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.

Page 133 of 288 · 20 per page

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  He discovered that they had their own spirituality. Yes, they were brazen and insolent, but they also had the great qualities of “kindness, honesty, fairness, and mercy,... and the spirit of knowledge and idealism is ascendent [among them].” More important, their rebelliousness, which so offended the “weak who inhabit the world of order, the moderate, and well- mannered,” would push the Jewish people forward; their dynamism was essential if Jews were to progress and fulfill their destiny. 61 When he praised the Zionist pioneers, he picked out those qualities which would have been utterly abhorrent to a sage of the premodern period, where people had to accept the rhythms and restrictions of the existing order and where individuals who stepped out of line could gravely damage society: 62 These fiery spirits assert themselves, refusing to be bound by any limitation.... The strong know that this show of force comes to rectify the world, to invigorate the nation, humanity and the world. It is only in the beginning that it appears in the form of chaos. 63 Had not the rabbis of the Talmudic period predicted that there would be an “age of insolence and audacity,” 64 in which young men would rise up against their elders? This distressing rebellion was simply “the footsteps of the Messiah,... gloomy steps, leading to a rarefied, joyous existence.” 65 Kook was one of the first deeply religious thinkers able to embrace the new secularism, though he believed that ultimately the Zionist enterprise would lead to a religious renewal in Palestine. Instead of seeing the religious and secularists—representing mythos and logos, respectively—as coexisting peacefully, he developed a Hegelian vision of a dialectical clash of opposites leading to the synthesis of Redemption. The secularists clashed with the religious, but in this rebellion the Zionists were pushing history forward to new fulfillment. The whole of creation was being propelled, often painfully, toward a final reunion with the divine. One could see this in the evolutionary processes described by modern science, Kook believed, or in the scientific revolutions of Copernicus, Darwin, or Einstein, which seemed to destroy traditional ideas but which led to new understanding. Even the agony of the First World War could be seen, in Lurianic terms, as a “breaking of the vessels,” part of the creative process, which would eventually reinstate the sacred in our world. 66 This was how religious Jews should see the Zionist rebellion. “There are times when the laws of the Torah must be overridden,” Kook argued audaciously. When people were searching for a different path, everything was new and unprecedented, so “there is no one to show the legitimate way and so the aim is accomplished by a bursting of bounds.”

• From Shunned (2018)

  Title : Shunned Author: Curtis, Linda A. ASIN : B074CW45BZ [image file=Image00003.jpg] Praise for Shunned [image "Images" file=Image00000.jpg] “ What a pleasure to journey with Linda Curtis in her brave, captivating story of really growing up all the way. I read this book deep into the night and picked it up in the morning, unable to turn away from the unfolding adventure of a young woman determined to live a true life.” —SHERRY RUTH ANDERSON , coauthor of The Feminine Face of God and The Cultural Creatives “ You can’t read Shunned without realizing that Linda’s story is, writ large, the primal story of leaving home, in which you can’t become yourself without betraying your family. A wonderful book that is about so much more than the Jehovah’s Witnesses.” —ADAIR LARA , longtime columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and author of Hold Me Close, Let Me Go “ Shunned is a beautiful and moving account of discovery, awakening, and courage. Linda’s candor, insight, and warmth are a gift.” —MARC LESSER , author of Less: Accomplishing More By Doing Less “ A profound, at times fascinating, personal transformation told with meticulous detail. The author’s radical transformation— from dogmatism to relativism and from timidity to self-assurance—unfolds gradually. Beyond providing an eye-opening look at her former religious community, this memoir subtly encourages readers to challenge childhood views in search of chosen beliefs.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS “ This memoir of faith, struggle and rebirth will have you on the edge of your seat. It’s brilliant, respectful, insightful and most of all hopeful.” —OPENLY BOOKISH “ Linda’s brilliant writing lights up the page. She speaks with great authenticity, insight, and candor. This book is a wonderful inspiration for anyone who has been trapped in religious dogma or constricted by social and family pressures. Her courageous journey beautifully illuminates the path to find one’s freedom in the face of being shunned.” —MARK COLEMAN , Mindfulness Meditation Teacher, author of Awake In The Wild Shunned [image "Images" file=Image00001.jpg] Copyright © 2018 by Linda Curtis All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press. Published April 17, 2018 Printed in the United States of America Print ISBN: 978-1-63152-328-1 E-ISBN: 978-1-63152-329-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017959980 For information, address: She Writes Press 1563 Solano Ave #546 Berkeley, CA 94707 Interior design by Tabitha Lahr She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC. Names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals. For my mother, Ruth, who nurtured my reverence for the Divine, and my father, Frank, who instilled in me an appreciation for the well-told story.

