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 The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  My uncle has a friend who says he can hook me up . . .")? Or do you want somebody who's come up the hard way? A guy who has started at the bottom, worked his way up, educated himself, step by step, station by station in the intricacies of your particular operation—who knows where everything is, in every corner of your restaurant, who has been shown, again and again until it's implanted in his cell structure, the way you want it cooked? He may not know what a soubise is, but he can sure make one! He may not know the term monter au beurre, or know who Vatel was—but who cares? Vatel punked out over a late fish delivery and offed himself like a bad poet. Somebody had to cover his station the next day. Manuel would have shrugged and soldiered on. No shrieking and wailing and rending of garments for Manuel. He's a professional, not some flighty "artist" who can't handle a little pressure. No disrespect to my alma mater. The CIA is, without question, the finest professional culinary school in the country, maybe the world. It has, in my lifetime, raised the level of performance, the expectation of excellence, to previously unseen heights. To graduate from the CIA—or any other major culinary school—ensures basic, standardized knowledge of history, terminology, and procedures of our trade. A CIA diploma should, and does, mean a lot to potential employers; it represents an accumulation of valuable classroom experience and impeccable standards. But it is no guarantee of character. It speaks nothing of one's heart and soul and willingness to work, to learn, to grow —or one's ability to endure. The Mexican ex-dishwashers usually come from a culture where cooking and family are important. They have, more often than not, a family to provide for, and are used to being responsible for others. They are, more than likely, inured to regimes despotic, ludicrous, and hostile. They've known hardship—real hardship. The incongruities, contradictions, and petty injustices of kitchen life are nothing new compared to la mor-dida, wherein every policeman is a potential extortionist, and what was, until recently, a one-party system. You see an expression on the faces of veteran American cooks who've been around the block a few times, had their butts kicked, a look that says, "I expect the worst— and I'm ready for it." The Mexican ex-dishwasher has that look from the get-go. As I've said many times, I can teach people to cook. I can't teach character. And my comrades from Mexico and Ecuador have been some of the finest characters I've known in twenty eight years as a cook and as a chef. I am privileged, made better, by having known and worked with many of them.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Louis? I salute you. La Chaumiere in Washington, D.C., continues to feature quenelles de brocket (pike dumplings in Nantua sauce), a dish maybe one chef among thousands remembers, much less knows how to prepare. They also feature cassoulet Toulousain, boudin blanc, tripes, and calves' brains. The tripe and calves' brains can hardly be flying out of the kitchen—especially in these fearful, troubled times—but kudos for sticking with them. It's a decision that borders on the heroic. La Petite Auberge in New York City still sells coquilles Saint-Jacques, served in scallop shells, just like my mom did back in the sixties. Frogs' legs with garlic, chasseur sauce, and bordelaise sauce still take their place on the menu. It's been a long time since I've seen bordelaise on a menu—it's usually been long supplanted by the healthier-sounding "demi-glace" or "reduction." New York's Pierre au Tunnel wins the Biggest Balls award for keeping the unthinkably scary-ass tete de veau (essentially calf's face, rolled up and tied with its tongue and thymus gland and slowly stewed in court bouillon) on their menu. They must get a lot of old Frenchmen as customers, because even in Paris these days, you pretty much have to point a gun at someone's head before you can motivate them to eat a calf's face. Pierre? Good on you. I wish I could serve tete. Really I do. For sheer number and frequency of lumbering, old-style, unapologetically French dishes, you've just got to give it up to (again New York's) Chez Napoleon. A trip down memory lane into inspired lunacy: rillettes de pore, veal forestiere (Remember that one from school? Anybody?), tripes, kidneys, liver, brains, boudin noir, coq au vin, bouillabaisse, hot souflees—and cherries freaking jubileel The mind reels. At Boston's Ritz-Carlton Hotel, their Dining Room continues to prove the existence of the old-style professional waiter, serving Dover sole meuniere tableside. One wonders where one can find a server these days who knows how to fillet a whole sole with fork and spoon in front of an audience, or prepare the Dining Room's crepes Suzettes flambees without igniting themselves or their customers. It's inspiring to know they're there, and doing what they do. Chefs, many of whom grew up with these dishes, are often passionate about them. But are their customers? It's interesting to see how resolute and determined modern chefs try and slip in the occasional oldie through guile and seduction. At Vincent in Minneapolis, they have had to make concessions to the marketplace, dutifully offering up a hamburger and a "carpaccio" of beets along with the steak tartare and escargots. The escargots de Bourgogne, tellingly, are helpfully described on the menu as "a traditional bistro dish"—as if to take the sting away from the more straightforward "snails." The "blanquette" is a compromise between urges and generations, a "braised veal shank . . . with cauliflower, wild rice, and green onions." "Les haricots persillades" sit next to "creamy yellow grits" on the list of side dishes.