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 Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  On October 31, 1967, just a month before he was to return home, Captain Riley L. Pitts of the U.S. Army led his company on an assault of a Vietcong position in the dense jungle of Ap Dong, South Vietnam. After enduring withering fire, Pitts threw his body on top of an enemy hand grenade and waited to die. When the grenade failed to explode, Pitts moved his company forward, putting himself in the direct line of enemy fire until he was cut down in a hailstorm of bullets. As the crew of Apollo 8 arrived with their wives at the White House, Capt. Pitts’s widow, Eula, laid out a dark suit and a bow tie for her five-year-old son, Mark, and a fine white blouse for her seven-year-old daughter, Stacie, at their home in Oklahoma City. The next day, the president would make her husband the first African American officer ever to receive the nation’s highest military decoration, the Congressional Medal of Honor. Millions of Americans considered astronauts to be the epitome of American courage. To Borman, Lovell, and Anders, that label better belonged to men like Pitts. Joining the crew of Apollo 8 and their wives at the black tie gala were twenty other astronauts, Chris Kraft and Wernher von Braun, and former NASA chief James Webb, who was to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom later in the evening. Also present was Charles Lindbergh, who’d stunned the world when he flew nonstop from New York to Paris in 1927. To many at NASA, despite his controversial political views, Lindbergh was a pinnacle aviation hero, a man who had taken to the skies to do the impossible. Before dinner, a small concert was staged in the East Room. When Valerie Anders took her place in the audience, she was dismayed to hear dozens of people coughing and sneezing. This is so stupid, she thought. They are putting this crew at risk. And yet there was no escape for any of them. So they stayed, droplets of the Hong Kong flu and who knows what else atomizing into the room. During dinner, Kraft got to talking to Lindbergh about airplanes, a nuts-and-bolts conversation between one of the great original aviators and an old flight test engineer. Seated nearby with the president, Borman stole glances toward Kraft’s table, envying the conversation he was missing. He also noticed that LBJ seemed irascible, describing his annoyance at a press corps—and maybe an entire swath of the American public—whose criticism of his Vietnam policies seemed to have beaten him down. Listening to the president rail against the media, Borman felt empathy for Johnson, not just for the stigma of Vietnam that would attach to his legacy, but for how it must feel to be a man in the final days of his standing, knowing that soon he would never again matter in the way he once had.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Christianity which, in its development as ‘Anglicanism’, has sometimes looked with some distaste on its Reformation inheritance from the Cranmer years. One incomparable aspect of the book is the language in which it was written, which even those who distrust its theological content can unreservedly admire. The processes of the Prayer Book’s original construction will probably always remain obscure, but it is evident that a single powerful voice lies behind its phrasing and that can only be Cranmer’s. The unity of the book, and the subtle way in which it draws on and transforms an astonishing variety of earlier texts in Latin, German and English, indicate that Cranmer was very much more than simply the chairman of a drafting committee. His particular literary genius was narrowly for formal prose, without the range of conversational or dramatic tones of which Tyndale was capable, but prose which can be spoken generation on generation without seeming trite or tired – words now worn as smooth and strong as a pebble on a beach. The Archbishop bequeathed first England and then the whole world a liturgical drama which he wished to be enacted by all those present in an act of worship; and so it has proved. The words of his Prayer Book have been recited by English-speakers far more frequently than the speeches and soliloquies of Shakespeare. Fragments remain even with the unchurched: ‘for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part’, or from another resonant moment in human experience, ‘earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’.40 Cranmer’s words are the common inheritance of all those who use English, that language which in his age was so marginal to European cultural life, yet is now so universal. Besides its prose, Cranmer’s Prayer Book has left one liturgical legacy to all Western Christendom: an evening service or ‘office’ called Evensong. Evensong is the part of the Prayer Book now most regularly performed in Anglicanism, and so it is there that Cranmer’s superbly dignified prose is still most frequently appreciated in its proper context. Cranmer had a particular aptitude for creating the short prayers known as ‘collects’, of which he wrote a set for the changing weeks of his new English liturgical year (considerably simplified from the pre- Reformation yearly kalendar of holy days). These small jewels of prayers are rarely simply his own work, but their expression and the delicately precise choice of language are his. One of the briefest of all, second of the Evensong collects used throughout the year, is also one of the most memorable. It was a translation of an existing eighth-century collect from the Latin West, but Cranmer tweaked the text in his own way. Taking its controlling metaphor from the setting of the service in the fading evening light, the collect is a perfectly balanced threefold structure: a petition of two thoughts is followed by an appeal to the Trinitarian relationship of Father and Son. Cranmer has characteristically

