Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  “pre-eminent ancestor of the Davidic dynasty.” 20 At the least, then, to name Tamar is to draw attention to Judah and the Davidic and messianic focus of the genealogy already here at its beginning.21 But to read Genesis is to see that Tamar is important to Judah’s role as “Lion of Israel” in her own right. Judah, in Gen 38, has no heir; the sons of Judah have not produced a son. Two of them die childless and Judah refuses to fulfil his levirate obligations and give his third son to Tamar their widow. Jacob’s prophecy, the Davidic dynasty, is threatened. Enter Tamar. Sent away from Judah’s home, childless and a widow in her father’s house, Tamar disguises herself and conceives a child—twins—by Judah. In this way she, and not Judah, makes possible the continuation of the Davidic line and the fulfilment of Jacob/Israel’s prophecy to Judah (“the sceptre shall not depart from Judah,” Gen 49:10).22 She, and not Judah, fulfils the levirate law.23 Condemned by Judah to be burnt at the stake for prostitution, she reveals to Judah that she is the daughter-in-law he has abandoned childless, contrary to the law. “She is more righteous than I,” Judah says (38:26). Who is Tamar? She is, in Genesis, both widow and seeming prostitute, and the righteous one who insists on the fulfilment of the law of Israel, when Judah, Lion of 19 On intertextuality in Matthew see especial y Ulrich Luz, “Intertexts in the Gospel of Matthew,” HTR 97.2 (2004): 119–37, esp. 121–2 (citations 122, 121). I use “intertext” here in Luz’s first sense: intertexts as the product of the text (as opposed to the reader), belonging to the rhetorical strategy of the text, “consciously invoked by an author.” “Intertextuality on the level of the text is primarily descriptive; it facilitates the precise description of the strategies of a text.” 20 Heil, “Narrative Roles,” 539. Cf. Richard Bauckham, “Tamar’s Ancestry and Rahab’s Marriage: Two Problems in the Matthean Genealogy,” NT 37.4 (1995): 313–29, esp. 326. 21 Heil, “Narrative Roles,” 539. 22 Cf. Weren, “Five Women,” 297. 23 Cf. Clements , Mothers on the Margins, 64; Wainwright, Feminist Critical Reading, 162. Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “Tamar 1,” in Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal, Deuterocanonical Books, and the New Testament (ed. Carol Meyers et al.; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 161–2, here 161, notes: “in-law incest rules are suspended for the purpose of the levirate”; when a son is not available, the father-in-law is permitted, even required, to take the place of the widow’s husband in providing a son. Hence there is no “sin” in Tamar; the problem is with Judah, as he himself admits (Gen 38:26). 136 136 Paul and Matthew among Jews and Gentiles

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  108 Ironically, despite the creationists’ rejection of their animal roots, religious awe may be yet another confirmation of the Darwinian continuity of the species and of our profound instinctual heritage. To many reasonable scientists, the attribution of “religious awe” to nonhuman primates would seem a stretch at best. At the very worst, it could be seen as an extreme case of anthropomorphism gone amok. However, there is a solid, empirically based tradition of studying the behaviors and emotions in chimpanzees as evolutionary antecedents to human morality. Beginning with Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s seminal work, Love and Hate: The Natural History of Behavior Patterns, 109 and recently culminating in Frans de Waal’s beautifully written Our Inner Ape, 110 a compelling case is made for certain social behaviors of monkeys and apes as precursors for various human moral behaviors, including highly refined deportment such as peacemaking. These forerunners include reciprocity of grooming, maintenance of social ranking and violence attenuation. Easy to appreciate are clear examples such as an adult chimp helping a juvenile climb a tree or zoo-confined chimps (who are known to be unable to swim) jumping into the moat in a futile attempt to rescue a drowning chimp. Such altruistic behaviors conjure images of fireman entering buildings engulfed in flames to rescue trapped families or soldiers running directly into the line of fire to rescue a fallen comrade. De Waal’s views are based on many decades of observing aggression in primate societies. He noticed that after fights between two chimps, other chimpanzees would appear to console the loser—a behavior requiring both the capacity for empathy and a significant level of self-awareness. De Waal also describes female chimpanzees poignantly removing stones from the hands of males readying to fight so as to head off the brawl or at least to prevent them from inflicting mortal harm. Such “reconciliation” efforts may preserve group solidarity, thus diminishing vulnerability from outside attackers. Human morality organizes around questions of right, wrong and justice. According to de Waal and others, 111 it originates with concern for others and in understanding and respecting social rules. This is seen in a multitude of mammalian groups. The orchestration of such premoral behaviors requires a highly sophisticated level of emotional and social functioning. Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist working at Harvard University, has extended these notions and regards the brain as having genetically shaped mechanisms whose function is the acquisition of moral rules based in complex feeling states. 112 In the face of such robust observations, the social sciences often appear to manifest their distaste for the human-as-animal supposition, most notably by sanitizing their terminology around the concepts of instinctual behavior. In fact, the word instinct is rarely found in modern psychological literature. Rather it is purged and replaced with terms such as drives, motivations and needs .

