The Magic Glasses of Critical Thinking

List of Figures - Introduction: Critical Thinking, Magic Glasses, and Film - Part One: Critical Thinking in Our Post-Fact World of Fake News - Alternative Fact and Fake News Inside Plato's Cave - My Own Escape From Our Culture's Cave: From Ego-Centrism to Global Awareness - Inching Towards Cosmic Consciousness - Part Two: The First Eight Rules of Critical Thinking - Rule One: Reflect Systemically - Rule Two: Select Market as the Economic Root of Political Differences - Rule Three: Reject Neutrality - A Compromise World Vision - Rule Four: Suspect Ideology - Rule Five: Respect History - Rule Six: Inspect Scientifically - Rule Seven: Quadra-Sect Violence - Rule Eight: Connect With Your Deepest Self - Part Three: Reviewing History Through the Magic Glasses - How the Wealthy Privatized the Commons - Colonialism and Its Structures - Commoners Resist Privatization - Hitler and Fascism's Defense of Privatization - Part Four: Fascism Today, Drawing Conclusions, and Breaking Silence - Continuation of Hitler's System in Globalization and the War on Terrorism - Capitalism's Contemporary Crisis and the Rise of Neo-Fascism - Rule Nine: Collect Conclusions and Live Critically - Rule Ten: Detect Silences (and Fake News) - Index.

D. Michael Rivage-Seul is a liberation theologian and former Roman Catholic priest. He taught for 40 years at Berea College in Kentucky, where he directed the Peace and Social Justice Studies program. There he soon received Berea's Seabury Award for Excellence in Teaching, the institution's highest faculty honor. His publications include The Emperor's God: Imperial Misunderstandings of Christianity and A Kinder and Gentler Tyranny: Illusions of a New World Order, co-authored with his life partner, Dr. Marguerite K. Rivage-Seul.

"Those with the courage to put on D. Michael Rivage-Seul's Magic Glasses will be given the opportunity to acquire the conditions of possibility for seeing the world with new conceptual lenses. This magical eyewear is not rose-tinted but assists the wearer in penetrating the viscera of social life, whose dank cavities contain the muck of the ages, the bile of political bitterness, and the sinewy tissue that connects all the turpitudinous machinations of everyday life. But if one steadies one's gaze, a glint of light appears, growing brighter the more one becomes accustomed to a more magnified world. And eventually the wearer is able to illuminate possibilities for reimagining the landscape of the ordinary, whose dank and fetid rot can become transformed into the loam of the extraordinary-the foundations for a new and more critical and loving humanity." -Peter McLaren, Distinguished Professor of Critical Studies, Chapman University, and author of Pedagogy of Insurrection