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 Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Yet the legislation was implemented in only a few regions and in the West, where there were few Christian communities, hardly any at all. It is difficult to know how many people died as a result. Christians were rarely pursued if they failed to show up for the sacrifice; many apostatized, and others found loopholes. 132 Most of those who were put to death had defiantly presented themselves to the authorities as voluntary martyrs, a practice the bishops condemned. 133 When Diocletian abdicated in 305, these edicts expired, though they were renewed for a period of two years (311–13) by Emperor Maximianus Daia. The cult of the martyrs, however, became central to Christian piety because they proved that Jesus had not been unique: the Church had “friends of God” with divine powers in its very midst. The martyrs were “other Christs,” and their imitation of Christ even unto death had brought him into the present. 134 The Acts of the Martyrs claimed that these heroic deaths were miracles that manifested God’s presence because the martyrs seemed impervious to pain. “Let not a day pass when we do not dwell on these tales,” Victricius, the fifth-century bishop of Rouen, urged his congregation. “This martyr did not blench under torturers; this martyr hurried up the slow work of the execution; this one eagerly swallowed the flames; this one was cut about but stood up still.” 135 “They suffered more than is possible for human beings to bear, and did not endure this by their own strength but by the grace of God,” explained Pope Gelasius (r. 492–96). 136 When the Christian slave girl Blandina was executed in Lyons in 177, her companions “looked with their eyes through their sister to the One who was crucified for them.” 137 When the young wife and mother Vibia Perpetua was imprisoned in Carthage in 203, she had a series of remarkable dreams that proved even to her persecutors that she enjoyed special intimacy with the divine. The prison governor himself perceived “that there was a rare power in us,” her biographer recalled. 138 Through these “friends of God,” Christians could claim respect and even superiority over pagan communities. Yet there would always be more than a hint of aggression in the martyr’s “witness” to Christ. On the night before her execution, Perpetua dreamed that she had been turned into a man and wrestled with an Egyptian in the stadium, a man huge and “foul” of aspect, but with an infusion of divine strength, she was able to throw him to the ground.

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

  During the last years of his life the patriarch of monasticism withdrew as much as possible from the sight of visitors, but allowed two disciples to live with him, and to take care of him in his infirm old age. When he felt his end approaching, he commanded them not to embalm his body, according to the Egyptian custom, but to bury it in the earth, and to keep the spot of his interment secret. One of his two sheepskins he bequeathed to the bishop Serapion, the other, with his underclothing, to Athanasius, who had once given it to him new, and now received it back worn out. What became of the robe woven from palm leaves, which, according to Jerome, he had inherited from Paul of Thebes, and wore at Easter and Pentecost, Athanasius does not tell us. After this disposition of his property, Anthony said to his disciples: "Children, farewell; for Anthony goes away, and will be no more with you." With these words he stretched out his feet and expired with a smiling face, in the year 356, a hundred and five years old. His grave remained for centuries unknown. His last will was thus a protest against the worship of saints and relics, which, however, it nevertheless greatly helped to promote. Under Justinian, in 561, his bones, as the Bollandists and Butler minutely relate, were miraculously discovered, brought to Alexandria, then to Constantinople, and at last to Vienne in South France, and in the eleventh century, during the raging of an epidemic disease, the so-called "holy fire," or "St. Anthony’s fire," they are said to have performed great wonders. Athanasius, the greatest man of the Nicene age, concludes his biography of his friend with this sketch of his character: "From this short narrative you may judge how great a man Anthony was, who persevered in the ascetic life from youth to the highest age. In his advanced age he never allowed himself better food, nor change of raiment, nor did he even wash his feet. Yet he continued healthy in all his parts. His eyesight was clear to the end, and his teeth sound, though by long use worn to mere stumps. He retained also the perfect use of his hands and feet, and was more robust and vigorous than those who are accustomed to change of food and clothing and to washing. His fame spread from his remote dwelling on the lone mountain over the whole Roman empire. What gave him his renown, was not learning nor worldly wisdom, nor human art, but alone his piety toward God .... And let all the brethren know, that the Lord will not only take holy monks to heaven, but give them celebrity in all the earth, however deep they may bury themselves in the wilderness."

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I said only, rather primly, that I was waiting for my hair to grow; and she answered, ‘Ah’, and her smile grew a little smaller. Then she said, in a puzzled sort of way: ‘And you’re staying with Florrie and Ralph, are you?’‘They let me sleep last night in the parlour, as a favour; but today I have to move on. In fact - what time have you?’ She showed me her watch: a quarter to five, and much later than I had expected. ‘I really must go very soon.’ I took the pan off the stove - the onions had burned a little browner than I wanted - and began to look about me for a bowl.‘Oh,’ she said, waving her hand at my haste, ‘have a cup of tea with me, at least.’ She put some water on to boil, and I began jabbing at the potatoes with a fork. The dish, as I assembled it, did not look quite like the meal that Mrs Milne had used to make; and when I tasted it, it was not so savoury. I set it on the side, and frowned at it. The girl handed me a cup. Then she leaned against a cupboard, quite at her ease, and sipped at her own tea, and then yawned.‘What a day I have had!’ she said. ‘Do I stink like a rat? I’ve been all afternoon down a drain-pipe.’‘Down a drain-pipe?’‘Down a drain-pipe. I’m an assistant at a sanitary inspector’s. You may not pull such a face; it was quite a triumph, I tell you, my getting the position at all. They think women too delicate for that sort of work.’‘I think I would rather be delicate,’ I said, ‘than do it.’‘Oh, but it’s marvellous work! It’s only now and then I have to peer into sewers, as I did today. Mostly I measure, and talk to workers, and see if they are too hot or too cold, have enough air to breathe, enough lavatories. I have a government order, and do you know what that means? It means I can demand to see an office or a workshop, and if it’s not right, I can demand that it be put right. I can have buildings closed, buildings improved ...’ She waved her hands. ‘Foremen hate me. Greedy masters from Bow to Richmond absolutely loathe the sight of me. I wouldn’t swap my work for anything!’ I smiled at the enthusiasm in her voice; she might be a sanitary inspector, but she was also, I could tell, something of an actress. Now she took another mouthful of tea. ‘So,’ she said, when she had swallowed it, ‘how long have you been a friend of Florrie’s?’‘Well, friend isn’t quite the word for it, really...’‘You don’t know her terribly well?’‘Not at all.’‘That’s a shame,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘She’s not been herself, these past few months.

