Getting real about our ‘issues’

This week on CW, Lee Jones reports on the fifth ‘Changing the Subject’ seminar featuring interdisciplinary perspectives on emotional well-being and social justice, this time considering perspectives from history. Jones argues that the task of historicising the therapeutic turn poses distinct challenges for theorists of therapy culture, for historians, and for anyone interested in the social role of education. This comes in the week Dennis Hayes and Kathryn Ecclestone, who instigated the seminar series, have been accused of championing ‘unfettered male reason’. Showing a similar disregard for ‘touchy-feely stuff’, CW editor Dolan Cummings argues over on the spiked review of books that a convincing humanism must also reckon with the hard truths captured in the theology of John Calvin, born 500 years ago last month.

Meanwhile, Miriam Gillinson is unimpressed by an production of Lorca’s Blood Wedding set in a knifey contemporary London. Plus Janacek in Holland Park and Alan Ayckbourn in Scarborough. Coming next week: Culture Wars at the Edinburgh festivals.

7 August 2009