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. de cæco et Zacchæo) There was a great multitude gathered round Christ, and the blind man indeed knew Him not, but felt a drawing towards Him, and grasped with his heart what his sight embraced not. As it follows, And when he heard the multitude passing by, he asked what it was. And those that saw spoke indeed according to their own opinion. And they told him that Jesus of Nazareth passeth by. But the blind man cried out. He is told one thing, he proclaims another; for it follows, And he cried out, saying, Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on me. Who taught thee this, O man? Hast thou that art deprived of sight read books? Whence then knowest thou the Light of the world? Verily the Lord giveth sight to the blind. (Ps. 146:8.) CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. Having been brought up a Jew, he was not ignorant that of the seed of David should God be born according to the flesh, and therefore he addresses Him as God, saying, Have mercy upon me. Would that those might imitate him who divide Christ into two. For he speaks of Christ as God, yet calls Him Son of David. But they marvel at the justice of his confession, and some even wished to prevent him from confessing his faith. But by checks of this kind his ardour was not damped. For faith is able to resist all, and to triumph over all. It is a good thing to lay aside shame in behalf of divine worship. For if for money’s sake some are bold, is it not fitting when the soul is at stake, to put on a righteous boldness? As it follows, But he cried out the more, Son of David, & c. The voice of one invoking in faith stops Christ, for He looks back upon them who call upon Him in faith. And accordingly He calls the blind man to Him, and bids him draw nigh, that he in truth who had first laid hold on Him in faith, might approach Him also in the body. The Lord asks this blind man as he drew near, What will thou that I shall do? He asks the question purposely, not as ignorant, but that those who stood by might know that he sought not money, but divine power from God. And thus it follows, But he said, Lord, that I may receive my sight.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  AUGUSTINE. (de Con. Ev. lib. iii. c. 22.) Now John says, that Joseph was a disciple of Jesus. Hence it is also here added, Who also himself waited for the kingdom of God. But it naturally causes surprise how he who for fear was a secret disciple should have dared to beg our Lord’s body, which none of those who openly followed Him dared to do; for it is said, This man went unto Pilate, and begged the body of Jesus. We must understand then, that he did this from confidence in his rank, by which he might be privileged to enter familiarly into Pilate’s presence. But in performing that last funeral rite, he seems to have eared less for the Jews, although it was his custom in hearing our Lord to avoid their hostility. BEDE. So then being fitted by the righteousness of his works for the burial of our Lord’s body, he was worthy by the dignity of his secular power to obtain it. Hence it follows, And he took it down, and wrapped it in linen. By the simple burial of our Lord, the pride of the rich is condemned, who not even in their graves can be without their wealth. ATHANASIUS. (in Vit. Ant. 90.) They also act absurdly who embalm the bodies of their dead, and do not bury them, even supposing them to be holy. For what can be more holy or greater than our Lord’s body? And yet this was placed in a tomb until it rose again the third day. For it follows, And he laid it in a hewn sepulchre.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I was cold as I knelt there, I had broken out in a sweat. The man was breathing heavily too, he had exerted himself, the rest was as much for him as for me. He knew what he was doing, I thought with sudden admiration; he knew how far to push and when to ease off, and I was excited at the thought of being taken further by him, into territories I had only glimpsed or had intimations of. Then, still keeping one hand on my head, he reached down and very quickly removed first one and then the other clamp from my chest, at which there was a quick flare of pain, making me cry out again, and then a flood of extraordinary pleasure, not sexual pleasure exactly but something like euphoria, a lifting and lightness and unsteadiness, as with certain drugs. He returned his hand to my head and gripped me firmly again, still not moving, having grown very still; even his cock had softened just slightly, it was large but more giving in my mouth. And then he repeated the word I didn’t know but that I thought meant steady and suddenly my mouth was filled with warmth, bright and bitter, his urine, which I took as I had taken everything else, it was a kind of pride in me to take it. Kuchko, he said as I drank, speaking softly and soothingly, addressing me again, mnogo si dobra, you’re very good, and he said this a second time and a third before he was done.

