In this week’s BMJ column, Dalrymple writes of Samuel Pepys’s account of the great plague of 1665. Read it here (purchase required).
No fleas on me
By Clinton on | Filed in Essays | No comments yet
Monthly Archives: October 2009
The Cult of Insincerity
Prison is “an absurd system in a modern democracy”. Criminals do not knowingly do wrong. They simply lack information about how to behave properly. If we give them that information, they will no longer commit crimes. What we really need are not prisons but “places of social reintegration” where criminals and all other “socially disintegrated people” can get the care they need.
So says a French intellectual, whose views Dalrymple disassembles, analyzes and neatly discards in a new essay for The New English Review.
Now I’m a believer
Dalrymple’s latest BMJ column:
When I was a student I attended a public faith healing meeting. I went as a joke, but what I saw angered me. The American evangelist—to my eyes obviously a crook—told the hopeless cases assembled there that if they believed deeply and sincerely enough they would be cured. They weren’t, and therefore it was their own fault. I found it cruel, repellent, and grossly exploitative.Read the rest here (purchase required)
I grew less ill disposed to faith healing when I attended the annual ceremony of the Black Christ of Esquipulas in Guatemala many years later…