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Yet we need to move on to consider a further question: how can we understand how beliefs are best enacted in life? What is the most authentic or appropriate expression of certain beliefs? If beliefs make possible certain ways of life, where can we find models of such lives? What exemplars of embodied belief can be identified, that help us grasp both the impact of beliefs on human existence, and the forms of life that they inform and enable? Saints and Sages: Exemplars and a Meaningful LifeIn her important reflections on the growing importance of moral exemplars in a postmodern context, the American philosopher Edith Wyschogrod highlighted the importance of having someone we can observe or imagine who lives up to and lives out an ethical ideal, rather than simply being presented with an abstract theory that is detached from real life. ‘To lead a moral life one does not need a theory about how one should live, but a flesh and blood existent.’57 Beliefs are not limited to the realm of the mind, but are capable of being lived out through the realities of a life which they both inform and enrich. An exemplar is someone who has internalised a way of thinking so that it becomes their way of living. Instead of telling us to be good, they show us what a good life can and should look like. We need a definition of goodness that is not framed in the language of ideas, but in terms of the character, and an exemplar shows us what goodness is like, rather than telling us how it is to be understood. There is an important connection here with Pierre Hadot’s account of some schools of ancient philosophy. While there is a degree of overstatement in Hadot’s analysis,58 he has clearly identified an aspect of earlier philosophical practice which has not found its proper counterpart in post-Enlightenment thought – the development of certain personal disciplines which help people assimilate and enact their vision of a good life. These transformed modes of seeing and being in the world were exemplified and lived out in the figure of the sage. In the ancient world, philosophy was eminently concerned with self-criticism and self-improvement. Plutarch spoke of ‘weaving’ or ‘painting’ our lives; Plotinus suggested we see ourselves as a sculptor, chipping away at a block of marble to allow the statue within to be seen. Philosophy is about seeing our potential, and guiding us as we try to achieve this, in company with appropriate mentors and exemplars. While ancient schools of philosophy were concerned with the development of argument and reasoning, they also developed what Hadot calls ‘spiritual exercises’ as a means of enacting their ideas and values. Aristotle’s discussion of the question of how we should live focuses on the idea of eudaimonia, a Greek term often translated as ‘happiness’, but which perhaps is better rendered as ‘flourishing’ or ‘fulfilment’.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  She did not even try to get it published. The novel spans several summer days—ah, summer in Moscow!—during which the capital is visited by the Devil himself, trailed by a piebald entourage: two baroquely disfigured henchmen, a naked seductress named Hella, and an easily insulted giant cat with a fondness for vodka and guns. Registering himself as a foreign ‘artiste’ specializing in black magic—one of the novel’s sweet ironies is that the dean of deception is just about the only truth-teller in town—Woland (as the novel’s Devil is known) proceeds to expose, via a series of séances at the Variety Theater, the vanity, greed, and servility that continue to rule even in socialist Moscow. But this is a warm-up. Woland is in Moscow for Margarita, an unhappily married woman who once loved the Master, the author of a novel about Pontius Pilate, who consigns Christ to the cross despite being morally awed by Him (and whose portrayal could not fail to summon comparisons to a certain present-day dictator). The Master burned most of the manuscript after it was turned down by a publisher and, saving the authorities the trouble, consigned himself to a mental asylum in secret from Margarita. At Woland’s invitation, Margarita goes through hell—literally—for the chance to find her beloved. We follow the story with periodic detours to the day of Christ’s execution in Jerusalem. But this tells you nothing. The Master and Margarita is one of those novels that, even in translation, makes one feel that not one word could have been written differently. I’ve read it half a dozen times now, in three translations and in the original, and its mystery has only increased. Trying to explain what makes it transcendent is like explaining what one cherishes about someone with whom one is in love. Yes, she is kind and trustworthy, but that’s not really it. It’s like those ten-ruble notes that Woland rains down on his ravening audience at the Variety—they change into bottle labels the next day. You try to hold the novel’s face, and it turns away once again. It was Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons that, in high school in suburban New Jersey, inaugurated my return to a heritage I’d been doing my best to ignore since immigrating to the States a decade before, but it was The Master and Margarita that brought me back, in college, to my native tongue. It may have been the first novel I read in Russian, having been too young for novels when we left the Soviet Union, and it was the reason I decided to major in Slavic languages and literatures; why I went off to intern at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow one college summer; and why today I speak Russian, then atrophying to half-croaks and mumbles, with native fluency. That first reading of The Master and Margarita is bittersweet to recall for many reasons. At eighteen, I idolized the Master.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  That every single one of Batali's restaurants is not only solidly good (at least), but even more remarkably—given the fiercely competitive nature of the New York restaurant business—profitable, should, one would think, deserve admiration. Life with Mario for New York foodies is surely better than it was before he arrived on the scene. Each new restaurant concept he's brought us has been, on balance, not only beneficial, but daring. Who knew we needed a place specializing in raw Italian seafood (Esca), or Sardinian pizza (Otto), or hoof and snout Italian (Babbo), or offal-centric Spanish tapas (Casa Mono)? Apparently we did. So who cares if you don't like the clogs or the TV show? Mario, of course, regularly cooks in none of the restaurants. You'll see him hovering by the pass for the first few weeks of operations, as at the recent opening of Bistro du Vent, or swilling wine on the stoop across from Babbo. But cut the guy a break. He's not