• From My People (2022)

  It may have been meant as a joke, but when a group of women in the civil rights movement informed Stokely Carmichael, one of the men in charge, that they wanted to present him with a list of their positions, he is alleged to have said that the only position for women in the movement was prone. Even in the Black church, which otherwise fought over the years for Black liberation, women were rarely embraced in leadership positions or supported in the pulpit. Even my father, a man I thought of as a progressive minister, had not allowed women to speak from the pulpit until I came to speak as an adult. Knowing how much my father respected me and my professional life, my stepmother whispered that I should ask him if I could speak from the pulpit, which he obliged. But it was still, even in the 1970s, a rare occurrence. Having been excluded for the most part from the white women’s suffragist movement, and on up to the modern-day liberation movements, Black women have walked alone, and often taken diverse paths among themselves. They’ve had different experiences, and I believed it was important to record this phase of their diverse history. On a more personal note, I was happy to be in a position to focus once more on Constance Baker Motley, who had been the lead attorney (and a tough interrogator) in my court case, with my classmate Hamilton Holmes, that she and her team won and which led to our desegregation of the University of Georgia in 1961. This was now five years later and although in another incarnation, she was still on the case, fighting for her people. While I hadn’t had the same kind of personal connection to Shirley Chisholm, I also saw her as a trailblazer, another committed to helping people who looked like her. And while my first cause was in the segregated South, hers helped reveal that the North was not so different from the South concerning discrimination against Black people. So I made it a priority to get her story told in the New York Times . On another occasion, I was able to make a successful argument to my editors at the Times to allow me to follow a story beyond New York’s borders, all the way to Jackson, Mississippi. It was for an occasion marking the two hundredth birthday of one of the Black women whom I had been introduced to by my Black teachers down South as someone who refused to allow her station in life to get in the way of her God-given talents. That woman was Phillis Wheatley, who was born in Senegal/Gambia, West Africa, and when she was about seven years old was transported to America as a slave. Yet she pursued her dream, which manifested itself in some of the most beautiful poetry that would eventually achieve international acclaim.

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

  Hilary, bishop of Poitiers (hence Pictaviensis, † 368), the Athanasius of the West in the Arian controversies, is, according to the testimony of Jerome,1252 the first hymn writer of the Latin church. During his exile in Phrygia and in Constantinople, he became acquainted with the Arian hymns and was incited by them to compose, after his return, orthodox hymns for the use of the Western church. He thus laid the foundation of Latin hymnology. He composed the beautiful morning hymn: "Lucis largitor splendide;" the Pentecostal hymn: "Beata nobis gaudia;" and, perhaps, the Latin reproduction of the famous Gloria in excelsis. The authorship of many of the hymns ascribed to him is doubtful, especially those in which the regular rhyme already appears, as in the Epiphany hymn: "Jesus refulsit omnium Pius redemptor gentium." We give as a specimen a part of the first three stanzas of his morning hymn, which has been often translated into German and English:1253 "Lucis largitor splendide, "O glorious Father of the light, Cuius serene lumine From whose efflugence, calm and bright, Post lapsa noctis tempora Soon as hours of night are fled, Dies refusus panditur: The brilliance of the dawn is shed: "To verus mundi Lucifer, "Thou art the dark world’s truer ray: Non is, qui parvi sideris, No radiance of that lesser day, Venturae lucis nuntius That heralds, in the morn begun, Augusto fulget lumine: The advent of our darker sun: "Sed toto sole clarior, "But, brighter than its noontide gleam, Lux ipse totus et dies, Thyself full daylight’s fullest beam, Interna nostri pectoris The inmost mansions of our breast Illuminans praecordia." Thou by Thy grace illuminest." Ambrose, the illustrious bishop of Milan, though some-what younger († 397), is still considered, on account of the number and value of his hymns, the proper father of Latin church song, and became the model for all successors. Such was his fame as a hymnographer that the words Ambrosianus and hymnus were at one time nearly synonymous. His genuine hymns are distinguished for strong faith, elevated but rude simplicity, noble dignity, deep unction, and a genuine churchly and liturgical spirit. The rhythm is still irregular, and of rhyme only imperfect beginnings appear; and in this respect they certainly fall far below the softer and richer melodies of the middle age, which are more engaging to ear and heart. They are an altar of unpolished and unhewn stone. They set forth the great objects of faith with apparent coldness that stands aloof from them in distant adoration; but the passion is there, though latent, and the fire of an austere enthusiasm burns beneath the surface. Many of them have, in addition to their poetical value, a historical and theological value as testimonies of orthodoxy against Arianism.1254