• From Post Office (1971)

  Sit there until they sent a rescue squad? What did the Postal Manual say? Where was it? I had never known anybody who had seen one. Balls. I locked the truck, put the ignition keys in my pocket and stepped into the water—nearly up to my waist—and began wading toward West Garage. It was still raining. Suddenly the water rose another three or four inches. I had been walking across a lawn and had stepped off the curbing. The truck was parked on somebody’s front lawn. For a moment I thought that swimming might be faster, then I thought, no, that would look ridiculous. I made it to the garage and walked up to the dispatcher. There I was, wet as wet could get and he looked at me. I threw him the truck keys and the ignition keys. Then I wrote on a piece of paper: 3435 Mountview Place. “Your truck’s at this address. Go get it.” “You mean you left it out there?” “I mean I left it out there.” I walked over, punched out, then stripped to my shorts and stood in front of a heater. I hung my clothes over the heater. Then I looked across the room and there by another heater stood Tom Moto in his shorts. We both laughed. “It’s hell, isn’t it?” he asked. “Unbelievable.” “Do you think The Stone planned it?” “Hell yes! He even made it rain!” “Did you get stalled out there?” “Sure,” I said. “I did too.” “Listen, baby,” I said, “my car is 12 years old. You’ve got a new one. I’m sure I’m stalled out there. How about a push to get me started?” “O.K.” We got dressed and went out. Moto had bought a new model car about three weeks before. I waited for his engine to start. Not a sound. Oh Christ, I thought. The rain was up to the floorboards. Moto got out. “No good. It’s dead.” I tried mine without any hope. There was some action from the battery, some spark, though feeble. I pumped the gas, hit it again. It started up. I really let it roar. VICTORY! I warmed it good. Then I backed up and began to push Moto’s new car. I pushed him for a mile. The thing wouldn’t even fart. I pushed him into a garage, left him there, and picking the highland and the drier streets, made it back to Betty’s ass. 12The Stone’s favorite carrier was Matthew Battles. Battles never came in with a wrinkled shirt on. In fact, everything he wore was new, looked new. The shoes, the shirts, the pants, the cap. His shoes really shined and none of his clothing appeared to have ever been laundered even once. Once a shirt or a pair of pants became the least bit soiled he threw them away. The Stone often said to us as Matthew walked by: “Now, there goes a carrier!” And The Stone meant it. His eyes damn near shimmered with love.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I offered the cherries to him, too, telling him to take the bag, I had had enough. You brought us gifts, D. said, flowers and cherries, you brought us springtime, he said, which made everyone laugh. The writer had already been saying his goodbyes when I arrived. He wouldn’t march tonight, he said, he had come to watch the crowd gather but he had to get home to his daughter, it was her bedtime already. She would be getting cross, he said to me; he spoke the English of the British Institute, of the Cambridge exam. He was devoted to this girl, who was four or five; his Facebook page was full of pictures of her, of the two of them, he was a convert to fatherhood, having come to it late. She came the first couple of days, he said, but after that she refused, she wanted to stay home with her mother and read—she loves to read, he said, you’ve never seen a child who loves so much to read—she says the protests are boring. Smart girl, D. said, they are boring, every night is the same, it’s not really a protest, it’s just a boring party. He spoke as if he were picking up a conversation I had interrupted. They don’t have any ideas, he said, throwing up his hands, what’s the good of a movement without any ideas. No no, the writer said, please, you can’t write that—D. was reporting on the protests for a newspaper in Britain, almost the first international coverage they would receive—please, that can’t be your story. You have to say what the feeling is, the energy, but D. cut him off. The energy, he said, not sounding happy now, what the fuck is that? Look, if it’s just energy, we should hope it stops, right away, energy without a plan can’t build anything, it’s more likely to make things worse. No, the writer said again, but he was already withdrawing, he put his hand on D.’s shoulder but it was a way of ending the conversation, not of drawing him near. I don’t think you’re right, he said, it’s the future they want, you should do what you can to help them. He smiled then, he put his hand on D.’s face, cupping his cheek like a grandfather, a much older man. If you had children you’d see it differently, he said, switching to Bulgarian, you’d support them then. D. scoffed but the writer had already moved on, he reached his hand to D.’s mother, who took him by the arm instead. I’m going too, she said, I’ll walk with you.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I had been sitting too long now, I was steeling myself to go, when with a sudden increase of noise and a change of pressure, a slight disorder in the air, the door opened and R. came in. He was wearing a hat and scarf and a heavy winter coat, though it wasn’t very cold; but then he was from a warm country, it was his first real fall. He grew up in the Azores, and though his town seemed beautiful in the photos I had found online, orderly white houses brilliant against the sea, he would never go back there, he said; it was a small place, he hated small places. He saw me right away, and without waiting to be greeted by a server he began making his way over, pulling off his hat and scarf as he walked. I was struck again by his beauty, which was offhand and accidental, with his disheveled hair and ruffled clothes, a beauty stripped of self-regard. Even though it was familiar to me I felt it as a kind of physical force, not welcoming me but pushing me off, so that I was always astonished to find I could take him in my arms. This was what I did now, embracing him though I had intended to remain seated, to greet him coolly and punish him a little. We parted after a second or two, but not before I heard R. make a sound I had come to love, a little grunt of happiness, a homecoming sound, and all my irritation drained away. It’s crazy outside, he said as he sat down, gesturing to the window