Posts

Is hate speech "free speech"?

One of the issues we discuss in my class on Society and Values is this precise issue about what limits should be set on groups that preach hatred.  I begin by citing the story of Angela Davis, originally fired from the Philosophy department at UCLA because she was a member of the Communist Party and at the time our state constitution prohibited Communists from teaching in our public schools (I well remember taking the loyalty oath when I was applying for my teaching credential).  Asked whether she felt she had a right to speak about Communism (which she was not doing in her classes) and then whether she thought Nazis had the same right, she answered that the difference was that Nazis wanted to subvert democracy itself and she thought this was not true of Communists such as herself.  I then go on to explain that Angela's mentor at UC Davis when she got her PhD was Herbert Marcuse, who had escaped Nazi Germany.  Marcuse's key point, if I may oversimplify it, was that t...
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Honoring St. Ignatius

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July 31 is the day on which Catholics honor Ignatius Loyola, he founder of the Jesuit Order (the Society of Jesus).  I was a member of the Society from the time I graduated high school (1952) until 1962, after teaching at the Jesuit high school in San Francisco named for Ignatius.  At one time or another I have made quasi-pilgrimages to places associated with Loyola, including the family estate in Basque country where he recuperated from a wartime injury and began rethinking how he wanted to spend the rest of his life.  The ten years I spent as a Jesuit shaped my own life in ways that I still may not appreciate completely.  I was first the prayerful novice, then a student spending two years getting what was a very old-fashioned training in the classics and three years more getting indoctrinated in Thomistic philosophy, and then back into the classroom as the teacher, doing my best to teach batches of San Francisco teenagers the wonders of algebra and Spanish (and a...
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Back to blogging

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I've tried this before for a couple of interests of mine but never kept it up.  I'm going at it again because I'm currently bringing out several new books on Amazon, both under my own name and under my writing name of David Farren.  They may not really be that new in themselves, in a few cases just being shorter versions of things I've already done, but I'm hoping to find new readers.  Also, some are ways of trying out things that I may have been thinking about for as long as I have been writing, which is just a little less than the time I have been teaching. My wife shot this photo when we were in Thailand a few years back.  At one of the temples in Chiang Mai English-speaking tourists are very much encouraged to spend some time chatting with the monks to encourage their use of our language (and we also get hit up by often desperate high school or university students assigned to record themselves talking with us "native speakers").  The young monk ha...
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