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 How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  What a difference. Even though he still got a no (a triumph—his goal, remember, was to get rejected), he doesn’t feel the panic he felt with the security guard. The way you ask makes a big difference, Jia discovered. Even though he was still anxious, without his safety behaviors Jia appeared as if he were not anxious. He stood up straight, looked directly at the guy instead of at the floor or over his head, smiled, and used his normal volume and speed. He slowed down and took his time. And lo and behold, this looked the same as confidence. After just two experiences, one with safety behaviors and one without, Jia had discovered a major secret: you set the tone. Act as if you were not anxious, drop your safety behaviors, and not only will you feel better; you’ll also get a better response. And guess what? No one can tell you’re acting. Guess what else? Eventually, you won’t be. When I talked to Jia about this discovery, he said, “I realized that what I was asking was out of the realm of the social norm, but the way I was asking was not. I didn’t blow a horn or do a dance. I came in being very respectful. And people usually respond in kind.” * * * My first inkling of how this worked occurred in college. My junior year, I was a “Resident Counselor,” an upperclassman who lived in a freshman dorm, not necessarily to enforce rules but to act as a resource for first-years as they transitioned to college life. As a public health measure, all Resident Counselors had help-yourself envelopes of safer-sex supplies—condoms, lube, dental dams—taped to the outside of our doors. I was usually conscientious about refilling them, but in the late spring I got caught up in the rush of finals, leaving wilting, empty envelopes hanging sadly on my door. At the very end of the year, on move-out day, I was packing books in boxes in my room. My door was open—I was hoping friends would pop in to distract me. But then a student I didn’t recognize—glasses, spiky hair—knocked and stuck his head in my doorway. “Hey, do you have any condoms?” he asked. I was impressed with his boldness. “No, sorry, I’m out—but there’s another counselor’s door down the hall and to the right. Try there.” “Thanks,” he said, and trotted off. Almost twenty years later, I still remember this guy’s chutzpah with admiration. He needed a condom, urgently, which implied what he planned to do as soon as he found one. But he wasn’t afraid to reveal all this to a stranger and ask for help—two things that are usually one-way tickets to social anxiety. He could have easily thought, She’s going to think I’m creepy/weird/perverted, and snuck away, but instead he knocked, showed his face, and asked like it was no big deal.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  At the time of his “retirement,” Dan appeared to go out on top. He had not let the NCAA defeat define him; he had become an Olympic champion, a world champion, the most acclaimed athlete of his time. Kate Gable probably never dreamed that Dan would go on wrestling even as a coach, that he would continue working out and pushing himself to absurd limits and then beyond—that he would retire as an officially sanctioned wrestler, but never as a competitive one. She probably didn’t guess at the time that he would ultimately suit up and take the mat against entire legions of elite wrestlers to come, coaching them in the process of pounding himself physically, hurling himself at them like waves against the breakers. All that Kate knew, at the time, was that she was tired of going out in the hallway. And that really is why the great Gable walked away—which, not to put too fine a point on it, he is not actually able to do at this moment. No, at this moment the crutches will have to suffice, and after his left hip gets to feeling better, they’ll take him in for his nineteenth surgery, and at some point one assumes that Gable will hit the road again, making what amounts to a modern-day whistle-stop tour on behalf of wrestling, trying to prop up the sport on the college campuses where it lies dying under layers of bureaucracy and paperwork, trying to keep it alive in the minds and budgets of cost-conscious athletic directors and lawsuit-timid university presidents. He will travel the continent and beyond, from country to country. He won’t stop. He may never stop. Inside the Iowa City High School gym, the dual match is over. City High has easily beaten Doug Streicher’s Linn-Mar team, which looks like it is one solid year away from being competitive with the elites, with promising kids who still need to figure out how it’s done at the highest levels. Jay has won in his usual overwhelm ing manner, as has Kyle Anson for City High, which means the people who came to watch these two stars have gotten their money’s worth. Dan Gable sees Jay and Kyle for what they are: two terrific young wrestlers who no longer have Iowa in their futures. There was a time when he would have had more to say about that. Instead, this time, he gets up to go. He proceeds cautiously but with no hesitation. “I think I still have a lot of getting around left,” Gable says simply, and he smiles and pulls on his fur-lined cap, and he gets ready to hobble out into the cold. Moving forward again. CHAPTER 9Same TeamIf Jay has no doubts about his decision to forgo college in Iowa, he also harbors few illusions about the fallout. “They probably think we’re traitors,” he says calmly, sitting on the bed in his room, fiddling with his guitar.