beside us, it’s totally crazy, I’ve never seen anything like it, have you—but he went on before I could answer. He was sorry he was late, he said, he was supposed to go to a party but had bowed out at the last minute, and then it had been hard to persuade his roommate to go on without him. I thought I wouldn’t be able to come, R. said, and I made a noncommittal sound, feeling my annoyance return. Oh, he said, are you mad, and he wore an expression of such openness and willingness to be in the wrong that it was impossible to stay angry. I told him it was all right, that he shouldn’t worry, it was nothing. No, he said, it isn’t nothing, I hate that I can’t see you when I want to, and he made a small gesture with his hand, extending it slightly toward mine. We couldn’t touch, of course, it would be imprudent, but he flexed his fingers in a way that I knew meant desire, that though he was touching the polished wood it was me he wanted to touch. This was clear in his expression, too, when I looked at his face and he said very softly, almost mouthing it, Skupi , one of the few words of Bulgarian he had learned.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  I kept outgrowing my shoes, two pairs in the seventh grade alone. Dwight was indignant. He thought I was growing out of malice. He put off buying the third pair until I could hardly walk, and said there would be no sneakers this time. We would talk about sneakers when I settled down and decided what size my feet were going to be. I wanted to buy them myself out of my savings from the paper route, but Dwight refused to withdraw the money from the bank. I wouldn’t have cared that much about the sneakers except for basketball. The Chinook grade school had very few boys to draw on for sports, which meant that I got to play in most of the games, and wear a sharp uniform—red satin with white stripes. I was not wrong to suppose that this uniform would lose a certain something with the addition of brown street shoes. We played our games at night. When they were away my mother usually drove me, but if she was busy Norma would get Bobby Crow to take me in his car. Of course Norma came along too. This was one of their ways to steal time together. On the drive to the game Bobby gave me tips, inside dope about passing, shooting, feinting. I hung over the front seat as Bobby talked, nodding shrewdly at everything he said. Bobby had played football for Concrete High. He’d been their quarterback, the smallest and best player on the team, so much better than the others that he seemed alone on the field. His solitary excellence made him beautiful and tragic, because you knew that whatever prodigies he performed would be undone by the rest of the team. He made sly, unseen handoffs to butterfingered halfbacks, long bull’s-eye passes to ends who couldn’t catch them. But his true wizardry was brokenfield running: sprinting and stopping dead, jumping sideways, pirouetting on his toes and wriggling his hips girlishly as he spun away from the furious hulks who pursued him, slipping between them like a trout shooting down a boulder-strewn creek. Bobby was small-boned and slender. He neither drank nor smoked. He had the narrow features of his half-caste mother and the dark eyes and skin of his Nez Percé father, who, Norma told me, was a direct descendant of Chief Joseph. Bobby did not play basketball for Concrete, but I listened to all his words of

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  88 Lecture 21: Shakespeare Keats, a Romantic poet, said that Shakespeare had negative capability: the ability to empty out one’s own ego enough to be able to become a character in a play. Shakespeare used this capability to empty himself so thoroughly that he could become a character fully, knowing what it felt like to see the world from that character’s point of view and also how that character would talk.Shakespeare’s range of characters is extraordinary: from the pidgin English of Caliban to the philosophical language of Hamlet—and everything in between—there is a virtually complete cross-section of people in his world throughout his plays. Doctors, sailors, statesmen, soldiers, lawyers, and many others have written books showing that Shakespeare must have been one of them, because he always gets the language of every profession right. Shakespeare could do this in part because of his amazing vocabulary and his delight in language. When he could not ¿ nd the right word, he invented or rede¿ ned one. He also made hundreds of expressions proverbial, so that most of us quote Shakespeare several times a day, even if we do not recognize the source of the expression. Words had a lot to do on the Elizabethan stage, which had no scenery or arti¿ cial lighting, so that words had to set the scene and the atmosphere. An audience in Elizabethan England went to hear a play, not to see one (the root of the word “audience” is to hear). Shakespeare also had a metaphoric habit of mind, which means that his plays are full of amazing, brilliant, and illuminating comparisons. Shakespeare’s personal reticence—a part of his negative capability—is responsible for the objective point of view taken by his plays. After 400 years of intense scrutiny, we still know almost nothing about Shakespeare’s personal life and beliefs. In his plays, points of view are expressed by individual characters, but in the context of the entire play, individual points of view tend to be balanced by those of other characters. As You Like It is a wonderful debate about the values of the pastoral, without the playwright endorsing any single one of them. This is one of the characteristics of his plays that have made them nearly universal, since they are so open-ended that each age and individual is free to interpret them. Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinean short story writer,