making your pasta. Even Saint Thomas of Napa, probably America's greatest and most revered chef—Thomas Keller of the French Laundry, that is—now also runs two Bouchons (one in Napa, one in Vegas) and the four-starred Per Se in New York. Hasn't the man done enough? Do you really want him to die behind the range? The answer to that is probably "yes, you do." "You create a style," explains Famous Chef. "You work all those years, all those hours. No family life, no free time. All the sacrifice. Around thirty-eight, thirty-nine, you look around and you see the new guys, with their own vision, their own styles— and it doesn't speak to you. You see it. You respect it. But you can't do it. It's not you. You've said what you had to say. It's time to get out. To move on. Expand. Create something for your old age." It's not just about you, he goes on to explain. "When your chef de cuisine has been with you ten years, they want their own thing. They deserve it. You want to keep them in the company, all these people who have been with you. They want to move up. So you open up another place. Then another. You make room for the next generation." Judging from the strident opinions on this subject in magazines and newspapers and foodie Web sites, it would be easy to conclude that it's a class thing: The dining classes, who have always been different (at least until recently) from the cooking class, simply hate to see the backstairs help coming up in the world. In England, Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White, in particular, were singled out as "climbers," stepping up from their "class" in a way that seemed to offend. The speed with which some hurried to declare them "over" as soon as they opened another restaurant was breathtaking. The Famous Chef has no obligation to you, or anyone else, to be present in the restaurant.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  SALTY SYSTEM D Debrouillard is what every plongeur wants to be called. A debrouillard is a man who, even when he is told to do the impossible, will se debrouiller—get it done somehow. —George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London He was a master of the short cut, the easy way out, the System D. D. stands for de as in debrouiller or demerder—to extricate . . . and to a hair (he) knew how to stay out of trouble. He was a very skillful cook, and a very bad one. —Nicolas Freeling, The Kitchen I stumbled across my first reference to the mysterious and sinister-sounding System D in Nicolas Freeling's wonderful memoir of his years as a Grand Hotel cook in France. I knew the word debrouillard already, having enjoyed reading about the concept of se debrouiller or se demerder in Orwell's earlier account of his dishwashing/prep-cooking at the pseudonymous Hotel "X" in Paris. But what sent chills down my spine and sent me racing back to my weathered copies of both books was a casual remark by my French sous-chef as he watched a busboy repairing a piece of kitchen equipment with a teaspoon. "Ahh . . . Le System D!" he said with a smirk, and a warm expression of recognition. For a moment, I thought I'd stumbled across a secret society—a coven of warlocks, a subculture within our subculture of chefs and cooks and restaurant lifers. I was annoyed that what I had thought to be an ancient term from kitchens past, a little bit of culinary arcanum, was in fact still in use, and I felt suddenly threatened—as if my kitchen, my crew, my team of talented throat slitters, fire starters, mercenaries, and hooligans was secretly a hotbed of Trilateralists, Illuminati, Snake Handlers, or Satan Worshippers. I felt left out. I asked, "Did you say 'System D'? What is 'System D'?" "Tu connais . . . you know MacGyver?" replied my sous-chef thoughtfully. I nodded, flashing onto the idiotic detective series of years back where the hero would regularly bust out of maximum-security prisons and perform emergency neurosurgery using nothing more than a paper clip and a gum wrapper. "MacGyver!" pronounced my sous-chef, "CA . . . ca c'est System D."

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Now take off those panties!" Guys who wake up every morning, brush their teeth, shower, shave, then go to work at the serious business of committing felonies, these are the characters who continue to dominate my reverie—and my fiction. Bank robbers, spies, enforcers, contract killers, loan sharks, confidence men, and racketeers . . . it's their consistency over time, their relentless adherence to the requirements of the job, that makes me, in my way, love them. Take a guy like Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, the former boss of the Genovese crime family, who I used as an inspiration for a character in Bone in the Throat. Here's a guy who, for thirty years, played the public role of a doddering, schizophrenic old man, appearing on the street for walk-talks with his soldiers in bathrobe and slippers, talking to himself, behaving erratically, moving his eyes and head in such a way as to indicate insanity—and all the while was running with an iron grip the largest and most ruthless criminal enterprise in the country. This crazy act kept him out of jail for most of his life—though the Feds did catch up with him in the end. You have to admire that kind of work ethic. They never caught The Chin on tape, telling a subordinate to "whack somebody out" or "put a rocket in his pocket." You never heard The Chin's voice playing over the courthouse speakers, talking about how he was going to "sever [somebody's] motherfuckin' head off" (one of my favorite Gotti-isms). The Chin played his part to the end. Gotti, to his detriment, surrounded himself with those other fascinating creatures of the criminal netherworld: informers. Listening to recordings of the embattled don in his Little Italy social club, berating his crew, bemoaning his gambling losses, contemplating the machinations and intentions of his rivals, there's a poignancy to the experience: Not only was the poor bastard being secretly recorded by the FBI, but sometimes three out of four of the close associates in the room with him were, or later became, government informants. It's hard these days, it seems, to get good help. So for purposes of fiction, organized criminality offers plenty of drama, plenty of situations in which characters find themselves in extreme circumstances with presumably difficult choices to make: Should I shoot my best friend today? What happens if I don't? Can I trust Paulie? After I kill him, when his kids come over to play with my kids, what should I tell them about Daddy's disappearance? Should I cooperate with the prosecutors? Can I survive the rest of my life eating jail food? These are the Big Questions in my kind of crime fiction. And of course, crime can be funny. The line between crime fiction and real-life crime becomes fuzzy, often hilariously so. All the real gangsters have seen The Godfather, One, Two, and maybe Three. They've seen Good-fellas.