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  that the anti-Trinitarians became known as ‘Socinians’ after two further Italian radicals, Lelio Francesco Sozini (Socinus), whose nephew Fausto Paolo Sozzini [sic] brought his teachings to Poland. Remarkably swiftly, in 1569 the anti- Trinitarians were even able to open their own institution of higher education in Poland, the Raków Academy, complete with printing press: the Catechism of Raków produced in 1609 became in its Latin version an internationally known statement of anti-Trinitarian belief. The academy was at the heart of another effort to provide an alternative to the normal organization of society: like the communitarian Hutterites enjoying an oasis of freedom in Moravia, the community held property in common, embraced strict pacifist principles and observed no distinctions of rank. Unlike the Hutterites, Raków was not suspicious of independent thinking or advanced learning. It represented the most thoroughgoing challenge so far to sixteenth- century Europe’s hierarchical assumptions, yet there was much else in the fertile variety of Polish radical Christianity. Anti-Trinitarians also argued in their Church gatherings as to whether or not Christian believers were justified in possessing serfs, for the very practical reason that patrons of anti-Trinitarian congregations there were normally serf-owning noblemen. This was a very different version of radical Christianity from that of the unassuming Hutterite craftsmen of central Europe.63 In what was then Lithuania (now Belarus), Simon Budny, a long-lived scholar with a tendency to change his mind which disconcerted even the anti-Trinitarians, published his first version of the Polish Bible in 1572. In its preparation, several rabbis of the Karaites, a branch of Judaism which like Protestantism respected only what it saw as the literal meaning of scripture, amicably cooperated with this Protestant Christian who emphasized his admiration for the Tanakh.64 Amid the competitive religious market which was Poland-Lithuania in the mid-sixteenth century, its leaders launched political changes with profound implications for the future of the region. First came the restructuring of their polity in the Union of Lublin of 1569 (see p. 533) and then an opportunity to enshrine religious pluralism in the constitution of the commonwealth. King Sigismund Augustus died in 1572: after a tragically tumultuous marital history, he was the last of the Jagiellon male line. Now the provisions in the constitutional settlement of the Union of Lublin came into operation: the election of a new monarch was in the hands of the noblemen of the commonwealth. A majority was determined to keep the Habsburgs from adding to their collection of European thrones, and the obvious alternative candidate would come from the Habsburgs’ chief dynastic rivals in Europe, the Valois dynasty of France. Accordingly, negotiations began with the younger brother of King Charles IX,

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  of nuns, but even then, Merici’s original vision of individuality survived and inspired new Ursuline initiatives. Under the cloak of Ursuline identity, a number of strong-minded women pressed their own vision of vocation in the Church and seized varied opportunities offered to them, with a judiciously deaf ear to alternative plans laid down by the hierarchy. It was a recurrent pattern in the Catholic Reformation.4 Juan de Valdés eventually settled in Naples, Spanish-governed but happily free from the Spanish Inquisition, where from his arrival in 1535 he developed a circle of friends, wealthy or talented or both, who shared his passion for humanist learning and for promoting a vital, engaged Christian faith. They included two powerful preachers, leading figures in their respective religious orders, Bernardino Ochino from a newly founded Franciscan reformed order named the Capuchins, and Piermartire Vermigli (‘Peter Martyr’ in his later north European career), an Augustinian who became Abbot of San Pietro ad Aram in Naples. Both men set off on individual paths. Brooding on the message of his order’s patron, Augustine of Hippo, Vermigli went further than Contarini and developed a predestinarian theology of salvation as thoroughgoing as Luther, Bucer or Calvin. Ochino’s followers whitewashed over the frescoes in the Neapolitan church in which they met, not a conventional action for Italian Catholics.5 Among Valdés’s other admirers were talented members of some of Italy’s premier noble families, such as the two poets, artistic patrons and lay theologians Vittoria Colonna and her cousin by marriage Giulia Gonzaga. Gonzaga was a celebrated beauty who, in her widowhood, retired to a Neapolitan convent to become part of the Valdés circle in Naples – indeed, provided the equivalent of a salon for it. The Colonna, an ancient dynasty in Rome, had produced two popes and claimed others as ancient family members – one relative had been Cardinal Prospero Colonna, who in the fifteenth century pioneered investigative archaeology (see pp. 576–7). With such support, Valdés had a ready entry to courts and noble palaces all over Italy. Divergent preoccupations naturally emerged from such a group, yet central was a renewed emphasis on the grace which God sent through faith, together with a consistent urge to reveal the Holy Spirit as the force conveying this grace. Associates of the movement were indeed soon characterized as Spirituali, and it is equally possible to acknowledge the leading role of Valdés in their thought and call them Valdesians. They brooded much (like Luther far away in Wittenberg) on the Cross and Passion of Christ, themes which dominated the later art and poetry of Michelangelo, who was a close friend of Vittoria Colonna. Valdés produced two of their key texts: one the so-called Alphabet, the other yet another specimen of a Catechism (they were now proliferating, as Europe argued

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  which were often subsequently ignored: like the Jesuit de Nobili before him (see p. 705), he showed a deep respect for Hindu traditions and tried to avoid presenting Christianity in woodenly Western terms. His resolution to discuss his faith thoughtfully with Muslims and Hindus took precedence for him over seeking rapid conversions. Ziegenbalg’s work aroused the interest of Anglicans: it helped that Queen Anne of England’s husband, Prince George, was Danish, and that the Prince’s chaplain was a friend of Francke’s. In a gesture of ecumenical cooperation rare at the time and not consistently shown later, the Anglican educational Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge sent Ziegenbalg a printer and press to make it possible to publish a pioneering translation of the Bible into Tamil. Alas for his gradualist strategy, he was beset by political troubles in India, and his fragile constitution led to an early death.52 Zinzendorf had his own close connections with the Danish Court, and from the 1730s he made something permanent of Ziegenbalg’s interrupted work. Yet there was a difference from nearly all previous Western missions: the first Moravian missionaries whom he sent out were laypeople, often quite humble and uneducated folk, who tried to earn their livings by their craft skills on mission (see Plate 62). The Count himself personally joined his followers on an extraordinary series of journeys worldwide — to North America and the Caribbean, as well as travels through Europe from France to Britain to Scandinavia. These adventures came close