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

  Readers of the Pentateuch are often confused by the patriarchs’ ethics. None of them are particularly admirable characters: Abraham sold his wife to Pharaoh to save his own skin; Joseph was arrogant and self-centered; and Jacob was shockingly indifferent to the rape of his daughter Dinah. But these are not morality tales. If we read them as political philosophy, things become clearer. Doomed to marginality, Israel would always be vulnerable to more powerful states. Ordered to leave civilization yet unable to survive without it, the patriarchs were in an impossible position. Yet despite his flaws, Abraham still compares favorably with the rulers in this story, who appropriate their subjects’ wives, steal their wells, and rape their daughters with impunity.33 While kings routinely confiscated other people’s possessions, Abraham was always meticulously respectful of property rights. He would not even keep the booty he acquired in a raid he had fought simply to rescue his nephew Lot, who had been kidnapped by four marauding kings.34 His kindness and hospitality to three passing strangers stand in stark contrast to the violence they experienced in civilized Sodom.35 When Yahweh told Abraham that he planned to destroy Sodom, Abraham begged him to spare the city, because unlike rulers who had scant respect for human life, he had a horror of shedding innocent blood.36 When the biblical authors tell us about Jacob on his deathbed blessing his twelve sons and prophesying their future, they are asking what kind of leader is needed to create a viable egalitarian society in such a ruthless world. Jacob rejected Simeon and Levi, whose reckless violence meant that they should never control territory, populations, and armies.37 He predicted that Judah, who could admit and correct his mistakes, would make an ideal ruler.38 But no state could survive without Joseph’s political savvy, so when the Israelites finally escaped from Egypt, they took Joseph’s bones with them to the Promised Land. Then there were occasions when a nation might need Levi’s radicalism, because without the aggressive determination of the Levite Moses, Israel would never have left Egypt.

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  T h i s p a r a d o x i s e x p l a i n e d i n t h e n e x t c a n t o . IV. S t a t i u s ’ s p r a i s e o f V i r g i l c o n t i n u e s i n C a n t o 2 2 . A. S t a t i u s t e l l s t h e s t o r y o f h is conversion to Christianity. B. T h i s s t o r y i s D a n t e t h e p o e t ’ s invention, in that no evidence exists that the historical Statius ever became a Christian. C. S t a t i u s , i n a n a l m o s t s h o c k i n g r e v e l a t i o n , s t a t e s t h a t t h e m a i n source of his conversion was none other than Virgil himself: “It was you whose radiance revealed the way to God” (Purgatorio 22: 65–66.) 1. V i r g i l , a p a g a n , w a s c o m p l e t e l y u n a w a r e t h a t h i s o w n w o r k contained that power. 2. V i r g i l ’ s “ l a m p ” s h e d l i g h t , n o t for himself, but to make others wise (Purgatorio 22: 68). 3. V i r g i l w a s s e e n i n D a n t e ’ s t i m e a s a “ p r o p h e t ” o f t h e Incarnation. 4. The poem in question was actually about the birth of the heir to Augustus. 5. D a n t e t h e p o e t p u s h e s t h i s i d e a e v e n f a r t h e r h e r e i n t h e conversion of Statius. D. D a n t e t h e p o e t i s p r a i s i n g V i r g i l a t t h e s a m e t i m e t h a t h e i s pointing toward his limitations.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  Though Kramer is obviously a solid wrestler, Jay takes him down repeatedly and pushes him around on the mat; it is all Kramer can do to avoid being pinned. “He’s on a mission,” Jim says, a touch of admiration in his voice. God, how Jim loves to watch Jay do his thing. After the final presentations, the boys all stand out on the mat together, their parents off nearby. There is still time for a few more photographs, for the albums. Jay and Kyle will stand together for one shot, their reward for having been named the most valuable wrestlers of the tournament. Not far away, Doug Streicher has room for a few smiles himself: While Jay was pounding his way through his bracket, Streicher has seen progress elsewhere as well. At 103 pounds, Matt McDonough has had a great day, winning his way to the finals before being cut down by the top-ranked wrestler in the state. At the far end of a long season of work, Matty suddenly looks like a wrestler worthy of consideration for the Barn. But that is yet to come. Here in the middle of the mat, it is the seniors, together again, smiling one more time, already looking forward to their final charge at those state championships. There is Jay, and Mitch, and Kyle, and Joey. The weights have been spaced; the competition has been thinned. They are four returning state champions, and the chance is there to go out on a glorious note. It all sets up so perfectly. It seems strange that, in the end, one of them will leave Des Moines in tatters. CHAPTER 10The Youth MovementThey start them young. Young and stupid, preferably, or at least young and as empty-headed as possible. The point, either way, is for them to receive the information that may someday lead to their knowing what to do at championship time. They start kids wrestling as soon as they safely can be tossed onto a mat, and they set them in competitions at around age 5. You can be a kindergartner on the weekdays and a wrestling maniac on the weekends, and, in fact, that’s pretty much the preferred option. It certainly worked for Dan and Jay. Perhaps it also will work for one of the hundreds of kids scattered about the North-Linn gymnasium on a Sunday morning, surrounded by hundreds of parents, each slightly more out of control than the last. With the addition of the middle school at North-Linn a few years back, it is now possible for the students of the area to drive to the same address for six years before heading off to college, which, the statistics suggest, is exactly what they’ll do. In the early years of the new millennium, Iowa’s reported literacy rate of 99 percent was the highest in the nation, and its 85 percent high school graduation rate was far above the national average of 71 percent.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  Do you remember where you were the day Kennedy was shot? I don’t. I was born the year Kennedy was shot. So I can’t remember anything about it. But I remember Michael. In every part of my life. The first time I saw Michael, he was standing next to Phillip in the painting studio at Texas Tech. It was late at night. I walked up to the floor to ceiling windows and looked in at them from the outside. Two tall, thin, beautiful young men, standing next to each other, painting on canvas. I held my breath. Staring at the image of them … something happened in my heart. It throbbed when I looked at these two men painting. My eyes stung and my throat got tight. But I just took a swig of vodka from a flask and walked up to the glass window and lifted my shirt up and pressed my bare tits up against the glass and knocked. Phillip turned and laughed, pointed. Michael turned, and laughed, and our eyes locked. Michael. My father’s name. Is that what my father looked like, I thought, as a man in his early twenties? Tall, thin, beautiful, his hands making a dance against canvas? I didn’t learn to love men from anything I knew. I learned to love men from loving Michael. There is so much I didn’t glean from being a daughter in a family full of women. I didn’t learn to love holidays from my family. I learned it from entering Mike and Dean’s house, beautifully decorated - as beautiful as you imagine fantasy worlds as a child - warm amber rooms and candle lights and ribbons and the smell of baked things and spice - with no father to smash it apart. I didn’t learn how to cook from any mother. I learned to cook from watching Michael - his hands, the patience, the artistry, the care, the joy of putting something into your mouth so filled with love it made me weep to chew. I didn’t learn how to be feminine from any women. I learned to take off my combat boots and comb my crooked hair from looking at pictures Dean took of me over the years, pictures where he showed me that someone like me could be … pretty. Michael was at my first wedding on the beach in Corpus Christi when I said I do to Phillip on the white sand. Michael and Dean were with me at my second wedding with Devin on the top of Harvey’s Casino in Lake Tahoe, where a strange casino minister with hair black as a record album recited a Hopi prayer while my mother waited to drink and gamble. Michael was not with me when I married Andy in front of a justice of the peace in San Diego, but my big belly was, and it carried something of him, too.