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Perhaps the best thing chefs can do is to cook, whenever possible, with heart. Where poorer nations have a tradition of cooking well because they have to, we have choices. If we can take something lasting from the Blood cause, it is that it is always better to make the most of what's available, to cook well. If a chef's unique vision and identity is associated closely with a particular area or local culture, great. He's doing God's work. If there is good, local skate available, then there is no reason to fly in the endangered, mushy, and oft-frozen Chilean sea bass. A good chef imports an ingredient from the other side of the globe because it makes sense—not for its novelty value or its rarity. Why bother to make Mexican food in London if the end result is nothing but soulless sour-tasting caulking compound? Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars creating a fashionable ersatz dim-sum emporium and then bleed out all the happy sloppy informality that makes the dim-sum experience so much fun? However horrifying it might be to see some young, fresh-out-of-culinary- school novice bombarding his guests with dende oil, Thai basil, yuzu, and chipotles, it's nice to know that others for whom those ingredients are more familiar can find them at will. But I'm not giving up my white Italian truffles until the last one is gone. Show me a bootleg ortolan and I'm there, crunching bones with only a minimum of guilt. I'll just be sure to not overcook it. VIVA MEXICO! VIVA ECUADOR! Let's be honest, let's be really, painfully honest: Who is cooking? Who is the backbone of the American restaurant business? Whose sudden departure could shut down nearly every good restaurant, nightclub, and banquet facility in every major city in the country? Whose sweat and toil allows annoyingly well-known white-boy chefs like me to go around the country flogging books, appearing on TV, writing obnoxious magazine articles, and baiting their peers? Who, pound for pound, are the best French and Italian cooks in New York? If you're a chef, manager, or owner, you know the answer: Mexicans. Ecuadorans. Salvadoran guys (and women) from south of the border, many of them with green cards they bought on Queens Boulevard for thirty dollars. Ex- dishwashers with no formal training, minimal education; people who have often never eaten in restaurants as good as the ones they cook in.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  When pressed, she grudgingly concedes a fondness for "their cheese, wine, and perfume." But here, I think it's Hamilton who is full of shit. Prune exudes France from every pore. She can run from French terminology and French menu descriptions, she can lard her menu with nostalgic Americana of long-ago summers and still- remembered meals with friends, mix in some rural Brit and a little country Italian. But Gabrielle's French mother's cooking hangs over the place. Prune looks French. It feels French. Before the smoking ban, it was a smoker's paradise. Even the laid-back bistro attitude is stealth French. Perhaps eager to put the boot in again, she agrees enthusiastically that Spain is indeed "the New France" but shrinks from the tiny bite, pinchos/tapas thing: "I still have an attention span. I can eat a meal." At the end, "I want to feel fed" (words most Frenchmen would probably agree with). Pressed to name some chefs she admires, she gives me the biggest, warmest smile of the day as she names Veritas's Scott Bryan (heavy French influence) and his one-time underboss Mark Ladner (okay, he's cooking Italian at Lupa, but there's a French cook in there somewhere). "I love what they do." Like a lot of chefs I know who can date their careers back to the good old/bad old days of the eighties, Gabrielle Hamilton is a survivor and a cynic, and like all cynics, a failed romantic. Sorry Gabrielle. I can smell the French on you. It's the radishes with butter and salt on the bar that gave you away. You can run from the past, but you can't hide. None of us can. She feeds me some braised lamb before I leave, and once again (and I've been trying for years) I attempt to convince her to write the women's version of Kitchen Confidential. "You'd make me look like a freakin' manicurist!" I insist. "This is a book that needs to be written. Isn't there enough testosterone in this genre?!" I point out that she's already a writer, having been published many times in Food & Wine magazine, and that publisher pals of mine have been asking. She waves away the idea and stands up, ready to get back to the downstairs prep kitchen where her crew are setting up for dinner service. "I'm not going to write the Great American Novel," she sighs. "But we'll feed a few people." WHEN THE COOKING'S OVER(TURN OUT THE LIGHTS, TURN OUT THE LIGHTS) Food and sin are two words that—in the English-speaking world, anyway—have long been linked. Food is a matter of the senses, a pleasure of the flesh, and when one anticipates eating a good meal, one's body undergoes physiological changes similar to those experienced prior to . . . other functions. The lips engorge, saliva becomes thick, the pulse quickens.