to bankrupting him, and the work had to be rescued by others, but it continued. Moravian missionary work among slaves in the British West Indies and in America proved acceptable to slave owners, as they found that the Moravians taught their converts obedience and made them more hard-working. Moravians sought to improve the welfare of slaves rather than give institutional support to the growing British calls for the abolition of the trade and the institution (see pp. 870–71). Ostentatiously abstaining from involvement in politics, they still managed, in an astute balancing act, to preserve the esteem of British abolitionists. More generally, the Moravians showed other Protestant Churches that missions could be successful and that the initiative was worth imitating. Moravian numerical strength now lies outside their European homeland, thanks to their missionary work worldwide.53 THE EVANGELICAL REVIVAL: METHODISM In parallel with the Pietist movement in Germany and enjoying many links with it was a renewal of English-speaking Protestantism which came to be described as the Evangelical Revival.54 In the background were similar concerns to those

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  “Where does Christianity begin? In Athens, Jerusalem, or Rome? How did the early creeds of the church develop and differentiate? What was the impact of the Reformation and the Catholic Counterreformation? How have vital Christian communities emerged in Asia, Africa, and India since the eighteenth century? Award-winning historian MacCulloch attempts to answer these questions and many more in this elegantly written, magisterial history of Christianity. … He offers sketches of Christian thinkers from Augustine and Luther to Desmond Tutu. … His monumental achievement will not soon be surpassed.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A prodigious, thrilling, masterclass of a history book. MacCulloch is to be congratulated for his accessible handling of so much complex, difficult material. … He keeps the reader engaged with wit and choice anecdotes and throughout the entire book he retains his own distinctive, slightly irreverent perspective, and an unerring instinct for when to go from macro to micro history.” —John Cornwell, Financial Times “A triumphantly executed achievement. This book is a landmark in its field, astonishing in its range, compulsively readable, full of insight even for the most jaded professional and of illumination for the interested general reader. It will have few, if any, rivals in the English language.” —Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury “[MacCulloch’s] writing is brilliant, critical, inspiring, humorous.” —Brother Curtis, The Society of Saint John the Evangelist “Excellent … I suspect it will quickly become the go-to book for those seeking information on this major world religion.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer “Diarmaid MacCulloch’s splendid account of Christianity’s long, momentous, non-ignorable life among us is in one way an account of everything that has gone on during the three millennia in which he sets his story. … A well- informed and—bless the man—witty narrative, fluent, well-judged and wholly free of cant. Christianity, the book, is more than informative, more than measured and temperate. It’s enjoyable—a jolly good read.” —The Washington Times “I heartily recommend Christianity to anyone with an interest in the history of the Church. The book is very accessible and readable. Both the novice and the expert should find it profitable. Believers will find challenges which we should be willing to face, and which should be a catalyst for some appropriate soul- searching. Cynics may just find some things that might make them willing to open up a dialog with the Faithful.” —HollywoodJesus.com “Diarmaid MacCulloch’s monumental book is essential reading for those enthralled by Christianity and for those enraged by it, while those who protest indifference may be ambushed by surprise at its force in world culture over the millenniums.” —Melvyn Bragg, The Observer, choosing Christianity as Book of the Year

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Portuguese). Higher-caste Hindus still tended to ignore him, but his strategy did produce results in establishing his guru status among lower-caste people. The Portuguese authorities fiercely opposed de Nobili, but finally lost their case against him in Rome in 1623; his reports back to Europe in the course of these disputes are among the earliest careful western European accounts of Hinduism and Buddhism. Whatever success the Church had in the Tamil country of south India was entirely thanks to Nobili and his Italian successors, but their work suffered during the eighteenth century both from severe Muslim persecution and, as in South America, from the general suppression of the Society of Jesus.29 Nobili was actually adopting a precedent of his Society from another vast mission field, China. Here, in the face of one of the world’s most powerful empires, Portugal had even less influence than in India.30 The Chinese were not especially interested in large-scale contacts with foreign countries, not even for trade, and with their military might they were certainly not prepared to let the Portuguese in their small trading enclave at Macau adopt the ruthless proselytizing methods of Goa. The Jesuits quickly decided that missionaries must adapt themselves to Chinese customs. This involved much rapid self- education. Their first great missionary, the Italian Matteo Ricci, on his arrival in 1582, adopted the dress of a Buddhist monk (bonze), without realizing that bonzes were despised by the people who mattered.31 When his mistake was pointed out, he and his fellow Jesuits began dressing as Confucian scholars, complete with long beards (see Plate 46); they were determined to show that their learning was worthy of respect in a culture with a deep reverence for scholarship (an ethos of which naturally they greatly approved). In this they had the advantage of the network of colleges and educational experience built up back in Europe in the previous decades. One Portuguese member of the Society in 1647 used a metaphor for a Jesuit college drawn from a more militant mission field: it was ‘a Trojan horse filled with soldiers from heaven, which every year produces conquistadors of souls’. He also commented whimsically that the Jesuits’ long training was reminiscent of the naturalist Pliny’s assertion that baby elephants were carried in their mother’s womb for two years. The purpose of such long gestation both for elephants and for Jesuits was that they would be prepared for battle and strike fear into other creatures.32 The Chinese upper class was indeed impressed by the Jesuits’ knowledge of mathematics, astronomy and geography, and the Society gained an honoured place at the emperor’s court through its specialist use of these skills, even taking charge of reforming the imperial calendar — but not gaining many converts. The Jesuit emphasis on their honoured place at Court was always something of a diversion from the real reasons for the growth of adherents, who were very