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

  3. But, on the other hand, Augustine is, of all the fathers, nearest to evangelical Protestantism, and may be called, in respect of his doctrine of sin and grace, the first forerunner of the Reformation. The Lutheran and Reformed churches have ever conceded to him, without scruple, the cognomen of Saint, and claimed him as one of the most enlightened witnesses of the truth and most striking examples of the marvellous power of divine grace in the transformation of a sinner. It is worthy of mark, that his Pauline doctrines, which are most nearly akin to Protestantism, are the later and more mature parts of his system, and that just these found great acceptance with the laity. The Pelagian controversy, in which he developed his anthropology, marks the culmination of his theological and ecclesiastical career, and his latest writings were directed against the Pelagian Julian and the Semi-Pelagians in Gaul, who were brought to his notice by the two friendly laymen, Prosper and Hilary. These anti-Pelagian works have wrought mightily, it is most true, upon the Catholic church, and have held in check the Pelagianizing tendencies of the hierarchical and monastic system, but they have never passed into its blood and marrow. They waited for a favorable future, and nourished in silence an opposition to the prevailing system. Even in the middle age the better sects, which attempted to simplify, purify, and spiritualize the reigning Christianity by return to the Holy Scriptures, and the reformers before the Reformation such as Wiclif, Russ, Wessel, resorted most, after the apostle Paul, to the bishop of Hippo as the representative of the doctrine of free grace. The Reformers were led by his writings into a deeper understanding of Paul, and so prepared for their great vocation. No church teacher did so much to mould Luther and Calvin; none furnished them so powerful weapons against the dominant Pelagianism and formalism; none is so often quoted by them with esteem and love.2209 All the Reformers in the outset, Melancthon and Zwingle among them, adopted his denial of free will and his doctrine of predestination, and sometimes even went beyond him into the abyss of supralapsarianism, to cut out the last roots of human merit and boasting. In this point Augustine holds the same relation to the Catholic church, as Luther to the Lutheran; that is, he is a heretic of unimpeachable authority, who is more admired than censured even in his extravagances; yet his doctrine of predestination was indirectly condemned by the pope in Jansenism, as Luther’s view was rejected as Calvinism by the Form of Concord.2210 For Jansenism was nothing but a revival of Augustinianism in the bosom of the Roman Catholic church.2211

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

  The most important passages of the fathers on the veneration of saints are conveniently collected in: The Faith of Catholics on certain points of controversy, confirmed by Scripture and attested by the Fathers. By Berington and Kirk, revised by Waterworth." 3d ed. 1846, vol. iii. pp. 322–416. II. The later Literature: (1) On the Roman Catholic side: The Acta Sanctorum of the Bollandists, thus far 58 vols. fol. (1643–1858, coming down to the 22d of October). Theod. Ruinart: Acta primorum martyrum sincera et selecta. Par. 1689 (confined to the first four centuries). Laderchio: S. patriarcharum et prophetarum, confessorum, cultus perpetuus, etc. Rom. 1730. (2) On the Protestant side: J. Dallaeus: Adversus Latinorum de cultus religiosi objecto traditionem. Genev. 1664. Isaac Taylor: Ancient Christianity. 4th ed. Lond. 1844, vel. ii. p. 173 ff. ("Christianized demonolatry in the fourth century.") The system of saint-worship, including both Hagiology and Hagiolatry, developed itself at the same time with the worship of Mary; for the latter is only the culmination of the former. The New Testament is equally ignorant of both. The expression a{gioi, sancti, saints, is used by the apostles not of a particular class, a spiritual aristocracy of the church, but of all baptized and converted Christians without distinction; because they are separated from the world, consecrated to the service of God, washed from the guilt of sin by the blood of Christ, and, notwithstanding all their remaining imperfections and sins, called to perfect holiness. The apostles address their epistles to "the saints" i.e., the Christian believers, "at Rome, Corinth, Ephesus," &c.813 After the entrance of the heathen masses into the church the title came to be restricted to bishops and councils and to departed heroes of the Christian faith, especially the martyrs of the first three centuries. When, on the cessation of persecution, the martyr’s crown, at least within the limits of the Roman empire, was no longer attainable, extraordinary ascetic piety, great service to the church, and subsequently also the power of miracles, were required as indispensable conditions of reception into the Catholic calendar of saints. The anchorets especially, who, though not persecuted from without, voluntarily crucified their flesh and overcame evil spirits, seemed to stand equal to the martyrs in holiness and in claims to veneration. A tribunal of canonization did not yet exist. The popular voice commonly decided the matter, and passed for the voice of God. Some saints were venerated only in the regions where they lived and died; others enjoyed a national homage; others, a universal. The veneration of the saints increased with the decrease of martyrdom, and with the remoteness of the objects of reverence. "Distance lends enchantment to the view;" but "familiarity" is apt "to breed contempt." The sins and faults of the heroes of faith were lost in the bright haze of the past, while their virtues shone the more, and furnished to a pious and superstitious fancy the richest material for legendary poesy.