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  People now choose to be chefs. It's clean, educated, squeaky." Though she is seven months pregnant, avoiding alcohol (and the smoke from my cigarette) assiduously, Hamilton clearly still misses the bad old days. She misses "sitting at the bar after closing, drinking for a few hours. It's amazing how you can get a third wind after you've been covered in meat juice all day." Her particular road to becoming a chef and owning her own restaurant was not an easy one. Hamilton grew up one of five kids in Lambertville, New Jersey, an industrial town of lumberyards and factories (now undergoing something of a renaissance as a weekend getaway). Her father, a theatrical designer, and her French mother split up when she was eleven. After a year with her mother in Vermont, she returned to New Jersey to live with her father. By age twelve, she was working in restaurants. "Were you a problem child?" I ask. She gives me a very dry, sardonic smile and replies, "Only if you consider kleptomania and drugs a problem." After school, and for summer jobs, she began washing dishes at The Picnic Basket in New Hope, Pennsylvania. "I needed the money," she says. "I wanted the money." Restaurants were "the only thing I knew how to do." Fortunately, her mother, an excellent cook, had given her and her siblings "a lot of skills already." At various establishments, she continued to wash dishes, bus tables, wait on customers. "I did everything," she says, "bartended, pastry . . . everything." At fifteen, she got her first cook's position. She rolled into New York in the early eighties and worked as a food stylist and catering employee until 1999, when she opened Prune. When Hamilton says she did "everything," it's sort of like Keith Richards with sleepy understatement telling you he "used to party a little"; her description is tantalizingly inadequate. Stories of Hamilton's long hard road of "wilderness years" between dish jobs and later chefdom have become something of an urban legend. According to who you talk to, there were brief stints in everything from stripping to murder-for-hire. Of course, I believe them all. She's hard-core. Example? Much later, when I ask her what she first looks for in a potential employee, she responds with, "First thing? If I'm standing there in my whites in the dining room, and they ask me 'Is the chef here?' They're not getting the job." You should probably know that she is, by turns, ardently feminist, reactionary, and refreshingly (even painfully) candid. She is absolutely devoid of artifice, and she has a very low tolerance for bullshit. New York's freebie paper, The New York Press, included her in its list of New York's fifty Most Loathsome People last year, and it's not hard to imagine her stepping—if not stomping—on some toes. It's no surprise that I like and admire her tremendously. Had she written her version of Kitchen Confidential before I did, I'd probably still be flipping steak frites.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  But, under the regularly changing header of "Something Strange But Good," they have managed to sneak in that beloved old warhorse, "Normandy-Style Braised Tripe"—incredible. The central irony of a subject already overloaded with ironies is that the market is, perhaps, beginning to come around full circle. Cult hero-to-chefs Fergus Henderson of London's offal-centric St. John just rolled out a widely touted new edition of his classic Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating cookbook, and was feted by Alice Waters in San Francisco, Charlie Trotter in Chicago, and Mario Batali in New York. A posse of chefs, including Eric Ripert, Marcus Samuelsson, Mark Ladner, Gabrielle Hamilton, Patti Jackson, Mary Sue Milliken, Maurice Hurley, and Kerry Heffernan (as diverse a mix of modernists, traditionalists, Francophiles, and Francophobes as one can imagine) gathered to eat tripe and cassoulet and talk about a shared love of the old school with Henderson. Pork belly is now a "hot" menu item on both coasts. Duck confit has permeated menus across the nation and "house-made" charcuterie is everywhere. Does this mean that Le Veau d'Or will suddenly find itself "hot" again, after all these years? Will air-kissing trendoids in little black dresses and loud-talking yuppies with beeping cell phones flock to their doors, looking to experience calves' brains in beurre noir? I kind of hope not. They might have to hire another waiter. DIE, DIE MUST TRY MY FIRST TIME IN Singapore, I hated it. The heat punched me in the chest every time I stepped outside, a thick, penetrating humidity made worse by relentlessly broiling sun. Three-shower-a- day, change-your-clothes-at-noon kind of heat; yet, whenever I ducked inside for a beer, the bars were refrigerated, with locals happily sipping Tiger beers in their T-shirts in the bone-chilling, meat-locker cold. R.W. Apple Jr. has referred to Singapore as "Disneyland with the death penalty," and for good reason. The list of things you can't do (spitting, littering, gum chewing, jaywalking) is as endless as it is hard to believe, and the government's mania for relentless social engineering and development has left much of what you and I would find charming replaced by ultramodern rabbit warrens of interlocking shopping malls. They censor the Internet, you do not want to get caught with drugs within its borders, and yes, technically, even blow jobs are illegal (though thankfully, readily available.) But now I love it. And I go back whenever I can. Because Singapore is probably the most food-crazed, lunatic-eater's paradise on the planet. We're not talking about "gourmets" here. Singapore's "foodies" are nothing like the annoying, nerdy, status-conscious variety one finds in New York, chattering about Jean-Georges's new place, or how such and such a restaurant lost a star. Singaporeans do not collect dining experiences like stamps, to be discussed or bragged about later. Singaporeans are not gastronomes.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  By drawing to themselves the best spirits of the time, the convents became in their good days, from the tenth well into the thirteenth century, hearthstones of piety, and the chief centres of missionary and civilizing agencies. When there was little preaching, the monastic community preached the most powerful sermon, calling men’s thoughts away from riot and bloodshed to the state of brotherhood and religious reflection.544 The motto aratro et cruce, "by the cross and the plough," stood in their case for a reality. The monk was a pioneer in the cultivation of the ground, and, after the most scientific fashion then known, taught agriculture, the culture of the vine and fish, the breeding of cattle, and the culture of wool. He built roads and the best buildings. In intellectual and artistic concerns the convent was the chief school of the times. It trained architects, painters, and sculptors. There the deep problems of theology and philosophy were studied; there manuscripts were copied, and when the universities arose, the convent furnished them with their first and their most renowned teachers. In northeastern Germany and other parts of Europe and in Asia it was the outer citadel of church profession and church activity. So popular was the monastic life that religion seemed to be in danger of running out into monkery and society of being transformed into an aggregation of convents. The Fourth Lateran sought to counteract this tendency by forbidding the establishment of new orders.545 But no council was ever more ignorant of the immediate future. Innocent III. was scarcely in his grave before the Dominicans and Franciscans received full papal sanction. