Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

Book Matters

Posted on March 24, 2026 by Abigail

Why Religion? A Personal Story

By Elaine Pagels

Why Religion? is partly a memoir, and partly the record of a personal struggle over the spiritual questions that trouble us all. I’ve not quite finished reading it, but the story it tells – along with the questions it raises – are of such obvious import that I see no need to wait before sharing it with readers.

Pagels is the Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion at Princeton University and the winner of practically every Fellowship I’ve ever heard of. In her field, I don’t imagine you can climb any higher. She’s widely known for breaking the news to educated readers that – although the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are the ones that came out ahead in the first-century CE competition over who got to tell the Jesus story – there are some interesting gospels that also ran.

The gospels that lost out in the competition – had nevertheless been copied by certain nonconformist monks in the 4^th-century CE. Those monks acted in secret to preserve the rejected gospels, hiding them inside a six-foot jar, that’s been unearthed at the Egyptian village of Nag Hammadi. The findings of Pagels‘ work – deciphering and translating the Nag Hammadi writings – are described in her book, The Gnostic Gospels. Its publication kicked up theological storms of condemnation and praise. Here are some of the storm samples:

“Raymond Brown, a renowned senior colleague and biblical scholar … attacked the secret gospels, declaring that since they were only rubbish in the first century, and were still rubbish, what I’d written could only deceive the public.”

Another prominent professor, Henry Chadwick, who’d been her “mentor at Oxford,” attacked Pagels in the London Review of Books, essentially agreeing with the early Church fathers that “Gnostics were essentially not Christian at all” not forgetting to add that “women, weaker than men and less rational, are easily seduced by heresy” (64).

There were enthusiastic reviews as well, but she seems to have taken both kinds – the favorable and the unfavorable – in admirably detached, scholarly stride.

That said, Pagels was clearly delighted that the gospels found in the six-foot jar gave a more prominent status to women than the subordinate status women had been assigned by male authorities like St. Paul, Bishop Irenaeus and Tertullian.

This book, however, is not primarily about her work, path-breaking though it’s been. Instead, it tells her life story. Perhaps because her student pathway partly overlapped my own, that story had me hooked from early on. I too took a course in Art History with Meyer Schapiro (he’d been a classmate of my father and his wife Lillian had been my pediatrician) and also audited a course in New Testament with her great mentor, Krister Stendahl.

Up to a point, however, her youthful studies seemed much more trouble-free than my own. While still a graduate student, she married Heinz Pagels. He was the love of her life, as their wedding photo transparently shows. Pagels was a gifted physicist, working at the frontier of current knowledge of the physical universe and its constituent components. Their first child, Mark, was a beautiful little boy, as we can also see from another photo in her book.

What could be more desirable – more fulfilling – than all this?

What happened next seems to me captured most precisely in this verse by the American poet Edgar Allan Poe:

The angels not half so happy in heaven

Went envying her and me …

Mark, their radiant little boy, was discovered to have “a hole in the walls of his heart.” Though he survived the initial surgery, which was deemed successful, there was still one chance in ten thousand that he would develop pulmonary hypertension, which was “invariably fatal” (p. 100). Yet, that’s precisely what happened!

When he died, Heinz said to a friend, “I would’ve given my life for him, but no one would take it” (p. 119).

The loss seemed to lance the whole world on the point of a fatal spear.

Recovery from their shared sorrow seemed almost unimaginable. Since her pregnancy had itself been an event that beat the odds – they had meanwhile gone ahead to adopt two siblings, Sarah and then David, so as to provide Mark with a more generous-sized family. Now, if only for their new children’s sakes, the heartbroken parents needed to pull themselves together and go on with life as soon, and as normally, as they could manage.

Till the truly unthinkable happened. They’d been on vacation. Heinz had been out climbing the Colorado Rockies, as he had safely done many times before. Except that this time his path underfoot gave way unexpectedly, and suddenly he plunged more than a thousand feet to his death.

Despair might have looked the most truthful way for her to take this ultimate catastrophe – except that she now had these two small adopted children, who depended entirely on her.

Her memoir chronicles the trajectory of her near-despair, lightened by occasional dream-visions, helps from friends who include meditating monks, till she is able to weave some of the questions raised by her sorrow into further textual explorations.