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  opposite, and legislate first the British slave trade and then slavery out of existence throughout the growing British Empire. Wilberforce’s campaigning energies and charisma made him the dominant figure in his circle of Evangelical reformers, who gained the nickname ‘the Clapham Sect’ from a village south of London which was then a pleasant rural home to Wilberforce and other wealthy Evangelicals. His struggle was long and bitter, but in 1807 he achieved his first goal. When he and his friends realized that the abolition of the slave trade had not led to the weakening of slavery as they had hoped, they widened their horizons to persuade the British Parliament to cut off the institution at its root. It was only after Wilberforce’s retirement from Parliament that, in 1833, the old man heard his friends had won that second victory, receiving the news just three days before he died. Like Charles Darwin later, the often-reviled reformer was now given national honour by burial in Westminster Abbey.15 The long struggle to abolish slavery remained throughout a curious collaboration of fervent Evangelicals, who were mostly otherwise extremely politically conservative, with radical children of the Enlightenment, many of whom had no great love of Christianity, though some were enthusiastic Unitarians (as Socinians were now more courteously known).16 Such radicals saw an end to slavery as part of the war on oppression of which the French Revolution also formed a part. So in 1791, before that Revolution became a liability rather than a potential ally for English radicals, the adventurous Whig MP Charles James Fox – whose colourful private life certainly did not make him a natural ally for morally censorious Evangelicals – spoke forcefully in Parliament in support of one of Wilberforce’s earlier unsuccessful motions against ‘this shameful trade in human flesh’. ‘Personal freedom,’ he insisted, ‘must be the first object of every human being … a right, of which he who deprives a fellow-creature is absolutely criminal’.17 There has been nearly a century of argument as to whether slavery’s abolition was merely a Machiavellian outcome of the West’s realization that slavery was becoming an economic liability. It is understandable that descendants of enslaved Africans should tire of hearing complacent British repetition of the famous judgement by the Victorian historian of European ethical change, W. E. H. Lecky, that the ‘unwearied, unostentatious and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous acts recorded in the history of nations’. Yet after all the debate, and the research it engendered, Lecky seems vindicated: abolition was an act of moral revulsion which defied the strict commercial interests of European and anglophone nations.18 Less frequently has it been recognized as one of the more remarkable turnarounds in Christian history: a defiance of biblical certainties,

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  “It was an enormously bold decision,” he told an interviewer on film. It was the way he said the word “enormously” that stayed with me. In ways, it sounded like Armstrong thought Apollo 8 to be an even bigger leap for mankind than landing on the Moon. Other astronauts and NASA personnel said as much directly. Several called Apollo 8 the riskiest and most thrilling of all the Apollo missions. Few remembered having dry eyes as Borman, Lovell, and Anders spoke to the world on Christmas Eve as they circled the Moon. All of them—along with billions of others around the world, more than any than had ever listened to a human voice at once—remembered what these three astronauts said. As I pushed deeper into researching Apollo 8, I found another story, one with striking parallels to life in America today. Apollo 8 flew at the end of 1968, one of the most terrible and divisive years in the country’s history. Assassinations, riots, war, and other events split the country and turned neighbor against neighbor, Republican against Democrat, young against old. When Apollo 8 flew at the end of December, it looked like nothing could heal a nation so badly wounded from the inside. Nearly fifty years later, the United States seemed torn apart again. As candidates launched their presidential campaigns in 2015, the country stood divided by a world of political and cultural differences, some of which manifested in violence or ugly public displays. Many people had never seen their country so fractured, their fellow citizens so furious with one another, and it only got worse as the election approached and then a new president was elected. But to those old enough to remember, it all looked so much like 1968. There was one significant difference between 1968 and modern-day America, however. In 1968, there was Apollo 8. When Borman, Lovell, and Anders returned from the Moon, few could argue—no matter their age or political leaning or background—that they hadn’t seen something important and beautiful happen, that these three men had helped the country, and the world, to heal. So far, there has been no Apollo 8 for our time. I knew right away that I wanted to tell the story of Apollo 8. But I also knew that I couldn’t do the story justice without interviewing the three crew members. At the time, Borman and Lovell were 87 years old, Anders was 83. I wasn’t certain that any of them would want to talk to me. I found Lovell’s email address and wrote to him. A few days later, his assistant called and said he would be pleased to meet with me at his office, just a 15-minute drive from my home. When I arrived, Lovell told me that years earlier he’d listened to Shadow Divers as an audiobook and found himself so engrossed he’d circled in the parking lot at his office, unwilling to leave the car until a chapter had ended.