• From Shunned (2018)

  Here was a person who did nothing to hide his flaws or embellish a story to appear the hero. He seemed comfortable and unaware of this innocence. Part of me thought him simple and unsophisticated, but I admired the courage and commitment he showed to change his life so completely. I spent the majority of my time in the door-to-door ministry, looking for people willing to make this type of dramatic conversion. It disarmed me to meet someone so sincere and open at first meeting. Something fluttered inside my chest and then relaxed. I knew intuitively this person would not judge me or look down upon me. I wanted to believe his openness was caused by something he saw in me, something that put him at ease in the same way. “From what I hear,” Ross said, “your story is quite different from mine.” And then he paused to focus his gaze on me, the way a TV reporter might do as he shifts his microphone and awaits a reply. I noticed the soft skin of his lips and wondered what it would be like to kiss them. “What have you heard?” I was in a coy mood and jumped down off the counter, standing about a foot away from him. “You seem to already know a few things about me, and I wouldn’t want to bore you by repeating anything.” He smiled like someone who had been caught stealing a glimpse of another’s poker hand. “At my insistence, Bill has told me a thing or two about you—all of it good, of course. Ed Torres and I work together, and he’s been talking you up for months now. Ever since you moved in to his congregation, he’s been telling me about this wonderful woman I should meet. He keeps encouraging me to come over and visit your congregation’s Sunday meeting.” A wave of heat radiated through my chest and cheeks as I imagined having unknowingly been the central topic of several conversations. In Witness circles, visiting someone’s congregation was a classic courtship move. “Please go on,” Ross said. “Bill said you were raised in The Truth, just like he was. But I understand your dad isn’t a Witness, which means your mom took the lead teaching you, just like Ellen did with Emily and Paige. Is that right?” His genuine curiosity summoned my story into focus. I told him that my mom’s immediate family were all Witnesses and had raised her with those principles. They lived in the small town of Dundee in the Willamette Valley, decades before it became a denizen of world-renowned pinot noirs. Dad was a dashing football player at Newberg High School. Mom was a cheerleader. They became sweethearts. A better athlete than student, Dad enlisted in the navy when he was barely nineteen. After basic training, he shipped off to Korea. Mom got a job as an operator at the phone company and waited.

• From Shunned (2018)

  A successful graphic designer by trade, Phil was the latest in a long succession of elders assigned to lead the study group. He and his wife, Grace, became Witnesses after their three children were born. They were first contacted by other Witnesses in the door-to-door ministry, and both responded to the message out of concern over what kind of world their children might inherit. Phil was well into his forties, but his well-toned, stocky build and jaunty personality gave him the air of a thirty-year-old. He kept fit by running five miles each day. Phil and Grace were two of the few Witnesses I knew with college degrees. They were well off, well traveled, and interesting, especially to my dad. There was a certain indescribable something about Phil that Dad couldn’t dismiss, and the feeling was mutual. When Dad learned that Phil had a daily addiction to ice cream, he made a point of having a fresh gallon at the ready each Tuesday. After the Bible study, everyone was invited upstairs to linger for dessert. Phil and Grace were usually the last to leave; he and my dad sat together at the kitchen table while the women chatted on the couch. Phil was just as interested in getting to know my father as a person as he was in teaching him anything about God. I suspect my father was undone by the genuine personal interest Phil showed, minus any agenda to convert him. One day he said, “Frank, no matter what happens—whether you ever study the Bible or not—we’ll always be friends.” And Dad knew that he meant it. “He’s not a bullshitter,” Dad said. Phil had come from the world and did not fear its influences the same way we Lifers did. Soon Mom and Dad were playing cards each weekend with Phil and Grace and dining out with them often. Throughout most of their marriage, my parents did not blend much of their social lives. Mom had rich friendships with women in the congregation, but relationships with other couples were rare because Dad was an unbeliever. I noticed a gentle felicity emerge between my parents as they basked in the joy of this new era. Phil never mistook Dad’s absence of scholarly accomplishments for a lack of intelligence. The two men shared a fascination with history and love of a well-told story. For the sheer joy and mental stimulation of it, they purchased a four-foot roll of white butcher-block paper and over many months mapped out a timeline of man’s history on Earth. At the far end of the paper was a line for Year Zero, to mark the first of the seven “creative days” described in Genesis. Using a scale of one inch per hundred years, they unfurled all the major stories of the Bible, marked with notches across the advancing timeline, like seams on a football.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Once people were deprived of that type of spiritual activity, they would lose their faith. This is what happened to some of the Jews who decided to convert to Christianity and remain in the Iberian Peninsula. This has also happened to many modern people who no longer meditate, perform rituals, or take part in any ceremonial liturgy, and then find that the myths of religion mean nothing to them. Many of the conversos were able to identify wholly with Catholicism. Some, indeed, such as the reformers Juan de Valdes (1500–41) and Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540), became important leaders of the Counter Reformation and thus made a significant contribution to early modern culture in rather the same way that secularized Jews such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Albert Einstein, and Ludwig Wittgenstein had a profound impact on later modernism after their assimilation into mainstream society. One of the most illustrious of these influential conversos was Teresa of Avila (1515–82), the mentor and teacher of John of the Cross and the first woman to be declared a Doctor of the Church. She was a pioneer of the reform of spirituality in Spain and was especially concerned that women, who did not have the benefit of a good education and were frequently led into unhealthy mystical practices by inept spiritual directors, receive a proper grounding in religious matters. Hysterical trances, visions, and raptures had nothing to do with holiness, she insisted. Mysticism demanded extreme skill, disciplined concentration, a balanced personality, and a cheerful, sensible disposition, and must be integrated in a controlled and alert manner with normal life. Like John of the Cross, Teresa was a modernizer and a mystic of genius, yet had she remained within Judaism she would not have had the opportunity to develop this gift, since only men were allowed to practice the Kabbalah. Yet, interestingly, her spirituality remained Jewish. In The Interior Castle, she charts the soul’s journey through seven celestial halls until it reaches God, a scheme which bears a marked resemblance to the Throne Mysticism that flourished in the Jewish world from the first to the twelfth centuries CE. Teresa was a devout and loyal Catholic, but she still prayed like a Jew and taught her nuns to do the same. In Teresa’s case, Judaism and Christianity were able to blend fruitfully, but other, less gifted conversos experienced conflict. A case in point: Tomás de Torquemada (1420–98), the first Grand Inquisitor. 