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

  At best he was thought of as a dabbler in the dark arts and a necromancer. He had no place of authority among his contemporaries, and the rarest notice of him is found for several centuries. D’Ailly, without quoting his name, copied a large paragraph from him about the propinquity of Spain and India which Columbus used in his letter to Ferdinand, 1498. It was not till the Renaissance that his name began to be used. Since the publication of his writings by Samuel Jebb, 1733, he has risen more and more into repute as one who set aside the fantastical subtleties of scholasticism for a rational treatment of the things we see and know, and as the scientific precursor of the modern laboratory and modern invention. Prophetic foresight of certain modern inventions is ascribed to him, but unjustly. He, however, expounded the theory of the rays of light, proved the universe to be spherical, and pronounced the smallest stars larger than the earth.1594 With Anaxagoras, he ascribed the Nile to the melting of the snows in Ethiopia.1595 He was not the inventor of gunpowder of which the Arabs knew. Bacon’s works, so far as they are published, combine the study of theology, philosophy, and what may be called the physical sciences. His Opus majus in seven books, the Opus minus, and Opus tertium are measurably complete. Of his Scriptum principale or Compendium studii philosophiae, often referred to in the writings just mentioned, only fragments were written, and of these only portions are left. The work was intended to be in four volumes and to include a treatment of grammar and logic, mathematics, physics, and last metaphysics and morals. The Communio naturalium and other treatises are still in manuscript. The Opus majus in its list of subjects is the most encyclopaedic work of the Middle Ages. It takes up as separate departments the connection of philosophy and theology, astronomy including geography, astrology, barology, alchemy, agriculture, optics or perspective, and moral philosophy, medicine and experimental science, scientia experimentalis. By agriculture, he meant the study of the vegetable and animal worlds, and such questions as the adaptation of soil to different classes of plants. In the treatment of optics he presents the construction of the eye and the laws of vision. Mathematics are the foundation of all science and of great value for the Church. Alchemy deals with liquids, gases, and solids, and their generation. A child of his age, Bacon held that metals were compound bodies whose elements can be separated.1596 In the department of astrology, in accordance with the opinions prevailing in his day, he held that the stars and planets have an influence upon all terrestrial conditions and objects, including man. Climate, temperament, motion, all are more or less dependent upon their potency. As the moon affects the tides, so the stars implant dispositions good and evil. This potency influences but does not coerce man’s free will.

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

  The Dark Ages.—*W. Wattenbach: D. Schriftwesen in Mittelalter, 3d ed., Leip., 1896.—Art. Bibliothek in Wetzer-Welte, II. 783 sqq. Transl. and Reprints of Univ. of Pa. II. 3. Books and schools go together and both are essential to progress of thought in the Church. The mediaeval catalogue of the convent of Muri asserts strongly the close union of the intellectual and religious life. It becomes us, so it ran, always to copy, adorn, improve, and annotate books, because the life of the spiritual man is nothing without books.1202 Happy was the convent that possessed a few volumes.1203 The convent and the cathedral were almost the sole receptacles for books. Here they were most safe from the vandalism of invaders and the ravages of fire, so frequent in the Middle Ages; and here they were accessible to the constituency which could read. It was a current saying, first traced to Gottfried, canon of St. Barbe-en-Auge, that a convent without a library is like a fortress without arms.1204 During the early Middle Ages, there were small collections of books at York, Fulda, Monte Cassino, and other monasteries. They were greatly prized, and ecclesiastics made journeys to get them, as did Biscop, abbot of Wearmouth, who made five trips to Italy for that purpose. During the two centuries and more after Gregory VII., the use and the number of books increased; but it remained for the zeal of Petrarch in the fourteenth century to open a new era in the history of libraries. The period of the Renaissance which followed witnessed an unexampled avidity for old manuscripts which the transition of scholars from Constantinople made it possible to satisfy. To the convents of Western Europe, letters and religion owe a lasting debt, not only for the preservation of books, but for their multiplication. The monks of St. Benedict have the first place as the founders of libraries and guardians of patristic and classical literature. Their Rules required them to do a certain amount of reading each day, and at the beginning of Lent each received a book from the cloistral collection and was expected to read it "straight through." This direction shines as a light down through the history of the monastic institutions, though many a convent probably possessed no books and some of them had little appreciation of their value. A collection of several hundred books was relatively as large a library as a collection of hundreds of thousands of volumes would be now. Fleury, in the twelfth century, had 238 volumes, St. Riquier 258.1205 The destruction of the English monastery of Croyland in the eleventh century involved the loss of "300 original and more than 400 smaller volumes." The conventual buildings were destroyed in the night by fire. The interesting letter of the abbot Ingulph, relating the calamity, speaks of beautiful manuscripts, illuminated with pictures and adorned with crosses of gold.