• From Open (2009)

  It’s amazing, Gil says, how many fallacies there are about the human body, how little we know about our own bodies. For instance: guys do incline benches for their upper pecs. It’s not an efficient use of time, he says. I haven’t done an incline in thirty years. Is it possible that my chest would be bigger if I did inclines? No, sir. The step-ups you’re doing, the exercises where you hold a heavy weight on your back as you walk upstairs? You’re asking for a catastrophic injury. You’re lucky you haven’t already ruined your knee. How so? It’s all about angles, Andre. At one angle, you’re engaging your quad. Fine, great. At another angle, you’re engaging your knee, putting loads of pressure on that knee. Engage that knee too many times—it’ll break off the engagement. The best exercises, he says, exploit gravity. He tells me how to use gravity and resistance to break down a muscle, so it will come back stronger. He shows me how to do a proper, safe bicep curl. He walks me over to a dry-erase board and diagrams my muscles, arms, joints, tendons. He talks about a bow and arrow, shows me the pressure points along a bow as it’s pulled taut, then uses this model to explain my back, why it hurts after matches and workouts. I tell him about my spine, my spondylolisthesis, the vertebra that’s out of sync. He jots a note, says he’ll look up the condition in the medical books and learn all about it for me. Bottom line, he says, if you keep doing what you’re doing, you’re going to have a short career. Big-time back problems, knee problems. Plus, keep doing curls the way I saw you doing them, you’re going to have elbow problems. While spelling it all out, Gil sometimes literally spells it out. He likes to emphasize a point by spelling the key word. He likes to break words down for me, crack them open, reveal the knowledge inside, like the meat inside a nut. Calorie, for instance. He says it comes from the Latin calor, which is a measure of heat. People think calories are bad, Gil says, but calories are just measures of heat, and we need heat. With food, you feed your body’s natural furnace. How can that be bad? It’s when you eat, how much you eat, the choices you make—that’s what makes all the difference. People think eating is bad, he says, but we need to stoke our internal fire. Yes, I think. My internal fire needs stoking. Speaking of heat, Gil mentions casually that he hates the warm weather. He can’t bear it. He’s unusually sensitive to high temperatures, and his idea of torture is sitting under the direct sun. He turns up the air-conditioning. I make a note. I tell him about running with Pat on Rattlesnake Hill, how I feel I’ve hit a plateau. He asks, How much do you run every day? Five miles. Why?

• From The Power of Myth (1988)

