I have come to realize after 5 decades of teaching that I am a philologos -- a philologist or "lover of words." Maybe you're not, but you're reading the words of one who is.
In our current academic setting, it is increasingly common to work on the basis of the term "linguistics" rather than "philology." I may have unwittingly contributed to this trend. After all, several of my publications have the word "linguistics" in their titles. When words are treated mainly as analyzable objects of linguistic research, language studies can easily become nothing more than a conveyor belt of information (data). Words are stripped of their poetic, ontological, ethical force, etc. This is why philology -- the historical, semantic, and cultural study of words -- is needed. For example, a word like "exercise" has been medicalized, even commodified. The Latin exercitum referred to exercise of any kind, not just reps in a gym.
To return to philology is to return to a love of language and literature. This branch of science deals with more than mere utility. It comprehends the linguistic, historical, interpretive, and critical aspects of literary and classical scholarship. Simplified, philology is the discipline of making sense of texts. It's not merely the study of language -- that's linguistics -- or the study of truth -- that's philosophy or theology. Philology is what J. R. R. Tolkien did.
Some German universities even have a Department of Philology (e.g., Leipzig, Göttingen, Freiburg, Köln) that study such topics as Anglistik, Slawistik, Germanistik, etc. Indeed, when I began work in Basel on Paul's words for "weakness," I found that to be a profoundly philological topic. It involved a combination of literary studies, history, theology, lexicography, and linguistics.
This is why the return to philology matters. It can serve as the locus for an emergent cross-disciplinary revolution, allowing for just as many approaches as the kinds of texts we read and study.