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 Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  Tobias hurries home when the feast is ended. Raphael instructs him to smear the gall of the fish on his father’s eyes, and sure enough, his sight is restored. Tobit proposes to give Raphael half of the silver in gratitude, but the angel finally reveals his true identity. Tobit thereupon bursts into praise of God (chap. 13). Before he dies he prophesies that all Israel, including Jerusalem, will be made desolate, but that Jerusalem will subsequently be restored and the exiles will return to the land. The book ends with a brief notice about the deaths of Tobit and his wife, and says that Tobias lived to see the destruction of Nineveh. The story of Tobit is no more historical than the other stories we have reviewed. Its fanciful nature is apparent in the roles of the angel, the demon, and the magical cures. Even though it is set in Assyria before the Deuteronomic reform, it clearly reflects the piety of Second Temple Judaism. The story is a romance; in large part it is the story of the quest of a young man for a bride and the trials he encounters. More broadly, the plot is that of a traditional folktale. At the beginning, the protagonists are in a state of lack (Tobit is blind, Tobias needs a wife, and Sarah needs a husband). Their needs are met and their problems are resolved through the aid of a wonderful helper (Raphael). The story draws on widespread folkloric motifs such as the Grateful Dead and the Dangerous Bride. Tobit’s ultimate good fortune is clearly related to his piety in burying the dead, even if the link is not made explicit. The mention of Ahikar also links Tobit to the world of Near Eastern folklore. Ahikar was a legendary wise man at the Assyrian court. His story, which included a collection of proverbs, circulated in several languages. An Aramaic version was preserved by the Jewish community in Elephantine in southern Egypt in the fifth century B.C.E. All these folkloric elements are woven together by a master storyteller with a good sense of humor. What other Israelite hero is undone by bird droppings? One of the delightful touches of the story is the role of the dog, which is quite unnecessary for the plot but adds a dimension of realism. Unlike the story of Esther, Tobit is not lacking in explicit piety. The protagonists miss no opportunity to praise the God of heaven. The piety, however, involves a strange mix of elements. On the one hand, Tobit gives a rare glimpse of popular Jewish piety in the Second Temple period. This involved a lively faith in angels and demons and in cures that we would regard as superstitious, or even magical.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  What these cases show is that the mere organic retentiveness of a man need bear no definite relation to his other mental powers. Men of the highest general powers will often forget nothing, however insignificant. One of the most generally accomplished men I know has a memory of this sort. He never keeps written note of anything, yet is never at a loss for a fact which he has once heard. He remembers the old addresses of all his New York friends, living in numbered streets, addresses which they themselves have long since moved away from and forgotten. He says that he should probably recognize an individual fly, if he had seen him thirty years previous—he is, by the way, an entomologist. As an instance of his desultory memory, he was introduced to a certain colonel at a club. The conversation fell upon the signs of age in man. The colonel challenged him to estimate his age. He looked at him, and gave the exact day of his birth, to the wonder of all. But the secret of this accuracy was that, having picked up some days previously an army-register, he had idly turned over its list of names, with dates of birth, graduation, promotions, etc., attached, and when the colonel's name was mentioned to him at the club, these figures, on which he had not bestowed a moment's thought, involuntarily surged up in his mind. Such a memory is of course a priceless boon. [579] Cf. Ebbinghaus: Ueber das Gedächtniss (1885), pp. 67, 45. One may hear a person say: "I have a very poor memory, because I was never systematically made to learn poetry at school." [580] How to Strengthen the Memory; or, The Natural and Scientific Methods of Never Forgetting. By M. H. Holbrook, M.D. New York (no date). [581] Page 30. [582] Op. cit. p. 100. [583] In order to test the opinion so confidently expressed in the text, I have tried to see whether a certain amount of daily training in learning poetry by heart will shorten the time it takes to learn an entirely different kind of poetry. During eight successive days I learned 158 lines of Victor Hugo's 'Satyr.' The total number of minutes required for this was 131 5/6—it should be said that I had learned nothing by heart for many years. I then, working for twenty-odd minutes daily, learned the entire first book of Paradise Lost, occupying 38 days in the process. After this training I went back to Victor Hugo's poem, and found that 158 additional lines (divided exactly as on the former occasion) took me 151 1/2 minutes.