  The ego that sees a “thou” is not the same ego that sees an “it.” And when you go to war with people, the problem of the newspapers is to turn those people into “its.” MOYERS: This happens in marriage, too, doesn’t it? And happens with children, too. CAMPBELL: Sometimes the “thou” turns into an “it,” and you don’t know what the relationship is. The Indian relationship to animals is in contrast to our relationship to animals, where we see animals as a lower form of life. In the Bible we are told that we are the masters. For hunting people, as I said, the animal is in many ways superior. A Pawnee Indian said: “In the beginning of all things, wisdom and knowledge were with the animal. For Tirawa, the One Above, did not speak directly to man. He sent certain animals to tell mankind that he showed himself through the beast. And that from them, and from the stars and the sun and the moon, man should learn.” MOYERS: So it is in this time of hunting man that we begin to sense a stirring of the mythic imagination, the wonder of things. CAMPBELL: Yes. There is a burst of magnificent art and all the evidence you need of a mythic imagination in full form. MOYERS: Do you ever look at these primitive art objects and think not of the art but of the man or woman standing there painting or creating? I find that I speculate—who was he or she? CAMPBELL: This is what hits you when you go into those ancient caves. What was in their minds as they created these images? How did they get up there? And how did they see anything? The only light they had was a little flickering torch. And with respect to the problem of beauty—is this beauty intended? Or is it something that is the natural expression of a beautiful spirit? Is the beauty of the bird’s song intentional? In what sense is it intentional? Or is it the expression of the bird, the beauty of the bird’s spirit, you might say? I think that way very often about this art. To what degree was the intention of the artist what we would call “aesthetic” or to what degree expressive? And to what degree is the art something that they had simply learned to do that way? When a spider makes a beautiful web, the beauty comes out of the spider’s nature. It’s instinctive beauty. How much of the beauty of our own lives is about the beauty of being alive? How much of it is conscious and intentional? That is a big question. MOYERS: Tell me what you remember when you first looked upon those painted caves.

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  ©2001 The Teaching Company. 53 E. W e a r e b e i n g p r e p a r e d f o r t h e d e p a r t u r e o f V i r g i l t h a t w i l l t a k e place in a few cantos. F. T h e c l a s s i c a l o r p a g a n h e r i t a g e i s n e c e s s a r y b u t r e v e a l s m o r e w h e n read through Christian “lenses.” G. W e a r e a l s o g i v e n a k i n d o f a n a logy for what Dante must learn, not only from Virgil, but also from his own poetic predecessors in the vernacular languages. V. T h e t h r e e p o e t s p r o c e e d u p t h e m o u n t a i n t o t h e l a s t t w o t e r r a c e s , t h o s e of gluttony and lust. A. I n t h e s e t w o t e r r a c e s , D a n t e m e e t s s o m e o f h i s i m m e d i a t e p o e t i c predecessors in the vernacular languages. B. I n C a n t o 2 3 , h e m e e t s a n o l d f r i e n d , F o r e s e D o n a t i , w i t h w h o m h e exchanged poems in his youth. 1. T h e D o n a t i w e r e B l a c k G u e l f l e a d e r s — e n e m i e s o f D a n t e ’ s family. 2. They are one of only two families whose members Dante meets in all three parts of the Commedia. 3. Their exchange here points implicitly to the shallowness and limits of Dante’s and Forese’s earlier poetic works. C. I n C a n t o s 2 4 , 2 5 , a n d 2 6 , D a n t e m e e t s t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t o f h i s predecessors in the tradition of vernacular love poetry. D.

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

  CHRYSOSTOM. Let Marcion and Paul of Samosata then blush, who will not see what the Magi saw, those progenitors of the Church adoring God in the flesh. That He was truly in the flesh, the swaddling clothes and the stall prove; yet that they worshipped Him not as mere man, but as God, the gifts prove which it was becoming to offer to a God. Let the Jews also be ashamed, seeing the Magi coming before them, and themselves not even earnest to tread in their path. GREGORY. (ubi sup.) Something further may yet be meant here. Wisdom is typified by gold; as Solomon saith in the Proverbs, A treasure to be desired is in the mouth of the wise. (Prov. 21:20.) By frankincense, which is burnt before God, the power of prayer is intended, as in the Psalms, Let my speech come before thee as incense. (Ps. 141:2.) In myrrh is figured mortification of the flesh. To a king at his birth we offer gold, if we shine in his sight with the light of wisdom; we offer frankincense, if we have power before God by the sweet savour of our prayers; we offer myrrh, when we mortify by abstinence the lusts of the flesh. GLOSS. (Anselm.) The three men who offer, signify the nations who come from the three quarters of the earth. They open their treasures, i. e. manifest the faith of their hearts by confession. Rightly in the house, teaching that we should not vain-gloriously display the treasure of a good conscience. They bring three (vid. sup. note g, p. 18.) gifts, i. e. the faith in the Holy Trinity. Or opening the stores of Scripture, they offer its threefold sense, historical, moral, and allegorical; or Logic, Physic, and Ethics, making them all serve the faith. 2:1212. And being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way. AUGUSTINE. (non occ.) The wicked Herod, now made cruel by fear, will needs do a deed of horror. But how could he ensnare him who had come to cut off all fraud? His fraud is escaped as it follows, And being warned. JEROME. They had offered gifts to the Lord, and receive a warning corresponding to it. This warning (in the Greek ‘having received a response’) is given not by an Angel, but by the Lord Himself, to shew the high privilege granted to the merit of Joseph.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  I’m not sure if this is true; I’d have to call all 12 of them and take a poll. But I think we had a dumb hope the whole year. Our hope had nothing to do with the not very good at all book we were collaboratively writing. I think our hope was that Ken Kesey would write another perfect book. That he still had one in him and that we could somehow get it out. But all he kept doing was drinking. No amount of our getting high with him or walking the beach with him or listening to his stories could resurrect the man within the man. Sometimes a Great Notion and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are on my bookshelf next to As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Absalom, Absalom. Some books take your breath away. Is it the books, or the writers? When I hold Kesey’s books in my hands, when I open them, I can hear his voice. I can see him. Smell him. Feel him. But it’s the words that take my breath. Isn’t that enough? In the spring of the year of Kesey, on Easter, we walked up Mt. Pisgah to Jed’s resting place. Some of us were high on pot and some of us dropped acid and some of us ate mushrooms. And always Kesey drank from a flask. At the top the wind shuddered the leaves of trees. The mound of grass hill like one of Kesey’s shoulders. I liked being up there. Jed underneath us. I felt most alive near death anyway. I just didn’t talk about it much. Except a few times with Kesey. We embraced up there at one point. Toward the end of the year of Kesey at his house in Pleasant Hill he showed all 13 of us video clips of Neal Cassady. I think Babbs brought them over. Some of us were high on pot and some of us dropped acid and some of us ate mushrooms. And always Kesey drank. Faye was in the kitchen, then she went to church. We sat on the floor we sat on old stuffed chairs we sat on a sunken couch. When Neal Cassady came on the screen my chest filled with butterflies. He looked and acted exactly like a Kerouac sentence. The close up face of Neal Cassady … all that random quixotic fantastic gibberish and eye shifting and head bobbing and facial tic-ery … it was beautiful. Still though it seemed unreal, or surreal. We were nothing in the face of history but a bunch of waiting ducks. Someone could have picked us off one at a time in a pond. I sat there and wished our watching meant more.

