The Doctor Is In

This is a repost of an essay from 2004.
 
In contemporary political discourse, we often discuss the Rule of Law, especially in our postmodern culture where bad behavior is often justified (and excused) by situation, upbringing, or historical injustice. But no one ever talks about the Law of Rules.
Today in the office I reviewed one of […]

Do not move the ancient boundary stone set up    by your forefathers.
        – Proverbs 22:28 –
 
Ancient wisdom: a sage injunction uttered in a time when simple shepherds and farmers parsed out land for grazing and grain, speaking to the prudence of respecting contracts, negotiated agreements with those with whom we live, to abide in a measure of […]

I’ve been working on several posts, which had been taking longer than expected — especially a post on euthanasia, which is beginning to look like another multi-part series. I hope to start getting some of these up in the near future.
In the meantime, a link from Glenn Reynolds hooked into something I’ve been ruminating on […]

In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, there were some scattered reports–in an admittedly questionable media source (a British tabloid)–of euthanasia of patients trapped in a New Orleans hospital. I discussed the initial media report here, and did a follow up post here which expanded on the questionable nature of the sources and some of the […]

In my previous post on guilt and shame, I discussed their nature and differences, their impact on personal and social life, and their instrumentality in much of our individual unhappiness and communal dysfunction. If indeed shame is the common thread of the human condition–fraught as it is with pain, suffering, and evil–it must be mastered […]

A wise friend–a man who helped me emerge from a period of considerable difficulty in my life–once taught me a simple lesson. In less than a minute, he handed me a gift which I have spent years only beginning to understand, integrating it into my life with agonizing slowness. It is a lesson which intellect […]

Like most Americans, I have watched with morbid fascination and horror the tragedy of immense proportions unfolding in the Gulf states and New Orleans. Partially distracted by the need to prepare for a large family get-together this weekend, the repeated images of this disaster nevertheless have been haunting and thought-provoking, in ways I have not […]

In the years following the Great War, a sense of doom and panic settled over Germany. Long concerned about a declining birth rate, the country faced the loss of 2 million of its fine young men in the war, the crushing burden of an economy devastated by war and the Great Depression, further compounded by […]