In both of those, he added, “we have to be able to imagine that another world exists.”In a recent email, Dr. Dunbar told me: “Positive gossip is one of the ways we bond communities. Negative gossip can be useful because it allows the community to police itself.” But he makes a distinction between negative gossip that alerts the community to an individual’s bad or dangerous behavior and destructive gossip that’s intended to hurt or undermine. But what we know about gossip indicates that it is rarely negative. It is gossip, after all, to say that we ran into a mutual friend on the street or to brag about our child’s good grades. So why did the church rhetoric that I grew up with condemn gossip so fiercely?

Source: International New York Times July 14, 2021 18:56 UTC