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  T h e i n f l u e n c e r a n f r o m t h e P r o v e n ç a l t r o u b a d o u r s o f s o u t h e r n France through Sicily to Dante’s northern and central Italy. E. T h e p o e t B o n a g i u n t a o f L u c c a t a l k s a b o u t D a n t e ’ s p o e t r y a n d praises Dante’s innovations as a poet in Canto 24. F. I n C a n t o 2 6 , D a n t e p r a i s e s h i s p r e d e c e s s o r s . VI. T h e p o e t s a r e h e r e b e i n g p u r g e d o f t h e s i n o f l u s t . T h i s i s t h e h i g h e s t o f the seven terraces on the mount of purgatory. A. T h e s u g g e s t i o n i s t h a t i t i s n o t only the figures but also their poetry that is in need of this purgation. B. D a n t e n e e d s t o t a k e w h a t i s b e s t f r o m t h e m b u t p u r g e h i s o w n poetry as well. C. H e m u s t , i n o t h e r w o r d s , s e e s o m e t h i n g i n t h e m t h a t i s b e y o n d what they themselves see. D. D a n t e i s t o t h e s e p o e t s a s S t a t i u s i s t o V i r g i l .

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

  The Incarnation of God was made known to man by adequate signs. The Godhead cannot be better evidenced than by those things that are proper to God. Now it is proper to God to be able to change the laws of nature, by performing a work that is above nature, whose author He is. Hence it is a most appropriate proof of divinity, if works are done that transcend the laws of nature, such as giving sight to the blind, cleansing lepers, raising the dead to life. Now, Christ performed such works as these: hence, when He was asked (Lk. 7:20), Art thou he that art to come, or look me for another? He proved His divinity by these works, replying, The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are made clean, the deaf hear, the dead rise again, etc. And there was no need to create another world, for this was neither in the plan of divine wisdom, nor in the nature of things. If, however, it be contended that like miracles are related to have been done by others, as the eighth argument suggested, we must observe that Christ’s way of doing them was very different, and more God-like. Others did these things by praying; Christ, by commanding, as acting by His own power. Moreover, not only did He do these things Himself, but gave the power to do these and greater things still, to others who worked miracles by merely calling on His name. Again, Christ worked miracles not only on men’s bodies, but also on their souls: which latter works are much greater. Thus, for instance, through Him and the invocation of His name, the Holy Ghost was given, by Whom men’s hearts were kindled with the fire of divine love, their minds suddenly filled with the knowledge of divine things, and the tongues of simple men made eloquent in declaring God’s truth to the people. Such works are an evident proof of Christ’s divinity, for no mere man could have done them. Hence the Apostle says (Heb. 2:3, 4) that the salvation of mankind having begun to be declared by the Lord, was confirmed unto us by them that heard him: God also bearing them witness by signs, and wonders, and divers miracles, and distributions of the Holy Ghost.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  Now consider the unusual situation we are identifying here: part of the process of subjectivity is made from the same kind of material with which we construct the manifest contents held in subjectivity, specifically, images. But while the kind of material is the same, the source is different. Rather than corresponding to the objects, actions, or events, which normally dominate consciousness, these particular images correspond to general images of our bodies, as a whole, caught in the act of producing those other images. This new set of images constitutes a partial revelation of the process of making the manifest contents of mind deftly and quietly inserted along those other images. The new set of images is generated within the same body that owns those manifest contents, those that are now being shown in the multiplex stage-screen of our brains and that consciousness will let us own and appreciate. The new set of images helps describe nothing less than the owner’s body in the process of acquiring the other images, but unless you pay close attention, you hardly notice them. This overall strategy achieves a complex collage of (a) the fundamental images we experience and interpret as critical to the moment we are living in our minds and (b) the images of our own organisms in the process of constructing the said images. We pay little attention to the latter, although they are essential to construct the subject. We save our attention for the newly minted images that describe the fundamental contents of mind, the contents that we need to deal with if we are to continue living. This is one of the reasons why subjectivity and, more broadly, the process of consciousness have remained such a mystery. The strings of the puppetry remain conveniently hidden, as they should. None of this requires any homunculi or mysterious magic. It is so natural and simple that the best one can do is smile with respect and admire the ingenuity of the process. What happens when the images flowing in our minds arise from memory, in recall, rather than in live perception? This same account still applies. When recalled materials are inserted in the mind contents, they are interspersed with the ongoing percepts of the moment, and the latter, fully framed and personalized, provide the “anchor” necessary for the personal perspective. 