Here’s Baylor University humanities professor Alan Jacobs, in a remarkable essay for The New Atlantis, referencing a variety of literary and real-world instances of the “madness of crowds” (as in the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot) to offer a demonic account of what’s happening to us in this age of digitally distributed memes and thought…
Tag: spirit possession
When mental illness is really demonic possession, according to a psychiatrist
The following two paragraphs are excerpted from what’s basically your everyday, run-of-the-mill article about the reality of demonic possession as distinct from mental illness. Written by a board-certified psychiatrist and professor of clinical psychiatry at New York Medical College. For The Washington Post. Move along. Nothing to see here. For the past two-and-a-half decades and over several…
Teeming Links – September 20, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Today’s opening word comes from novelist and National Book Award winner Richard Powers, speaking to The Believer magazine in 2007 about the unique value of reading — and specifically, reading fiction — in helping to “deliver us from certainty” during an age when a great deal of evil…
Teeming Links – July 30, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net To preface today’s offering of recommended and required reading, here’s a not-so-idle speculation from Damien Walter about the momentous fact of our collective cultural obsession with losing ourselves in the ever more immersive fantasy worlds that digital technology has enabled for us: I am a writer and critic…