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  187 admires Sutpen to the point of adoration and ¿ nds meaning in his own life through Sutpen’s glory. After the Civil War, in which Sutpen has lost virtually everything, he seduces Wash’s granddaughter, Milly, in an effort to have a son and restart his dynasty. Wash knows what is happening but trusts Sutpen to behave honorably. When the baby—a girl—is born, Wash realizes that Sutpen cares more for his horses than he does for Wash and Milly, and he kills Sutpen with a scythe. After dark, when the body had been discovered and the inevitable posse comes for Wash, he kills Milly and the baby, douses his old shack with kerosene, lights it on ¿ re, and then runs out, silhouetted in the À ames, into a rain of bullets from the posse. The ending feels like—and in some ways resembles—the ending of a Greek tragedy. The story is about many things, but one of them is Wash’s ¿ nal gesture, which is so compounded with both magni ¿ cence and the reprehensible that they cannot be separated. Aldous Huxley argues in “The Whole Truth” that while tragedy is always a distilled essence with the baseness entirely eliminated, comedy always tells the whole truth, leaving in all that tragedy distills away. In that sense, Faulkner’s works are always comic; they always include the warts. It is not that this makes the heroism or courage or endurance we ¿ nd there any less admirable, it is just that they are always embedded in the whole character, as they are in Wash. “A Rose for Emily” illustrates the Faulknerian world even more graphically. This complicated story is about a woman—a descendent of the old aristocracy in Jefferson, the seat of Yoknapatawpha County in 1928—and of the town’s assessments of her over the years. The narrator uses the “we” pronoun, suggesting that he speaks for all of Jefferson. The story uses the technique of broken chronology to move backwards and forwards in time, the way someone telling a story would do, giving us a sense of the town’s perception of Emily Grierson over time. Among other things, we discover in the story’s last paragraph that Emily had years ago poisoned her lover, who was about to leave her, and kept his body in the upstairs bedroom of her house, where he died; in the story’s last paragraph we discover that she still slept in the bed where he lay, now badly decomposed. Emily is of course mad, but the story’s title refers to the town’s gift to her of a rose for her refusal to give in, compromise, and adapt herself to the increasingly grubby world around her; as critics have noted, there may be an element of madness

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  207 is what realistic ¿ ction does. Borges’s favorite authors included writers like Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson, who are usually denigrated for their implausibility and for the unrealistic tidiness of their stories. That is precisely what Borges admired about them—that they make no attempt to be realistic. He also, along with virtually all Postmodernists, admired the 1001 Nights and the stories and novels of Kafka for the same reason: because they are perfect, beautiful, and give us a formal perfection and meaning that incomprehensible reality never can. All of this is illustrated in another famous story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” The story is about the gradual discovery of a society which over the past three centuries has created ¿ rst an imaginary land and then an imaginary planet. One of its founding members was Bishop Berkeley, the Idealist philosopher, so it turns out to be a most intriguing and interesting kind of place. It is, of course, also logically consistent and coherent because it was made by humans using the rules of human logic and language. When word of this imaginary planet gets out into the world, the world begins to adapt itself to Tlön; even objects unique to this created world begin to show up in ours. The reason for this is clear: Tlön is made up, but it is orderly, rational, and understandable vis-à-vis our own reality, whose order and rules and meaning we never grasp. As Oscar Wilde said half a century earlier, reality is merely process looking for form. Art is form, and when someone creates something of formal perfection, we try to adapt reality to it; thus, the world is becoming Tlön. In one way or another, that is what most Postmodernists assert: that art and literature can construct for us ¿ ctions by which we can live—so long as we remember that they are ¿ ctions which have no more necessary connection to reality than a chess game. Postmodernists can still promote things they believe in, as do John Barth, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Kurt V onnegut; even as they are writing their novels and stories, however, they keep reminding us that these are ¿ ctions, not accurate pictures of reality. Borges himself largely avoids political and social agendas in his stories, of which there are many brilliant ones in Labyrinths. There are important implications for us in Borges’s stories, even though he does not reach for them. Fascist ideology in Nazi Germany was certainly an imaginary world, hobbled together out of the most disparate sources. Once the creators of the ideology had invented

• From Branded: Brainwashed Inside NXIVM (2020)

  240 00:11:03,429 --> 00:11:04,930 company headquarters... 241 00:11:05,031 --> 00:11:09,201 and her new lover, Raniere. 242 00:11:09,301 --> 00:11:12,004 [Dr. Marie] They were a dynamic couple. 243 00:11:12,104 --> 00:11:14,240 She just seemed to really have her act together 244 00:11:14,340 --> 00:11:15,675 and be confident. 245 00:11:15,775 --> 00:11:16,976 Keith could make you feel like 246 00:11:17,076 --> 00:11:20,579 the most important person in the world. 247 00:11:20,680 --> 00:11:24,083 And...the women around him just loved him. 248 00:11:24,183 --> 00:11:28,521 He had something magical about him. 249 00:11:28,621 --> 00:11:30,623 [Narrator] But it's not just Raniere's romantic life 250 00:11:30,723 --> 00:11:32,892 that's thriving. 251 00:11:32,992 --> 00:11:35,628 Between 1990 and 1992, 252 00:11:35,728 --> 00:11:37,897 Consumer Buyline's gross receipts ballooned 253 00:11:37,997 --> 00:11:42,668 from $200,000 to 35 million. 254 00:11:42,768 --> 00:11:44,670 But like everything with Raniere, 255 00:11:44,770 --> 00:11:47,239 it's all just smoke and mirrors. 256 00:11:47,339 --> 00:11:48,974 When these people become affiliates, 257 00:11:49,075 --> 00:11:51,343 what are they going to do on the average? 258 00:11:51,444 --> 00:11:52,978 -[unintelligible] -Right. 259 00:11:53,079 --> 00:11:55,581 They're going to at least, at least, 260 00:11:55,681 --> 00:11:57,016 at least do this. 261 00:11:57,116 --> 00:11:58,584 [Paige] It became pretty apparent 262 00:11:58,684 --> 00:12:00,019 that Consumer Buyline was more about 263 00:12:00,119 --> 00:12:04,557 selling those memberships than actually bulk buying. 264 00:12:04,657 --> 00:12:07,860 It's going to perpetuate, right. It's going to go and go, 265 00:12:07,960 --> 00:12:09,562 'cause on the average, this works. 