2. Feeling: The Other Ingredient of SubjectivityThe perspective generated by the musculoskeletal frame and its sensory portals is not enough to build subjectivity. Besides sensory perspective taking, the continuous availability of feelings is a critical contributor to subjectivity. The abundance of feelings generates a rich background state that one might well call feelingness.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  became the first prince of the Catholic Church to take a vigorous line against the slave-trade, and swung France, and the other Catholic powers, into line. At the 1884 Berlin Conference on Colonial Questions, the Protestants at last got Catholic backing on this issue, and all the powers undertook to suppress slavery and to exterminate the traffic; they agreed, too, to adopt full religious liberty in colonial territories and to guarantee special protection for Christian missions. Five years later, at the Brussels Conference for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Lavigerie got a definitive international agreement drawn up and signed. There is no doubt that Lavigerie’s initial aim was to Christianize the Arab peoples, and thus begin to reverse the ravages introduced by the Monophysite schism over 1300 years before. He sent his White Fathers into the desert (where they were often murdered by Tuaregs) and for a time ran his own ‘Christian Militia’ to protect them. But like Raymond Lull before him, and indeed everyone else, he found it impossible to make any real headway against Islam. The French could conquer Arab territories, and annex them, or establish protectorates; and they planted huge numbers of Christian settlers in Algeria; but they could not make Moslem converts. It was this failure which led them (later followed by the Belgians) to push south of the Sahara into black Africa, and the easy missionary pickings among the pagans. Here they did exceedingly well; on the whole, much better than the Protestants. Lavigerie’s advice was: ‘Be all things to all men.’ He told his Fathers: ‘Love the poor pagans. Be kind to them. Heal their wounds. They will give you their affection first; then their confidence; and then their souls.’ The Catholic missions had a number of distinct advantages in competition with Protestants. Their unmarried missionaries were much cheaper to maintain, between one-fifteenth and one-twentieth of the cost of a full-time Protestant (even in 1930, Catholic missionaries cost, on average, only £35 a head a year; the CMS paid a married European missionary £650 a year, and an African clergyman £10–£25). They were better educated than the largely lower middle-class Protestants. They lived much closer to native living standards, were less identified with European social and cultural absolutes, and were often much more flexible in their approach. Superficially, at least, Catholicism tended to be more attractive to Africans than most brands of Protestantism. Protestants often made war on images – Holman Bentley recorded: ‘My dinner . . . was cooked with the wood of a fetish image four feet high, which was publicly hacked to pieces without a word of dissent by one of

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  on privilege, hierarchy, grandeur and ceremony. The Jesuits did not practise austerities. They were allowed to use the shorter breviary. They moved in the world. At their schools and colleges, the pupils were encouraged to produce plays and public performances, at a time when such were closely linked to the rituals of royalty and lordship. Jesuit plays became famous: Lope de Vega and Calderon both learnt from them; and the European stage, especially in the fields of stage management and design, owes much to the Jesuit theatre. Their big city churches, designed to accommodate huge congregations for propagandist sermons (very like Calvinist edifices) were themselves theatres of the new Baroque arts, of which they became the leading patrons. They encouraged their princes to support artists such as El Greco and Caravaggio, who dedicated themselves to Counter-Reformation themes. 4 They fleshed out the miserable bones of the Tridentine reforms in such a way as to create a new universe, in which it seemed absolutely natural and inevitable that a man with a vested interest in the established order should be not only a Catholic, but a militant papalist. The Jesuits opened a college at Padua, the most innovative of the Italian universities, as early as 1542, within three years of their establishment as an order. The same year, the Catholic bishops of southern Germany summoned them to operate’ there. The Jesuits started their first secondary school at Messina in 1548, and this was quickly duplicated all over Catholic Europe. During the 1550s, they particularly concentrated on Germany, with an operational headquarters at Ingoldstadt University, and a German College in Rome (1552) to train Counter-Reformation clergy. Within a generation, pupils from the last occupied many of the key German prince-bishoprics. Jesuits moved into all areas where conflicting religions were struggling for the hearts and minds of the well-born. In 1580, we find the Prince of Parma, Governor of the Netherlands, writing to Philip II: ‘Your Majesty desired me to build a citadel at Maastricht. I thought that a college of the Jesuits would be a fortress more likely to protect the inhabitants against the enemies of the Altar and the Throne. I have built it.’ The Jesuits were not only more effective than fortresses; they were cheaper. The Counter-Reformation made its most important gains not by battle but by capturing the loyalty and enthusiasm of well-placed individuals. Until the mid 1560s, Protestantism, both Lutheran and Calvinist, was gaining ground everywhere in Germany. In Graz, for instance, the population was almost entirely Protestant, and