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  One man will distinguish by taste between the upper and the lower half of a bottle of old Madeira. Another will recognize, by feeling the flour in a barrel, whether the wheat was grown in Iowa or Tennessee. The blind deaf-mute, Laura Bridgman, has so improved her touch as to recognize, after a year's interval, the hand of a person who once has shaken hers; and her sister in misfortune, Julia Brace, is said to have been employed in the Hartford Asylum to sort the linen of its multitudinous inmates, after it came from the wash, by her wonderfully educated sense of smell. The fact is so familiar that few, if any, psychologists have even recognized it as needing explanation. They have seemed to think that practice must, in the nature of things, improve the delicacy of discernment, and have let the matter rest. At most they have said: "Attention accounts for it; we attend more to habitual things, and what we attend to we perceive more minutely." This answer is true, but too general; it seems to me that we can be a little more precise. There are at least two distinct causes which we can see at work whenever experience improves discrimination: First, the terms whose difference comes to be felt contract disparate associates and these help to drag them apart. Second, the difference reminds us of larger differences of the same sort, and these help us to notice it. Let us study the first cause first, and begin by supposing two compounds, of ten elements apiece. Suppose no one element of either compound to differ from the corresponding element of the other compound enough to be distinguished from it if the two are compared alone, and let the amount of this imperceptible difference be called equal to 1. The compounds will differ from each other, however, in ten different ways; and, although each difference by itself might pass unperceived, the total difference, equal to 10, may very well be sufficient to strike the sense. In a word, increasing the number of 'points' involved in a difference may excite our discrimination as effectually as increasing the amount of difference at any one point. Two men whose mouth, nose, eyes, cheeks, chin, and hair, all differ slightly, will be as little confounded by us, as two appearances of the same man one with, and the other without, a false nose. The only contrast in the cases is that we can easily name the point of difference in the one, whilst in the other we cannot. Two things, then, B and C, indistinguishable when compared together alone, may each contract adhesions with different associates, and the compounds thus formed may, as wholes, be judged very distinct.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  This is, of course, the doctrine which we have professed. John Mill says: "The formation of a Concept does not consist in separating the attributes which are said to compose it from all other attributes of the same object, and enabling us to conceive those attributes, disjoined from any others. We neither conceive them, nor think them, nor cognize them in any way, as a thing apart, but solely as forming, in combination with numerous other attributes, the idea of an individual object. But, though meaning them only as part of a larger agglomeration, we have the power of fixing out attention on them, to the neglect of the other attributes with which we think them combined. While the concentration of attention lasts, if it is sufficiently intense, we may be temporarily unconscious of any of the other attributes, and may really, for a brief interval, have nothing present to our mind but the attributes constituent of the concept. . . . General concepts, therefore, we have, properly speaking, none; we have only complex ideas of objects in the concrete: but we are able to attend exclusively to certain parts of the concrete idea: and by that exclusive attention we enable those parts to determine exclusively the course of our thoughts as subsequently called up by association; and are in a condition to carry on a train of meditation or reasoning relating to those parts only, exactly as if we were able to conceive them separately from the rest." [392] This is a lovely example of Mill's way of holding piously to his general statements, but conceding in detail all that their adversaries ask. If there be a better description extant, of a mind in possession of an 'abstract idea,' than is contained in the words I have italicized, I am unacquainted with it. The Berkeleyan nominalism thus breaks down. It is easy to lay bare the false assumption which underlies the whole discussion of the question as hitherto carried on. That assumption is that ideas, in order to know, must be cast in the exact likeness of whatever things they know, and that the only things that can be known are those which ideas can resemble. The error has not been confined to nominalists. Omnis cognitio fit per assimilationem cognoscentis et cogniti has been the maxim, more or less explicitly assumed, of writers of every school.