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries the important change was accomplished whereby all monks received priestly ordination. Before that time it was the exception for a monk to be a priest. Extreme unction and absolution had been administered in the convent by unordained monks.546 With the development of the strict theory of sacerdotalism, these functions were forbidden to them, as by the ninth oecumenical council, 1123. The synod of Nismes, thirty years earlier, 1096, thought it answered objections to the new custom sufficiently by pointing to Gregory the Great, Gregory of Tours, and Augustine as cases of monks who had priestly ordination. On the other hand the active movement within the convents to take a larger part in the affairs of society was resisted by oecumenical councils, as, for example, the Second Lateran, 1139, which forbade monks practising as physicians or lawyers. The monastic life was praised as the highest form of earthly existence. The convent was compared to Canaan547 and treated as the shortest and surest road to heaven. The secular life, even the life of the secular priest, was compared to Egypt. The passage to the cloister was called conversion, and the monks converts, conversi, or the religious.548 They reached the Christian ideal. Renouncing the vow was pronounced turning to the company of the lost, to the lion’s mouth, and to the realm of blackness and death.549

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  As a preacher, Bernard excels in the glow of his imagination and the fervor of his passion. Luther said, "Bernard is superior to all the doctors in his sermons, even to Augustine himself, because he preaches Christ most excellently."650 In common with his other writings, his sermons abound in quotations from the Scriptures.651 They are not pieces of careful logical statement nor are they keen analyses of the states of conscience, but appeals to the highest impulses of the religious nature. His discourse on the death of his brother Gerard is a model of tender treatment652 as his address before Konrad was of impassioned fervor.653 The sermons on the Canticles preached within convent walls abound in tropical allegory, but also in burning love to the Saviour. One of the most brilliant of modern pulpit orators has said, "the constant shadow of things eternal is over all Bernard’s sermons."654 His discourses, so speaks his biographer Gaufrid, were congruous to the conditions of his hearers. To rustic people he preached as though he had always been living in the country and to all other classes as though he were most carefully studying their occupations. To the erudite he was scholarly; to the uneducated, simple. To the spiritually minded he was rich in wise counsels. He adapted himself to all, desiring to bring to all the light of Christ.655

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  In the twelfth century there were at least two other ecclesiastics of the first order of genius, Anselm and Innocent III. The former passed away a few years after the century opened. Innocent began his papal reign two years before it went out. Anselm has pre-eminence as a profound theological thinker and dialectician. Innocent ruled the world, as pope never ruled it before or since. Between the two fall the intellectual genius and activity of Bernard, combining some of the qualities of Anselm and Innocent. As a mystical theologian he is allied to Anselm, whose Meditations give him a high place in the annals of devotional literature. And Bernard was also a statesman, although he did not attain the eminence of Innocent and shrank from participation in public affairs which were so much to the taste of the great pope. Contemporary with himself was Peter Abaelard, whose brilliant mind won for him enviable fame as a teacher and thinker. But Abaelard never won the confidence of his own age, and is not to be compared with Bernard in moral dignity. By preference a monk, Bernard figured, with almost equal prominence, in the history of the papacy, the Crusades, mysticism, monasticism, and hymnology. In the annals of monasticism, the pulpit, and devotional literature he easily occupies a place in the front rank. He was called the "honey-flowing doctor," doctor mellifluus. Twenty years after his death he was canonized by Alexander III. as "shining preeminently in his own person by virtue of sanctity and religion, and in the whole Church by the light of his doctrine and faith."627 Pius VIII., in 1830, admitted him to the select company of the doctors of the Church. Both Calvin and Luther, who ridiculed the Schoolmen as a body, held him in high regard.628 Bernard was descended from a noble family of Burgundy, and was born at Fontaines near Dijon. He was one of seven children, six of whom were sons. His mother, Aletha, like Nonna and Monica, was a deeply pious woman and planted in the son the seeds of religious faith.629 Carried away for a time with enthusiasm for scholastic learning, the son was overwhelmed, while on a lonely journey, with religious impressions, and, entering a chapel, resolved to dedicate himself wholly to God. He entered the convent of Citeaux, two of his brothers following him at once, and the rest later into the monastic life.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  After twelve years as Northumbrian Queen Consort, Æthelthryth finally separated from her unfortunate second husband in 673 and returned to her East Anglian homeland to found and govern her own abbey on its fenland border; it still flourishes in modified form as Ely’s Anglican Cathedral. Various royal relatives followed Æthelthryth in ruling over this powerful Fenland community; after her interred corpse had been revealed as miraculously incorrupt when her successor had it moved to a new tomb in the abbey church, she became one of the most popular among native Anglo-Saxon saints. Pilgrims also became enthusiastic about her saintly royal siblings from the East Anglian dynasty, Seaxburh, Æthelburh and Sæthryth, and devotional demand appears to have later added an extra princess-sister, Wihtburh, for good measure. The ladies’ confusingly named father King Anna received further pious attention, though on a smaller scale. One notes that, as in early monasticism in the Christian East, Æthelthryth’s deliberate abandonment of a marriage for something better was no obstacle to sainthood. [32]