22 The zeal with which he attempted to stamp out residual Judaism in Spain may perhaps have been an unconscious attempt to extirpate the old faith from his own heart.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  It was an aggressive movement, which imposed itself on the people by force. Some of these violent and rejectionist Wahhabi techniques would be used by some of the fundamentalist Islamist reformers during the twentieth century, a period of even greater change and unrest. 24 The Moroccan Sufi reformer Ahmad ibn Idris (1780–1836) had quite a different approach, which also has its followers in our own day. His solution to the disintegration of life in the peripheral Ottoman provinces was to educate the people and make them better Muslims. He traveled extensively in North Africa and the Yemen, addressing the people in their own dialect, teaching them how to perform the ritual of communal prayer, and trying to shame them out of immoral practices. This was a grassroots movement. Ibn Idris had no time for Wahhabi methods. In his view, education, not force, was the key. Killing people in the name of religion was obviously wrong. Other reformers worked along similar lines. In Algeria, Ahmad al-Tigrani (d. 1815), in Medina, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Karim Sameem (d. 1775), and in Libya, Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi (d. 1832) all took the faith directly to the people, bypassing the ulema. This was a populist reform; they attacked the religious establishment, which they considered to be elitist and out of touch, and, unlike Abd al-Wahhab, were not interested in doctrinal purity. Taking the people back to the basic cult and rituals and persuading them to live morally would cure the ills of society more effectively than complicated figh. For centuries, Sufis had taught their disciples to reproduce the Muhammadan paradigm in their own lives; they had also insisted that the way to God lay through the creative and mystical imagination: people had a duty to create their own theophanies with the aid of the contemplative disciplines of Sufism. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these reformers, whom scholars call “Neo-Sufis,” went one step further. They taught the common people to rely entirely on their own insights; they should not have to depend upon the scholars and learned clerics. Ibn Idris went so far as to reject the authority of every single Muslim sage and saint, however exalted, except the Prophet. He was thus encouraging Muslims to value what was new and to cast off habits of deference. The goal of the mystical quest was not union with God, but a deep identification with the human figure of the Prophet, who had opened himself so perfectly to the divine. These were incipiently modern attitudes. Even though the Neo-Sufis were still harking back to the archetypal persona of the Prophet, they seem to have been evolving a humanly rather than a transcendently oriented faith and were encouraging their disciples to prize what was novel and innovative as much as the old.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther may well have picked up humanist ideas through Lang, and together they brought the new biblical humanism, critical of scholasticism and determined to return to the original texts, to university teaching. 30 Yet this was not a friendship of equals. Although Luther was probably only four years older, the younger man’s admiration for him was evident from the beginning, and Luther did not mince his words when, in 1517, sending him the Ninety-five Theses, he felt Lang did not understand his new theological direction. 31 Luther’s position at the university, which he had inherited from Staupitz and would hold until his death, was professor of the Bible, and it required him to lecture on Scripture, hold disputations, and preach to students and members of the university. 32 He undertook the task with gusto, lecturing first on the Psalms. Using the new technology of printing when he lectured on Romans in 1515–16, he had the university printer, Johann Rhau-Grunenberg, set the Vulgate text in double-spaced format, with generous margins on all sides. In his lectures Luther then read out his glosses and emendations to the text, based on the more up-to-date editions of Faber Stapulensis and Erasmus’s edition of Lorenzo Valla’s text; the students would insert them into their individual copies. Luther would expound the meaning of the text, working from notes he had prepared but sometimes speaking extempore. 33 Johann Oldecop, later an opponent of the Reformation, recalled how well Luther explained biblical passages, not using Latin but German. 34 This style of lecturing, which engaged closely with the text, would have given the students an almost tactile experience of encountering Scripture and working with it themselves. 18., 19., and 20. Three woodcuts from 1578 illustrate the rituals involved at Wittenberg, showing the blackened faces and horned fools’ caps of the initiates. The ceremonial tools—gilded saw, pliers, ax, brush, bell, and the like—have survived from the University of Leipzig. The rituals, which also involved a mock confession, are clearly parodies of religious ceremonies, yet Luther supported their retention. Just as Staupitz joked that Luther needed the Devil, so Luther never frowned upon a ritual that captured something of the state of utter sinfulness of the Christian—and in this case, the university initiate. It was also transforming Luther.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Moreover, his influence over the education of the future Elector and the progeny of other princely lines probably helped ensure that they would in time become not only personal supporters of Luther but firm advocates of the Reformation. 5 Indeed, from about 1520, the young Duke Johann Friedrich asked Luther for advice on spiritual matters while Luther, for his part, dedicated some of his most important writings to him. 6 However, Spalatin also tried to rein Luther in, commenting time and again that his printed pamphlets were too aggressive, and trying to prevent him from publishing them or at least to modify his tone. For his part, Luther teased Spalatin by calling him “the courtier,” and sent one of his trusted students, Franz Günter, to be educated by him in the affairs of the court. 