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Go to sleep, O Morella, how awful are aquiline lives His plangent tonalities I shall never forget, nor shall I ever forgive myself the ill-tempered review in which I attacked him for trivial faults in his unfledged verse. I met wise, prim, charming Aldanov; decrepit Kuprin, carefully carrying a bottle of vin ordinaire through rainy streets; Ayhenvald—a Russian version of Walter Pater—later killed by a trolleycar; Marina Tsvetaev, wife of a double agent, and poet of genius, who, in the late thirties, returned to Russia and perished there. But the author that interested me most was naturally Sirin. He belonged to my generation. Among the young writers produced in exile he was the loneliest and most arrogant one. Beginning with the appearance of his first novel in 1925 and throughout the next fifteen years, until he vanished as strangely as he had come, his work kept provoking an acute and rather morbid interest on the part of critics. Just as Marxist publicists of the eighties in old Russia would have denounced his lack of concern with the economic structure of society, so the mystagogues of émigré letters deplored his lack of religious insight and of moral preoccupation. Everything about him was bound to offend Russian conventions and especially that Russian sense of decorum which, for example, an American offends so dangerously today, when in the presence of Soviet military men of distinction he happens to lounge with both hands in his trouser pockets. Conversely, Sirin’s admirers made much, perhaps too much, of his unusual style, brilliant precision, functional imagery and that sort of thing. Russian readers who had been raised on the sturdy straightforwardness of Russian realism and had called the bluff of decadent cheats, were impressed by the mirrorlike angles of his clear but weirdly misleading sentences and by the fact that the real life of his books flowed in his figures of speech, which one critic has compared to “windows giving upon a contiguous world … a rolling corollary, the shadow of a train of thought.” Across the dark sky of exile, Sirin passed, to use a simile of a more conservative nature, like a meteor, and disappeared, leaving nothing much else behind him than a vague sense of uneasiness.

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

  Hence it is clear that it was not wicked and cruel for God the Father to have willed Christ’s death, as the sixteenth objection argued. For He did not compel Him against His will, but it pleased Him that Christ should accept death through charity: indeed He wrought this charity in Christ’s soul. Likewise there is nothing unseemly in saying that Christ was willing to suffer death on the cross, in order to give an example of humility. It is true, as the seventeenth objection asserted, that humility is not in God: since the virtue of humility consists in this, that a man keeps to his own place, and does not reach out to things above him, but is subject to his superior. Hence it is evident that humility is not becoming to God, who has no superior, but is above all. If however someone out of humility, subject himself at times either to an equal or to an inferior, this is because he looks upon as superior to himself in some respect, one who is simply his equal or inferior. Accordingly, though the virtue of humility is not becoming to Christ in His divine nature, it is becoming to Him in His humanity. And His humility is rendered the more praiseworthy by reason of His divine nature: because personal worth adds to the praise of humility, as for instance when a great man has through necessity to suffer an indignity. Now no man is of greater worth than one who is God: and consequently most praiseworthy was the humility of the Man-God, who suffered the infamies which it behoved Him to suffer for man’s salvation. For pride had made men lovers of worldly glory. Wherefore, that He might transform man’s mind from the love of worldly glory to the love of divine glory, He was willing to suffer death, not any kind, but the most humiliating death. There are those who, though they fear not death, abhor an ignominious death, and it was that men might despise even this that our Lord heartened men by the example of His death. Again, although men might have been taught humility by divine discourses, as the eighteenth objection urged, nevertheless deeds incite more to action than words, and all the more effectively, as the goodness of the doer is known with greater certainty. So that however many other men might be examples of humility, it was still most expedient that we should be incited by the example of a Man-God, who certainly could not err, and whose humility is all the more wonderful as His majesty is the more sublime.

