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In an excerpt from his new book, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, Sam Kean ponders the possible connection between religious experience and brain disturbances, especially epileptic seizures:

All human beings seem to have mental circuits that recognize certain things as sacred and predispose us to feeling a little spiritual. It’s just a feature of our brains (Richard Dawkins excepted, perhaps). But temporal lobe seizures seem to hypercharge these circuits, and they often leave victims intensely religious, as if God has personally tapped them as witnesses. Even if victims don’t become religious, their personalities often change in predictable ways. They become preoccupied with morality, often losing their sense of humor entirely. (Laugh lines are few and far between in Dostoyevsky.) They become “sticky” and “adhesive” in conversations, refusing to break them off despite pretty strong signs of boredom from the other party. And for whatever reason, many victims start writing compulsively. They might churn out page after page of doggerel or aphorisms, or even copy out song lyrics or food labels. The ones who visit heaven often chronicle their visions in excruciating detail.

Based on these symptoms, especially the rectitude and sudden spiritual awakening, modern doctors have retrodiagnosed certain religious icons as epileptics, including Saint Paul (the blinding light, the stupor near Damascus), Muhammad (the trips to heaven), and Joan of Arc (the visions, the sense of destiny). [Emanuel] Swedenborg also fits the profile.

Ultimately, though, Kean warns against reducing the numinous to the neurological:

Most seizures last a few seconds or minutes, not the hours that some prophets spend immersed in trances. And because a temporal fit can paralyze the hippocampus, which helps form memories, many temporal lobe epileptics can’t remember their visions in much detail afterward. (Even Dostoyevsky lapsed into vague descriptions when recounting their actual content.) Also, while Swedenborg’s trances in particular blended sights, sounds, and smells into a heady, heavenly froth, most epileptics hallucinate with one sense only. Most damningly, most epileptic auras are tedious, producing the same refulgent light, the same chorus of voices, or the same ambrosial smells time and again.

So while epilepsy might well have induced their visions — the idea makes sense — it’s important to remember that Joan of Arc, Swedenborg, Saint Paul, and others also transcended their epilepsy. Probably no one but Joan would have rallied France, no one but Swedenborg would have imagined angels eating butter. As with any neurological tic, temporal lobe epilepsy doesn’t wipe someone’s mental slate clean. It simply molds and reshapes what’s already there.

(Image: Illumination from Liber Scivias, showing Hildegard of Bingen receiving a vision, via Wikimedia Commons)

In an interview about her new book The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison addresses whether it’s wrong to empathize with those who’ve made others suffer:

I think that trying to understand someone’s state of being or feeling doesn’t necessitate condoning or agreeing with their point of view. Getting inside someone’s mind doesn’t mean thinking what they think; it only means realizing what they’re thinking. This gets to another question or distinction that has come up in various conversations I’ve had—with psychologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists—about empathy: should we empathize with sociopaths? With evil? And I think we should try precisely because empathy doesn’t have to catalyze complete agreement or convergence—only an entry and a reckoning. Andrew Solomon’s recent New Yorker profile of Peter Lanza—father of Newtown shooter Adam Lanza—is a perfect illustration of this distinction: he offers his readers the chance to empathize fully with this father and yet—also, improbably—with the figure of this boy, whose actions might seem to place him outside the realm of empathy entirely.

On a related note, Joanna Bourke contemplates how pain fosters connection:

Talking about pain is a way of cementing interpersonal bonds: when people ‘suffer with’ their loved ones, they are bearing testimony to their closeness to that person. Witnesses to pain often find the experience agonising themselves, which can lead them to further intimacy with sufferers. This is what Claire Tisdall alluded to in her memoir based on the First World War. Tisdall, a nurse, admitted she’d been ‘burning with the agony of losing a dearly loved brother at Ypres’ and so her ‘feelings towards them [Germans] were less than Christian’. Nevertheless, one day she was given the job of looking after some German prisoners on their way to the hospital. One ‘very young, ashen-faced boy’ with a leg-wound looked up at her and murmured ‘Pain, pain’, an episode about which Tisdall wrote: ‘a bit of the cold ice of hatred in my heart… softened and melted when that white-faced German boy looked up at me and said his one English word – “Pain”.’