At the point I’ve got to, she’s pondering the significance of the Jesus in the gnostic Gospel of Thomas. That Jesus seems to her more accessible than the more abstract savior of Paul’s epistles. We know that Paul had never met Jesus in the flesh. The Book of Acts records that Paul quarreled with the disciples who had known Jesus. Nevertheless, Paul’s view of the mission of Jesus became the one adopted by Christian doctrine. Does she have any distinct, nonPauline yearnings to make contact with God? I’m not sure. In any case, she seems to me a sincere truth-seeker.

*. *. *

What do I think of this long and troubling story that is Pagels’ memoir?

I really don’t know. If God exists (and I believe God does exist), the question must take in God’s part in the story.

Did the Creator allow this catastrophe to visit the author’s young life because … giving her powerful and honest mind a question so oversized to grapple with would also give her readers a prompt to reflect more deeply on the fragility of all our human lives? Well, maybe, but maybe not.

At any rate,

such wisdom as I have

doesn’t rise to the level

of this tragedy.

Posted in book reviews, books | Tagged book matters, Elaine Pagels’ Why Religion? A Personal Story | 2 Comments

What Jonathan Saw When He Was Dead

Posted on March 17, 2026 by Abigail

A spooky title for this column, I know. But first, let’s pause over the question: do the dead live on – in some form appropriate to their condition – but still recognizably themselves?

My mother was quite close to Louise Green, the woman who came once a week to clean, and later helped me very much in the work of closing the apartment on 96th Street after both my parents were gone.

One day Louise told me that my mother had visited her from the afterlife. “She’s with Henry [my father],” Louise went on, “and they’re very happy to be together again.”

Only one feature of that afterlife visit struck Louise as remarkable. “I never thought she’d come to Brooklyn!’ she said.

I have other such stories and I’ll bet you do too. However, the story on my mind today is one I saw recently on a video, reported by a man who gave only minimal information about himself:

His name was Jonathan and he was 75 years old.

Since the story was so unusual that one would be inclined to doubt it, I looked for any kind of corroboration. The sole supportive evidences were his face and his voice as he told his story. Neither showed any of the marks of doubleness that undercut made-up stories. Jonathan spoke with a slight foreign accent, but it was an accent recognizable to me. In childhood, in my parents’ home, I’d met people who had accents like his.

This is what Jonathan said. He’d been sitting at home in his familiar armchair, feeling at ease and in apparent good health. But suddenly he felt himself losing balance and consciousness. Everything went dark. He no longer had a pulse (as later he was told). His heart had stopped.

There was little time for dread or panic before he found himself in quite a wonderful ambiance. Presently he was face to face with a figure he had no trouble recognizing as Jesus. (I’ve read of Jews returning from the afterlife who reported seeing Jesus, as well as Christians who didn’t, so this by itself doesn’t identify Jonathan as a Christian. Especially since his accent put me in mind of the refugees of my childhood.)

“Jonathan,” said the Jesus figure to him, “I am showing you something. You will return and you will speak!” (This message was conveyed rather than uttered in words.)

What Jesus showed him was a place that was quite unmistakable.

Hell.

The fire burning there was unlike any fire we know – in that it burned with intention! In the midst of that very fire was the late Ayatollah Khamenei.

“I recognized him immediately,” said Jonathan. “He was there and he saw me.”

Here Jonathan emphasized that he himself was “not a political man.” Also that he “took no satisfaction in it. What I saw,” he went on, “filled me with a grief so heavy” … that he feels it still!

From hell, Khomeini had a message for him. “Tell the world that no man who uses God’s name like a sword for his own power is serving God. … The fire knows the difference even when the world does not.”

“It was,” Jonathan added, “a soul stripped of every title, rank, earthly armor – just a man, terrified, burning, undone.”

*. *. *

That was about the substance of Jonathan’s message. Was he telling the truth? Even if he meant to be honest, could any of this be thought credible?

All I could judge by was his face, his expression, the timber of the voice and the look in his eyes. There was nothing double in what I could see – nothing covert or complicated or self-important. To me, by whatever marks one uses to distinguish the fraudulent from the genuine, he appeared credible.

The Comments posted below the video seemed to come overwhelmingly from evangelical Christians and they were as jubilant as if they’d won a race in the intergalactic Olympics. Hey, hurray! – we win! We get the gold! The champs are us!

However, I noticed that Jonathan himself had refrained from identifying himself with any denomination or faith community. He’d laid stress on inner genuineness in contrast to outward show. He’d not appeared to endorse any of the known brands of religion.

So what do I personally make of it? Obviously it made an impression or I wouldn’t be devoting a whole column to it!