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

  He urged the necessity of study, and counselled high thought rather than graceful and well-turned sentences, comparing the former to food and the latter to the dishes on which it is served. To these homiletical rules and hints must be added the notices scattered through the sermons of preachers like Honorius of Autun and Caesar of Heisterbach. Caesar said,2072 a sermon should be like a net, made up of texts of Scripture; and like an arrow, sharp to pierce the hearts of the hearers; straight, that is, without any false doctrine; and feathered, that is, easy to be understood. The bow is the Word of God. Among the prominent preachers from 1050 to 1200, whose sermons have been preserved, were Peter Damiani, d. 1072, Ivo of Chartres, d. 1116, Hildebert of Tours, d. 1133, Abaelard d. 1142, St. Bernard, d. 1153, and Maurice, archbishop of Paris, d. 1196. Of the eloquence of Arnold of Brescia, Norbert, the founder of the Premonstrant order, and Fulke of Neuilly, the fiery preacher of the Fourth Crusade, no specimens are preserved. Another class of preachers were the itinerant preachers, some of whom were commissioned by popes, as were Robert of Abrissel and Bernard of Thiron who went about clad in coarse garments and with flowing beards, preaching to large concourses of people. They preached repentance and sharply rebuked the clergy for their worldliness, themselves wept and brought their hearers to tears. Bernard enjoys the reputation of being, up to his time, the most brilliant luminary of the pulpit after the days of Gregory the Great. Luther held his sermons in high regard and called him "the golden preacher"—der gueldene Prediger. Among the preachers of France he is placed at the side of Bourdaloue and Bossuet. He has left more than two hundred and fifty discourses on special texts and themes in addition to the eighty-six homilies on the Song of Solomon.2073 The subjects of the former range from the five pebbles which David picked up from the brook to the most solemn mysteries of Christ’s life and work. The sermons were not written out, but delivered from notes or improvised after meditation in the convent garden. For moral earnestness, flights of imagination, pious soliloquy, and passionate devotion to religious themes, they have a place in the first rank of pulpit productions. "The constant shadow of things eternal is over them all," said Dr. Storrs, himself one of the loftiest figures in the American pulpit of the last century.

• From The Art of Memoir

  11 | The Visionary Maxine Hong Kingston We know the truth not only by reason but also by heart. Blaise Pascal, Pensées Maxine Hong Kingston’s oddly ethereal vision helped forge the genre of memoir as we know it, and her Woman Warrior, published in 1975, stands today on the shelves of most college bookstores and libraries. After three decades of teaching her, I still marvel at how she enthralls my students. The two prongs of her massive talent mirror the two sides of the story’s conflict—her truth-hungry, feminist, Americanized self does battle with her mother’s repressive notions of Chinese ladylikeness and humility. From the book’s first breath, the writer betrays a confidence from her mother, a secret born of ancient cultural values that define what being a woman should embody—mostly eating a big shit sandwich with a servile smile on your face. “Better to raise geese than girls” is one piece of wisdom, and infanticide for girl babies is accepted practice. So the writer sets her own blabby, American-educated mouth against her mother’s traditional ideas of feminine modesty, clan loyalty, and demure comportment—her struggle throughout the book. The book opens with both the mother’s admonishing voice and —in the very act of reporting that voice—the daughter’s broken covenant. In this exquisite ventriloquism, the two opponents start off speaking through the same mouth: “You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped

• From The Art of Memoir

  investigative research to rout out his con-man father’s lies. Research and interviewing were gifts Geoffrey had mastered in his fascinating and immaculately documented biography of Lost Generation suicide Harry Crosby, Black Sun. Geoffrey’s memoir uses photos and documents to announce it as an investigated work. But nonfiction’s notions of the truth kept evolving. By the time his brother Tobias brought out This Boy’s Life in 1989, he used no photos, no interviews. His work is an act of memory. Two men, two talents, two approaches. Developing a voice is actually learning how to lodge your own memories inside someone else’s head. In some ways the narrator comes to exist as a stand-in for the reader. The only way I know to develop a voice is to write your way into one. As a memoirist moves words around on a page, telling stories, she starts to uncover that thing she does best, which should stay in view during most of the book. And you need not be fancy in diction and syntax to win an audience—only true. Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes uses the proletariat’s blunt, monosyllabic diction to work magic. My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born. Instead, they returned to Ireland when I was four, my brother, Malachy, three, the twins, Oliver and Eugene, barely one, and my sister Margaret, dead and gone. When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years. Above all—we were wet. Other than a peppering of Latinate words like loquacious, McCourt uses words we learned by fifth grade. It’s what he writes

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  If I had ever seen women with hair as short as hers, it was because they had spent time in hospital or prison; or because they were mad. They could never have looked like Kitty Butler. Her hair fitted her head like a little cap that had been sewn, just for her, by some nimble-fingered milliner. I would say it was brown; brown, however, is too dull a word for it. It was, rather, the kind of brown you might hear sung about - a nut-brown, or a russet. It was almost, perhaps, the colour of chocolate - but then chocolate has no lustre, and this hair shone in the blaze of the limes like taffeta. It curled at her temple, slightly, and over her ears; and when she turned her head a little to put her hat back on, I saw a strip of pale flesh at the nape of her neck where the collar ended and the hairline began that - for all the fire of the hot, hot hall - made me shiver. She looked, I suppose, like a very pretty boy, for her face was a perfect oval, and her eyes were large and dark at the lashes, and her lips were rosy and full. Her figure, too, was boy-like and slender - yet rounded, vaguely but unmistakably, at the bosom, the stomach, and the hips, in a way no real boy’s ever was; and her shoes, I noticed after a moment, had two-inch heels to them. But she strode like a boy, and stood like one, with her feet far apart and her hands thrust carelessly into her trouser pockets, and her head at an arrogant angle, at the very front of the stage; and when she sang, her voice was a boy’s voice - sweet and terribly true. Her effect upon that over-heated hall was wonderful. Like me, my neighbours all sat up, and gazed at her with shining eyes. Her songs were all well-chosen ones - things like ‘Drink Up, Boys!’, and ‘Sweethearts and Wives’, which the likes of G. H. Macdermott had already made famous, and with which we could all, in consequence, join in - though it was peculiarly thrilling to have them sung to us, not by a gent, but by a girl, in neck-tie and trousers. In between each song she addressed herself, in a swaggering, confidential tone, to the audience, and exchanged little bits of nonsense with Tricky Reeves at his chairman’s table. Her speaking voice was like her singing one - strong and healthy, and wonderfully warm upon the ear. Her accent was sometimes music-hall cockney, sometimes theatrical-genteel, sometimes pure broad Kent. Her set lasted no longer than the customary fifteen minutes or so, but she was cheered and shouted back on to the stage at the end of that time twice over. Her final song was a gentle one - a ballad about roses and a lost sweetheart.

