Since it’s Jean-Paul Sartre’s birthweek and #Christianity is trending on Twitter, here’s a little thread about why Martin Luther King, Jr. thought Sartre was wrong about freedom. But first, a photo of Dr. King’s note card on existentialism ⬇️: 1/ In his well-known account of his ‘pilgrimage to nonviolence’, King claimed that Protestant liberalism and neo-orthodoxy both left him dissatisfied: “each represents a partial truth”. Existentialism, he wrote, “in spite of the fact that it had become all too fashionable, 2/

I know it’s apt and amusing that Camus’ *The Plague* is selling well in these interesting times, but may I also recommend Simone de Beauvoir’s *Old Age*?

In it, Beauvoir described the hypocrisy of societies that claimed to value ‘human’ life. 1/ If the economy is founded upon profit, she said, “the entire civilization is ruled by profit. The human working stock is of interest only insofar as it is profitable. When it is no longer profitable it is tossed aside” (OA 13). 2/