Incidentally, "Jesus wept" is the very succinct shortest chapter of the Bible easily beats the shortest chapter of Moby Dick, brief as that is: 

Chapter 122, "Midnight Aloft - Thunder and Lightning" consists of the following as its entire text:

"Um, um, um. Stop that thunder ! Plenty too much thunder up here. What's the use of thunder ? Um, um, um. We don't want thunder; we want rum; give us a glass of rum. Um, um, um."

For some reason, you will read on the internet that "The Lee Shore" is the shortest chapter in Moby Dick, which it clearly is not being easily 10 times longer than "Midnight Aloft."

italyprof - please send me the link to your article.  I may be an atheist, but I find organized religions endlessly fascinating, and in many ways very similar.  I'm firmly convinced Jesus of Nazareth was a Buddhist (not an actual Buddhist, but his teachings are of the same strain). 

We found something we agree on. Have you read Karen Armstrong's "The Great Transformation" (no relation to the book of the same title by economic historian Karl Polanyi) ? 

You might like it as she shows that the "Axial Age" philosophical movements were inter-related and had a remarkable degree of common positions on things. 

I will sitemail you now.

I have not read "The Great Transformation", so forgive me if I am repeating something cited therein.  I don't find it unusual that major religions/philosophical movements have many similarities, in that I believe human consciouness evolves relatively consistently across the planet even without cross-communication, just as technological advances are often developed simultaneously.  For example many of the great technological developments of the last couple centuries, such as telegraph, the internal combustion engine, the creation of geology as a science, and radio transmission, were pursued simultaneously by people with little or no contact.  If technology can develop in multiple places 'in a vacuum', why not consciousness and sensibility?

Perhaps I've gotten a little off topic ...

Shoot, send your article my way as well, if you don't mind!

brandon, you can send it to me after italy passes it on to you :) 

I will send it to both of you now. 

Karen Armstrong has written an unbelievable number of great books on religion and religious figures. The only one I did not think utterly brilliant was her most recent, called "The Case for God" which I thought was snobby and did not have the same sense of someone opening a whole new way to see things that I found in her other works, including an amazing biography of Mohammad, and equally good one of Buddha, and a brilliant and important book against all fundamentalist versions of all religions. 

She is a former nun, now longtime theologian living in Britain, and is one of the people on my list of the smartest people in the world.

Others on the list (incomplete) include Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, John McDermott, a friend and author of the indispensable book "Corporate Society" as well as an incredibly innovative book on the time factor in economic theory, Ellen Mieksins Wood, John Bellamy Foster,  Richard Dawson and Stephen Hawking (though I cannot stand either of them), Eric Lerner, and my friends C. George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici, as well as fiction writer Ursula LeGuin. I might have included my former professor Giovanni Arrighi who passed away last year, but will keep the list to currently living people, Ten years ago Joseph Campbell would have been on it., and Stephen Jay Gould.  Not sure if I would put Toni Negri and Michael Hardt on the list. Admire some of their work but they get on my nerves a lot. We should probably add Bill James. 

Oh, and honorable mention to Mathew Crawford, author of "The Case for Working with Your Hands."

NOT on the list and specifically considered over-rated: 

Jeffrey Sachs - possibly the most over-rated individual on the face of the earth
Bill Gates - another candidate for that, but everyone knows that
Mark Zuckerberg - see above

Barack Obama - smart, not as smart as he thinks he is though, which is a problem
Bill and Hillary Clinton - see Obama, Barack
Larry Summers - argh !! 
Alan Greenspan - see Summers, Larry...
Mario Draghi
Elinor Olstrom - not what she appears to be, though less over-rated than Sachs despite their similarities

Would not have been on this list even were s/he still alive:  Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama

I noticed you said you were grading political science exams.  I was wondering how does one teach political science in today's world.  For example, here in the U.S. government has not been perfect but there was a decent attempt to serve the people up until about twenty years ago.  Now the goal of politicians and government is to screw thy constituents and take as much ill-gotten gain as they can at the expense of the people they serve.  This behavior has been spreading across the world which has contributed to the current state of affairs across the globe.  My question becomes how does one teach young people to devote themselves to a life of service to help others when the real world mantra demonstrates unbridled greed to the nth degree? 

Have a case to be on the list, but not sure how much is brilliance and how much good timing and luck, or else seem too limited by thinking that it is sufficient not to be on the wrong side to be on the right side: 

George Soros
Paul Krugman
Joseph Stiglitz

Hawkins and Dawson are a special case - their scientific brilliance is undoubted but I find the latter especially a jerk, whose intolerance of those who believe in God is as unthinking and offensive as anything any of the fundamentalists criticized by Armstrong have to say, while Hawkins is the smartest of the people that follows the dominant paradigm in physics, one that I think will be transcended sometime soon, though almost certainly after my lifetime. 

If you think this is a controversial list, you should see the flack I got on Bill James' website for dissing Brian Cashman ! 

Also might have been on the list were s/he still alive: 

George Carlin

And for those of you annoyed that this thread is WAY off topic - here is my teams' game of the week at least - weak hitting team outlasts a 1914 all-star lineup with Big Train pitching (I did have Grover Alexander pitch in relief but he only goes 33 innings in 1914 so he is not in my rotation) in 14 innings: 

http://www.whatifsports.com/slb/Boxscore.aspx?gid=18110600&pid=1&pbp=0&tf=9.95