Religion & Society

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Educated

A Memoir

By Tara Westover

Educated is Tara Westover’s memoir of growing up in an isolated survivalist family in rural Idaho and gradually building a life beyond the boundaries of her childhood. Without conventional schooling, she works in her father’s junkyard, absorbs a worldview shaped by religious certainty and distrust of public institutions, and initially lacks basic knowledge that her future classmates take for granted. Self-directed study eventually brings her to Brigham Young University and, later, to Cambridge and Harvard. Yet education does not function as a simple escape route. As Westover acquires language for history, power, violence, and personal autonomy, she must reconsider memories and loyalties that formed her identity. The memoir’s central conflict is therefore not ignorance versus knowledge alone, but belonging versus self-definition. It examines what happens when intellectual growth makes a former understanding of home impossible to sustain—and when telling one’s own story carries the risk…

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Parable of the Sower

By Octavia E. Butler

In a near-future California destabilized by climate disruption, extreme inequality, privatization, addiction, and failing public institutions, teenager Lauren Olamina recognizes that her walled neighborhood cannot remain safe. She also lives with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her physically experience the suffering she witnesses. When violence destroys her home, Lauren travels north among displaced people, concealing her vulnerability while gathering companions and testing the principles of Earthseed, the belief system she has begun to formulate. Told chiefly through Lauren’s dated journal entries, the novel combines a dangerous migration story with an inquiry into leadership, faith, adaptation, and collective survival. Butler’s future is frightening not because it depends on a single spectacular catastrophe, but because familiar social failures intensify and reinforce one another. The result is both dystopian science fiction and a coming-of-age novel about building purpose wit…

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The Power of Images

Studies in the History and Theory of Response

By David Freedberg

Why do people pray before images, touch them, fear them, censor them, attack them, or respond to them sexually? David Freedberg argues that such behavior is not a marginal residue of superstition but evidence of a fundamental feature of visual experience: viewers frequently react to representations as though the depicted person or power were somehow present. Drawing on material from classical antiquity, Christianity, European popular devotion, legal punishment, magic, erotic art, and iconoclasm, he shifts attention from style and attribution to what images cause people to feel and do. Pilgrimage objects, votive offerings, effigies, visions, wax figures, and celebrated paintings consequently belong to one history of response. The book challenges the disciplinary boundary between “high art” and supposedly crude or irrational image use, proposing that embarrassment and aesthetic convention often conceal the bodily, emotional, and behavioral force of seeing.