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  # Book - Christianity (Notes & Bibliography) # Source: sources/books-inbox/Book - Christianity (Notes & Bibliography).pdf # Extracted via pypdf (ASN-512, 2026-04-22) # Pages: 353 (empty: 2) Praise for Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch “It is difficult to imagine a more comprehensive and surprisingly accessible volume on the subject than MacCulloch’s. This is not a book to be taken lightly. … To me its appeal lies in its illuminating explications of things so apparently obvious that they would seem to require no explanation.” —Jon Meacham, The New York Times Book Review “A tour de force. The most brilliant point of this remarkable book is its identification of the U.S. as the prime example of the kind of nation the reformers hoped to create.” —Paul Johnson, The Spectator “This ambitious project represents the first attempt in decades by a major historian of Christianity—MacCulloch is professor of the History of the Church at Oxford—to craft a one-volume narrative of the faith from its origin to the present. … The engaging narrative and incisive analysis for which he is renowned make this work an essential companion for any student of Christianity.” —Commonweal “At a time when quarrels between believers and nonbelievers, new atheists and old faithfuls, dominate so much of our public discourse, Diarmaid MacCulloch has given us the one thing that we most need—not polemic but history, high, wide and lucid, and, given the enormity of his task, often winningly light of touch. Taking as his subject nothing less than the whole history of the faith, he has written a social history that illuminates changes in belief; and a history of belief that helps us see how our society got so much of its structure. … Throughout he achieves a near-perfect match of narrative flair and analytic detail. In the best old-fashioned, classical sense, we are offered here a ‘pageant’ of people and events. … [He] reminds us that history matters.” —Adam Gopnik, bestselling author of Paris to the Moon and judge of the 2010 Cundill Prize in History “He brings an insider’s wit to tracing the fate of official Christianity in an age of doubt, and to addressing modern surges of zeal, from Mormons to Pentecostals.” —The Economist

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  # Book - Christianity (Part 7 - 1492 - Present) # Source: sources/books-inbox/Book - Christianity (Part 7 - 1492 - Present).pdf # Extracted via pypdf (ASN-512, 2026-04-22) # Pages: 251 (empty: 1) Praise for Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch “It is difficult to imagine a more comprehensive and surprisingly accessible volume on the subject than MacCulloch’s. This is not a book to be taken lightly. … To me its appeal lies in its illuminating explications of things so apparently obvious that they would seem to require no explanation.” —Jon Meacham, The New York Times Book Review “A tour de force. The most brilliant point of this remarkable book is its identification of the U.S. as the prime example of the kind of nation the reformers hoped to create.” —Paul Johnson, The Spectator “This ambitious project represents the first attempt in decades by a major historian of Christianity—MacCulloch is professor of the History of the Church at Oxford—to craft a one-volume narrative of the faith from its origin to the present. … The engaging narrative and incisive analysis for which he is renowned make this work an essential companion for any student of Christianity.” —Commonweal “At a time when quarrels between believers and nonbelievers, new atheists and old faithfuls, dominate so much of our public discourse, Diarmaid MacCulloch has given us the one thing that we most need—not polemic but history, high, wide and lucid, and, given the enormity of his task, often winningly light of touch. Taking as his subject nothing less than the whole history of the faith, he has written a social history that illuminates changes in belief; and a history of belief that helps us see how our society got so much of its structure. … Throughout he achieves a near-perfect match of narrative flair and analytic detail. In the best old-fashioned, classical sense, we are offered here a ‘pageant’ of people and events. … [He] reminds us that history matters.” —Adam Gopnik, bestselling author of Paris to the Moon and judge of the 2010 Cundill Prize in History “He brings an insider’s wit to tracing the fate of official Christianity in an age of doubt, and to addressing modern surges of zeal, from Mormons to Pentecostals.” —The Economist

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  The walls of the crater are terraced, about six or seven different terraces on the way down.” A few minutes later, the spacecraft passed over one of the sites NASA had identified as a potential landing area for future missions. “It’s very easy to spot,” Lovell said. “You can see the entire rims of the craters from here with, of course, the white crescent on the far side where the Sun is shining on it.” A few seconds later, Borman jumped in. He still couldn’t believe the accuracy with which planners had calculated the flight. “Houston, for your information, we lost radio contact at the exact second you predicted. Are you sure you didn’t turn off the transmitters at that time?” “Honest injun, we didn’t,” Carr replied. “While these other guys are all looking at the Moon, I want to make sure we got a good SPS,” Borman said. Without the properly functioning SPS engine, Borman knew, Apollo 8 could never leave lunar orbit. “And we want a Go for every rev, please,” Borman added. “Otherwise, we’ll burn in TEI-1 at your direction.” It was the request of a conservative commander. Before every new orbit, Borman wanted Houston to confirm that everything—the spacecraft, its systems, its computers—was working well. If not, he was prepared to fire his engine, leave lunar orbit, and head home—Trans Earth Injection, or TEI—at the first opportunity. In Borman’s voice, even from a distance of a quarter million miles, Kraft could hear he had the right commander on board. Apollo 8 continued flying, more and more nose-first, over the near side of the Moon. Inside, Anders kept his still and movie cameras firing, trying to record as much of the lunar surface as possible, all according to the photographic plan provided by Houston. Aiming and focusing weren’t easy. The center window had been fogged by sealant fumes. Framing panoramas from the small rendezvous window was like trying to look out over the Grand Canyon through a welder’s helmet. And when Anders did lock on to something good, he might have to interrupt the moment to change lenses or swap out film magazines. Still, as the Moon moved under the spacecraft, Anders began to capture spectacular shots, hundreds of close-up answers to questions that had endured for millennia. Lighting conditions stayed good for another few minutes before Apollo 8 flew into darkness. (Generally, the crew would have about an hour of good lighting for photography during each two-hour orbit.) Forty minutes later, the ship slipped around to the lunar far side, where it again lost contact with Earth. Apollo 8 had made its first full revolution; when they next came around, they would be making their first TV broadcast from the Moon. It would be an early morning telecast in the United States, but millions would be watching and listening, there and all over the world. At home, the astronauts’ wives gathered their children in front of their television sets.