7 On the face of it, the two men were unlikely friends. An early portrait of 1509 shows Spalatin with delectable curls, dressed in a simple gray gown with a black lining that combines academic reserve with courtly display. A woodcut from 1515 depicts a serious young man in sober garb, meditating on the Cross. But Spalatin was not a courtier by birth. His father was a tanner, and he came from Spalt, near Nuremberg. One of the “new men,” he had risen through education. He joined the court but knew that, as a commoner, he was not an aristocrat’s equal; there was also speculation that he may have been illegitimate. While he was a trusted servant and important advisor—and on occasion intimate enough to be present when the Elector did his toilet before dinner—he was not invited to join the table afterward. 8 Spalatin seems to have had a sure touch for negotiation and maneuver, a grasp of the possible, and a sense of realism that Luther lacked. Like Luther he was educated in Greek as well as Latin, and he became part of the humanist circles around Conrad Mutian and Nikolaus Marschalk at the University of Erfurt. He did not possess Luther’s abrasive self-confidence, and was a poor speaker. But the two men formed a hugely creative partnership. Spalatin bought books for the university library and supported university reforms that brought in biblical studies and those of the Church Fathers. Together they made a series of brilliant appointments, of whom Melanchthon was the star. Repeatedly Luther would recommend people to Spalatin, asking for small favors, or pensions from Friedrich, or seeking posts for them. Spalatin worked tirelessly in the service of the Elector, often late into the night; he nevertheless found time to translate Luther’s Latin works into German, and did so with a fine musical sense.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Staupitz was also different from Luther in that he enjoyed the good things in life. His idea of the “proper Christian man,” described to friends at Nuremberg, was close to a self-portrait: “he suits his mood and being each time with that which the circumstances of the time, place and people demand, for in the church he is pious, in counsel brave and wise, at table and with honorable people he is pleasant and happy.”49 At home in courts and civic circles as well as in the world of the Augustinian order, Staupitz was constantly traveling, trying to sort out one problem or another. He knew all about patronage, and Luther and his other friends, like Wenzeslaus Linck, benefited enormously from this knowledge. Both owed their careers within the order to Staupitz, who, like a cunning chess player, systematically placed “his men” in key posts. He trained Luther to replace him as professor at Wittenberg and Linck became vicar general of the order. But his protégés were not always grateful. Staupitz later said ruefully that “when I raised somebody up to the highest they shat through their hands onto my head.”50 Staupitz made Luther study theology but, as an admirer of the late-thirteenth-century philosopher Duns Scotus, it was probably he who made sure that the young monk also studied philosophy. Almost certainly at his behest as well, Luther spent a year in 1508–9 at the new University of Wittenberg, which the older man had been instrumental in founding in 1502 and where he was a professor. As he was constantly on the road in the service of the order, however, Staupitz had little time to give lectures himself. Wanting Luther to become his successor at Wittenberg, he suggested that he study for a doctorate in theology. Decades later Luther recalled the conversation, describing to his own students how he and Staupitz sat under the pear tree in the courtyard of the monastery at Wittenberg (the tree was still there when he told the story). Luther said he did not want to become a doctor, as he believed that he would not live very long—a gloomy reference to his relentless mortification of the flesh. Staupitz, however, knew just how to puncture Luther’s morbid grandiosity: God had need of clever people, whether on earth or in heaven, he replied.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Last but not least, unlike Cajetan, Eck understood the importance of the printing press. From the very beginning of the debate with Luther, he exploited print to get his views across, and he knew how to keep the dispute alive by publishing new challenges. In late December 1518, after his first reply to Luther, he had a set of twelve theses printed in placard form in Augsburg. Unlike Karlstadt, he also grasped the importance of brevity. Ostensibly the theses were addressed to Karlstadt, but all of them aimed at key points of Luther’s theology.14 Luther rose to the bait and replied to them himself. In any other man, the combination of aggression, ambition, and intellectual gifts would have ensured preferment to high church office, a bishopric or perhaps even a cardinal’s hat, and it may be that this was what Eck hoped for by taking on Luther. Indeed, he considered the key issue underlying the dispute to be obedience to the Pope. He would be awarded the title of “papal legate” in 1520, but the bishopric, if hoped for, never materialized, and Eck spent the rest of his life as a pastor and professor in Ingolstadt on a modest salary. He later wrote that all he had ever wanted in life was to “remain a schoolmaster.” But he preached assiduously in his parish; again like Luther, he was determined that his preaching should reach the common man, and he published five volumes of sermons in the vernacular because he thought priests were being driven to use Lutheran sermons for lack of anything serviceable from their own side. Eck’s parishioners found his sermons tough going, however: Intellectually challenging, they made no concessions. Like Luther, Eck translated the Bible, publishing in 1537 a German New Testament based on Hieronymus Emser’s text, translating the Old Testament himself.15 —JUST what a mistake Luther had made in agreeing to meet in Leipzig was evident from the start. Held at the height of summer, when, as Luther’s friend and chronicler Friedrich Myconius put it, the weather was good for hiking, the debate attracted large crowds from all around. Eck got there first, timing his arrival for the day before Corpus Christi, and was entertained by the mayor, with whom he lodged. He was therefore able to take part in the town’s Corpus Christi procession alongside the town dignitaries. Since the festival, during which the boundaries of the parishes are reaffirmed, was an important celebration of local identity, this was a shrewd move.16