More than half a century earlier, the physician Samuel Henry Dickson in his Essays on Life, Sleep, Pain, Etc (1852) put the case more strongly: ‘Without suffering there could be no sympathies,’ he concluded, ‘and all the finer and more sacred of human ties would cease to exist.’ At the very least, pain exposes our fragile connection to other people and serves as a reminder of our need for those around us.

Meanwhile, in a profile of James Doty – who helped form the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, or CCARE – Bonnie Tsui describes the science behind “helper’s high”:

When we help someone else or give something valuable away, the pleasure centers of the brain, or mesolimbic reward system, activated by stimuli such as sex, food, or money, provides emotional reinforcement. Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies by the National Institutes of Health have shown that the reward centers are equally active when we watch someone give money to charity and when we receive it ourselves; in addition, giving something valuable away activates the subgenual area, a part of the brain that is key in establishing trust and social attachment in humans and other animals, as well as the anterior prefrontal cortex, which is thought to be highly involved in the complexities of altruistic decision-making. What researchers call the “helper’s high” may be aided by the release of endorphins. By virtually every measure of health we know—reducing blood pressure, anxiety, stress, inflammation, and boosting mood—compassion has been shown to help us. These are some of the ways we are encouraged to establish trust and community, which have long been necessary to human survival.

Previous Dish on Jamison here, here, and here.

Rachel Kadish shares her experience teaching a creative writing course at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, where her classroom doubled as a bomb shelter. Noting that her 11 students “spanned six nationalities, as well as a range of points along the religious spectrum (some were wholly secular Jews, some Orthodox, some Christian …)”, she announced to the class, “We’re going to offend each other — let’s consider that a given”:

Religious difference, it turned out, was only the beginning of what surfaced in the classroom.

Any writing exercise I assigned — no matter how technical and craft-based — tugged at larger issues. In the weeks that followed, a woman in a head covering wrote a moving piece about childhood memories of terrorist bombings. Another woman — a dancer — wrote a powerful scene about sneaking into a West Bank bathhouse and dancing with Palestinian women there. A Christian woman wrote about her teenage immersion in mosh pit culture in the U.S., and offered the first pages of a harrowing piece about friends who joined neo-Nazi skinhead hate groups. Challenged to rewrite a single paragraph in three different voices, a Swedish student began a nostalgic passage extolling his mother’s baking. By the third iteration of the same paragraph, he ended up revealing that his mother was an Auschwitz survivor, and that this bounty of pies and cakes stood in sharp contrast to her own childhood of starvation. …

I’ve never before written about a workshop. What happens in class stays in class. So when I asked my students whether they’d be comfortable if I wrote about the work we’d done together, their quick assent took me by surprise. “The conversation in this room is different than the conversation on the bus,” one said, to nods. In daring each other to explore literary craft, they’d given each other permission to explore stories many of them had feared to tell. And of course, our weeks together had expanded my point of view as well. When I walked out of that bomb shelter for the final time, it seemed less a metaphor for the threat of war, and more a reminder of how difficult and how essential it is to create shelters like this: safe places where heartfelt argument, human gestures, and the occasional interpretive dance keep the lights on.

Drawing on themes from his new book, Beyond the University:Why Liberal Education Matters, Michael S. Roth pushes back (NYT) against higher education’s valorization of critical thinking, worrying that it results in “creating a class of self-satisfied debunkers”:

In campus cultures where being smart means being a critical unmasker, students may become too good at showing how things can’t possibly make sense. They may close themselves off from their potential to find or create meaning and direction from the books, music and experiments they encounter in the classroom.

