The Little Friar

I've spent a good deal of my life dealing with the notion of "mental illness".  It's not a secret that I'm on the Autism Spectrum.  That diagnosis alone comes with a host of attendant diagnoses of various additional disorders.  So I'm not one to downplay any particular diagnosis.  I know the suffering involved. That said, I'm struck by how often a diagnosis becomes a socially controlling thing in our lives. Enter Thomas Szasz . For those of you unfamiliar with Szasz's work, Thomas Szasz was the radical and iconoclastic psychiatrist who spent most of his life attacking the profession of psychiatry by arguing that "mental illness" didn't exist.  Rather, Szasz argued, "mental illness" was a social construct created so that society could use it as a form of social control via the medical and legal professions.  According to Szasz, mental illness was a myth as he wrote in his famous book The Myth of Mental Illness , pub...

I have long argued that Christians should work a whole lot more on kindness than love.  Love, I've argued, is too amorphous and abstract.  Christians have lost the meaning of that word in day to day interactions.  Even worse, some Christians use the word love to justify being harsh and exclusive.  Love becomes doing what is "best" for you and, by the way, you don't get to decide what is best for you.  I do. But it seems to me, when you look at the Christian virtue lists, that kindness comes before love.  So we start small.  Work on kindness first and then graduate on to love.  If you are a thorough-goingly kind person, odds are you have a great shot at becoming a loving person.  But if you skip the lessons of kindness it's very unlikely you'll learn how to love.  It's about baby-steps.  And they start with kindness.  To capture this there's a saying that I share quite a lot:  Kindness is the tutor of love. ...

We are, as Aristotle put it , defined by words.  Speech is uniquely human.  Thing is, we find it hard to talk, even with closest friends.  Even more so, with our lover. Take Mr & Mrs Hendy, from Monty Python's Meaning of Life .  We find the retired American couple at a restaurant.  Like many friends and couples, their conversation has all those awkward silences and half-spoken words.  I guess they didn't heed Nietzsche's words, in Human, All-Too-Human :  "When marrying, one should ask oneself this question:  Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this woman into your old age?" To remedy the silence, the couple orders a conversation from the menu:  Philosophy.  "Have you ever wondered ... just why you're here?" asks the waiter to the couple, trying to help them begin.  "Well, we went to Miami last year," replies Mr. Hendy ingenuously, "and California the year before that, and we've" … "No, no, no...