Two Lectures in Early 2026

What a great time I had with my last lecture series Pilgrims and Puritans: A Theocracy in Colonial New England.  And it seems the participants really liked the experience.  As one of them emailed me:

Thank you for another WONDER-FULL presentation. Of course, YOU would go above and beyond what the title implied. Pilgrims and Puritans ain't all turkey when Dincher is the one talkin'!

I am doing something a little different in early 2026.  I'll be delivering two single-session presentations through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Cal State East Bay.

Beyond Economics: Healthcare Justice

Tuesday, March 3, 2026
9:30 AM to 11:30 AM

Register here

Medicine’s classical duty to “do no harm” has collided with a modern, market-driven healthcare system.  In today’s America, health care is no longer a simple exchange between doctor and patient. It’s a sprawling, high-stakes system involving providers, hospitals, clinics, labs, pharmaceuticals, cutting-edge technologies—and the ever-present insurance industry. The cost of accessing this system was the central flashpoint in the 43-day U.S. government shutdown of 2025.  But beyond economics lies a deeper concern: justice. When access to life-saving care depends on a person’s ability to pay, the problem becomes not only economic but ethical—a question of justice about who counts, who pays, and how a just society cares for the sick. Beyond Economics:  Healthcare Justice explores how values in medicine have evolved from Hippocrates’ timeless call to “do no harm” to today’s urgent debate over fairness and equity—and the intersections with theories of justice.

Erasing History—or Caring for our National Soul?

Tuesday, April 21, 2025
9:30 AM to 11:30 AM

Register here

Confederate statues topple from their pedestals. Military bases shed names that once honored rebellion. Government websites are scrubbed clean, museum exhibits closed, and school curricula rewritten.  Across the political divide, accusations fly—each side charging the other with “erasing history.” Yet beneath the noise lies a deeper question: when does such action distort the past, and when does it nurture the spirit of our nation? Erasing History—or Caring for the National Soul offers one perspective on the difference. 

Enchantments and Villains

[Registration for Enchantments is now available at California State University - East Bay's Osher Lifelong Learning website.  Click HERE.]

With my lecture series on fairy tales and psychology coming up soon, I had a bit of a chuckle yesterday when an article popped up in my newsfeed about Disney’s plans for massive renovations and expansions to its theme park.  The Magic Kingdom is about to get a bit darker as villains will soon have their own home in the Magic Kingdom!   The expansion of Walt Disney World in Florida includes creating Villain Land.  Watch out, Sleeping Beauty and other fairy tale damsels in distress! 

Fairy tales do have their dark side. In fact, there has long been concern that fairy tales are generally too scary and gruesome for young children.  [Of course, they didn’t originate as children’s stories; they were stories told by adults to other adults.  But that changed by the mid-1800s after the Brothers Grimm realized that promoting their academic work on folktales as stories for children could ease their financial worries.]  In 1900, L. Frank Baum wrote in the introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz:

          … the old time fairy tale, having served for generation, may now be classed as “historical” in the children’s library; for the time has come for a series of newer “wonder tales” in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale.

          … Having this thought in mind, the story of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was written solely to please children of today.  It aspires to being a modern fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.

The villains eliminated together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents?  Nightmares left out?  Baum appears not to have thought that it might be a bit nightmarish to tell a story about a young girl being hunted down by a wicked witch who sends an army of flying monkeys after the girl and her friends—that is, after attacking them three previous times with an army of wolves, an army of crows and an army of killer bees—and then enslaves her. 

The struggle between the hero/heroine and the villain—between good and evil—is often at the center of the fairy tale. The hero/heroine and the villain are at odds with each other. They each want a different outcome, producing conflict and competition which drives the action in the story.  What would fairy tales be without their villains? 

[My related post:  Fairy Tale Damsels in Distress]

Planning Ahead: "Now for Something Completely Different"

Yes, Iceland was just as cold as it looks!

I am just back home this week from a wonderful 10-day adventure in Iceland - and am ready to give some attention to a new lecture series.  