Once outside the university, these students may try to score points by displaying the critical prowess for which they were rewarded in school, but those points often come at their own expense. As debunkers, they contribute to a cultural climate that has little tolerance for finding or making meaning — a culture whose intellectuals and cultural commentators get “liked” by showing that somebody else just can’t be believed. But this cynicism is no achievement.

Dreher nods, connecting Roth’s argument to his days as a film critic:

Because of my job, I got into the habit of watching every movie critically. That’s not to say I watched every movie trying to tear it down, but rather every film I saw I watched in an analytical frame of mind, because I knew I was going to have to write a short essay saying what the film’s strengths and weaknesses were. Once you get into that habit, it’s hard to turn it off. I couldn’t watch anything just for fun in those days, even if I wanted to. After I moved to another line of writing, it took a couple of years for me to be able to lose myself in the subjective experience of movie-watching — which is how almost everybody else watches movies. …

To draw out the philosophical point, this suggests that there are some things that cannot be fully known from a critical distance, that is to say, objectively, but rather must be engaged subjectively if they are to be understood. Then again, to know something subjectively is to cease to be able to see it objectively, and that means closing off a dimension of knowledge. If I only know X., the Oscar-winning actress, from her film performances and what others have written about her, I don’t know her as her father does. But then, a father’s eyes are conditioned to see differently, and he almost certainly cannot judge her performative capabilities with anything approaching objectivity.

In an interview about his book, Roth offers a defense of what he calls a “pragmatic liberal education”:

[Y]ou can’t just tell students to go study German literature or philosophy and then figure out how to transfer it once they graduate. That process needs to start earlier. If you’re studying German literature, you should be able to explain to someone in computer science what’s valuable about it. And the computer scientist should be able to do the same thing to the German literature student. I teach Great Books courses, and if students can’t explain why Virginia Woolf or Baudelaire matters in terms relevant to their own lives, I don’t think they understand the book. It gets back to that anti-specialization theme. I don’t think there’s anything “liberal” about specializing in philosophy compared to specializing in business. We don’t want specialists with just technical training. When you have a liberal education, you’re not just a technician. You’re able to move among fields. We don’t want you just to be an academic expert to please a professor. That’s just making believe you’re a mini-professor and you want to grow up to be a big professor.

Grant Kaplan profiles James Alison, arguing that he “belongs on any short list of the most important living Catholic theologians.” He notes the influence of the French anthropologist René Girard’s theory of “mimetic desire” – the idea that “human desires are learned from others rather than forged within a person, and this results in discontent, rivalries and conflicts” – on Alison’s interpretation of original sin:

If mimetic theory teaches us anything, it is that we do not begin with a blank slate. Further, our larger communities, built on victims hidden from sight, maintain traces of an original violence. Thus our desire, ordained by God as pacifically mimetic and fundamentally good, becomes the conduit for actual sins on account of the sinful communities that donate to us our sense of being. We are far too communal and too inclined to be locked into others to avoid being infected, ontologically, by sin. Throughout his work, Father Alison offers examples both trivial and serious to demonstrate the fundamental, Augustinian truth about our inherited identity and communal sinfulness.

Father Alison also argues that the resurrection of Jesus as the forgiving victim makes the doctrine of original sin possible. It is no surprise that the expulsion from Eden (Genesis 3), though largely ignored in the Old Testament, receives serious attention in the writings of St. Paul. Augustine, the great inheritor of Paul, struggled intensely to understand the relationship between the old Adam and the new Adam. It is only after the salvific revelation of the risen Lord that humans have the capacity to understand how deeply enmeshed they were in the proclivities and systems of violence that led to the death of the sinless second Adam. There is thus no chasm between the development of the Western doctrine of original sin and the message of the Gospel.

Recent Dish on Alison’s work here.