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Peasants, so the images seemed to suggest, were pious evangelicals—simple Christians who could preach better than the educated clergy. It seemed that in Peringer’s sermons God’s spirit was being poured out on ordinary folk. Even Spalatin, who heard him preach at Nuremberg, was impressed. But in 1524 Peringer was unmasked as an ex-cleric, who certainly knew how to read and write (and preach)—much to Luther’s amusement, who teased Spalatin for being taken in. Yet if Peringer had not existed, he would have had to be invented. His imposture gave voice to a prevalent mood in Germany of admiration of simple folk, especially peasants, and suspicion of intellectuals. Karlstadt, who shared in this mood, now began to toy with leaving the university for good and becoming a vintner—he had grown up in a wine-growing area—or living as an ordinary priest. He eventually opted for the latter and chose to move to Orlamünde, for which he was technically responsible as archdeacon. Karlstadt was careful to square this with the authorities, and in May 1523 the parish formally asked the Elector to appoint him as pastor. It was quite a comedown. It meant taking on a lowly paid job that he had previously employed someone else to do, in the days when he had aspired to the richest benefice in Wittenberg. Instead of the fine clothes he had worn after his return from Italy, the former university professor now took to wearing gray peasant attire, and donned the peasant felt hat in place of his doctor’s cap. 10 As he later put it, “I now have a gray coat (thank God) in place of the finery which at one time greatly delighted me and caused me to sin.” Luther mocked his “felt hat and a gray garb, not wanting to be called doctor, but Brother Andrew and dear neighbor, as another peasant,” but these were visible signs of Karlstadt’s determination to relinquish social superiority. 11 The parsonage in Orlamünde was falling down and the fences were broken; the woods had not been properly tended and the previous incumbent, who had left under a cloud, had used the manure set aside for the priest’s vines for his own fields. Yet this was the peasant life that Karlstadt had craved—although it is unclear how much laboring he did himself. 12 43. and 44. Two illustrations from Diepold Peringer’s tracts. In the first, the peasant holds a rosary and gestures like a preacher with the other hand; in the second the pious peasant, wearing peasant boots, holds a flail. Karlstadt’s period of enforced silence in Wittenberg after 1522, difficult though it had been, had also been very creative as he used the time to develop further his mystical theology.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Rumors of attempts on Luther’s life also persisted; it was reported, for example, that a doctor of medicine who could make himself invisible “by magical arts” had been ordered to kill him. 5 All this coincided with a major change in Luther’s thought, and in the character of his religiosity. Up to this point, he had been deeply influenced by the Theologia deutsch; in the months leading up to the Leipzig Debate, Luther vigorously defended the mystical text against Eck, who insisted that the Theologia deutsch and other works by authors such as Johannes Tauler did not have the authority of the Church Fathers and should not be cited in debate. Luther accused Eck of denigrating these texts simply because they were written in German rather than Latin, and felt that their devotional style was the best guide for any Christian. While the book shared with Luther and Augustinianism a negative attitude toward human works, however, it also taught that through dedicated devotional piety, the individual can bring their will into conformity with God. This focus on the perfectibility of human nature was increasingly at odds with Luther’s emphasis on the lack of free will, but he continued to praise the book, even when his own religious practice began to diverge from it as he spent less time in contemplation. 6 Prayer, however, would remain hugely important to Luther. From a short work he wrote in 1535, we know that he prayed either kneeling or standing up, with his hands folded, and looking toward heaven with his eyes open. As he described it, prayer is a process: Its purpose is to “warm the heart.” Luther advised the believer to contemplate each line of the “Our Father” and elaborate it in his prayer, before going through the Ten Commandments, each of which should be considered “as a book of doctrine, a song book, a confessional manual and a prayer book.” “If you have time left over,” he suggested adding a creed. His advice clearly contains traces of the methodical system of the hours, although he also insisted that “a good prayer should not be long and should not be drawn out, but should be frequent and fiery.” 7 As Luther now moved away from the kind of spirituality he had explored with Staupitz, his relationship with his former patron and confessor also began to change.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  The Custer and Battleground guys got a kick out of it, but the Custer coach asked us to leave. Just after we pulled out of Denny’s parking lot, Otto called out above the din, “Hey, Coach! How about next year you don’t get us up so early just to go beat up a bunch of cowboys and miners!” “Yah, yah, yah!” everybody yelled. Before Coach could respond, Schmoozler declared in a firm cadence, “We’re not gonna be here next year, Turd Head.” The bus went a little quieter for a minute or two while the seniors thought that one over. But the noise picked right back up. Coach promised never again to get Otto out of bed to beat up a cowboy or a miner. I talked to Balldozer awhile. He also thinks tonight’s match was his best ever. We listened to Schmoozler’s tape for a while. I snatched it when Schmooz fell asleep. Balldozer’s asleep now, too. The bus driver and I are probably the only ones awake. Sausage and Little Konigi may be awake back there somewhere, though, still trying to determine which girls in the sophomore class are ripe for the large one. It’s amazing. Balldozer’s grandparents in France live in a house that’s been in their family since right before the French Revolution. That’s 183 years. He says the house is even older than that. The stones have scars from two world wars. He says they have a room with paintings of all the Baldosiers up until the invention of the camera and then they have photographs. It must be neat to know where you come from. The relatives on his mom’s side are Spanish, which must account for Jean-Pierre’s darkness. He wasn’t terribly impressed with my thesis as I summarized it. I guess he’s more classical in his approach to things. Like when we talk about the meaning and importance of different things in life, I bring up Fitzgerald and Agee and Carlos Castaneda and other fairly contemporary guys like that. But Balldozer always talks about Rousseau and Voltaire and Montaigne and Shakespeare and other guys long dead. Once he brought up Chief Joseph, but that was probably because he’d just come back from a camping trip with Kuch. I explained about the myth of self-discovery—that this stuff about a person “finding himself” and having the world then fall into place around him is wishful bullshit, and that what really happens among the few people who make it happen is not that they find themselves but that they “define” themselves. I used the example of Bob Dylan from the Scaduto biography Kuch gave me for my birthday. Dylan wanted to be a folk-hero-singer, so he made up a history, went on the road and followed the tradition, worked hard, and by the power of his will and imagination became his dream and probably more.

