02-11-2006, 07:20 AM
According to this author sensitivity toward touch leads people to become nazis or something. Everything she has to say in this interview is nonsense. Proof positive that anyone can get a Ph.d in the US, even from a "top twenty" university like Vanderbilt.
An Examined Life: Linda Holler of Religious Studies
By Jenni Winfrey
Linda Holler makes a living thinking about things.
Chair of Religious Studies at SDSU, she describes her profession that way, laughing at the memory of her early days in college when “I realized that I had never had a thought in my whole life. I regurgitated information well, but I didn’t think.”
The joy of thinking led Holler to pursue a master’s degree in theology and a Ph.D. in religious ethics from Vanderbilt University in Nashville after graduating from Chico State University with a degree in philosophy and religion.
Lately, Holler has been thinking about the role of touch in our moral agency. The accounts of two autistic women for whom touch was painful inspired her to explore the extent to which the senses, particularly the tactile sense, inform self-awareness, world awareness and emotional feeling.
In Erotic Morality: The Role of Touch in Moral Agency, Holler examines how physical touch, and the way we learn and experience touch, helps to determine our repulsions, attractions and indifferences, our emotional response to our surroundings and our ability to “care passionately and compassionately about our own lives and the lives of others.”
To support her theory that touch should be considered the center of moral life, Holler looked at two autistic women who avoided touch, and found in them a corresponding inability to feel empathy or connection with people. She also found corroboration in accounts from 20th century history: Adolf Hitler reportedly disassociated physical pain and emotion and learned to connect physical pain with weakness; Adolf Eichmann, a leading Nazi officer was “so alienated from his own body, so incapable of feeling his body’s needs that he ate the same meal every day,” Holler’s research revealed.
In essence Holler explored “the connection between feeling comfortable with our bodies and our capacity for empathy, and how we can use awareness of our pain and suffering to engender compassion in ourselves." She said she was drawn to the stories of these two women “because they spoke to me of my own sensory and emotional life.”
Holler believes that everyday pressures and enticements like stress, material consumption and television viewing disconnect people from the world. People anesthetize themselves with these things instead of participating in activities that touch the self like gardening or playing music.
“Part of the idea in this book is to escape anesthetizations so that we can come to our senses and feel again,” said Holler. She pursues these ideals in her own life by practicing vipassana, an ancient meditation technique, and spending time in the desert, which she imagines as a big Zen garden.
However, Holler does not specialize in Buddhism or in any particular religion. “I used to see religion as a set of propositions that you either choose to believe or not believe,” she said. “But that perception was an artificial relic of secularism; religion is really about the ability to connect. Some people call that spirituality instead of religion because they are frustrated with institutionalized religion. But religion is always about the experience. Religion would never have existed for thousands of years if people had seen it only as a set of propositions.”
Holler believes that the public education system is doing students a disservice by banning religious discussion in the classroom. “The result of not talking about religion in our schools for nearly two decades is that Americans don’t think critically about religion,” she contends.
In the SDSU religious studies department, she says, “we teach students to think about religion from a variety of perspectives, and to examine their own religious lives.”
Holler teaches World Religions, Religion and the Sciences, Religious Violence and Nonviolence, and Nature, Spirituality and Ecology.
http://www.sdsuniverse. info/people_content.asp?id=5788
An Examined Life: Linda Holler of Religious Studies
By Jenni Winfrey
Linda Holler makes a living thinking about things.
Chair of Religious Studies at SDSU, she describes her profession that way, laughing at the memory of her early days in college when “I realized that I had never had a thought in my whole life. I regurgitated information well, but I didn’t think.”
The joy of thinking led Holler to pursue a master’s degree in theology and a Ph.D. in religious ethics from Vanderbilt University in Nashville after graduating from Chico State University with a degree in philosophy and religion.
Lately, Holler has been thinking about the role of touch in our moral agency. The accounts of two autistic women for whom touch was painful inspired her to explore the extent to which the senses, particularly the tactile sense, inform self-awareness, world awareness and emotional feeling.
In Erotic Morality: The Role of Touch in Moral Agency, Holler examines how physical touch, and the way we learn and experience touch, helps to determine our repulsions, attractions and indifferences, our emotional response to our surroundings and our ability to “care passionately and compassionately about our own lives and the lives of others.”
To support her theory that touch should be considered the center of moral life, Holler looked at two autistic women who avoided touch, and found in them a corresponding inability to feel empathy or connection with people. She also found corroboration in accounts from 20th century history: Adolf Hitler reportedly disassociated physical pain and emotion and learned to connect physical pain with weakness; Adolf Eichmann, a leading Nazi officer was “so alienated from his own body, so incapable of feeling his body’s needs that he ate the same meal every day,” Holler’s research revealed.
In essence Holler explored “the connection between feeling comfortable with our bodies and our capacity for empathy, and how we can use awareness of our pain and suffering to engender compassion in ourselves." She said she was drawn to the stories of these two women “because they spoke to me of my own sensory and emotional life.”
Holler believes that everyday pressures and enticements like stress, material consumption and television viewing disconnect people from the world. People anesthetize themselves with these things instead of participating in activities that touch the self like gardening or playing music.
“Part of the idea in this book is to escape anesthetizations so that we can come to our senses and feel again,” said Holler. She pursues these ideals in her own life by practicing vipassana, an ancient meditation technique, and spending time in the desert, which she imagines as a big Zen garden.
However, Holler does not specialize in Buddhism or in any particular religion. “I used to see religion as a set of propositions that you either choose to believe or not believe,” she said. “But that perception was an artificial relic of secularism; religion is really about the ability to connect. Some people call that spirituality instead of religion because they are frustrated with institutionalized religion. But religion is always about the experience. Religion would never have existed for thousands of years if people had seen it only as a set of propositions.”
Holler believes that the public education system is doing students a disservice by banning religious discussion in the classroom. “The result of not talking about religion in our schools for nearly two decades is that Americans don’t think critically about religion,” she contends.
In the SDSU religious studies department, she says, “we teach students to think about religion from a variety of perspectives, and to examine their own religious lives.”
Holler teaches World Religions, Religion and the Sciences, Religious Violence and Nonviolence, and Nature, Spirituality and Ecology.
http://www.sdsuniverse. info/people_content.asp?id=5788