By Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn When encountering something outside one’s usual experience, one’s first instinct is to draw comparisons and contrasts with what one knows. Trite and true, right? It sounds so simple. But of course there are deep philosophical and psychological questions about what makes us us and what makes them them–and ethical questions about whether it should. Layer onto this questions from theology, cognitive science, anthropology, and history, let alone art and literature, and we must ask, in more ways than one, who do we think we are? When we take note of so-called cultural differences, is a generalization about Read more