Human nature does not change. Despite our postmodern sophistication and our wishful thinking about perfectibility, our nature is immutable—not least in its fickleness, its embrace of irrational ideas and practices, and its suggestibility.Charles Mackay’s classic work, Extraordinary Popular . . . . Continue Reading »
In early April, the Obama administration responded to an online petition calling for a “Leelah’s Law” that would ban “conversion” therapies. The petition, launched in response to the suicide of a child born a boy and given the name Joshua Ryan Alcorn who felt himself to be a girl and called himself Leelah, conflated therapeutic practices aimed at treating gender dysphoria and those aimed at sexual orientation change. In response to the petition, the White House added its voice to a growing chorus of opposition to such therapies while doing little to clarify the petition’s confusion: “We share your concern about its potentially devastating effects on the lives of transgender as well as gay, lesbian, bisexual and queer youth,” wrote Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama. “As part of our dedication to protecting America’s youth, this administration supports efforts to ban the use of conversion therapy for minors.” Continue Reading »
It wasn’t a conclusion he thought he’d come to. When he was a young graduate student, Jonathan Haidt presumed that “liberal” was pretty much a synonym for “reasonable,” if not for “obvious.” Now, as he writes in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and . . . . Continue Reading »
Chesterton was wrong, for that other vision stood in the wings. But, writing in 1908, how could he have predicted that parents would one day pay minds so modest as these for the opportunity to teach their children that they might not exist, that the answer to the question “Are we?” is not . . . . Continue Reading »
Wild Beasts and Idle Humors by Daniel Robinson Harvard University Press,311 pages, $29.95 Daniel Robinson, as I recall him, was a striking figure when he landed at Amherst in the late 1960s, and he was made all the more striking as he was viewed against the backdrop of this new setting. He was a . . . . Continue Reading »
Heresies perish not with their authors, but like the river Arethusa, though they lose their currents in one place, they rise up again in another . - Thomas Brown, Religio Medici Modernism is the synthesis of all heresies . - Pope Pius VI When I was young, time took forever to pass. I remember that . . . . Continue Reading »
This book has its flaws, especially with regard to Freudian thought, but its contributions to our understanding of how Freudian concepts were used to transform American culture are important and largely unknown. E. Fuller Torrey, a psychiatrist, focuses on the ways in which Freudian theory was used . . . . Continue Reading »
In the heat of the anguished nineteenth-century debate over evolutionary theory, Samuel Butler declared that Darwin had banished mind from the universe. But it was in fact Freud, with his insistence on sex as the fundamental force in human development, who delivered the death blow to man’s . . . . Continue Reading »
In his 1987 book Hope Within History, Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann argues that when people are in situations like that of the ancient Hebrews under Babylonian captivity, where an overwhelmingly powerful majority holds seemingly complete and brutal sway over an oppressed minority, the latter must . . . . Continue Reading »
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