Do I think – along with Jonathan and possibly Plato – that every soul stands before the same bar of judgment after death? Not if I credit the wide array of afterlife reports. (For a somewhat different report, see my article, “What Ayer Saw When He Was Dead.” A. J. Ayer was a highly-regarded twentieth-century philosopher who “died” in the clinical sense for about fifteen minutes during which he saw what it would be like to live inside the world that his theories had postulated. He discovered that it wouldn’t be livable! It’s a nice test for any philosophic theory.)

I do take seriously the implication that when we depart this life, we deposit on this side all the honors – all the ribbons – that we’ve won here. Also, as Jonathan said, that “any wall between ourselves and accountability will come down.”

By the same token, I honor a life unmarked by pretense – though humility too can be an affectation.

To be a straight shooter is

not as simple as it sounds.

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Birth and Rebirth Days

Posted on March 10, 2026 by Abigail

Our return from California last Saturday February 28th roughly overlapped my birthday on the Monday directly following. However, we didn’t set aside time to celebrate on that Monday, being preoccupied with all that had needed attention while we’d been away.

Nevertheless, birthday wishes were cascading onto my online sites, from people I’d never met – except in the semi-science-fictional world of cyberspace. Science fictional or not – I took care to thank each and every one of these virtual friends. To all the people – who knew (God knows how) that March 2nd was my birthday and whom I don’t know – heartfelt thanks and may the force be with you!

The force seems to have been with me since, during that birthday week, several meaningful events – of unequal and unequivalent scope and type – converged.

First, on Sunday morning, Jerry told me of the joint US/Israeli actions in Iraq, such that Ayatollah Khomeini had been killed along with 40 of his top leaders. Since, directly and via proxies, Iran had kept the Jewish state in its genocidal crosshairs, and incidentally killed hundreds of Americans while stating its intention to kill more – this news was a bolt of lightning in my skies. Hard – near-impossible – to absorb. (Commentators differ on how imminent was the global threat posed by the rulers of Iran. But nobody thought that their publicly-proclaimed, long-term purposes had changed.)

Monday the 2nd, my actual birthday, was mostly spent catching up with bills, mail and honing last week’s column.

But on Tuesday March 3rd, the day after my birthday, there was the beautiful, never-before-seen hawk! All during our breakfast, he sat still, immobile, perched on a branch directly outside our window. When, after breakfast, I at last got up and left, so did the hawk.

You want to say that’s a coincidence? Well it could be. But I take it as a celebratory visit from Mother Nature’s wide and wonderful world. Mind, I’m no Henry David Thoreau. Snakes don’t curl appreciatively around my ankles when I walk in the woods, as Louisa May Alcott, who knew Thoreau as a child, reported wildlife doing with the real Thoreau. I’m a city kid. So I’ve not earned any such tributes from Nature as he did. However, I take the hawk’s breathtaking visit to be a sort of award for not pretending to be anyone or anything but myself. The way the hawk is merely himself!

Then later that Tuesday someone rang our doorbell. Unless it’s a delivery, that doesn’t happen very often. I was upstairs working on “The Unexpected,” last week’s column, so Jerry went down to see who it was. The visitor said he’d come to see me. As I stepped downstairs, into the foyer came a tall, bearded man, garbed in somewhat antique black, carrying a bag containing sweets for the holiday of Purim. That holiday celebrates an occasion described in the Biblical Book of Esther, when Jews who’d been slated for slaughter by the wicked courtier Haman had managed to turn the tables thanks to the creative stratagems of Esther, the Persian King’s Jewish queen. Persia is of course the ancient name for Iran!

Though I didn’t belong to the rabbi’s Chabad congregation, he’d brought me these presents for the Purim holiday because – after the narrowly-thwarted, murderous attack on the Chabad headquarters in Brooklyn – I’d sent the local Chabad a check in sympathetic support. In my covering letter, I mentioned two separate occasions when I’d met his wife, and then him, and found both spiritually quick and thoughtful.

Thanking this rabbi for the gift, I mentioned that I’d just had a birthday, on Monday the 2nd, the day before. To my surprise, he took birthdays quite seriously. They commemorate, as he told me, the day the soul enters the body for the spiritual purposes belonging uniquely to that person.

“How interesting,” I said sincerely as I thanked him for the Purim sweets.

