Biases & Assumptions Influence What We Notice, Seek, or Neglect (Part 1)
Our biases and assumptions will influence what we notice, seek, or neglect. I have been thinking about bias in recent weeks, in part because I came across two articles from late 2018 about a visit by Rowan Williams (former Archbishop of Canterbury) to Notre Dame. He gave a keynote lecture titled “‘Relieved by Prayer’: Power, Shame and Redemption in Shakespeare’s Drama.” The lecture is available on Youtube and was also scheduled to be published in Religion and Literature Journal . The lecture itself begins about 6 minutes in, and goes until about the 50 minute mark, although the introductions take a while and some discussion follows. What caught my attention was that the news items described the keynote as part of a series called “The Catholic Artistic Heritage,” as if assuming Shakespeare was Catholic. Yet the two news items ( here and here ) did not quote Rowan Williams as mentioning anything about Shakespeare’s institutional-religious allegiancesas leaning Catholic, but the fu...