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

  The Regula Benedicti has been frequently edited and annotated, best by Holstenius: Codex reg. Monast. tom. i. p. 111–135; by Dom Marténe: Commentarius in regulam S. Benedicti literalis, moralis, historicus, Par. 1690, in 4to.; by Dom Calmet, Par. 1734, 2 vols.; and by Dom Charles Brandes (Benedictine of Einsiedeln), in 3 vols., Einsiedeln and New York, 1857. Gieseler gives the most important articles in his Ch. H. Bd. i. AbtheiI. 2, § 119. Comp. also Montalembert, l.c. ii. 39 sqq. The rule of St. Benedict, on which his fame rests, forms an epoch in the history of monasticism. In a short time it superseded all contemporary and older rules of the kind, and became the immortal code of the most illustrious branch of the monastic army, and the basis of the whole Roman Catholic cloister life.378 It consists of a preface or prologue, and a series of moral, social, liturgical, and penal ordinances, in seventy-three chapters. It shows a true knowledge of human nature, the practical wisdom of Rome, and adaptation to Western customs; it combines simplicity with completeness, strictness with gentleness, humility with courage, and gives the whole cloister life a fixed unity and compact organization, which, like the episcopate, possessed an unlimited versatility and power of expansion. It made every cloister an ecclesiola in ecclesia, reflecting the relation of the bishop to his charge, the monarchical principle of authority on the democratic basis of the equality of the brethren, though claiming a higher degree of perfection than could be realized in the great secular church. For the rude and undisciplined world of the middle age, the Benedictine rule furnished a wholesome course of training and a constant stimulus to the obedience, self-control, order, and industry which were indispensable to the regeneration and healthy growth of social life.379

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

  "Albert was turned from all ass to a philosopher and from a philosopher to an ass." In 1880, the six hundredth anniversary of his death, a statue was erected to his memory at his birthplace. Albertus Magnus was a philosopher, naturalist, and theologian; a student of God, nature, and man. He knew no Greek, but was widely read in the Latin classics as well as in the Fathers. He used the complete works of Aristotle, and was familiar with the Arabic philosophers whom at points he confuted.1477 He also used the works of the Hebrews, Isaac Israeli, Maimonides, and Gabirol.1478 His large indebtedness to Aristotle won for him the title, Aristotle’s ape,—simia Aristotelis — but unjustly, for he often disagreed with his teacher.1479 He traversed the whole area of the physical sciences. No one for centuries had been such a student of nature. He wrote on the vegetable kingdom, geography, mineralogy, zoology, astronomy, and the digestive organs. The writings on these themes are full of curious items of knowledge and explanations of natural phenomena. His treatise on meteors, De meteororibus, for example, which in Borgnet’s edition fills more than three hundred pages (IV. 477–808), takes up at length such subjects as the comets, the milky way, the cause of light in the lower strata of air, the origin of the rivers, the winds, lightning, thunder and cyclones, the rainbow, etc. In the course of his treatment of rivers, Albert speaks of great cavities in the earth and spongy regions under its flat surface. To the question, why the sun was made, if the prior light was sufficient to render it possible to speak of "morning and evening" on the first days of creation, he replied, "that as the earlier light amply illuminated the upper parts of the universe so the sun was fitted to illuminate the lower parts, or rather it was in order that the day might be made still more bright by the sun; and if it be asked what became of the prior light, the answer is that the body of the sun, corpus solis, was formed out of it, or at any rate that the prior light was in the same part of the heavens where the sun is located, not as though it were the sun but in the sense that it was so united with the sun as now no more to be specially distinguished from it."1480 Albert saw into a new world. His knowledge is often at fault, but sometimes his statements are prophetic of modern discovery. For example, he said that the poles of the earth were too cold to be inhabited. He knew about the sleep of plants and many of the laws of the vegetable world. He was indefatigable in

• From My People (2022)

  And while it was a South that had been challenged and changed by mostly young civil rights activists, I thought it was important to tell a story that focused on the ongoing, day-to-day experiences of ordinary Black people. It was equally important to me to show readers where we got our own sense of commitment to family and community. So I embarked on a journey that shed some light on those realities.” Ms. Hunter-Gault provided a template for me and countless other Black journalists across the world. Like mine, her interest in journalism was piqued as a precocious preteen, and like me, she came to understand that for Black journalists in the United States, there could be no pretense of neutrality in a nation that actively legislated against and suppressed the rights of our people. What does journalistic neutrality and objectivity look like when your career began with a fight for racial justice? When you spent your life being the first of your race to accomplish the things that you did because Black people had been either officially or unofficially barred from doing those things before? Where your very education and career were born out of activism and the generational Black rights struggles? Where you’ve always known that democracy in the United States was more an idea than a reality, one that has to constantly be fought for, and that America is not the free and just country it purported to be? Through Ms. Hunter-Gault’s reporting and personal biography we see that what has been treated as journalistic objectivity in nearly all-white newsrooms that produce a nearly all-white report has and remains to be the antithesis of objectivity; that newsrooms became richer, more accurate, and more democratic as reporters such as Ms. Hunter-Gault took their places in them. In these chapters we see Ms. Hunter-Gault as a young woman becoming part of the movement, then cataloguing it, then we see her through the years watching new movements arise, watching them falter, and then ultimately eulogizing her contemporaries. We get to witness the journalist as her writing and thinking evolves, as her reporting spans continents and yet tells for Black people across the diaspora an often-familiar story of resistance and resilience, and for white Americans reveals our often-overlooked humanity. We witness writing that is powerful and urgent and unflinching and, perhaps most of all, determined—determined, as my spiritual godmother Ida B. Wells said, to shine the light of truth upon our society. And we see through her reporting that the battles she waged for equality—starting as a college student determined to gain access to the state university that her own parents subsidized with their tax dollars—are never won for good, that the struggle is ongoing, that the legal barriers have fallen but the architecture of racial inequality remains. And as Ms. Hunter-Gault shows us, as long as the architecture of racial inequality remains, so does the journalists’ mandate to investigate and report on it.

