Category Archives: masculinity
The Fork in the Road
* * * A realization visited me the other day. It had to do with lost friendships. I’d always pictured these losses as mere phenomena lying on the surface of life. In the depth, in the end – in the … Continue reading →
Women Enemies and Women Friends
In Liaisons Dangereuses, the eighteenth-century epistolary novel of cynicism by Choderlos de Laclos, the plot turns around two aristocrats who co-conspire to seduce their unsuspecting victims. Their purpose is not so much to gratify sexual desire as to enjoy the … Continue reading →
The Story
“The crucial thing is the story.” That is what I claim in A Good Look at Evil, my book which holds that the person who would live a good life finds her own story while the evil-doer may be detected … Continue reading →
In Quest of Lost Friendship
The other night I had a dream in which I met a woman whom I used to regard as a friend. But she’d become an ex-friend – in the following fashion. An ill-wisher who’d known me from my earliest days … Continue reading →
Reincarnation: Anne Frank and Me
Some years back I read a book with the title, And the Wolves Howled: Fragments of Two Lifetimes. The author was Barbro Karlen, a Swedish woman who claims to be the reincarnation of Anne Frank. Anne was the Jewish Dutch … Continue reading →
Death and the Doctors
Readers of this column may recall that I had a near-death experience fairly recently. Not the good kind, where you meet all the dear ones who’ve gone before you up the golden stairway. Rather, the kind where you get to … Continue reading →
Do Evil People Get Better at Evil If They Reincarnate?
My book, A Good Look at Evil, doesn’t describe the best-known bad actors in human history. The cases I deal with are mostly of near-contemporaries. And, when dictators are discussed, it’s usually through their effects on people who executed their … Continue reading →
The Puzzle of Hannah Arendt
The career of Hannah Arendt is surely one of the oddest on record. Doubt has been cast on claims for which she was best known. Yet her posthumous prestige as a political theorist seems largely unaffected by any refutations of … Continue reading →
Fracture
Into each life some fractures must come. And they’re not all metaphorical. Mine came like this. It was Friday May 2nd. Jerry and I were due to speak at a Theology Without Walls group. We were standing in the foyer … Continue reading →
Encore Marie Antoinette
This week, Abbie revisits the unforgettable story of Marie Antoinette. First shared in an earlier column, Encore Marie Antoinette reflects on what made the Queen of France so captivating—and so condemned. Was she a symbol, a scapegoat, or simply herself? … Continue reading →
