"The Ethics of Oneness in a World of Pain" by Jeremy Engels

"We are all one" ... it’s a common refrain. Talk of oneness tends toward platitudes that make for great memes and GIFs but that offer very little guidance for how we should actually live our lives. In this presentation, based on his forthcoming book, The Ethics of Oneness: Emerson, Whitman, and the Bhagavad Gita, Jeremy Engels moves past commonplaces and bromides and inanities and hackneyed phrases to consider what it might mean to live a life of oneness. 

Engels is the Barry Director of the Paterno Fellows Program and professor of communication arts and sciences at Penn State. He is a rhetorical scholar who studies the rhetorical foundations of democratic culture, in all their beauty, in all their ugliness, and ultimately in all their perplexity.