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

  Luther never saw Calvin, and probably knew little or nothing of the Reformation in Geneva. His own work was then nearly finished, and he was longing for rest. It is very fortunate, however, that while his mind was incurably poisoned against Zwingli and Zürich, he never came into hostile conflict with Calvin and Geneva, but sent him before his departure a fraternal greeting from a respectful distance. His conduct foreshadows the attitude of the Lutheran Church and theology towards Calvin, who had the highest regard for Luther, and enjoyed in turn the esteem of Lutheran divines in proportion as he was known. Melanchthon was twelve years older than Calvin, as Luther was thirteen years older than Melanchthon. Calvin, therefore, might have sustained to Melanchthon the relation of a pupil to a teacher. He sought his friendship, and he always treated him with reverential affection.548 In the dedication of his commentary on Daniel, he describes Melanchthon as "a man who, on account of his incomparable skill in the most excellent branches of knowledge, his piety, and other virtues, is worthy of the admiration of all ages." But while Melanchthon was under the overawing influence of the personality of Luther, the Reformer of Geneva was quite independent of Melanchthon, and so far could meet him on equal terms. Melanchthon, in sincere humility and utter freedom from jealousy, even acknowledged the superiority of his younger friend as a theologian and disciplinarian, and called him emphatically "the theologian." They had many points of contact. Both were men of uncommon precocity; both excelled, above their contemporaries, in humanistic culture and polished style; both devoted all their learning to the renovation of the Church; they were equally conscientious and unselfish; they agreed in the root of their piety, and in all essential doctrines; they deplored the divisions in the Protestant ranks, and heartily desired unity and harmony consistent with truth. But they were differently constituted. Melanchthon was modest, gentle, sensitive, feminine, irenic, elastic, temporizing, always open to new light; Calvin, though by nature as modest, bashful, and irritable, was in principle and conviction firm, unyielding, fearless of consequences, and opposed to all compromises. They differed also on minor points of doctrine and discipline. Melanchthon, from a conscientious love of truth and peace, and from regard for the demands of practical common sense, had independently changed his views on two important doctrines. He abandoned the Lutheran dogma of a corporal and ubiquitous presence in the eucharist, and approached the theory of Calvin; and he substituted for his earlier fatalistic view of a divine foreordination of evil as well as good the synergistic scheme which ascribes conversion to the co-operation of three causes: the Spirit of God, the Word of God, and the will of man. He conceded to man the freedom of either accepting or rejecting the Gospel salvation, yet without giving any merit to him for accepting the free gift; and on this point he dissented from Calvin’s more rigorous and logical system.549