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  From the moment he stood beside these men, Borman could tell he was among a rare group, talented and competitive beyond any he’d met. The new astronauts became instant celebrities. As with the Original Seven, each received a contract with Life magazine and Field Enterprises that paid him $16,000 a year for exclusive access to his and his family’s personal stories. For her part, Susan would be obliged to speak at luncheons and urge young mothers to buy World Book encyclopedias (published by Field Enterprises) for their families. NASA assigned each new astronaut to a specialty. Borman’s was boosters, the rockets that lifted spacecraft off Earth and into orbit and beyond. His focus would be on a crucial aspect—the crew safety and escape systems. Borman and his colleagues would spend hundreds of hours in classrooms, visiting contractors, and on field trips, learning everything from astronomy to meteorology to flight mechanics to computers to spacecraft construction. If America was going to reach the Moon by President Kennedy’s deadline, now just seven years away, the astronauts had to learn in gulps, not sips. That applied to public relations, too. Meet-and-greets became commonplace, black tie functions the norm. Everyone in America, it seemed, wanted a piece of the astronauts. Once, Borman and Susan shared a limousine with a celebrity on their way to a gala sponsored by a wealthy Texas oilman. “I’m Tony Randall,” the man said. “So nice to meet you,” Borman said. “I really enjoyed your song ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco.’ ” The actor did not appreciate being mistaken for the singer Tony Bennett. Borman did not appreciate the arrogance in Randall’s indignation. “To hell with him,” Borman whispered to Susan. As Borman settled in at NASA, it became clear to peers and management that he was a different breed, even among these unique men. He did not dabble in reflection, showed no patience for shades of gray. Mission came first, always, and if he sensed you were unqualified for a job or, worse, a bullshitter, he got your ass out of the way. He seemed unconcerned with NASA politics, blew smoke up no one’s posterior, superiors included, and would not say, or do, anything he did not believe in. Some astronauts considered him arrogant or hard-headed, but all respected him, and few would have disagreed with Borman’s own assessment—that he was among the best of the astronaut corps. Like most astronauts, Borman was conservative politically. Yet he voted for Democrat Lyndon Johnson for president in 1964 because Borman believed strongly in racial justice and civil rights (it was a vote he’d later regret due to Johnson’s policies in Vietnam). He was affected by Johnson’s famous “Daisy” television commercial, aired during the campaign against Barry Goldwater, that juxtaposed a little girl against the mushroom cloud made by a nuclear bomb.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  own communities what they had learned of the faith from clergy, interpreting, visiting, leading prayer. This was something new: there was little known precedent for the importance of catechists in the medieval European Church, even in its early medieval missions. In Mexico, the resulting vernacular culture is symbolized by the centrality to national identity of the Virgin of Guadalupe. This apparition of Our Lady is supposed to have been experienced by an Aztec lay convert with the Spanish name Juan Diego. As Diego was affirming his experience to his bishop, her image became miraculously apparent in the cloak he was wearing; the cloak and its painted image remain an object of veneration at the shrine of Guadalupe Hidalgo, now engulfed by the vast sprawl of Mexico City, but a quiet hillside in the country when these events are said to have taken place in 1531. The Guadalupe tradition in written form cannot be traced earlier than the work of Fr Miguel Sánchez in 1648; that hardly matters to the impact of Our Lady’s appearance. It perfectly united old and new Latin American cultures in affirmation of divine motherhood — the very place name Guadalupe comes from Arabic Spain and a Marian shrine there, yet it was to a native that the sign of divine favour had been given, and the name sounds conveniently like the Náhuatl attribute of a goddess, Cuatlaxopeuh — she who trod the serpent underfoot. A recent study of the ‘miracle’ highlights the narrative achievement of the Creole priest Sánchez, who drew on both Augustine of Hippo and John of Damascus in meditating on the Guadalupe miracle. It is an extraordinary tribute to Augustine, the source of Luther’s and Calvin’s Reformations, that he should also fire the imagination of this Mexican priest.25 COUNTER-REFORMATION IN ASIA: EMPIRES UNCONQUERED Whereas in Iberian America, Christianity could rely on official backing from colonial governments (subject to the myriad other concerns of colonial administrators), this was not so in Asia or Africa; nor did Europeans have disease on their side to weaken the great Asian empires they encountered, thanks to the centuries of continuous contact between Asia and Europe. Here the Portuguese were the main European Catholic power, and even after Philip II of Spain gained the Portuguese throne in 1580, Portuguese weakness meant that there was little or no military backing for Christianity, particularly against far stronger native empires in India and China. Only in the small enclaves where the Portuguese authorities were able to exercise real control, such as their Indian fortress headquarters at Goa, could they emulate the Spaniards’ creation of a

