Back to normal posts tomorrow, hopefully. I’ve been a little snowed under — especially as I’m taking a hypercompressed ASL class at Gallaudet at the moment. So, for now, can anyone guess what fairy tale I’m (trying) to recount in this video from my homework? I needed to tell some story with not-too many characters that would give me the opportunity to contrast the different temperaments of the people in the story. For some reason (my fever, maybe?) my first... Read more
There are three priestesses at the heart of Max Gladstone’s newest book in his Craft Sequence, Full Fathom Five, and none of them fit easily into the traditional split of Maiden, Mother, Crone. In his last book, Two Serpents Rise, the action took place in a city that had thrown out its gods and had replaced it with a more mechanical means of keeping communion flowing between souls. This book also takes place in a city without gods (Kavekana’s gods went out... Read more
In 2014, I’m reading and blogging through Pope Francis/Cardinal Bergoglio’s Open Mind, Faithful Heart: Reflections on Following Jesus. Every Monday, I’ll be writing about the next meditation in the book, so you’re welcome to peruse them all and/or read along. This week, in my Pope Francis reading, I found his description of… for lack of a better word, the discretion of higher truths a little confusing: Truth has great value, but it lacks immediate clout, whereas power coerces. Paradoxically, the more noble the truth... Read more
My birthday is still about a week away, but my friends and I are celebrating tonight in the best way… with assigned reading and an argument. Two years ago, I got my friends to all watch Stephen Sondheim’s Company and Passion, and then we had a symposium on the nature of love that spilled over onto the blog, with guest posts from some of you who watched at home. This year, I emailed everyone a collection of excerpts from the Friendship/Philia chapter... Read more
In a review of Thrive: The Power of Evidence-Based Psychological Therapies, Jenny Diski is suspicious of CBT as a form of therapy. She’s concerned that it’s focused on managing symptoms of distress, rather than causes, and that, ultimately, it’s more focused on making mental illness bearable for bystanders than for the person who is ill. She writes: CBT fulfils the authors’ admirable desire for an improvement in mental health provision. It takes at most 20 sessions, often far fewer; it is so standardised... Read more
— 1 — I’ve been back stateside for a week, but I’ve still been doing Ireland reading, since I wound up with more books than could fit into a vacation. Here’s the Hibernian reading that got done this week: A Wizard Abroad by Diane Duane Strumpet City by James Plunkett, which was the book all of Dublin read together in April 2013 Tis Frank McCourt, much less enjoyable than Angela’s Ashes Cuchulain of Muirthemne: The Story of the Men of the... Read more
At her own blog, Elizabeth Bruenig has weighed in on yesterday’s discussion of the mother who abandoned her baby in a subway station, and she does an able job teasing out the two tangled questions: what the mother ought to do, and what the law should do in response. (I’m selling it short by excerpting, so check out the whole thing) [T]he question then becomes when looking at legal tools: what kind of a world are we trying to create? But... Read more
I’ve been rooting for the cops to not catch the mother who abandoned her baby in a NYC subway station. Turns out they did, and she’s facing a felony charge for abandonment of a child. The reason I’m feeling queasy about the trial is the poor incentives it creates for desperate parents. Given her limited options, the woman picked a pretty good place to leave a child. I can see the logic in picking a busily trafficked subway platform where... Read more
I had a great time speaking at the offices of The Irish Catholic this past week on tactics for having better fights about religion. It also wound up being written up for The Irish Times by Breda O’Brien. The video is now up on iCatholic.ie, plus, I’ve embedded it below: Often, here on the blog, I talk mostly about tactics for online fights, but, during the talk and the Q&A, more of the focus was on engineering productive conversations between small groups... Read more
In 2014, I’m reading and blogging through Pope Francis/Cardinal Bergoglio’s Open Mind, Faithful Heart: Reflections on Following Jesus. Every Monday, I’ll be writing about the next meditation in the book, so you’re welcome to peruse them all and/or read along. In this week’s chapter from Open Mind, Faithful Heart, Pope Francis is discussing the danger of punching down (in slightly more highfalutin language). For those experiencing tribulation, the great temptation is fatigue. The constant exposure to evil makes us lose a proper notion of... Read more
Unequally Yoked
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