266 00:12:09,662 --> 00:12:10,963 They were selling the opportunity 267 00:12:11,063 --> 00:12:12,965 to sell Consumer Buyline. 268 00:12:13,065 --> 00:12:15,134 And you can only do that so many times 269 00:12:15,234 --> 00:12:18,604 before you run out of people to sell that to. 270 00:12:18,704 --> 00:12:22,141 The math just does not work out, ever. 271 00:12:23,943 --> 00:12:25,144 [Armando] The longer that it went on, 272 00:12:25,244 --> 00:12:27,179 the less sustainable that it became. 273 00:12:27,279 --> 00:12:29,281 And suddenly you have all these government organizations 274 00:12:29,381 --> 00:12:30,483 breathing down your neck, 275 00:12:30,583 --> 00:12:34,153 investigating where's this money actually going. 276 00:12:34,253 --> 00:12:36,822 [Narrator] Raniere knows his scam's been exposed 277 00:12:36,922 --> 00:12:41,060 and cuts an astounding deal to save himself. 278 00:12:41,160 --> 00:12:43,896 [Armando] In the fall of 1996, Keith and Consumer Buyline 279 00:12:43,996 --> 00:12:48,033 settled out of court for approximately $40,000. 280 00:12:48,134 --> 00:12:50,436 He had defrauded all of these people, 281 00:12:50,536 --> 00:12:53,672 and he didn't even have to admit that he was wrong. 282 00:12:53,773 --> 00:12:55,007 [Dr. Joseph] Raniere was a businessman. 283 00:12:55,107 --> 00:12:57,009 He's gonna come back, 284 00:12:57,109 --> 00:12:58,878 and he's gonna try to do this again. 285 00:12:58,978 --> 00:13:01,113 It's a part of his genetic makeup. 286 00:13:02,181 --> 00:13:04,850 [Narrator] It's just another step in Raniere's meteoric rise 287 00:13:04,950 --> 00:13:07,419 from alleged child prodigy

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  ORIGEN. The disciples of Christ are better than the common herd; and you may find in the Church such as with more ardent affection come to the word of God; these are Christ’s disciples, the rest are only His people. And sometimes He speaks to His disciples alone, sometimes to the multitudes and His disciples together, as here. The Scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat, as professing his Law, and boasting that they can interpret it. Those that do not depart from the letter of the Law are the Scribes; those who make high professions, and separate themselves from the vulgar as better than they, are called Pharisees, which signifies ‘separate.’ Those who understand and expound Moses according to his spiritual meaning, these sit indeed on Moses’ seat, but are neither Scribes nor Pharisees, but better than either, Christ’s beloved disciples. Since His coming these have sat upon the seat of the Church, which is the seat of Christ. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. But regard must be had to this, after what sort each man fills his seat; for not the seat makes the Priest, but the Priest the seat; the place does not consecrate the man, but the man the place. A wicked Priest derives guilt and not honour from his Priesthood. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxxii.) But that none should say, For this cause am I slack to practise, because my instructor is evil, He removes every such plea, saying, All therefore whatsoever they say unto you, that observe and do, for they speak not their own, but God’s, which things He taught through Moses in the Law. And look with how great honour He speaks of Moses, shewing again what harmony there is with the Old Testament.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  It just sounded like an old family name, as the furniture he bought at antique stores looked like old family furniture, and as the coat of arms he’d designed for himself looked like the shield of some fierce baron who’d spent his life wallowing in Saracen gore, charging from battle to battle down muddy roads lined with groveling peasants and churls. He was also unhappy about my becoming a Catholic. “My family,” he told me, “has always been Protestant. Episcopalian, actually.” Actually, his family had always been Jews, but I had to wait another ten years before learning this. In the extremity of his displeasure my father even put my older brother on the phone. I was surly, and Geoffrey didn’t really care what I called myself, and there it ended. My mother was pleased by my father’s show of irritation and stuck up for me. A new name began to seem like a good idea to her. After all, he was in Connecticut and we were in Utah. Though my father was rolling in money at the time—he had married the millionairess he’d been living with before the divorce—he sent us nothing, not even the pittance the judge had prescribed for my support. We were barely making it, and making it in spite of him. My shedding the name he’d given me would put him in mind of that fact. That fall, once a week after school, I went to catechism. Yellow leaves drifted past the windows as Sister James instructed us in the life of faith. She was a woman of passion. Her square jaw trembled when something moved her, and as she talked her eyes grew brilliant behind her winking rimless glasses. She could not sit still. Instead she paced between our desks, her habit rustling against us. She had no timidity or coyness. Even about sex she spoke graphically and with gusto. Sometimes she would forget where she was and start whistling. Sister James did not like the idea of us running free after school. She feared we would spend our time with friends from the public schools we attended and possibly end up as Mormons. To account for our afternoons she had formed the Archery Club, the Painting Club, and the Chess Club, and she demanded that each of us join one. They met twice a week. Attendance was compulsory. No one thought of disobeying her. I belonged to the Archery Club. Girls were free to join but none did. On rainy days we practiced in the church basement, on clear days outside. Sister James watched us when she could; at other times we were supervised by an older nun who was nearsighted and tried to control us by saying, “Boys, boys . . .” The people next door kept cats.