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  30 Doig, 172. 31 N. Pevsner and A. Wedgwood, The Buildings of England: Warwickshire (London, 1966), 251, apropos of St Michael’s Coventry (Warwickshire, England), a grand fifteenth-century Gothic parish church which did indeed briefly become a cathedral in modern times before its bombing in 1940. 32 Incomparable as an essay on a church which captures the spirit of this era is H. Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (Boston, MA, 1904). For Chartres’s survival through the French Revolution, thanks to the resolve of local people and officials, see M. K. Cooney, ‘“May the hatchet and the hammer never damage it!”: The Fate of the Cathedral of Chartres during the French Revolution’, Catholic Historical Review, 92 (2006), 193–213. 33 H. E. J. Cowdrey, The Cluniacs and the Gregorian Reform (Oxford, 1970), 214–47, esp. 243–4. 34 C. Morris, The Sepulchre of Christ and the Medieval West from the Beginning to 1600 (Oxford, 2005), 134–46. For a dissenting view on the effect of 1009, see J. France, ‘The Destruction of Jerusalem and the First Crusade’, JEH, 47 (1996), 1–17. 35 H. Houben, Roger II of Sicily: A Ruler between East and West (Cambridge, 2002), 20. 36 P. E. Chevedden, ‘The Islamic View and the Christian View of the Crusades: A New Synthesis’, History, 93 (2008), 181–200, esp. 184–6, 192– 4. 37 T. Asbridge, The First Crusade: A New History (London, 2004), 29–30. 38 Tyerman, 61–3. For the background and Urban’s message, Asbridge, The First Crusade, 16–20, 32–6. 39 Tyerman, 79, 282–6. 40 D. Hay, ‘Gender Bias and Religious Intolerance in Accounts of the “Massacres” of the First Crusade’, in M. Gervers and J. M. Powell (eds.), Tolerance and Intolerance: Social Conflict in the Age of the Crusades (Syracuse, NY, 2001), 3–10. 41 Z. Karabell, People of the Book: The Forgotten History of Islam and the West (London, 2007), 93. 42 Tyerman, 247, 662–3. 43 Ibid., 838–43, and M. Barber, The Trial of the Templars (2nd edn, Cambridge, 2006); for the sad afterlife of some ex-Templars, see A. J. Forey, ‘Ex-Templars in England’, JEH, 53 (2002), 18–37. For recent arguments that the Templars were indeed guilty of some of the blasphemies attributed to them, see J. Riley-Smith, ‘Were the Templars Guilty?’, in S. J. Ridyard (ed.), The Medieval Crusade (Woodbridge and Rochester, NY, 2004), 107–24.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  BaKwêena at this. Livingstone was furious and left, never again to effect any conversions in his restless African travels. Livingstone’s departure suited Setshele rather well: the King continued eloquently preaching the Gospel among his people unhindered by Europeans, he made rain and he honoured all his wives.45 Polygamy was one of the great stumbling blocks for Western mission, just as it had been long before for the Church of Ethiopia, and with equally inconclusive results (see p. 281). Here yet again was an issue of biblical interpretation. Polygamous African Christian men were perfectly capable of reading their Bibles and finding their ancient marital customs confirmed in the private life of the patriarchs in the Old Testament; usually in vain did Europeans redirect them to a contrary message in the Pauline sections of the New Testament. John William Colenso, a polymath with an inconvenient Cornish propensity for pointing out truths to those disinclined to see them, became first Anglican Bishop of Natal in South Africa, and he had great admiration for the equal clear- sightedness which he found in his Zulu flock. He became alarmed at their puzzlement about anomalies in the Pentateuch.46 His struggles to satisfy their queries eventually won him ostracism within Anglicanism, but apart from his notorious (and it has to be said clumsy) championing of sensible critical analysis of the Bible, Colenso also became convinced that the Zulu had a good case on polygamy. He said so in a pamphlet of 1862 addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury. His fellow bishops worldwide were not going to agree with a heretical troublemaker, and the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops (with the agreement of Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the one African present and on the relevant committee) condemned polygamy in 1888.47 Back in Sierra Leone in the same year, Anglicans hotly debated the same issue, when one speaker bluntly said that to recognize polygamy would ‘make us all honest men’ – but the bookseller who had proposed the idea found himself forced to resign from the Church Finance Committee.48 Colenso articulated what was unannounced but general practice among Anglicans and Catholics, when with characteristic candour he made it clear that he did not force Christian converts to put away extra wives, considering it cruel and ‘opposed to the plain teaching of Our Lord’ (who, on any reading of scripture, showed a firm if not consistently reported hostility to divorce). Colenso’s pragmatism was equalled by that of the great missionary archbishop of North African Catholicism, Cardinal Charles Lavigerie, when considering with dismay another aspect of African esteem for marriage: the difficulties which it caused in recruiting local Catholic priests in the face of the Church’s rule of universal clerical celibacy. Lavigerie, an enthusiastic student of Church

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Apollo 8 went perfectly, there would be no one in the Pacific to pick up the crew after splashdown, since the Navy’s Pacific Fleet had already been given a reprieve for Christmas. Someone had to appeal directly to Admiral John McCain, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, to ask for special dispensation. The timing wasn’t ideal; McCain’s son, John McCain III, a Navy pilot, had been shot down over Hanoi and was being held as a prisoner of war by the North Vietnamese. But Kraft said he’d do it, and in person. A few days later, he walked into an amphitheater-style conference room in Honolulu, surrounded by a hundred military captains, admirals, and four-star generals. At 10:30 A.M. sharp, an order sounded—Attention! —and McCain entered the room. “Okay, young man,” the fifty-seven-year-old McCain growled at the forty-four-year-old Kraft. “What have you got to say?” Kraft described Apollo 8’s mission, its benefits and risks, and explained that America’s greatness was about to be tested in space. Then he laid out NASA’s request. This part he’d rehearsed and memorized down to the word. “Admiral, I realize that the Navy has made its Christmas plans and I’m asking you to change them. I’m here to request that the Navy support us and have ships out there before we launch and through Christmas. We need you.” For several moments, there was silence in the room. Finally, McCain got up from the table and slammed down the supporting documents Kraft had provided. “Best damn briefing I’ve ever had. Give that young man anything he wants.” And with that, the Navy’s aircraft carriers belonged to NASA for Christmas. — In Washington, Mueller continued to worry about Apollo 8. In a November 4 letter to one of NASA’s top managers, he wrote, “you and I know that if failure comes, the reaction will be that anyone should have known better than to undertake such a trip at this point in time.” Mueller