Casey Cep reviews Joshua Dubler’s Down in the Chapel, which explores the diverse religious lives of the inmates of Graterford Prison, Pennsylvania’s largest maximum security correctional facility. She comments on Dubler’s characterization of the prison chapel as “a wonder of American religious pluralism”:

The prison’s chapel is indeed a testament to the possibilities of pluralism, with so many belief systems meeting and sharing space, but Dubler exaggerates when he claims it is “the most religiously eclectic sliver of real estate in the history of the world.” Even the prisoners themselves complicate this rosy portrait, impugning the sincerity of one another’s beliefs, reminding Dubler that jail-house religion is a real thing, forged in boredom, faked for privileges like phone calls and privacy, performed for the benefit of the parole board.

Jail-house religion is real, but rare, and Dubler is right to take seriously the religious faith of these men. He spends hours talking with them about prayer, theodicy, music, ethics, ecumenism, revelation, and scripture. Take, for example, an exchange between Dubler and Vic, the chapel’s resident atheist. “‘You know,’ Vic says, ‘religion is the perfect example of how twisted we are as a species.’”

Dubler summarizes his own response: “I laugh with the pleasure of unanticipated recognition and deliver a short spiel on the nineteenth-century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach and his touchstone inversion of the principle that man is made in God’s image.” The “spiel” continues in summary form for our benefit, until Vic interrupts: “No, that part religion gets right. We are a bunch of dirty rotten sinners.”

Scott Korb finds that such conversations – which arose over the many months Dubler spent with the prisoners – are what makes the book work:

The men in the chapel are “realer” with Dubler, an inmate named Papa says, because he’s put in the time: “‘You know you see things that most people don’t see’ — most free people, [Papa] means.”

Indeed, for another of the inmates, Oscar, the intimacy of Dubler’s report from Graterford depends entirely on this open stance. “Oscar’s unnerving candor,” Dubler writes

is not limited to the struggles of faith and the humiliation of incarceration. He is also one of the very few men here who voiced reservations about projects like mine where researchers “come in to profit off of our misery.” By the time he told me that, six months into my research, he’d changed his mind about me. The difference with me, he said, was that I participate.

This participation results in an exquisite record of a thin slice of prison life — we’re only in the chapel, never on the blocks. Here, the men’s worship, their shouting and singing, and especially all their endless talk, reveal intellectual and spiritual lives of such vibrancy, seriousness, and intensity that a reader with similar proclivities may find himself envious of the time and space these men have to consider life’s big questions.

Reviewing the book last year, Joshua Dubois appreciated the book’s insights into a world most of us have never seen. He also explained why he’s skeptical of jailhouse conversions:

[R]eaders should be careful before drawing broad lessons about American religion from Down in the Chapel. Dubler explains that most of the men in Graterford Prison are convicted murders, and they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. We’re left with a suspicion that at least some of the religiosity—the reading of holy books, the commitment to their coreligionists, the “mastering of self”—is a function of the fact that these guys are in a place where most decisions are made for them, so faith is one decision they can make, and manipulate, for themselves. With all of the religious exceptions and latitude afforded to the faithful, there’s a faint air of deceit that wafts through the book.  The religious life at Graterford exists within an iron-domed bubble, and its lessons on ecumenism must be taken with a grain of salt.

Dubler addressed such concerns in an interview last summer:

My take is that the knee-jerk suspicion that religious prisoners are merely “faking it” is the natural consequence of the ways that we, as a culture, tend to think about religion, and what we, as a culture, tend to think about prisoners. …

As is no secret within the study of religion, the American discourse of religion is essentially a secularized Protestant discourse, which means that we tend to look for religion in presumed fixed states of interiority. Religion, when it is thought of as real, is attached to what one purportedly believes, deeply and immovably. Since minds and psyches are full of secrets, and we must rely on what people say, religion is generally to be found in what a person enduringly professes as good and true, most especially those ideas of the good and the true that are directly attached to some notion of a Supreme Being, divine judgment, eternal life, and so on.