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  The psychology of our desire often lies buried in the details of our childhood, and digging through the early history of our lives uncovers its archaeology. We can trace back to where we learned to love and how. Did we learn to experience pleasure or not, to trust others or not, to receive or be denied? Were our parents monitoring our needs or were we expected to monitor theirs? Did we turn to them for protection, or did we flee them to protect ourselves? Were we rejected? Humiliated? Abandoned? Were we held? Rocked? Soothed? Did we learn not to expect too much, to hide when we are upset, to make eye contact? In our family, we sense when it’s OK to thrive and when others might be hurt by our zest. We learn how to feel about our body, our gender, and our sexuality. And we learn a multitude of other lessons about who and how to be: to open up or to shut down, to sing or to whisper, to cry or to hide our tears, to dare or to be afraid. All these experiences shape our beliefs about ourselves and our expectations for others. They are part of the dowry each man and woman brings to adult love. Part of this emotional scorecard is obvious and manifest, but much of it is unspoken, concealed even from ourselves. Our sexual preferences arise from the thrills, challenges, and conflicts of our early life. How these bear on our threshold for closeness and pleasure is the object of our excavation. What turns you on and what turns you off? What draws you in? What leaves you cold? Why? How much closeness can you stand to feel? Can you tolerate pleasure with the one you love? When Steven’s father abandoned his mother, she picked up the pieces, devoted herself to caring for her children, and swore she would never let anyone hurt her like that again. An ER nurse, today she owns her home and has put three kids through college. Steven is filled with admiration and respect for his mother, and has spent much of his life guarding against becoming what he calls, “that asshole.” Six years into his marriage to Rita, he finds himself avoiding her démarches and ducking her accusations about his sexual passivity. Behind his excuses, Steven is baffled by his lack of interest—and by his unreliable erections. The more he loves and respects his wife, the harder it is for him to fuck her. In Steven’s mind, emotional security requires a constant monitoring of any selfish or aggressive inclinations. This belief, which grew out of his love for his mother, has become part of his sexuality. The more he loves Rita and the more he depends on her, the greater his need for caution and the more inhibited he is sexually. He doesn’t know how to experience the open range of lust in the context of emotional care. His unconscious is loyal to the past.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  But at our next meeting she did not respond directly to the ultimatum. Instead she handed me an issue of the New Yorker, open to an article by the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky titled “On Grief and Reason.” “In this,” she said, “you’ll find the key to what’s gone wrong in therapy. If not, if you read it and find no answer, then I’ll see your consultant.” Patients often ask me to read something of interest to them—some self-help book, an article about a new treatment or theory, a piece of literature that strikes close to their own situation. More than one writer-patient has handed me a long manuscript, saying, “You’ll learn a great deal about me by reading this.” This proposition has never proved valid: the patient could always have delivered the material verbally in far less time. Nor do they want an honest opinion of the writing from me—I generally loom too important to the patient to have the freedom to offer an objective commentary. Obviously they seek something else—my approval and admiration—and a therapist has far more direct and effective ways of dealing with that need than spending long hours reading a manuscript. I generally search for a gracious way to decline such requests—or at most agree to a quick skim. I value and protect my personal reading time. Yet I did not feel burdened as I began reading the article Irene had given me. I had great respect not only for her taste but for her clarity of mind, and if she believed this article contained the key to our impasse, I was confident that the time invested would be well spent. Of course, I would have preferred more direct communication, but I was learning to be receptive to Irene’s oblique and often poetic mode of discourse—a language she had learned from her mother. Unlike her father, a paragon of lucid rationality who had taught science in a small Midwestern high school, her mother, an artist, had communicated subtly. Irene had learned about her mother’s moods indirectly. On good days, for example, her mother might say, “I think I’ll put some irises in the blue-and-white vase,” or convey her mood by the way she arranged the dolls on Irene’s bed each morning. The article opened with Brodsky’s analysis of the first two stanzas of Robert Frost’s poem “Come In”: As I came to the edge of the woods, Thrush music—hark! Now if it was dusk outside, Inside it was dark. Too dark in the woods for a bird By sleight of wing To better its perch for the night, Though it still could sing.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Further, the state of the Church is between the state of nature and the state of glory. Now we find order in nature, in that some things are above others, and likewise in glory, as in the angels. Therefore there should be Order in the Church. I answer that, God wished to produce His works in likeness to Himself, as far as possible, in order that they might be perfect, and that He might be known through them. Hence, that He might be portrayed in His works, not only according to what He is in Himself, but also according as He acts on others, He laid this natural law on all things, that last things should be reduced and perfected by middle things, and middle things by the first, as Dionysius says (Eccl. Hier. v). Wherefore that this beauty might not be lacking to the Church, He established Order in her so that some should deliver the sacraments to others, being thus made like to God in their own way, as co-operating with God; even as in the natural body, some members act on others. Reply to Objection 1: The subjection of slavery is incompatible with liberty; for slavery consists in lording over others and employing them for one’s own profit. Such subjection is not required in Order, whereby those who preside have to seek the salvation of their subjects and not their own profit. Reply to Objection 2: Each one should esteem himself lower in merit, not in office; and orders are a kind of office. Reply to Objection 3: Order among the angels does not arise from difference of nature, unless accidentally, in so far as difference of grace results in them from difference of nature. But in them it results directly from their difference in grace; because their orders regard their participation of divine things, and their communicating them in the state of glory, which is according to the measure of grace, as being the end and effect, so to speak, of grace. on the other hand, the Orders of the Church militant regard the participation in the sacraments and the communication thereof, which are the cause of grace and, in a way, precede grace; and consequently our Orders do not require sanctifying grace, but only the power to dispense the sacraments; for which reason order does not correspond to the difference of sanctifying grace, but to the difference of power.