: Catholicism

  • Rashomon effect and understanding geopolitics in 2026: How to make sense of the world

    Rashomon effect and understanding geopolitics in 2026: How to make sense of the world

    We live in a post-modern world, where truth, with a certainty of 100% is very hard to establish, if not impossible. In a world of ubiquitous AI, seeing is not believing. We are also in a media context (in the USA and much of the West) where serious questioning of government propaganda is rare, if…

  • Interview with Dr. K.T. Connor on ethics and public life 

    Dr. K.T. Connor was a Senior Adjunct Professor with the MPPA program until recently, for over a decade and brings a wealth of experience in ethics, business as well as public leadership. She served as the Managing Director of Applied Axiometrics. She is the head of a virtual collaboration of consultants using decision-theory-based assessments in…

  • How does tourism promote human development?

    As someone who is new to understanding tourism and its impact on human development, I came across an academic article that asks the question which is quite literally the chicken and egg situation: which comes first, tourism or development and does one lead to the other, even though they may be correlated, at times?    …

  • Can celebrity philanthropy be harmful?

    Can celebrity philanthropy be harmful?

    Remember the ads in which Angelina Jolie comes out and shames the world for ignoring the plight of refugees?  Or the Bono concert for helping AIDS victims? While each of them has done incredible good in the world, there is an argument out there; and it is a fairly strong one that goes like this:…

  • How to measure what matters : Nonprofit management 101

    The nonprofit industry is obsessed with one thing : measurement. For those who do research or are involved in actual program delivery in the nonprofit sector, this desire to ‘measure spoons’ as Alnoor Ebrahim, a Harvard University professor calls it, can translate into a variety of things. There are a great many metrics that are…

  • Do we Need to Re-examine the History of Humanitarian Aid?

    I recently came across an article about the Ottoman Empire’s aid to Ireland during the great Potato Famine[i] in the 1840s. The article points out that the Ottoman sultan, Sultan Khaleefah Abdul-Majid I declared his intention to send £10,000 to aid Ireland’s farmers. However, the British did not like this idea and even forced the…

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