The following day, Wednesday the 4th, a letter arrived that the Chabad Rabbi had written previously. It explained his visit of the 3rd. I’d written a letter, enclosed with my check, that expressed my appreciation for two previous interactions with him and his wife. The Chabad rabbi’s letter expressed gratitude for my earlier letter. What particularly struck me was the power of remembering that his letter showed. In my own more modern temple, I’d fought many battles to protect and further the temple’s interests. But at present, so far as I know, there is no one who remembers any of it.

Remembering is a power of the spirit.

The Unexpected

Posted on March 3, 2026 by Abigail

We returned yesterday evening from our week-long stay in California where I resumed treatments for neuropathy. The treatments that in earlier visits I’d received at the Intraneural Facilitation Treatment clinic affiliated with Loma Linda Hospital differed from the predictions of doom previously pronounced by a top-dollar New York neurologist. In refreshing contrast, the innovative yet finely calibrated methods of Mark Bussell at INF hadn’t included dire predictions and, in the past, actually had helped.

That said, I was not expecting a hopeful outcome from this trip. Why not? Well, both the fine surgeon who’d fixed my hip fracture of last May and the fine physical therapists – who’d checked my exercises for months afterward – had deemed me fully repaired by their lights. And I knew that what they called a successful outcome had left me nowhere near as walkable as I’d been prior to the accident. I didn’t brood about it, but I was not optimistic about our California trip.

Nonetheless, from the first day of our week there, when Mark Bussell characterized my current condition with precision – as well as describing what the previous interventions had left undone – and explained what could now be done to put me back where I’d been before the accident – my expectations underwent steep upgrading. It was his view that, once the injury was fully repaired, I could go back to where I’d been before: healing the neuropathy itself.

What the heck. I’m for fixing whatever can be fixed. I don’t get off on other people’s pity! So we returned to our Pennsylvania home with me in a notably better mood than I’d been in when we’d left it.

“Any good news this morning?” I said jokingly to Jerry as he joined for brunch. Normally, Jerry catches up on the day’s news first thing in the morning, and then briefs me, since I don’t have the heart to look.

“Yes,” Jerry said, in reply to my atypically hopeful question. “Khamenei is dead.”

The mass murderer of his own people had been killed! It seems there had been an Israeli attack (coordinated with US actions on other fronts) on the entire first-tier Iranian leadership. They had collected in one place, together with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, for a top-secret meeting. Evidently, somebody who was in a position to know didn’t keep the secret, since they were all dead from a single strike.

I thought Jerry must be joking. The analogous moment that came to mind occurred years back, in June of 1976. My philosopher father had telephoned from Maine to say –

“The Israelis have rescued the hostages!”

He was referring to the Israeli and other Jewish passengers who’d been on an Air France flight when it had been taken over by highjackers. Chillingly, they’d been separated from nonJewish passengers – the latter eventually released to resume their journeys – while the Jewish hostages were being held in Uganda’s Entebbe International Airport. At that time, Uganda was under the dictatorial rule of Idi Amin. The demands of the highjackers had been relayed to the Israeli government with, of course, no assurance that meeting those terms would save the lives of the hostages.

So back then, I had not understood what my father was calling to tell me. Painstakingly, I explained that his so-called news could not possibly be believed since the Jewish captives were at the mercy of forces under the command of a dictator with a reputation for cruelty.

My father simply repeated the “impossible” news till at last I stopped lecturing and started listening.

This time was a lot like that earlier time. I simply could not take in what Jerry was telling me. It was all, as I well knew, impossible.

Okay. It was possible. A lot of highly unlikely occurrences were possible. But it couldn’t be actual. Khamenei was not the kind of mass murderer who could be killed at one of his own top-secret meetings.

*. *. *

As of this writing, we don’t know how it will play out. Perhaps, by the time this column is posted, the situation will have darkened, especially considering its ever-ramifying complexity and the tipping forces of the past.

But still: a flawless operation, the two nations having kept their simultaneous actions a secret even from those who get paid to unearth secrets … .

All of which goes to show that – as my mother used to say –

the unexpected always happens.

What’s Your Spiritual Story: Abigail’s Confessions on Childhood, Time, and Spiritual Awakening

Posted on February 24, 2026 by Abigail

Abbie is in California this week for health treatments. She asks me to send the video below, where she and her husband, Jerry L. Martin from God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, discuss her early life from childhood’s moments of truth up through the story of her twenties told in Confessions of a Young Philosopher.

World-Historical Lives: Winston Churchill and Hannah Senesh

Posted on February 17, 2026 by Abigail

Today I’ve read to the end of two books, both about lives honed on the cutting edge of history.

