This week I finished: The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, by Philip Zimbardo: Many of us know something of the Stanford Prison Experiment. It was a psychology experiment in 1971 where a Stanford psychologist led a team that turned the basement of a building into a temporary prison-like space. They recruited two dozen local people whom they randomly assigned to play guards and prisoners for twelve days. All were tested psychologically and found healthy and in normal ranges on all psychological traits they tested. They had to stop the experiment on the sixth day. The participants lost themselves in the roles. The guards became authoritarian and sadistic. The prisoners became learned-helpless and compliant. Some had to leave even earlier for their traumatic…

This week I finished: A Faith Undefeated, about Corrie ten Boom: I learned about Corrie ten Boom from Edith Eger's The Choice. Eger only mentioned ten Boom's name. Corrie ten Boom was a Dutch woman who lived with her family in Haarlem, Holland. The family ran a watchmaking and repair store that had operated over a century. They were devout Christians and when the Nazis took over, they helped Jews by hiding them in their house and helping them escape. They were betrayed. They were imprisoned and sent to concentration camps. Her father died soon, though Corrie didn't learn until after the war. She and her sister were imprisoned and enslaved for years. Her sister died in December 1944. Corrie was released twelve days later,…

This week I finished: Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, by Jon Meacham: I'd been seeing lately how much the pattern today of Saying all the right things about freedom, liberty, and values we support Saying others should act by those values, in fact all of society But not living by those values ourselves Even though we could Claiming, against clear, incontrovertible evidence, that we can't repeats how Thomas Jefferson lived. Today, people recognize his flaws. We wish that on slavery he had acted differently. We wish he had, as a politician, acted more to end slavery. We wish he had freed his slaves. We recognize that his personal actions caused internal conflict that inhibited him from acting politically. If I was going to talk…