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  They are realities as much as I am. What positive good is in them shall be mine too, etc., etc. The magnanimity of these expansive natures is often touching indeed. Such persons can feel a sort of delicate rapture in thinking that, however sick, ill-favored, mean- conditioned, and generally forsaken they may be, they yet are integral parts of the whole of this brave world, have a fellow's share in the strength of the dray-horses, the happiness of the young people, the wisdom of the wise ones, and are not altogether without part or lot in the good fortunes of the Vanderbilts and the Hohenzollerns themselves. Thus either by negating or by embracing, the Ego may seek to establish itself in reality. He who, with Marcus Aurelius, can truly say, "O Universe, I wish all that thou wishest," has a self from which every trace of negativeness and obstructiveness has been removed—no wind can blow except to fill its sails. A tolerably unanimous opinion ranges the different selves of which a man may be 'seized and possessed,' and the consequent different orders of his self-regard, in an hierarchical scale, with the bodily Self at the bottom, the spiritual Self at the top, and the extracorporeal material selves and the various social selves between. Our merely natural self-seeking would lead us to aggrandize all these selves; we give up deliberately only those among them which we find we cannot keep. Our unselfishness is thus apt to be a 'virtue of necessity'; and it is not without all show of reason that cynics quote the fable of the fox and the grapes in describing our progress therein. But this is the moral education of the race; and if we agree in the result that on the whole the selves we can keep are the intrinsically best, we need not complain of being led to the knowledge of their superior worth in such a tortuous way. Of course this is not the only way in which we learn to subordinate our lower selves to our higher. A direct ethical judgment unquestionably also plays its part, and last, not least, we apply to our own persons judgments originally called forth by the acts of others.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Such Germans as Weber, Fechner, Vierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot; and their success has brought into the field an array of younger experimental psychologists, bent on studying the elements of the mental life, dissecting them out from the gross results in which they are embedded, and as far as possible reducing them to quantitative scales. The simple and open method of attack having done what it can, the method of patience, starving out, and harassing to death is tried; the Mind must submit to a regular siege, in which minute advantages gained night and day by the forces that hem her in must sum themselves up at last into her overthrow. There is little of the grand style about these new prism, pendulum, and chronograph-philosophers. They mean business, not chivalry. What generous divination, and that superiority in virtue which was thought by Cicero to give a man the best insight into nature, have failed to do, their spying and scraping, their deadly tenacity and almost diabolic cunning, will doubtless some day bring about. No general description of the methods of experimental psychology would be instructive to one unfamiliar with the instances of their application, so we will waste no words upon the attempt. The principal fields of experimentation so far have been: 1) the connection of conscious states with their physical conditions, including the whole of brain-physiology, and the recent minutely cultivated physiology of the sense-organs, together with what is technically known as 'psycho-physics,' or the laws of correlation between sensations and the outward stimuli by which they are aroused; 2) the analysis of space-perception into its sensational elements; 3) the measurement of the duration of the simplest mental processes; 4) that of the accuracy of reproduction in the memory of sensible experiences and of intervals of space and time; 5) that of the manner in which simple mental states influence each other, call each other up, or inhibit each other's reproduction; 6) that of the number of facts which consciousness can simultaneously discern; finally, 7) that of the elementary laws of oblivescence and retention. It must be said that in some of these fields the results have as yet borne little theoretic fruit commensurate with the great labor expended in their acquisition. But facts are facts, and if we only get enough of them they are sure to combine. New ground will from year to year be broken, and theoretic results will grow. Meanwhile the experimental method has quite changed the face of the science so far as the latter is a record of mere work done. The comparative method, finally, supplements the introspective and experimental methods.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  IS THERE ANY EVIDENCE? I have spoken of the superiority of a person-centered approach to education, and it is surely clear to the reader that this is my bias. Is there any evidence to back up this claim and this attitude? The answer is yes; there is indeed a solid body of evidence. The research studies of David Aspy and his colleagues in the National Consortium for Humanizing Education are only beginning to be known, but I regard them as highly important. For a number of years, Aspy has been the leader in a series of research studies aimed at finding out whether human, person-centered characteristics in a classroom have any measurable effects, and if so, what these effects are. He and his major colleague, Flora Roebuck, have written a general report of their findings (1974a); with other colleagues, they have also written a series of technical reports of their studies (1974b). As a starting point, Aspy took the basic hypothesis that we had formulated in client-centered therapy, redefining