If you have been attending any of my classes over the years, then you are accustomed to my focusing on history with contemporary social, political and even religious implications.  Those series can get to be a bit heavy–like my recent Rise and Fall of the Not-So-Invisible Empire on America’s history of White supremacy, racism and the Ku Klux Klan. That series was a great event.  Lots of information.  But it certainly was intense.  So, I am taking a break from "heavy" and planning to do something a little more fun.

I have proposed an online lecture series in the SCU-East Bay OLLI program for the fall that takes me back to my academic roots in psychology and my interest in literature and culture. 

Enchantments:  The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales

Little Red Riding Hood by Jessie Willcox Smith
(1911) from the book A Child's Book of Stories

Contemporary Americans have simultaneously watered down fairy tales with Disney cuteness and eschewed them as stories too frightening for young children. But fairy tales did not originate as stories for children. They were stories told by adults for adults, the chief form of wintertime entertainment in pre-literate agricultural communities.

Those who study myths, dreams and the symbolic nature of human psychology believe that the telling—and hearing— of stories like fairy tales is not a passive experience, that there is a powerful dynamic that takes place in the telling and listening to stories. Some cultures even trained their physicians in the art of storytelling so that they could use stories as tools for psychic and emotional healing and to help a patient become a more integrated person. (Scheherazade's storytelling in One Thousand and One Nights is not simply a ploy to save her life; her storytelling is therapeutic.)

My Plans for the Series

I presented this series several years ago and am now updating it.  My plan is to look at the nature and history of fairy tales and the theories of psychological interpretation—with a presentation on the basics of Freudian and Jungian. psychology.  We will explore both some well-known and lesser-known fairy tales to see what they can tell us about ourselves and our journey towards integration, wholeness, and healthy human development.  

Hope to see you in the fall!  I'll keep you posted on scheduling.  In the meanwhile, check out the great selection of OLLI lectures available during the Spring/Summer 2024 Term!

[My related posts:  Fairy Tale Damsels in Distress and Enchantments and Villains]

Planning Ahead: The Rise and Fall of the Not-So-Invisible Empire

The Rise and Fall of the Not-So-Invisible Empire is the working title of my next online lecture series for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at California State University-East Bay.  With the current challenging conversations among Americans about race, I thought it would be a good idea to look at some of the America's racial history and have proposed a lecture series on slavery and the Ku Klux Klan which has often been referred to as the Invisible Empire.  We are still working out a schedule, but the series will take place in early 2024.  I will let you know when we finalize the schedule. 

Update:  Registration is now open on the OLLI at CSU-East Bay website.  Register by clicking here.

The Ku Klux Klan is an American white supremacist, terrorist, and hate group which has existed as three separate Klan organizations in three non-overlapping time periods in American history. 

• First Klan (1865-1872):  After the American Civil War, the first Klan terrorized formerly enslaved Black Americans and their White allies in in South until it was crushed by Ulysses S. Grant in 1872.

• Second Klan (1915-1944):  Inspired by D. W. Griffith’s 1915 incendiary film “The Birth of a Nation”, the second Klan (often referred to as the Invisible Empire) grew to include as many as 6 million Americans by the mid 1920s—primarily in the North and Midwest rather than in the South—targeting not only Black Americans but Jews, Catholics. and immigrants in general as well.  The second Klan tapped into American passion for fraternal organization at the time and partnered with Evangelical clergy, temperance groups and suffragists.  The Klan infiltrated local and state governments, Congress, the judiciary—and had its sights set on the presidency before its scandal-driven decline in the second half of the 1920s.  Membership dropped to about 30,000 by 1930, and it finally faded away in the 1940s.  

• Third Klan (1950-present):  The third and current manifestation of the KKK with between 5000 and 8000 members emerged after 1950 in opposition to the civil rights movement.  Contemporary Klan groups have consistently declined due to a variety of factors including the American public's general distaste of the group, prosecution by law enforcement, civil lawsuits, and the growth of alternative radical right-wing hate and militia groups such as neo-Nazis and neo-Fascists.

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For some recommended reading, click here.