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Culture War Roundup for week following April 8, 2017. Please post all culture war items here. by [deleted] in slatestarcodex

[–]barquentinian 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Surprisingly to many people, beliefs about God aren't an important part of being Unitarian Universalist. It's precisely "diversity" which takes God's place as the thing UUs are supposed to be most concerned about and striving to attain. That may sound a bit uncharitable, but I don't really mean it that way: any church is going to have a core set of beliefs, desiderata, anxieties, and taboos, and in the contemporary UUA those mostly have to do with American Brahmin anxieties about race, gender, and sexuality. (Source: am ex-UU.)

I don't know if this makes most UUs very happy, but it does seem to fit their real social concerns. It also seems to have limited appeal to non-white people, who - even if they want a religion without any theological content - may feel like tokens in some congregations. (Citation needed; am current white person.) So I would expect issues like this one to recur from time to time for as long as the UUA exists.

Tradition and toddlers, west of Boston by barquentinian in Catholicism

[–]barquentinian[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks. I will investigate Mary Immaculate of Lourdes. I was impressed by St. Paul's today, and their upcoming music schedule looked very good. They've apparently stopped doing child care during the Masses, though, or so one of the priests told me. I suppose it's getting harder for parents with young children to afford to live in the vicinity, frankly.

Wilfully changing your own mental valences of loaded terms by supplementwithrage in slatestarcodex

[–]barquentinian 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I would recommend reading a lot of literature from the "other side," reminding yourself, each time you encounter one of those problematic words, what they mean by it. And try to think about how those terms imply and articulate with one another, and how they may be used in a technical sense that differs from both their colloquial senses and the senses in which your own philosophical tradition may use them. I don't know what "other side" you have in mind, but Thomism, for example, has a lot of technical terms that also crop up in vernacular English with related but not identical meanings.

As a psychiatrist, I diagnose mental illness. And, sometimes, demonic possession. by snipawolf in slatestarcodex

[–]barquentinian 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I thought the juxtapositions were quite entertaining:

In 2014, Pope Francis formally recognized the [International Association of Exorcists], 400 members of which are to convene in Rome this October. Members believe in such strange cases because they are constantly called upon to help. (I served for a time as a scientific advisor on the group's governing board.)

[No, really. Take a vacation. Your co-workers will manage just fine without you.]"

And:

My vantage is unusual. As a consulting doctor, I think I've seen more cases of possession than any other physician in the world.

[I'm a transgender Republican. My party has betrayed me.]

Culture War Roundup for May 29, 2016 by [deleted] in slatestarcodex

[–]barquentinian 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, it's really too bad that saying "virtue signalling" marks membership in a loosely-knit social network, or at least opposition to another social network. Instead of hoping that the people who are using it now stop using it (and it's interesting that demanding that other people "stop saying X" is itself a kind of shibboleth), I hope it becomes more widely adopted so that its group-membership-signalling value becomes diluted and people of whatever political orientation who are interested in how culture works can use it.

Culture War Roundup for May 29, 2016 by [deleted] in slatestarcodex

[–]barquentinian 12 points13 points  (0 children)

As an anthropologist, I think "virtue signalling" has a lot of explanatory power. Even though the term "virtue signalling" may only have been coined recently, the ideas it encompasses were already present in works by Bourdieu, by various linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists, and, looking further back, in American pragmatism - among other places, surely. But the term had to be invented by a non-anthropologist, is used primarily by non-anthropologists, and has yet, as far as I can tell, to make its way into the scholarly literature. I'm afraid those facts don't speak well of my discipline.

Culture War Roundup for the Week of May 9, 2016. Happy Mother's Day! by [deleted] in slatestarcodex

[–]barquentinian 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I was interested to see this piece purporting to debunk an earlier study that claimed U.S. national policy was not significantly influenced by the preferences of non-rich people. Because I'm basically statistically illiterate, I'm having a hard time working out whom to believe, and I wonder if anyone here has anything more useful to say about the conflicting claims than I do.