• From Shunned (2018)

  As the group scattered around the dining and living rooms to eat, I stood off to the side of the kitchen sink, and Ross joined me. “Ross, how long have you known Bill?” “About two years,” he said. “The Kytes introduced me to him a few months before I got baptized.” He went on to describe his experience in high school, when he fell in love from a distance with the Kyte sisters, Emily and Paige, both of whom were Witnesses. Besides being beautiful young women, he was drawn to their wholesomeness. One day, he showed up on their doorstep for a friendly, unannounced visit. Michael, the girls’ father, greeted him. Michael was not a Witness but shared Ross’s interest in watching football and tennis on TV. The two became fast friends in a household dominated by women. Soon Ross was a dinner guest prior to all Monday-night football games. After the season ended, he remained a regular fixture at the table. All along, when she found an opening, Ellen the girl’s mother, witnessed to Ross. “Ellen told me later that she expected The Truth might turn me off and I’d run for the hills,” Ross said. “Instead, as I listened, she recognized my longing for something real to hold on to and freely offered what she had.” Over dinner dishes, Ellen told Ross the most amazing Bible stories. The stories turned into a weekly Bible study. Next he bought a suit, trimmed his bushy hair, and started showing up at the Kingdom Hall. By his senior year in high school, Ross was presenting himself for baptism, the outward expression of complete dedication to God. Because it is a symbolic gesture of a lifetime commitment, Witnesses do not baptize young children. “That was two years ago,” Ross continued, handing me a beer he’d retrieved from the fridge. “I’m the only member of my family who’s a Witness. Through Emily and Paige, I’ve made all kinds of new friends, including Bill. I always wanted brothers and sisters, and now I have them.” Listening to Ross’s story, I got a sense of how Michael and Ellen first experienced him. I saw how his unrelenting friendliness could win over the entire family. Here was a person who did nothing to hide his flaws or embellish a story to appear the hero. He seemed comfortable and unaware of this innocence. Part of me thought him simple and unsophisticated, but I admired the courage and commitment he showed to change his life so completely. I spent the majority of my time in the door-to-door ministry, looking for people willing to make this type of dramatic conversion. It disarmed me to meet someone so sincere and open at first meeting.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But although language about the impending end of the world heightened the sense of urgency, Luther still continued to reserve the role of Antichrist for the Pope and saw the Turks as a scourge sent to punish Christians for their sins, rather than as the main enemy. 11 This position led him to take a surprisingly severe view of the obligations of the conquered. Christians should fight the Turk out of obedience to their secular rulers, Luther argued, but those who had been captured and even enslaved under Ottoman rule should not rebel, or even flee, but rather obey the authorities, “because then you would be robbing and stealing your body from your master, which he bought or acquired by some other means, which is no longer your property but his, like an animal or other of his goods.” However, if—and only if—your master forces you to take up arms against Christians, “then you should not be obedient, but rather suffer anything [your master] does to you, yes, rather die.” 12 This respect for established authority and for property rights, even over slaves, was consistent with the line he had taken in 1523, in On Secular Authority, and again Luther could not imagine resistance except in relation to the dilemmas of individuals, who were advised to suffer martyrdom passively; revolt was not envisaged. The writing also betrays considerable admiration for the excellence of Turkish government, and Luther incorporated details about Turkish customs from Gregory of Hungary’s treatise on the Ottomans, which he edited and published to complement his tract. 13 His description of Turkish character provided an opportunity to ponder that of Germans as well. Whereas “we Germans” eat and drink to excess, the Turks show moderation; where the Germans are given to luxuriousness of dress, the Turks practice modesty; they do not swear and do not build such extravagant buildings. In these respects their mores were better than those of the Germans. Luther admired how the Turkish patriarchs kept their women on a tight leash: “they keep their wives in such discipline and beautiful behavior, that there is no such mischief, excess, immodesty and other excessive ornamentation, splendor amongst their women, as there is amongst ours.” 14 However, they did not respect marriage, because they allowed divorce too readily; they practiced polygamy, and their marriages had all the chastity of a soldier’s relation with a prostitute. Worse, they “practice such Latin and sodomitical unchastity that it is not to be mentioned in front of respectable people,” although he also leveled this charge against the Pope and his court.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But in 1524 Peringer was unmasked as an ex-cleric, who certainly knew how to read and write (and preach)—much to Luther’s amusement, who teased Spalatin for being taken in. Yet if Peringer had not existed, he would have had to be invented. His imposture gave voice to a prevalent mood in Germany of admiration of simple folk, especially peasants, and suspicion of intellectuals. Karlstadt, who shared in this mood, now began to toy with leaving the university for good and becoming a vintner—he had grown up in a wine-growing area—or living as an ordinary priest. He eventually opted for the latter and chose to move to Orlamünde, for which he was technically responsible as archdeacon. Karlstadt was careful to square this with the authorities, and in May 1523 the parish formally asked the Elector to appoint him as pastor. It was quite a comedown. It meant taking on a lowly paid job that he had previously employed someone else to do, in the days when he had aspired to the richest benefice in Wittenberg. Instead of the fine clothes he had worn after his return from Italy, the former university professor now took to wearing gray peasant attire, and donned the peasant felt hat in place of his doctor’s cap. 10 As he later put it, “I now have a gray coat (thank God) in place of the finery which at one time greatly delighted me and caused me to sin.” Luther mocked his “felt hat and a gray garb, not wanting to be called doctor, but Brother Andrew and dear neighbor, as another peasant,” but these were visible signs of Karlstadt’s determination to relinquish social superiority. 