“Prisoners” are easier to characterize. Prisoners we tend to define by virtue of their crimes. And so, when a person we regard as fundamentally rotten — a “murderer” or a “rapist,” say — professes himself to be a faithful follower of the Prince of Peace, Jesus, or a religion of peace, Islam, it is a natural assumption that this person is probably lying.

For more, read an excerpt from Down in the Chapel here.

Charles McNamara leafs through the Orbis Sensualium Pictus (aka The World of Things Obvious to the Senses drawn in Pictures), the mid-17th century work by John Comenius considered by many “to be the first picture book dedicated to the education of young children”:

Originally published in 1658 in Latin and German, the Orbis — with its 150 pictures showing everyday activities like brewing beer, tending gardens, and slaughtering animals — is immediately familiar as an ancestor of today’s children’s literature. This approach centered on the visual was a breakthrough in education for the young, as was the decision to teach the vernacular in addition to Latin. Unlike treatises on education and grammatical handbooks, it is aimed directly at the young and attempts to engage on their level. The Orbis was hugely popular. At one point it was the most used textbook in Europe for elementary education, and according to one account it was translated into “most European and some of the Oriental languages.”

In spite of its title, the book delves into the abstract:

After thirty-five chapters on theology, elements, plants, and animals, Comenius finally introduces man.

He again opts for the Biblical account and addresses Adam and Eve before more immediate topics like “The Outward Parts of a Man,” where we learn that women have “two Dugs, with Nipples” and that below the stomach we find “the Groyn and the privities.” The anatomical terminology is vast, including words for each finger and for a number of bones in the body. But amid instruction on the corporeal and familiar, Comenius again injects the abstract and invisible into his picture book with Chapter 43, a discussion of “The Soul of Man.” A dotted outline of a human, opening his arms as if to welcome the students’ gaze, stands at the top of the page. Despite this illustration, Comenius’ discussion of the soul is not dumbed down for children. He lays out the categories of souls for his young students: the “Vegetative” soul of plants, the “Sensitive” soul of animals, and the “Rational” soul of man.

(Image of “The Soul” from the 1705 English edition of Orbis Sensualium Pictus via The Public Domain Review)

Reviewing The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, Popova highlights the faith-focused exchanges between the Catholic writer and an anonymous correspondent:

In July of 1955, when she was thirty, O’Connor received a letter from a young woman, initially unknown to her, who later chose to remain anonymous upon the publication of the letters. Both hungry for conversation and intrigued by the woman’s intensity of conviction, the author felt compelled to reply, and so began a nine-year epistolary friendship that continued until O’Connor’s death in 1964 from complications due to lupus. The letters to “A.” are among the most extraordinary in the collection, exploring with remarkable dignity and dimensionality matters of faith and religion, the difference between the two, and the role of spirituality in O’Connor’s writing and her personhood.

From O’Connor’s first letter to the woman:

I am very pleased to have your letter. Perhaps it is even more startling to me to find someone who recognizes my work for what I try to make it than it is for you to find a God-conscious writer near at hand. The distance is 87 miles but I feel the spiritual distance is shorter.

I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic. This is a fact and nothing covers it like the bald statement. However, I am a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness, that thing Jung describes as unhistorical, solitary, and guilty. To possess this within the Church is to bear a burden, the necessary burden for the conscious Catholic. It’s to feel the contemporary situation at the ultimate level. I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it. This may explain the lack of bitterness in the stories.

Previous Dish on O’Connor here, here, and here.

Reporting on a recent Vatican-sanctioned convention on exorcism, Anthony Faiola finds that Pope Francis’s “teachings on Satan are already regarded as the most old school of any pope since at least Paul VI”:

Largely under the radar, theologians and Vatican insiders say, Francis has not only dwelled far more on Satan in sermons and speeches than his recent predecessors have, but also sought to rekindle the Devil’s image as a supernatural entity with the forces­ of evil at his beck and call.