So what is “history” and what does it mean to live on its edge? Let’s stipulate that history is the tale told by the transition from one view of the meaning of life to another view of life’s meaning. So it’s not just the chronicle of what happened but the story of why the participant/actors thought it happened and what they believed was at stake.

Though a realistic account must include chance events – unforeseen accidents – the whole medley becomes a scene of action when the agents line up events so that they will take their places within the story-line of human purposes.

In sum: macro-history, the big story, lines up more or less the way our personal lives do: with a story to honor, or betray, or forget, or resolutely continue to carry forward.

The book about Churchill, the British Prime Minister who rallied his country, including the US and the Allies-in-exile, to resist the Nazi project, bears the title, Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship (2007) by historian Martin Gilbert. I have it as a house present given me by Australian philosopher David M Armstrong, when he and his wife Jenny visited us here in Bucks County. It’s been years since I looked at it, but somehow got curious to reread it now, at the same time that I’ve been reading Crash of the Heavens, a book about World War II heroine Hannah Senesh, written in 2025 by investigative journalist Douglas Century.

I never knew that Churchill, whose eloquence and unusual practical intelligence made a substantial difference to the Allied victory in World War II, had also been a consequential figure in modern Jewish history. He happened to like Jews, even as a child – not a common preference among our British friends. “Some people like Jews,” Churchill wrote in 1920, “and some do not, but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race [sic] which has ever appeared in the world [p. 38].”

However, what cemented Britain’s commitment to an eventual “National Home” for Jews in Palestine was not their “formidable and remarkable” talent. It was acetone. Thirty thousand tons of it were needed as a key component in the production of explosives that would facilitate Britain’s supremacy on the High Seas and eventual victory in World War I. Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty when he approached an obscure Jewish immigrant chemist named Chaim Weizmann with a request that he produce acetone in that quantity. Weizmann said he could do it, given certain assistants and equipment. Then Churchill was succeeded in the Admiralty by Arthur J. Balfour, “whom Weizmann won over to the prospect of British support for a Jewish National Home in Palestine once Turkey were defeated (p. 25).”

The end results of these unplanned coincidences would be the letter sent by Balfour in November of 1917 that “His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people… .”

The backtrackings and reconfigurings and post-War turning of the whole project over to the United Nations in 1948 – eventuated in a UN vote for partition – accepted by the Jewish representatives but answered with war by the five nearest Arab nations. All that occurs farther along, though detailed with clarity in Gilbert’s valuable account. I found much that I never knew in this exhaustively researched history.

* * * * *

Where does Hannah Senesh figure in the larger story? She was a young Hungarian woman, very pretty and smart, who became a Zionist when her native Hungary became unrecognizably dangerous under a floodtide of anti-semitism. She then made her way to Palestine. She joined a Kibbutz in Palestine, learned Hebrew and, with her obvious talents and strength of purpose, was recruited to join a contingent of Jewish volunteers under the command of the British authorities, to be parachuted behind Nazi lines in Eastern Europe. Their mission was to aid downed Allied pilots and rescue any Jews who’d somehow managed to escape the Nazi mass murder regime.

In carrying out her task, Hannah fell into enemy hands, was tortured, became a fellow-prisoner inspiring to other captives and finally, in the last year of the War, was shot dead by her captors. She’d been a gifted poet and writer, a young woman of singular dedication and focus, and she is now a national heroine in Israel.

As the two histories unfolded for me, I began to locate members of my own family in some of the incidents recounted. My first cousin served in one of the units that made up the British component of the Italian campaign. Another cousin, his sister, was smuggling arms from the British headquarters in Cairo where she worked as a young secretary. My mother’s cousin was manufacturing bullets in a factory that was literally underground – the noise of production masked by the old-fashioned washing machine placed above its entrance. The British army unit that was stationed nearby took its weekly laundry to that noisy machine.

Here’s what Hannah Senesh wrote to her brother, who’d arrived in Palestine knowing nothing of her assignment. Her note was written before what would be her final mission.

Will you understand? … Will you sense that I had no choice, that I had to do this? There are events that render one’s life meaningless, a worthless plaything, or else compel one to action, even if it means sacrificing one’s life . …

What moral can one draw from these interwoven evidences of world-historical lives? Did lives like these unfold with a Divine Scriptwriter writing them out? Or does Chance roll the dice?

Even to have an opinion, one would need to stand above these events, which I am quite unable to do.

I suspect that God is involved, but with a component of freedom in the mix as well. Once freedom is included, no one – perhaps not even God – can predict

how the story will come out.