11 The parsonage in Orlamünde was falling down and the fences were broken; the woods had not been properly tended and the previous incumbent, who had left under a cloud, had used the manure set aside for the priest’s vines for his own fields. Yet this was the peasant life that Karlstadt had craved—although it is unclear how much laboring he did himself. 12 43. and 44. Two illustrations from Diepold Peringer’s tracts. In the first, the peasant holds a rosary and gestures like a preacher with the other hand; in the second the pious peasant, wearing peasant boots, holds a flail. Karlstadt’s period of enforced silence in Wittenberg after 1522, difficult though it had been, had also been very creative as he used the time to develop further his mystical theology. He could still not publish in Wittenberg, but in late 1523, the printer Michael Buchfurer moved from Erfurt to Jena and began printing his work, a move possibly facilitated by financial help from Karlstadt’s brother-in-law Gerhard Westerburg, a prosperous patrician from Cologne. Now at Orlamünde, Karlstadt put his new theology into practice in a manner that had not been possible while in Wittenberg under Luther’s watchful eye. He held his services in German and he translated Psalms from the Hebrew for the congregation to sing.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In Egypt too, modern Europe was regarded as exciting and inspiring during the 1870s, It was also seen as congenial to the Islamic spirit, and this despite the difficulties and pain of the modernization process. This enthusiasm is clearly reflected in the work of the Egyptian writer Rifah al-Tahtawi (1801–73), 48 who was a great admirer of Muhammad Ali, had studied at the Azhar, and served as an imam in the new Egyptian army, an institution for which Tahtawi had the deepest respect. But in 1826, Tahtawi became one of the first students sent by Muhammad Ali to study in Paris. It was a revelation to him. For five years, he read French, ancient history, Greek mythology, geography, arithmetic, and logic. He was particularly enthralled by the ideas of the European Enlightenment, whose rational vision he found very similar to Falsafah. 49 Before returning home, Tahtawi published his diary, which gives us a valuable early glimpse of the modern West as seen by an outsider. Tahtawi had his reservations. He found the European view of religion reductive and modern French thinkers arrogant in their lofty assumption that their rational insights were superior to the mystical inspiration of the prophets. But Tahtawi loved the way everything worked properly in Paris. He praised the clean streets, the careful education of French children, the love of work, and the disapproval of laziness. He admired the rational acuity and precision of French culture, noting that the Parisians “are not prisoners of tradition, but always love to know the origin of things and the proofs of them.” He was impressed that even the common people could read and write, “and enter like others into important matters, every man according to his capacity.” He was also intrigued by the passion for innovation, the essential ingredient of the modern spirit. It could make people changeable and erratic, but not in such serious matters as politics. “Everyone who is master of a craft wishes to invent something which was not known before, or to complete something which has already been invented.” 50 When he returned to Egypt and became director of the new Bureau of Translation, which made European works available to Egyptians, Tahtawi insisted that the people of Egypt must learn from the West. The “gates of ijtihad” (“independent reasoning”) must be opened, the ulema must move with the times, and the Shariah adapt to the modern world. Doctors, engineers, and scientists should have the same status as Muslim religious scholars. Modern science could be no threat to Islam; Europeans had originally learned their science from the Muslims of Spain, so when they studied Western sciences the Arabs would simply be taking back what had originally belonged to them. The government must not stamp down on progress and innovation, but lead the way forward, since change was now the law of life.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  He had been imprisoned by the British for pro-German activities in 1943: the iniquities of the Nazis were less important, in Kashani’s eyes, than the fact that they might help the Iranians to get rid of the British. 103 Kashani also had links with the Fedayin-e Islam, and when one of them tried to assassinate the shah in 1949, Kashani was sent into exile. From Beirut, he threw in his lot with the National Front party, issuing a fatwa in July 1949 in favor of the nationalization of oil. In 1950, Kashani was permitted to return to Iran and received another hero’s welcome. The crowds started to assemble at Mehrabad Airport the evening before his arrival. Musaddiq, whose National Front had just made large gains in the elections because of the oil issue, joined the welcoming party of senior ulema; when Kashani alighted from his plane, the din was so tumultuous that the official speech in his honor had to be abandoned, and when he began his journey to his Tehran home, the crowds became delirious, sometimes even lifting his car off the road. 104 The fourth crucial event of these years was the oil crisis, 105 which flared in 1953, when the prime minister, Ali Razmara, a supporter of the Anglo- Persian Oil Company, was assassinated by the Fedayin. Two days later the Majlis recommended that the government nationalize the oil industry, and Musaddiq became premier, replacing the shah’s candidate. Iranian oil was nationalized, and, even though the International Court at The Hague ruled in favor of Iran’s right to nationalize its own resources, British and American oil companies joined in an unofficial boycott of Iranian oil. In Britain and the United