Lee Douglas Hoffer

Teaching Fellow @ UChicagoDiv | Husband and Father | Avid Judoka, Powerlifter, Reader of Speculative Fiction / RT =/= endorsement

[Lee Douglas Hoffer @hofferNTPhD]

@jennfrey SOME of them are AI accelerationists/accommodationists, and GB programs represent a set of assumptions about meaning, virtue, and human flourishing opposed to their own myopic focus on education through the lens of economic ROI

[Lee Douglas Hoffer @hofferNTPhD]

@SketchesbyBoze Did you see Vicky Weber's Substack on Middle Grade books back in April? It's a slightly more heartening take on the situation.

https://t.co/eAvjW6b6dM

[Lee Douglas Hoffer @hofferNTPhD]

@TheMiddleborne @magnifikat32 I think the anti-dating mentality is shortsighted for the majority of Americans in churches today, but I don't have real beefs with the book

I'm just saying it was used IN CONTEXTS where people were hurt. That's a fact. I knew those people. I'm glad your wife was not among them!

[Lee Douglas Hoffer @hofferNTPhD]

@TheMiddleborne @magnifikat32 I'm not saying the book was all bad or denying that you and some others benefitted from it.

I thought it was banal, overhyped, and naive. For a number of reasons, I don't think Harris then was fundamentally different in terms of his hubris and self-aggrandizement then he is now

[Lee Douglas Hoffer @hofferNTPhD]

@TheMiddleborne @magnifikat32 In fairness, my friend, the people who have the most frustrations with purity culture now WERE American fundamentalists. I went to school with them. I was ostracized by them because my family watched TGIF in the late 90s haha.

[Lee Douglas Hoffer @hofferNTPhD]

@TheMiddleborne @magnifikat32 I grew up with kids in that sphere of evangelicalism who didn't watch TV or go to movies. Streaming porn was not a thing, nor were pocket-sized media centers. It was a very different time.

[Lee Douglas Hoffer @hofferNTPhD]

@TheMiddleborne @magnifikat32 This actually isn't accurate for a lot of the people who were in it. A lot of people in that part of evangelicalism were insulated from the wider American culture, and this was long before the widespread access to the internet.

[Lee Douglas Hoffer @hofferNTPhD]

@TheMiddleborne @magnifikat32 Yeah, I know plenty of people that weren't harmed by purity culture. There were different schools of thought, so it really wasn't monolithic. But some people were, and much of what people found good in it could have been achieved without Harris' intervention at all.

[Lee Douglas Hoffer @hofferNTPhD]

@TheMiddleborne @magnifikat32 and remind them terrible things can happen even if they have protection,

you can imagine that they'd have some pretty serious anxiety around the activity, right?

THAT was purity culture.

[Lee Douglas Hoffer @hofferNTPhD]

@TheMiddleborne @magnifikat32 If your kids have never even SEEN a bike, and you decide to teach them to ride by giving them lots of complex instructions and telling them all the horrible things that will happen if they bike without a helmet, and show them pictures of bicyclists hit by cars...

[Lee Douglas Hoffer @hofferNTPhD]

@TheMiddleborne @magnifikat32 Those were common illustrations, by the way. Youth leaders would rip flower petals off of roses and ask, "who would want a flower that looks like this?"

[Lee Douglas Hoffer @hofferNTPhD]

@TheMiddleborne @magnifikat32 indiscretion will cause them to lose their flower petals or the stickiness of their tape, ruin their future marital prospects, and betray their as-yet unknown future spouse, it creates a LOT of fear and anxiety that manifests physically

[Lee Douglas Hoffer @hofferNTPhD]

@TheMiddleborne @magnifikat32 He was a bit of a romantic, and time revealed that his romanticized views of their shared life experiences were not accurate to her experience.

[Lee Douglas Hoffer @hofferNTPhD]

@TheMiddleborne @magnifikat32 One other thing: Harris' views didn't just change because he left Christianity. He interpreted some of the events in his life differently with more hindsight, especially things he claimed about his and his wife's relationship. Things that weren't true from her perspective