The Desecration of Desire

Posted on February 10, 2026 by Abigail

What is desire? It’s what gives direction to our lives – on the organic and also conscious levels. If we lack purpose, our animate existence loses the sense that it is going somewhere. The consequences can be life-threatening. In personal cases I’ve met, directionlessness shows up as a crisis.

Some years back, I wrote a philosophical article bearing the title, “The Intelligibility of History,” which widens the same point so that it can be tracked in the cultures in which human beings live and in human history more generally. Here’s an excerpt from that article.

“What finally is culture? Culture can be deemed a collective passion. If a nexus of desired relations (biological, practical, creedal, poetic, legal, institutional, military) is held together … at a certain limit by a certain “range of knowable options,” those who think this limit to be unsurpassable have it in common as their collective passion.” …Cultures set boundaries for individuals and the boundaries are not so ineffable that the individual who transgresses them will not be promptly so informed.”

“History is an inquiry. If the inquiry is successful, the historian will have a tale to tell, the tale told by the transition from one collective passion to another, or from one phase to another of the same collective passion.”

Although these pronouncements are excerpts from a philosophical article, I cite them here shorn of their justifying arguments. That said, I believe it will be handy to bear these concepts in mind – culture as the shared or collective passion that draws boundaries around what its individual members feel entitled to desire – before I proceed to lay out my present concern.

*. *. *

In 1999, Wendy Shalit, then a young college graduate, wrote a book, A Return to Modesty, whose very title prompted an outpouring of ridicule and condemnation that was instant and widespread. She was caricatured in respected venues like the NY Times Book Review, The Nation, the NY Observer and so on as a pitiable poster child for the very repression and sexual hangups that liberated women were way above and beyond.

At the same time, as Shalit reports in the Preface to her present edition, messages of another kind – hundreds of appreciative letters from women and men of college age – were also arriving in her mailbox. She has kept those letters. And meanwhile, despite all the condemnations from voices on the cutting edge, Modesty began to have cultural impact. It was reflected in new types of clothing which trend-conscious manufacturers began making available – more modest swim suits and everyday wear that looked more subdued and lady-like.

Meanwhile, time passed, experiences piled up, the culture underwent some changes in its shared sensibility – fashions in feeling were changing – till finally saying “no” started to get a more sympathetic press.

So, do we have a happy ending for Shalit’s innovation in sensibility? Not quite. In her school days, her parents had stepped in to get her excused from the new sex education. However, the girls whose parents had not been alert enough to rescue them from the coed sex education class hours, were finding themselves jeered at by the boys, groped and even targeted for group assaults! Interestingly, Shalit, who’d spent the sex ed hours in the library, continued to be treated by the boys as she had been before.

Her female classmates who went on to college would find themselves expected to take male roommates and to say “yes” to sex without commitment. With such experiences and expectations, they would prove far less self-protective than Shalit. Her new Preface reports that “sex education” – in the same factual, counter-erotic, auto-mechanic style – has now widened in its scope, going as far down as kindergarten and first grade. At certain points in her account, I had to stop reading. It was too horrifying.

So what’s it all about, really? What’s driving this (actually desire-killing) education? Young men are backing into porn-addiction. Young women are suppressing their need for ideality, as they ricochet between mortification and the blunting of their feminine sensibility. Among shamed girls, suicides are increasing.

Is there a hidden agenda driving all this? If there is, I’m not privy to the backrooms where it’s being devised. But I can look at the results and read those back into the agenda. What are the results?

Desire loses its vector – its directional character.
One has trouble remembering what it was that one personally wanted.
Directionless, one can more readily be had for the taking.

If you no longer know what you want, you’ll be more easily subject to what others want of you. That’s not how a free human being operates. It’s not how a free society survives.

If, as I’ve argued in The Intelligibility of History, culture is a way of organizing desire, and history may be understood as a movement from one form of desire-thus-organized to the next, then what the so-called “sex education” of the young amount to is this:

the inversion of culture –

and the emptying out

of meaningful human history.

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Is There Still Any “Woman Question”?

Posted on February 3, 2026 by Abigail

In recent years, Jerry has been urging me to write something about women. This because, in his observation, I genuinely like – even love – women! He thinks this a credential for writing on the topic, since a lot of women might not feel that way about other women. Also (and this might be an additional qualification) I see real women in terms of their actual lives, in contrast to those putative feminists who force them into the Procrustean beds of their theories.