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  reentry, and those were practiced with particular intensity. But every part was worked through—over and over again. But no matter how much practice and simulation, no matter how ingenious the scenarios run by the SimSups, astronauts could not be trained for everything. During the highly successful Gemini program, three of the ten manned flights had nearly ended in astronaut fatalities. And even if simulator training could cover the most complex and unlikely scenarios, the most basic malfunctions still could kill men in space. So Borman, Lovell, and Anders just practiced more. — As the weeks passed, the Apollo 8 astronauts got to know not just the spacecraft and the mission, but also one another. Borman and Lovell already knew they flew well together. Anders was the newcomer—and a revelation to the other two men. In his six years at NASA, Borman had never seen a harder worker, or a man of deeper integrity, than Anders. It was true that Anders had his own ideas about what was important, and didn’t always agree with Borman on mission priorities, but he never went around Borman’s authority or took a shortcut to anything. To Borman, character and competence counted more than most anything else, and Anders had plenty of both. Borman could think of no other astronaut in the entire program, longtime veterans included, he would have chosen over Anders for systems engineer. Lovell, too, thought the team lucky to have Anders, and for many of the same reasons. He admired the way Anders had handled his initial disappointment with Apollo 8’s change in assignment, one that likely meant he’d never set foot on the Moon. And he appreciated that Anders saw adventure and exploration in the chance to make man’s first lunar journey. To both of them, going to the Moon wasn’t just about beating the Soviets. It was a chance to do something incredible. For his part, Anders felt welcomed by this old NASA duo. Like many, he considered Lovell a hail-fellow-well-met, just the kind of easy hand you’d want along on a six-day trip, whether to a fishing hole or to the Moon. Borman was another matter. Anders saw much of himself in the

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  S. H. Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam (Princeton, 2008). A masterly study of the crisis caused by the Mongols with a wider perspective than its already wide title implies is P. Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 1221–1410 (Harlow, 2005). Richly enjoyable in its no-nonsense sifting of probability from wishful thinking in Ethiopian Church history is S. Munro-Hay, The Quest for the Ark of the Covenant: The True History of the Tablets of Moses (London, 2006). PART IV: THE UNPREDICTABLE RISE OF ROME (300–1300) General Reading Quite magnificent in its originality and powers of synthesis is the work of the doyen of the field, P. Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity AD 200–1000 (Oxford, 1997). From a master of a previous generation comes a fine introduction, R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (London, 1970). An introduction which usefully draws on social and economic history, and which takes no prisoners, is R. Collins, Early Medieval Europe 300–1000 (Houndmills, 1991). 9: The Making of Latin Christianity (300–500) For the beginning of the period, see the reading for Chapter 6, but to those works should be added the particular focus on the city of Rome in J. R. Curran, Pagan City and Christian Capital: Rome in the Fourth Century (Oxford, 2000), also against the wider background presented with concise brilliance in P. Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (London, 1981). Much profit and entertainment can be derived from the essayists of A. Momigliano (ed.), The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century: Essays (Oxford, 1963). Augustine is perhaps the only Father of the Church whom non-Christians can read for pleasure, at least in two key works, H. Bettenson and D. Knowles (eds.), Augustine: Concerning the City of God against the Pagans (London, 1967), and R. S. Pine-Coffin (ed.), Saint Augustine: Confessions (London, 1961). Two splendid lives of this most central of Western theologians are G. Bonner, Saint Augustine of Hippo: Life and Controversies (2nd edn, Norwich, 1963) and P. Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (London, 1969). An absorbing effort to squeeze as much as possible out of the limited evidence, although there have been archaeological discoveries

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  since, is C. Thomas, Christianity in Roman Britain to AD 500 (London, 1981). 10: Latin Christendom: New Frontiers (500–1000) The period is well served for general introductions, such as G. R. Evans, The Church in the Early Middle Ages (London, 2007), J. Herrin, The Formation of Christendom (London, 1989), F. D. Logan, A History of the Church in the Middle Ages (London, 2002), T. F. X. Noble and J. M. H. Smith (eds.), The Cambridge History of Christianity 3: Early Medieval Christianities, c. 600–c. 1100 (Cambridge, 2008), and C. Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 (London and New York, 2009) – the last providing a wide sweep of perspectives including emphasis on the social and economic background. An eloquent and absorbing study, weighted before 1000, is R. Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe: From Paganism to Christianity 371–1386 AD (London, 1997). On a key figure, an excellent starter is R. A. Markus, Gregory the Great and His World (Cambridge, 1997), and there are fine essays on another key personality in J. Story (ed.), Charlemagne: Empire and Society (Manchester, 2005). J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church (Oxford, 1983), is a substantial study of the section of the Western Church which transformed religious patterns on a much wider scale. H. Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England (3rd edn, London, 1991) delightfully introduces the subject, in the nature of things owing much to an equally delightful work by an only slightly more venerable historian, L. Sherley- Price and R. E. Latham (eds.), Bede: A History of the English Church and People (rev. edn, London, 1968). More classic hagiographies of the period, some by Bede himself, are to be encountered in J. F. Webb (tr.) and D. H. Farmer (ed.), The Age of Bede (London, 1983). 11: The West: Universal Emperor or Universal Pope? (900–1200) After the general introductions to the whole period listed above, a refreshingly iconoclastic perspective is R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford, 1987), expanded into a more general survey in R. I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215 (Oxford, 2000). K. G. Cushing, Reform and the Papacy in the Eleventh Century: Spirituality and Social Change (Manchester and New York, 2005), presents a clear overview of the Gregorian Revolution, and is usefully