unclean Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality By Richard Beck Reviewed by Geoffrey W. Sutton My connection to Unclean By the time I found the book Unclean, I had spent the better part of two years writing a book about moral psychology and Christianity ( A House Divided ). It just so happened that philosopher, Doug Olena who co-leads a group I attend, chose Unclean for our discussions and as is usual in our group, Doug asked for volunteers. I ended up with a couple of chapters but I quickly read the entire book and found a lot of overlap with the literature I had been reading on disgust psychology—that’s a good thing because it shows Beck was in touch with the research supporting his thesis. The hook “Imagine spitting into a Dixie cup. After doing so, how would you feel if you were asked to drink the contents of the cup? (p.1)” Beck opens with this classic example of disgust on page 1. It comes from experiments by “...
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