Culture

Are Trigger Warnings Ruining Literature?0
- Culture
- August 9, 2018
It was an ordinary lecture to first-year students, on “Women Writers and Modernism.” My brief was to introduce the different ways men and women responded to the social, intellectual and artistic challenges of the modernist movement. This is a subject about the literature of the early 20th century, but it tackles some difficult social questions
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The Problem With Conflating Sexual Advances With Sexual Harassment 0
- Culture
- August 8, 2018
It is wrong to ask someone intrusive questions about his private life. A federal appeals court made that clear in allowing a woman to sue over invasive questions by federal officials. It ruled that she had a plausible claim that federal officials violated her constitutional privacy rights by questioning her about private details of her
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Liberation Theology: How Competing Claims of Being on God’s Side Are Testing Our Social Order 0
- Culture
- August 8, 2018
Religion is a vital source for change, but it does not yield easily to what the political philosopher John Rawls in 1997 called the ‘public reason’ that enables liberal democracies. In the late 1960s, for example, a new group of radicals, known as liberation theologians, challenged the accommodation of religion to an unjust society. The
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Why We Fear (and Crave) Commitment 0
- Culture
- August 8, 2018
Recently, I attended my friend’s bachelorette party. It was tasteful compared to typical bachelorette festivities, but one thing kept us talking. That night, my friend received a plethora of congratulations, too many to count. This might be as expected considering her mock wedding veil and the sash that read, “bride to be.” So what was
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Justifying Racism Through Language 0
- Culture
- August 8, 2018
The best way to grasp how sociology has managed to make color-blind racism (CBR) seem believable is to study its Newspeak (to continue the Orwell theme). Whiteness To many modern sociologists, color blindness is a racist weapon that works, somehow, through whiteness, a scheme of thought invisible to most whites, but revealed by CBR sociology. Whiteness
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Politics Is Beginning to Consume Our World. That’s Bad.0
- Culture
- August 7, 2018
I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Even after I’d earned my Ph.D. degree, my dad used to look at me with a twinkle in his eye and tell me, “Son, the trouble with you is that you don’t know nothing.” And he was right in regard to knowing worthwhile, practical things and having
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