States, the media portrayed Musaddiq as a dangerous fanatic, a thief (even though he had always promised compensation), and a communist, who would hand Iran over to the USSR (even though Musaddiq was a nationalist who wanted to free Iran from all foreign control). In Iran, however, Musaddiq was a hero, rather as Nasser would be after he nationalized the Suez Canal. He began to arrogate more power to himself at the shah’s expense. When he demanded control of the armed forces in July 1952, the shah dismissed him, but there were massive popular riots in Musaddiq’s favor, which alarmed the royalists, since it suggested that Iranians were on the verge of demanding republican rule. The riots also disturbed London and Washington, who wanted Musaddiq out. Ayatollah Kashani played a leading role in these demonstrations, rushing through the streets in a shroud to declare his willingness to die in the holy war against tyranny. After only two days, the shah was forced to reinstate Musaddiq.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Throughout Muslim history, there were movements of islah (“reform”) and tajdid (“renewal”), which were often quite revolutionary. 11 A reformer such as Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah of Damascus (1263–1328), for example, refused to accept the closing of the “gates of ijtihad.” He lived during and after the Mongol invasions, when Muslims were desperately trying to recover from the trauma and to rebuild their society. Reform movements usually occur at a period of cultural change or in the wake of a great political disaster. At such times, the old answers no longer suffice and reformers, therefore, use the rational powers of ijtihad to challenge the status quo. Ibn Taymiyyah wanted to bring the Shariah up to date so that it could meet the real needs of Muslims in these drastically altered circumstances. He was revolutionary, but his program took an essentially conservative form. Ibn Taymiyyah believed that to survive the crisis, Muslims must return to the sources, to the Koran and Sunnah of the Prophet. He wanted to remove later theological accretions and get back to basics. This meant that he overturned much of the medieval jurisprudence (fiqh) and philosophy that had come to be considered sacred, in a desire to return to the original Muslim archetype. This iconoclasm enraged the establishment, and Ibn Taymiyyah ended his days in prison. It is said that he died of a broken heart, because his jailers would not allow him pen and paper. But the ordinary people loved him; his legal reforms had been liberal and radical, and they could see that he had their interests at heart. 12 His funeral became a demonstration of popular acclaim. There have been many such reformers in Islamic history. We shall see that some of the Muslim fundamentalists of our own day are working in this tradition of islah and tajdid. Other Muslims were able to explore fresh religious ideas and practices in the esoteric movements, which were kept secret from the masses because their practitioners believed that they could be misunderstood. They saw no incompatibility, however, between their version of the faith and that of the majority. They believed that their movements were complementary to the teaching of the Koran and gave them new relevance. The three main forms of esoteric Islam were the mystical discipline of Sufism, the rationalism of Falsafah, and the political piety of the Shiah, which we will explore in detail later in this chapter.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Ali Shariati (1933–77), to whose lecture halls the young Western-educated Iranians flocked in ever-increasing numbers during the late 1960s. 53 Shariati had not had a conventional madrasah education, but had studied at the University of Mashhad and at the Sorbonne, where he had written a dissertation on Persian philosophy and studied the work of the French orientalist Louis Massignon, the existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Third World ideologist Frantz Fanon. He had become convinced that it was possible to create a distinctively Shii ideology which would meet the spiritual needs of modern Iranians without cutting them off from their roots. After returning to Iran, Shariati eventually taught at the husainiyyah in north Tehran, which had been founded in 1965 by the philanthropist Muhammad Humayun. Humayun had been much moved by the lectures of the reforming ulema in the early sixties, and had established the husainiyyah to try to reach Iranian youth. In Iran, a husainiyyah was a center of devotion to Imam Husain, and was usually built beside the mosque. The hope was that the Kerbala story would inspire the young who attended classes at the husainiyyah to work for a better society. Iran was also experiencing the swing toward religion that had taken place in the Middle East after the 1967 war, and by 1968, Ayatollah Motahhari, one of the reformers who had helped to set it up, could write that, thanks to the husainiyyah, “our educated youth, after passing through a period of being astonished, even repulsed [by religion] are paying an attention and a concern for it that defies description.” 54 None of the lecturers made as great an impact as Shariati. Students rushed to hear him during their lunch hour or after work, inspired by the passion and vehemence of his delivery. They could relate to him. Shariati dressed as they did, shared their dilemma of torn cultural allegiance, and some felt that he was like an older brother. 55 Shariati was a creative intellectual, but he was also a spiritual man. The Prophet and the Imams were real presences in his life, and his devotion to them was obvious. His was a truly mythical piety. The events of Shii history were not merely historical incidents of the seventh century, but timeless realities that could inspire and guide people in the present. The Hidden Imam, he used to explain, had not disappeared like Jesus. He was still in the world, but concealed; Shiis could encounter him in that merchant or this beggar. He was waiting to make his appearance, and Shiis must live in constant expectation of hearing the sound of his trumpet, ready at all times to respond to the Imam’s summons to the jihad against tyranny. Shiis must look through the concrete, perplexing realities that surrounded them in their everyday lives to catch a glimpse of their secret essence (zat).