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  During my third year of psychiatric residency five classmates and I spent every Thursday afternoon making rounds with Dr. Whitehorn. Beforehand we had lunch in his oak-paneled office. The fare was simple and unvarying—sandwiches of tuna, cold cuts, and cold Chesapeake Bay crab cake, followed by fruit salad and flattened pecan pie—but served with Southern elegance: linen tablecloth, glistening silver trays, bone china. The lunch conversation was long and leisurely. Though each of us had calls to return and patients clamoring for attention, there was no way to rush Dr. Whitehorn, and ultimately even I, the most frenetic of the group, learned to put time on hold. In these two hours we had the opportunity to ask our professor anything: I remember asking him about such matters as the genesis of paranoia, a physician’s responsibility to the suicidal, the incompatibility between therapeutic change and determinism. Though he responded fully, he clearly preferred other subjects: the accuracy of Persian archers, the comparative quality of Greek versus Spanish marble, the major blunders of the battle of Gettysburg, his improved periodic table (he was originally trained as a chemist). After lunch Dr. Whitehorn began interviewing in his office the four or five patients on his service while we silently observed. It was never possible to predict the length of each interview. Some lasted fifteen minutes; many continued for two or three hours. I most clearly remember the summer months, the cool, darkened office, the orange- and green-striped awnings blocking out the fierce Baltimore sun, the awning posts encircled by magnolia climbers whose fleecy blossoms dangled just outside the window. From the corner window I could just spot the edge of the house staff tennis court. Oh, how I ached to play in those days! I fidgeted and daydreamed about aces and volleys as the shadows inexorably lengthened across the court. Only when dusk had swallowed the very last strands of tennis twilight did I relinquish all hope and fully give my attention to Dr. Whitehorn’s interviews. His pace was leisurely. He had plenty of time. Nothing interested him as much as a patient’s occupation and avocation. One week he would be encouraging a South American planter to talk for an hour about coffee trees; the next week it might be a history professor discussing the failure of the Spanish Armada. You would have thought his paramount purpose was to understand the relationship between altitude and the quality of the coffee bean or the sixteenth-century political motives behind the Spanish Armada. So subtly did he shift into more personal domains that I was always surprised when a suspicious, paranoid patient suddenly began to speak frankly about himself and his psychotic world. By allowing the patient to teach him, Dr. Whitehorn related to the person, rather than the pathology, of that patient. His strategy invariably enhanced both the patient’s self-regard and his or her willingness to be self-revealing.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  35. And straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain. 36. And he charged them that they should tell no man: but the more he charged them, so much the more a great deal they published it; 37. And were beyond measure astonished, saying, He hath done all things well: he maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak. THEOPHYLACT. The Lord did not wish to stay in the parts of the Gentiles, lest He should give the Jews occasion to say, that they esteemed Him a transgressor of the law, because He held communion with the Gentiles, and therefore He immediately returns; wherefore it is said, And again departing from the coasts of Tyre, he came through Sidon, to the sea of Galilee, through the midst of the borders of Decapolis. BEDE. (in Marc. 2, 31) Decapolis is a region of ten cities, across the Jordan, to the east, over against Galilee.c When therefore it is said that the Lord came to the sea of Galilee, through the midst of the borders of Decapolis, it does not mean that He entered the confines of Decapolis themselves; for He is not said to have crossed the sea, but rather to have come to the borders of the sea, and to have reached quite up to the place, which was opposite to the midst of the coasts of Decapolis, which were situated at a distance across the sea. It goes on, And they bring him one that was deaf and dumb, and they besought him to lay hands upon him. THEOPHYLACT. Which is rightly placed after the deliverance of one possessed with a devil, for such an instance of suffering came from the devil. There follows, And he took him aside from the multitude, and put his fingers into his ears. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. (Vict. Ant. e Cat. in Marc.) He takes the deaf and dumb man who was brought to Him apart from the crowd, that He might not do His divine miracles openly; teaching us to cast away vain glory and swelling of heart, for no one can work miracles as he can, who loves humility and is lowly in his conduct. But He puts His fingers into his ears, when He might have cured him with a word, to shew that His body, being united to Deity, was consecrated by Divine virtue, with all that He did. For since on account of the transgression of Adam, human nature had incurred much suffering and hurt in its members and senses, Christ coming into the world shewed the perfection of human nature in Himself, and on this account opened ears with His fingers, and gave the power of speech by His spittle. Wherefore it goes on, And spit, and touched his tongue.