In contrast to Sigmund Freud’s famous question, What do women want? – which leaves real women silent as the Sphinx in the desert – if I have some occasion to ask that question of some particular woman, I’ll wait for her unique answer. Why drum up a mystery where there might not be one?

These considerations seemed to me to warrant giving it a go. So I set myself the project of reading through a list of women writers who might furnish real-life perspectives on Freud’s questionable question.

So, having earlier read whatever I could when Second Wave Feminism was at high-tide, I’ve now read for the first time titles that include Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, also Joan Didion’s The White Album, several short story collections by Simone de Beauvoir (having of course earlier read much of de Beauvoir), plus Marriage: A History by Stephanie Coontz, and a reminder collection assembled by Miriam Schneir, Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present. Also, The End of Gender by sex neurologist Debra Soh, plus several titles by Judith Butler for whom the biological side seems pretty much irrelevant.

Right now, I’m more than halfway through The Book of Lives, subtitled A Memoir of Sorts by Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood whose jesting photo adorns the cover.

Of course, if I decide to continue along these lines, the list still to be covered will be much longer, but what’s my impression so far?

There is no woman question.

At least not in the singular. That is, there are as many women-originated questions in the plural as there are women. Also, there are certain biologically-based (and correlative history-based) vulnerabilities that are shared by all women.

Is there still any overarching danger that all women face? Yes, and it has to do with self-defense. From feminism’s First Stage in the nineteenth century, women voiced the need for independent access to the money they’d earned or inherited. Before that time, on the whole (except for widows in certain countries and circumstances) they’d not had such access. Of course, many men are very fine people, but you don’t want to give anybody that much legal power over other adults. So women needed the right to vote and thereby to alter their legal standing, with regard to inheritance and other self-protective concerns.

One of the crucial new factors within Second Stage Feminism was independent access to contraception. With this unprecedented freedom from continuous pregnancies, even married mothers could seek long-term employment. Broad changes, both legal and social, were required to protect the newly-expanded options. And of course there were abuses, residual or newly-afforded, that individuals who love and care about women – also about justice – still combat at the present hour. I’ve had the honor of counting some of these warriors, living and dead, among my friends.

But is there anything meaningful within Freud’s larger question? What about Woman in the singular? Is there anything special that she – Woman – wants?

Well yes. So far as I can tell, there is. She wants to succeed as a woman. There’s an art to being a woman. It’s highly skilled. It can be practiced in quite individual ways. Like any art, it’s hard to teach. Analogously, though you can teach drawing from live models, you can’t teach a student how to be another Degas.

Women either learn the womanly art intuitively, or under the influence of a model, or both. How do I know this? I’ve seen and loved some women who were such models.

If there have been models who were actual people – not fictions – then we may need to look for recent exemplars so as to learn what we can from them.

Or, if we don’t find such models, it might be instructive to revisit the non-models or anti-models whom we have met and think what they might have done differently. (Cynicism and bitterness are tempting but not useful here.)

Also, if we happen to be on the lookout for models, it might be helpful to realize that.

The womanly art has been a neglected cultural power. At present, we may need to study it and –

relearn it

from the ground up.

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What’s Missing?

Posted on January 27, 2026 by Abigail

“The Death of Socrates”
Jacques- Louis David, 1787

The adults among whom I grew up were somewhat mysterious to me. They weren’t like other kids’ parents. But they were hyper-intelligent, at home in a world of emigrés – including the women who served as my European role models – as well as people you might call “Americans in high degree.” (Not necessarily a matter of social class.)

That said, I early formed an intuitive resolve not to live on my inheritance. Not to be what the French call a rentier – who lives off the rents paid by inherited tenants. Though I loved my parents and adored – thrived in – their world, I needed to find something like bedrock to stand on independently.

I found at least two ideal exemplars of what I had in mind: the Thoreau of Walden Pond and M. K. Gandhi with his satyagraha (truth-force). Okay okay, I know. The apostle of self-sufficiency depended on Mrs. (Ralph Waldo) Emerson to pick up and take care of his laundry. And, of the great Indian leader, it was said that, “It takes an awful lot of money to keep Gandhi living in poverty.”

So I was aware, even then, that the role models of my first youth bore traces of ordinary humanity. They were not cartoon cutouts but mixed characters like ourselves.

What was ideal about them, to my mind, was that they tried actually to be what they said they were. Their relative simplicity was fascinating to me. I didn’t want to be deeply shadowed by torment and “interesting” – like, for example, the protagonists in Dostoevsky’s novels.