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  With the help of digital media, servicemen in Afghanistan and Iraq became Driscoll’s proselytizers, organizing Sunday services on bases and projecting his recorded sermons: “The flood-gates opened with the guys as we worked through porn, masturbating, beer, Calvinism, the exclusivity of Christ, being a husband and daddy, and war.”18 Driscoll sought to distance himself from earlier culture warriors like Falwell and Dobson, and he liked to bill himself as apolitical. But the trendy packaging masked a culture-warrior mentality every bit as belligerent as that of his predecessors, if not more so. For instance, while he may have welcomed LGBT “seekers” into his church, he denounced gay men as “damn freaks.” Some evangelical leaders expressed reservations about Driscoll’s crudeness, but many nonetheless professed their admiration. As Al Mohler explained, “wherever the gospel is to be found, we need to be happy about that.” Though Mohler thought there was “a difference between being crude and being candid,” he admired the “boldness” and “tenacity” with which Driscoll preached “the gospel of Jesus Christ.”19 The aggressive masculinity Driscoll preached and performed found widespread appeal among young evangelical men in the 2000s. Men encountered these teachings in church camps and small groups, through parachurch ministries like InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, on Christian college campuses, and by listening to Christian radio or perusing the Christian blogosphere. Books like Eldredge’s Wild at Heart and Josh Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye were staples for this generation, as were recorded sermons by men like Driscoll and John Piper. Young men listened to their words for hours on end, discussing their teachings in exclusively male contexts. “I formed a lot of my opinions about theology and masculinity in isolation, the ideas were implanted within male only fellowship meetings, and I listened to hundreds of hours of sermons by myself, rarely discussing them with anyone except other men,” recalls one former Driscoll fan. Over the course of one and a half years, he started at the beginning and worked his way through all of Driscoll’s sermons: The hour long, stand up comedy style sermons were engrossing. I would load dozens onto my ipod and listen to them while walking around campus. I spent summertime mowing lawns and would listen to 5–6 sermons a day at times. I remember being fascinated by the way that he would talk about things in the sermons no one was talking about, like how sex plays an important role in marriage, and how “pussified” the church was becoming. . . . I didn’t recognize the misogyny in his theology at the time, as a stereotypical beta male, it was like an invitation to become important. . . . The call to leadership was compelling: Up until that point I don’t remember people expecting me to do much of anything.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Far from being maniacally programmed for holy war by their religion, the Muslims had little appetite for jihad and were preoccupied by new forms of spirituality. In particular, some of the Sufi mystics would develop an outstanding appreciation of other faith traditions. The learned and highly influential Muid ad-Din ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240) would claim that a man of God was at home equally in a synagogue, mosque, temple, or church, since all provided a valid apprehension of God: My heart is capable of every form. A cloister for the monk, a fane for idols, A pasture for gazelles, the votary’s Kabah, The tables of the Torah, the Quran. Love is the faith I hold. Wherever turn His camels, still the one true faith is mine. 75 During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the period of the Crusades, Sufism ceased to be a fringe movement and in many parts of the Muslim world became the dominant Islamic mood. Few were capable of achieving the higher mystical states, but Sufi disciplines of concentration, which included music and dancing, helped people to abandon simplistic and narrow notions of God and chauvinist attitudes toward other traditions. A few ulema and ascetics found the presence of the Franks intolerable. In 1111 Ibn al-Khashab, qadi of Aleppo, led a delegation of Sufis, imams, and merchants to Baghdad, breaking into the caliph’s mosque and smashing his pulpit in an unsuccessful attempt to rouse him from his inertia. 76 In 1119 the troops of Mardin and Damascus were so inspired by the qadi’s preaching that they “wept with emotion and admiration” and achieved their first Muslim victory over the Franks by defeating Count Roger of Antioch. 77 But no sustained action was taken against the Crusaders until 1144, when, almost by accident, Zangi, emir of Mosul, conquered the Christian principality of Edessa during his campaign in Syria. To his surprise, Zangi, who had little interest in the Franks, became an overnight hero. The caliph hailed him as “the pillar of religion” and “the cornerstone of Islam,” though it was hard to see Zangi as a devout Muslim. 78 The Turkish chroniclers condemned his “roughness, aggression, and insolence that brought death to enemies and civilians,” and in 1146 he was murdered by a slave while in a drunken stupor. 79 It was the spectacle of the huge armies arriving from Europe to recover Edessa in the Second Crusade (1148) that finally galvanized some of the emirs. Even though this Crusade was an embarrassing fiasco for the Christians, the local people were beginning to see the Franks as a real danger. The Muslim riposte was led by Nur ad-Din, Zangi’s son (r. 1146–74), who took the advice of the “fighting scholars” and first dedicated himself to the Greater Jihad. He returned to the spirit of the Prophet’s ummah, living a frugal life, often passing the whole night in prayer, and setting up “houses of justice” where anybody, whatever his faith or status, could find redress.

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

  The first post-apostolic works on church history, as indeed all branches of theological literature, take their rise in the Greek Church. Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, in Palestine, and contemporary with Constantine the Great, composed a church history in ten books (ejkklhsiastikh; iJstoriva, from the incarnation of the Logos to the year 324), by which he has won the title of the Father of church history, or the Christian Herodotus. Though by no means very critical and discerning, and far inferior in literary talent and execution to the works of the great classical historians, this ante-Nicene church history is invaluable for its learning, moderation, and love of truth; for its use of so since totally or partially lost; and for its interesting position of personal observation between the last persecutions of the church and her establishment in the Byzantine empire. Eusebius was followed in similar spirit and on the same plan by Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret in the fifth century, and Theodorus and Evagrius in the sixth, each taking up the thread of the narrative where his predecessor had dropped it, and covering in part the same ground, from Constantine the Great till toward the middle of the fifth century.6 Of the later Greek historians, from the seventh century, to the fifteenth, the "Scriptores Byzantini," as they are called, Nicephorus Callisti (son of Callistus, about A.D. 1333) deserves special regard. His Ecclesiastical History was written with the use of the large library of the church of St. Sophia in Constantinople, and dedicated to the emperor Andronicus Palaeologus (d. 1327). It extends in eighteen books (each of which begins with a letter of his name) from the birth of Christ to the death of Phocas, A.D. 610, and gives in the preface a summary of five books more, which would have brought it down to 911. He was an industrious and eloquent, but uncritical and superstitious writer.7 III. Latin Church historians of the middle ages. The Latin Church, before the Reformation, was, in church history, as in all other theological studies, at first wholly dependent on the Greek, and long content with mere translations and extracts from Eusebius and his continuators. The most popular of these was the Historia Tripartita, composed by Cassiodorus, prime minister of Theodoric, and afterwards abbot of a convent in Calabria (d. about A.D. 562). It is a compilation from the histories of Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret, abridging and harmonizing them, and supplied— together with the translation of Eusebius by Rufinus—the West for several centuries with its knowledge of the fortunes of the ancient church. The middle age produced no general church history of consequence, but a host of chronicles, and histories of particular nations, monastic orders, eminent popes, bishops, missionaries, saints, etc. Though rarely worth much as compositions, these are yet of great value as material, after a careful sifting of truth from legendary fiction. The principal mediaeval historians are Gregory of Tours (d. 595), who wrote a church history of the Franks; the Venerable Bede, (d.