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Domingo, or Dominic, was born 1170 at Calaroga, Spain, and died Aug. 6, 1121, in Bologna.859 His mother, Juana of Aza, is worshipped as a saint in the Dominican ritual. At seven the son passed under the priestly instruction of an uncle. Ten years were subsequently spent at Palencia in the study of philosophy and theology, and he is said to have excelled as a student. About 1195, he was made canon at Osma, which gives its name to the episcopal diocese, within whose bounds he was born. In 1203 he accompanied his bishop, Diego d’Azeveda, to France860 on a mission to secure a bride for the son of Alfonzo VIII. of Castile. This and subsequent journeys across the Pyrenees brought him into contact with the Albigenses and the legates despatched by Innocent III. to take measures to suppress heresy in Southern France. Dominic threw himself into the movement for suppressing heresy and started upon a tour of preaching. At Prouille in the diocese of Toulouse, he erected an asylum for girls to offset the schools established by the Albigenses, for the training of the daughters of impoverished noblemen. He was on intimate terms with Simon de Montfort, but, so far as is known, he took no active part in the Albigensian crusade except as a spiritual adviser.861 His attempt to establish a mission for the conversion of heretics received the support of Fulke, bishop of Toulouse, who in 1215 granted him one-sixth of the tithes of his diocese. Among the first to ally themselves to Dominic was Peter Cellani, a citizen of Toulouse, who gave him a house. An epoch in Dominic’s career was his visit in Rome during the sessions of the Fourth Lateran Council, when he received encouragement from Innocent III. who declined to assent to the proposal of a new order and bade him adopt one of the existing monastic constitutions.862 Dominic chose the rule of the canons regular of St. Augustine,863 adopted the black dress of the Augustinians, and built the convent of St. Romanus at Toulouse. He was again in Rome from September, 1216, to Easter, 1217. Honorius II. in 1216 approved the organization, and confirmed it in the possession of goods and houses. An unreliable tradition states that Honorius also conferred upon Dominic the important office of Master of the Palace, magister palatii. The office cannot be traced far beyond Gregory IX.864 The legendary accounts of his life represent the saint at this time as engaged in endless scourgings and other most rigorous asceticisms. Miracles, even to the raising of the dead, were ascribed to him.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  188 Lecture 26: Benedictine Monasticism and Its Influence Benedictine Monasticism and Its Influence Lecture 26 I n the last lecture, we saw the importance of the Frankish conquests and the consolidation of Frankish rule under Charlemagne as the Holy Roman Emperor, which involved, as well, a commitment to Catholicism and to the bishop of Rome. We have also sketched the basics of feudalism as the political-cultural context for medieval Christianity, and we saw briefly how monasteries both fit and caused some tension within this cultural system. Monasteries established cells of Christian life throughout Europe that contributed to the agricultural economy and served as examples of Augustine’s “city of God.” In this lecture, we’ll look in particular at Benedictine monasticism, highlighting the key role it played in shaping medieval Christianity in the West. Benedict of Nursia • The true founder of Western monasticism is Benedict of Nursia (c. 480–c. 550), often called the patriarch of Western monasticism because of the widespread influence of his Rule for monks (also called the Benedictine Rule). • The few details of Benedict’s life are known from the brief biography provided shortly after his death by Pope Gregory I (Dialogues 2). The account is highly laudatory and contains a considerable amount of legendary material. Gregory sought to portray Benedict and his sister Scholastica along the lines of biblical saints. o Born in Nursia in the region of Umbria, Benedict was educated in Rome, but for reasons unknown— The great achievement of Benedict, his Rule for monks, sought to describe a life that anyone of good will could live; his work represents a “school of the Lord’s service” for what we might call “beginners” to the religious life. © Hemera/Thinkstock.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  20 Josephine Butler: Victorian Feminist J osephine Butler faced down angry mobs, arson attempts, and overwhelming political opposition in her campaigns for women’s rights. Born to a wealthy, progressive family, her faith and her supportive husband, George, led her to work on behalf of women’s access to education and employment. After the traumatic death of her young daughter, she turned to working on behalf of the poor and then on behalf of sick prostitutes. Her campaigns for the rights of so-called fallen women and later against child prostitution and human trafficking made her famous across Europe. Butler’s charisma made her whirlwind speaking tours an enormous success. But it was her deep faith and daily contemplative prayer that enabled her to withstand vicious opposition and hostile governments. 