Like Gandhi and Thoreau, I too wanted to be … just who I said I was! Or, where there was a discrepancy – a gap between word and deed – to know the reasons why. Or like the characters implicitly aimed at in Socratic dialogues, where again the point is to be who you say you are! If that were easy, there would’ve been no need for a Socrates.

Question: Is there anything off kilter in my illustrative cases?

Anything that rings wrong?

Well yes, three things:

Mrs. Ralph Waldo Emerson did Henry David Thoreau’s personal laundry once a week, although we never see her tiptoe discretely across the ground that lies back of Walden Pond.
Pre-adolescent girls, children of the grownups in the ashram, were placed naked alongside Gandhi in the bed where he slept each night. The Mahatma claimed that this was a fail-safe way for him to test his commitment to celibacy. So far as I know, the mature women, who in childhood had furnished this test, continued to maintain a loyal (though possibly embarrassed) silence.
Socrates sent away the mourning women (including his soon-to-be widowed wife Xantippe) before conducting the final dialogue with his disciples that’s recorded in The Phaedo. At the conclusion of that conversation, he drank the lethal hemlock to which the Athenian jury had condemned him.

In the first case, the erasure simplifies the real story somewhat. In the second case, one wonders if the erasure conceals personal ambivalence or at least psychological unfairness. In the third case, the erasure of the women (though culturally-sanctioned in that place and time), deletes one human facet of the suffering brought about by the court-ordered execution of Socrates.

These three men – Thoreau, Gandhi and Socrates – were players in some of the best-known Adventures of Humanity with Highest Things. It takes nothing from their contributions to remark that the record has yet to show

how in future

women could appear

in all their own imperfect reality

inside equivalent adventures.

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Persons Real and Unreal

Posted on January 20, 2026 by Abigail

During the week just passed, I’ve gotten three invitations to enter into consequential interactions with correspondents who represented themselves as persons but in fact were not persons. What precedents are there for such an experience, in life or literature?

Jewish mystical literature includes an entity called a “Golem” who is, I take it, man-made but, once created, takes on a life of its own.

I’m mostly familiar with the term when it picks out someone who’s acting in a subpar way – possibly because the individual is under a misleading influence. In my experience, it’s not a frequently-heard insult.

Then there is Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, where a scientist by that name creates a man-like entity who is unfairly feared, shunned and proves sensitive enough to suffer a tragic end.

I mention these precedents just to situate my own recent experience in the wider context of literature and legend. Despite their occult or futuristic context, the categories of good and evil would not have been out of place in those earlier stories.

What’s recently happened to me was neither literature nor legend.

One apparent lady who contacted me online, represented herself as a literary agent, and offered to promote my books to “thousands” of new readers. She had a fee scale, varying with the scope and duration of her promotion efforts.

One apparent gentleman presented himself as the impresario of a reading group, and wanted my permission to discuss A Good Look at Evil in his group. He had not yet come to the point of naming his terms.

Since both of these applicants cited only the final chapter of that book – treating it as a stand-alone piece of writing – it was clear to me that their enthusiasm had not come from actually reading A Good Look at Evil.

It was the third applicant who came closest to captivating me. She purported to have lived with her family in or near the same town in Downeast Maine where my parents had a home. I continued to spend summers there for some time after my parents were gone. Many of the friends carried over from my parents’ time; others were mine independently. All were people I valued very much: clear-sighted, extremely decent, straightforward and not easily deceived.

There was a nice view of the Bay of which, from the upper story of our barn, I did several paintings. One hangs over the desk where I’m typing tonight.

So eager was I to find a new friend from a place I loved that, only on reflection did I realize that this supposed fellow-writer and lover of the Maine coast had not said anything in her emails to me that I hadn’t emailed to her first! Oh, and incidentally she had an agent to recommend … .

What’s the lesson here? Is it just that there’s “a sucker born every day”?

What I find so disconcerting is the way styles of con-artistry have changed!

It’s quite possible that none of these deceivers-by-email is a single, actual human being! Each one might be AI generated … .

So the wickedness that allows a bad actor to imitate sincerity for the purpose of exploiting a victim is, in all three cases, impersonal, distant from its target and deniable – by its perpetrators.

That said, a word of warning from me is due to all these new-style perps: Your deceptions may be more deniable these days, but –

they continue to go on your spiritual report card.

By contrast, here are some real people:

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Why Religion? A Personal Story

By Elaine Pagels

By contrast, here are some real people:

Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

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