Rev. Rich Bledsoe ties together Adam’s betrayal of Eve, trust, the Enlightenment, the Reformation, Descartes’ relations with women, and a few other odds at ends at the Trinity house web site. . . . . Continue Reading »
Oliver Sacks discusses false memories, forgettings and autoplagiarism - his own and others’. These afflict teachers and writers perhaps more than others: “It is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened—or may have happened to someone . . . . Continue Reading »
“Traditional societies are far more diverse in many of their cultural practices than are modern industrial societies,” writes Jared Diamond in his recent The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? . Modern societies are outliers on the spectrum. So . . . . Continue Reading »
Edward Welch’s Shame Interrupted: How God Lifts the Pain of Worthlessness and Rejection is a remarkable book. It offers a penetrating, discomfiting analysis of the experience of shame, which Welch summarizes under the headings of nakedness and exposure, isolation and being an outcast, . . . . Continue Reading »
Tournier ( Escape from Loneliness. , pp. 25-6) talks about the instability that results from religious conversions: “One woman, a soul eminently sensitive and deep, born a Catholic, was converted to Protestantism under influences which naturally I would not criticize. For her it was from an . . . . Continue Reading »
Edwin Friedman ( A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix ) notes that the intensity of an adulterous relationship arises from the way it creates an emotional triangle. The attraction is not the sex so much as the secrecy, which “creates an intense emotional bond by . . . . Continue Reading »
Kahn: “No great insight is required to see the movement toward the pornographic in the representations of romance, or the move toward romance in the genre of the pornographic. This is the great secret inside the romantic: romantic lovers are coconspirators in the pornographic moment. The . . . . Continue Reading »
In the same 2005 Critical Inquiry article where he quotes Freud on kissing, he gives a brief, provocative phenomenology of kissing. The mouth, he asserts, is the most intimate part of the body that is generally public. Eyes traditionally reveal the soul, but the mouth is a yawning entry into the . . . . Continue Reading »
In what J. Hillis Miller calls a “somewhat puritanical passage” from the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis , Freud targets kissing as the “first perversion” of sex: “There is something else that I must add in order to complete our view of sexual perversions. . . . . Continue Reading »
“The pornographic,” writes Paul W. Kahn in Putting Liberalism in Its Place , “is the ecstatic moment shorn of religion. It stands in the antipolitical tradition of the hierophanic. The sacred too can displace ordinary forms of language. In both, we are rendered speechless, without . . . . Continue Reading »
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