151 20. Josephine Butler: Victorian Feminist Josephine’s Early Years Josephine Butler was born in 1828 into the height of the British Empire— one of the most powerful nations on earth, but one in which women were essentially powerless. Married women had little control over anything—not their wages, their property, their children, or even their own bodies. They had only limited access to divorce, and even if successful, they would have little hope of seeing their children or gaining custody afterward. It was also considered unfeminine for women to pursue hobbies or interests outside the home, including higher education. Josephine was the seventh child of 10 and the fourth daughter. Her parents, John and Hannah Grey, made sure their daughters were as well educated as their sons. Their home was always open to friends from a wide variety of backgrounds, and young Josephine and her siblings would have been privy to discussions among American abolitionists, activists, agricultural experts, and staunch feminists. When Josephine was 5 years old, her father began working as manager of the vast estates of Greenwich Hospital. His children often accompanied him there to visit the dozens of farms and tenant families, where they saw the realities of rural poverty. By the time Josephine was 17, this exposure to the extremes of social inequality and its consequent human suffering brought her to a crisis point: How could a loving God permit such misery? She seems to have resolved the crisis somewhat, and her deep faith in God never faltered. Josephine’s Marriage and Early Activism In 1850, at the age of 22, Josephine met George Butler, a Classics master at Durham University. Like the Greys, the Butlers were upper-class progressives who moved in elite circles. After marrying, the young couple moved to Oxford, where George hoped to be appointed to a chair in Classics. The move was something of a comedown for Josephine. The Butlers’ social life consisted largely of unmarried male intellectuals, convinced of the importance of their own views and of the unimportance of women’s 152

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  93 • In March 297, Diocletian issued a decree against the Manichaeans (a Gnostic religion that combined Zoroastrian and Christian elements) as a new religion that broke the tradition of the Roman nation: “It is criminal to throw doubts on what has been established from ancient times.” • Between February 303 and March 304, Diocletian issued four decrees against Christians, first attacking worship and banning books and culminating with the demand that all inhabitants of the empire must offer sacrifice to the gods on pain of deportation or death. Historical evidence suggests that these edicts were vigorously pursued and that many Christians lost property, position, and life itself during the persecution. • Diocletian resigned the position of Augustus in 305, and his successors, Galerius and Maximinus Daia, waged a more ferocious persecution until the spring of 313. It was not uniformly imposed, but the pressure was continuous for a period of more than 10 years. The Reign of Constantine • In most respects, Constantine adhered to the same premise as Diocletian concerning imperial rule and religion. • First, he sought to establish a unified rule by making himself the sole Augustus. At one point at the beginning of 310, the empire had seven rival The real privileging of Christianity by the emperor Constantine became apparent with the practice of donating formerly pagan temples for use in Christian worship. © Photos.com/Thinkstock.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  148 tseW nitaL eht fo seussI evitcnitsiD ehT :02 erutceL Strongly influenced by Ambrose in Milan, Augustine converted o to Christianity in 386 and, despite his protests that he was ill- prepared, was ordained a priest in the North African city of Hippo in 391; he was elected bishop in 395. After a lifetime of prodigious pastoral and literary effort, he o died in 430 as the Vandals laid siege to the city of Hippo. If Ambrose provided the political posture and Jerome the o biblical learning that shaped the subsequent West, Augustine was the supreme source of its intellectual vision. Augustine’s Influence • Augustine’s Confessions is not only a classic account of conversion, but it also introduced a sense of interiority, of “self,” that was distinctive. His remarkable self-awareness is revealed, as well, in his Retractions, written shortly before his death, in which he reviewed, criticized, and amended each of his voluminous writings. • Augustine’s polemical and doctrinal works provided fundamental guidance for subsequent theology. His anti-Manichaean works established a sense of the church o and of the material order as positive. Despite his attraction to the ascetical life, he developed a principled defense of the created order: the goodness of the body, food, marriage, and children. His work on the Trinity introduced a profound “psychological” o model for understanding the inner life of the Christian God, suggesting that the path of introspection by one created in the image of God might plumb something of God’s inner life. His writings against Donatism and Pelagianism asserted, on o one side, the importance of the church as an inclusive body of sinners and, on the other side, the necessity of divine grace for any human goodness. On both sides, he emphasized the frailty of humans and the sovereignty and mercy of God. • Augustine’s sermons and biblical commentaries brought both literal and allegorical methods into creative harmony, while his tractate On Christian Doctrine provided a framework for all subsequent medieval interpretation of the Bible. • His City of God, begun in 413 in response to the Visigoth sacking of Rome in 410 and the pagan charge that Christianity was responsible for the fall of the empire, provided a political theology that had a profound impact on medieval church and society. His vision of a society on earth that sought to embody and foreshadow the “city of God” in heaven was a vision that was distinctively Christian, owing little or nothing to classical antecedents. Suggested Reading Brown, Augustine of Hippo. Von Campenhausen (Hoffman, trans.), The Fathers of the Latin Church. Questions to Consider 1. How did the characteristic problems of Latin Christianity in the 4th and 5th centuries differ from controversies in the East? 2. Discuss the distinctive political, literary, and theological contributions made respectively by the three doctors, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine. 149