Category: The Bazaar
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Is NPR Woke?
In William Deresiewicz’s article in the online service UnHerd March 8, 2022 “Escaping American tribalism” he says that he started to listen to contrarian podcasts including Meghan Daum’s The Unspeakable in 2021, when he thought that American National Public Radio (“NPR”) has become partisan, on the “woke” side of the cultural divide: “Moral clarity” became…
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Parapsychology
Rupert Sheldrake still believes in and writes about parapsychology. Mr. Sheldrake had an experience in the late 1970s and became convinced that he had recognized something important about the relationship between ideas and reality. At points, Sheldrake takes the posture of a pragmatist like William James. But where James was soft on conversion experiences and…
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Cultish
I put a hold on Amanda Montell’s 2021 book Cultish when the local library acquired it, and read it when an ebook copy was available. Author Amanda Montell Wikipedia entry Personal site Sounds Like a Cult Podcast Book Cultish HarperCollins(Publisher) Book Page Amazon listing The focus in on modern cults as understood in the modern…
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Alt-right Thinkers
Benjamin Teitelbaum is an ethnographer, teaching at the Univerity of Colorado. He studies Scandinavian far right groups. Teitelbaum observed the role of the entrepreneurial activist Daniel Friburg, the principal of the publishing firm Arktos Media, in European politics. Arktos publishes the writings of traditionalist figures including René Guénon and Julius Evola. Teitelbaum wrote an opinion…
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Catching Up – Templeton and Positive Psychology
Having mentioned Templeton, the mutual fund manager turned patron of the spiritual arts, in passing in my entry Ruse on Evolution, and Seligman’s Positive Psychology movement in my entry Psychology in Recovery and Be Happy, I was interested in “John Templeton’s Universe” in the The Nation. Barbara Ehrenreich looks at the weirdness that happens when…
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Religious Shopping Tour
British writer Roland Howard went on a tour to meet people demonstrating the variety of religious experience in Britain at the end of the 20th century. Shopping for God, A Sceptics Search for Value in the Spiritual Marketplace is a travel narrative – he went, he saw, he listened, he wrote. In the telling of…
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Bliss Chronicles
The cover art on Don Lattin’s Following our Bliss is a Volkwagen Bus painted in the psychedelic style associated with the hippie movement, which goes with the subtitle “How the Spiritual Ideas of the Sixties Shape our Lives Today”. Lattin has been writing about religion or spirituality for the San Francisco Chronicle and an assortment…
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Alien Abduction
Beam Me Up Godly Being, by Karen Olsson, in Slate, covers or reviews a book by psychologist Susan Clancy, Abducted: How People Come To Believe They Were Kidnapped By Aliens. The article contains this passage: In a chapter of The Varieties of Religious Experience called “The Reality of the Unseen,” William James attested to the…
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Psychic
On Tuesday (Nov. 1) I flew back to Winnipeg from Victoria, through Edmonton and Saskatoon. I had a window seat. The middle seat was vacant. A passenger who got on in Edmonton took the aisle seat. Last week a couple of Mormon missionaries wanted to talk to me on the street. What is it about…
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Pet Peeve
From Spiked, a book review Self Help: More than just a Sham, reviewing SHAM: How the gurus of the self-help movement make us helpless, by Nicholas Brealey. One of my pet peeves. The reviewer r mentions several fakirs including “Dr.” John Gray, who wrote Men are from Mars – a charlatan right down to his…