Last year, for instance, Francis laid hands on a man in a wheelchair who claimed to be possessed by demons, in what many saw as an impromptu act of cleansing. A few months later, he praised a group long viewed by some as the crazy uncles of the Roman Catholic Church — the International Association of Exorcists — for “helping people who suffer and are in need of liberation.”

“ ‘But Father, how old-fashioned you are to speak about the Devil in the 21st century,’ ” Francis, quoting those who have noted his frequent mentions of the Devil, said last month while presiding over Mass at the Vatican’s chapel in St. Martha’s House. He warned those gathered on that chilly morning to be vigilant and not be fooled by the hidden face of Satan in the modern world. “Look out because the Devil is present,” he said.

As part of his research, Faiola was given permission to witness an exorcism. In an interview, he describes what he saw:

When we walked into the room, the priest was consoling [the woman undergoing exorcism] in the corner of this converted kitchen where all sorts of images of Mary and Jesus Christ were strung up. I didn’t get the feeling that the woman was uneasy because of our presence there. There were a couple of other observers in the room who were somehow associated with the priest and three helpers with him that day. It’s a bit surreal: At one moment he’s chanting in Latin, and the helpers are saying rounds of Ave Maria, so you’ve got an odd vocalization happening in the room.

The woman was quiet for five minutes before there were any signs of metamorphosis. Then she started grunting, burping, coughing up phlegm, and her characteristics became more what you would expect in a movie. He started making the sign of a cross, and she was physically repelled from his touch. She was obviously made uncomfortable by any religious gestures. That’s when the drama really escalated: The priest asked, “What is your name?” calling the demons out. Making it answer questions is supposed to be a sign of the devil’s submission to the priest’s authority. He got the name Asmodeus. In the world of exorcism, there is only one Satan but many lesser demons.

The priest asks several really arcane questions. His voice starts escalating, his gestures become more dramatic and reach some sort of a climax. She looked like she was ready to vomit. Gradually she regressed and came out of her trancelike state. The whole thing took about 40 minutes.

Sophia Deboick puts Francis’s comments – and the resurgent interest in exorcisms – in context:

In recent decades, the church has been surprisingly vocal on the issue. In 1975, the former Roman Inquisition published a study called Christian Faith and Demonology, with the aim of making the reality of the devil clear. Three years earlier, Pope Paul VI – surely a man of the modern age, given his 1968 encyclical prompted by the contraceptive pill and the miniskirt – said evil “is a living spiritual being, perverted and corrupting” and certainly not “a conceptual and imaginary personification of the unknown causes of our ills”. Just last Tuesday, Francis himself put great emphasis on the role of the devil when speaking of the protomartyr Saint Stephen, saying that the “struggle between God and the devil” was apparent in the persecution of the church’s people. For the hierarchy, the devil is not to be forgotten nor softened into a metaphor. … The devil continues to be as useful for the modern church as he has been in the past, when he bolstered the case for the burning of heretics. The concept now provides a dramatic way to underscore the dangers of a godless society.

(Image: Ary Scheffer’s The Temptation of Christ, 1854, via Wikimedia Commons)

Petra Boynton looks at research on feigning orgasms:

In a two-stage study respondents (all heterosexual women college students majoring in psychology) were asked when, why and how they faked orgasm. The researchers then narrowed this into four categories:

Altruistic Deceit (e.g. faked orgasm to make a partner happy or prevent them feeling guilty)
Fear and Insecurity (e.g. faked orgasm because they felt ashamed they couldn’t experience orgasm)
Elevated Arousal (e.g. faked an orgasm to get more turned on or increase the intensity of the experience)
Sexual Adjournment (e.g. to end a sexual encounter because of tiredness, a lack of enjoyment etc)

We tend to view faking orgasm as manipulative, whereas this research suggested that it could well play a positive role in increasing arousal. I could see an additional measure of distress being useful here to identify whether the faking was something done pleasurably to enhance sex, or an indication of other sexual or relationships problems where perhaps education or therapy might be of benefit.