• From We Were Here (2011)

  WE WERE HERE CaptionMax Page 25 3/23/2011 1:58:06 PAUL (VO) (CONT’D) They just couldn’t get traction to continue to stigmatize people with AIDS. 1:58:12 DANIEL (VO) AIDS organizations were just popping up everywhere. 1:58:13 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on protest banner) San Francisco AIDS Foundation 1:58:16 DANIEL (VO) (CONT’D) I mean, that was-- It was called the San Francisco model. I think one of the reasons the San Francisco model worked... 1:58:20 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on protest banner) AIDS HEALTH PROJECT 1:58:21 DANIEL (VO/ON) (CONT’D) was ‘cause of the size of San Francisco and because of Castro Street itself, that there was a center. San Francisco, people came here not for career. They came here because they wanted to live here. 1:58:37 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on protest banner) FIGHTING FOR OUR LIVES 1:58:39 DANIEL (VO/ON) (CONT’D) And when AIDS came along, the community was sort of inherent in that, that all it needed was the AIDS epidemic to really make it coalesce. 1:58:50 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on protest banners) Pets Are Wonderful Support P.A.W.S. PAWS 1:58:51 DANIEL (VO) (CONT’D) You know, whether it was taking care of people’s pets if- when they were in the hospital, or bringing them food, like Open Hand. Everybody wanted to do something. 1:58:55 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on archival photo) PROJECT OPEN HAND Founder, Ruth Brinker 1:59:00 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on protest banner) BCA SF BLACK COALITION WE WERE HERE CaptionMax Page 26 3/23/2011 ON AIDS 1:59:01 DANIEL (VO) (CONT’D) It was a way the community came together in an amazing way that-- You know, politics had never done that. 1:59:05 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on archival photo) PROJECT inform founder, Martin Delaney 1:59:09 DANEIL (CONT’D) And it brought together the women’s community, the gay women’s community and the gay male community in ways that had certainly never happened before. 1:59:19 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on newspaper) WOMEN FIGHTING THE EPIDEMIC Sentinel 1:59:21 PAUL (VO/ON) Again and again, in every situation, every circumstance, there’s lesbians there leading the fight. All the women had friends who were gay guys who were sick. I was walking up Castro Street one day to- to my apartment, and in the early days of these ter- horrible tests, people would become anemic, severely anemic. 1:59:41 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on headline clip) Community Blood Drives Reinstated in Castro 1:59:42 PAUL (VO/ON) (CONT’D) There was also a blood shortage because of the HIV in- in blood. Lesbians weren’t at risk for HIV and- and could donate blood and did. And so I’m walking up Castro Street, and I see a poster. And I believe it was from the lesbian caucus of the Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club. And it said, our boys need blood. 1:59:59 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on flyer) OUR PWAs NEED BLOOD Women’s Day Blood Drive, August 22 Lesbians: Help Solve an urgent crisis in our community. Stand with our sister & brothers in fighting the AIDS epidemic. 2:00:00 PAUL (VO) (CONT’D) Lesbian caucus blood drive for people with AIDS, San

• From The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (2000)

  Title : The Mating Mind Author: Miller, Geoffrey F. Acclaim for Geoffrey Miller’s THE MATING MIND“Miller is an extremely talented writer, and he has produced a beautifully written book that is a genuine pleasure to read. The strength of this work, however, goes well beyond style. Miller has ambitiously described a scenario that provides insight into a number of puzzles about the human mind.” —Science “Fascinating.… This book will be intriguing even to readers with only a superficial knowledge of evolutionary biology.” —The Washington Post Book World “A brilliant and seductive book. It will sweep you off your feet. And, when you come to earth again, you’ll find yourself seeing the human mind and its most prized creations with new eyes.” —Nicholas Humphrey, New School for Social Research “This elegant, original, and lucid book is beguiling testimony to its own thesis: a fitting new feather in our cultural cap.” —Helena Cronin, London School of Economics “Miller is the real thing, and his wonderfully readable book should be read by everyone with a taste for serious ideas.” —The Independent (London) “A refined, an intellectually ingenious, and a very civilized discussion of the possible importance of sexual selection for mental evolution.” —John Constable, Cambridge University, in Psychology, Evolution, and Gender “Entertaining and wide-ranging.” —Nerve “Flies in the face of evolutionary orthodoxy—proposed by Stephen Jay Gould and others—which suggests that culture evolves on its own, separate from the evolution of the human mind.” —The Observer (London) “Witty, well-argued.… Ultimately, Miller is arguing for a commonsense view of the evolution of human nature.” —The Times (London) “Anyone who thinks evolutionary theory is stuffy should pick up The Mating Mind. Geoffrey Miller sets our usual assumptions about human intelligence—that natural selection alone is responsible—on its head.” —Meredith Small, author of What’s Love Got to Do with It? “Erudite, lucid, and ambitious.” —Mirabella “Written with grace and wit while conveying a new and world-changing scientific theory … Miller’s prose is as fluent, clever and epigrammatic as a good novelist’s. At the very least what he has done is to find a place for beauty, waste and extravagance in science.” —Matt Ridley, The Sunday Telegraph (London) “Consistently penetrating and ingenious … mixing outstanding sober exposition of the mechanisms of sexual selection with speculations about its role in our capacities for morality, language, and creativity that range from deep to wild.” —Financial Times [image file=image_rsrc3AC.jpg] Geoffrey Miller The Mating MindGeoffrey Miller is an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and at UCLA, where he teaches animal communication and marketing. Born in 1965 in Cincinnati, he studied at Columbia University and received a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Stanford University. After moving to Europe, he worked at the Universities of Sussex and Nottingham, at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, and at University College London. He lives with his family in Surrey, England and Los Angeles. [image file=image_rsrc3AD.jpg] FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, APRIL 2001 Copyright © 2000 by Geoffrey Miller