Individualism

Sex and the Commons III -- Stunted Intimacy

Love cannot be disembodied even in its most sanctified forms, nor is it without sanctity even in its most fleshly. – Thomas Mann, Magic M...

Sex and The Commons II: Uncommon Sex

In this three-part series, I wanted to reflect on the relationship between the erosion of our discourse on the Common Good and our most i...

Sex and The Commons I: The Erosion of the Common Good

I taught college for most of four decades, and it just seems to me that these sentiments have become alien to citizens of a nation for wh...

How Do You Think You Are?

We all take as a given, like fish in water, a cultural and historical preoccupation with the “self” as something to nurture, protect, exp...

How We Know Ourselves: d. Intimately

There is a real paradox in intimate relationships. No one wants to be alone, but for someone to be really with you, especially to be a li...

Why Not Just Tell the Stories?

An occasionally wise erstwhile friend once told me he thought there were three important things in life to think about. While his express...

The Power of Literary Reading

This is a "guest blog" from my old friend Martha, my one-time Dean of Faculty who got me involved in a writing group, part of the inspira...

Family Drama

“This Be the Verse,” by Philip Larkin, 1971 They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the...

Disembodied Communication

We live in a social world in which we are mimetically engulfed, constantly sharing and imitating the behavior and facial expressions of t...

You're Breaking Up

We use the phrase “you’re breaking up” too often these days to simply mean (or occasionally just pretend) that an electronic signal betwe...

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