Tag: OPRFHS
-
Memoir: Joking can be serious (1974)
Why do humans laugh? Why do they make jokes? Ask the evolutionary psychologists, and they’ll tell you that people only speak and behave to further the survival of our species. Two scientists at S.U.N.Y Binghamton assert that laughter first began among our ancestors two to four million years ago as a sort of social glue.…
-
Memoir Self-reflection: Black and White thinking
As suggested elsewhere, a big part of my family’s culture was centered around the Bible-believing Plymouth Brethren. In the Austin neighborhood, on Leamington Avenue, this group of fundamentalist Christians that included my father’s grandparents established this “Gospel Hall” (photo from 2018) in the 1910s. The congregants of this fellowship ordered their lives by its weekly…