the terms slightly to make them more appropriate to the school setting. Empathy (E) was redefined as a teacher’s attempt to understand the personal meaning of the school experience for each student. Positive regard (PR) was defined as the various ways in which the teacher shows respect for the students as persons. Congruence (C) needed no redefinition; it was the extent to which the teacher was genuine in relationship to the students. The method was first to obtain tape-recorded hours of classroom instruction. Rating scales, ranging from low to high, were developed to assess various degrees of these three primary attitudes, as shown in teachers’ behavior. Basing their measurements on these three scales, unbiased raters measured the “facilitative conditions” as exhibited by each teacher. These ratings were then correlated with students’ achievement-test scores, problem-solving ability, number of absences from class, and a large number of other variables. Having established a methodology, the researchers applied it on a previously unheard-of scale. Their final report indicates that they recorded and assessed nearly 3,700 hours of classroom instruction from 550 elementary and secondary school teachers! These studies were done in various parts of the United States and in several other countries. They involved black, white, and Mexican- American teachers and students. No other study of comparable magnitude has ever been made. Here is my summary of the findings of Aspy and his colleagues:

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  O PREFACE ne of the most memorable films of all time is To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), a classic portrait of the legacy of slavery and racial segregation in the South. It is a film that I have been teaching for over two decades, and is one of President Obama’s favorite movies. Yet when my students watch this film (even if they were exposed to it in high school), they see for the first time that the drama within has not one but two disturbing messages. One plotline is about the brave, principled lawyer Atticus Finch, who refuses to perpetuate the racial double standard: despite opposition, he agrees to defend an Afro-American, Tom Robinson, on the charge of raping a poor white girl, Mayella Ewell. Though the court finds Robinson guilty, we the viewers know he is innocent. An honorable, hardworking family man, he stands well above the degraded Ewells, his accusers. The shabbily attired Mayella is cowed by her bully of a father, a scrawny man seen in overalls, who is devoid of merit or morality. Bob Ewell demands that the all-white jury of common men take his side, which they do in the end. He insists that they help him avenge his daughter’s honor. Not satisfied when Robinson is killed trying to escape from prison, he attacks Atticus Finch’s two children on Halloween night. Bob Ewell’s full name is Robert E. Lee Ewell. But he is not an heir of one of the aristocratic families of the Old South. As Harper Lee described them in the novel from which the classic film was adapted, the Ewells were members of the terminally poor, those whose status could not be lifted or debased by any economic fluctuation—not even the Depression. They were human waste. In the author’s words, “No truant officers could keep their numerous offspring in school; no public health officer could free them from congenital defects, various worms, and diseases indigenous to filthy surroundings.” They lived behind the town dump, which they combed every day. Their run-down shack was “once a Negro cabin.” Garbage was strewn everywhere, making the cabin look like the “playhouse of an insane child.” No one in the neighborhood knew how many children lived there: some thought nine, others six. To the town of Maycomb, Alabama, the Ewell children were simply “dirty-faced ones at the windows when

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  Six Vignettes I tend to learn the most from small, intense experiences which illuminate for me different aspects of what I am doing. They also illustrate in a vivid fashion some of the more abstract concepts of a person-centered approach. Frequently I write them down in order to store them as memories or to provide them for the use of the people involved. I have assembled six of these experiences here, each very different, but each illustrating some point or points. They are all true stories, yet they also have something of the quality of fables. Each one has been, and is, quite precious for my own growth or for my confidence in what I am doing. The first, “I Began to Lose Me,” contains a young woman’s letter describing her experience in therapy. I do not know the woman, nor do I know the therapist. But her experience crams into one letter a whole gold mine of learnings about individual therapy. “The Cavern” is an intensely personal account, again by letter, of how the experiencing of the emptiness of a person—the inner void—can become a rich and fulfilling event, when it is accepted. It, too, is an account of a one-to-one therapy relationship. “Nancy Mourns” tells of an incident which will always remain fresh in my memory, involving my daughter and Nancy and several others in a large person- centered workshop, aimed both at facilitating personal growth and the building of community. “Being Together” is a particularly well-documented story of the long-range effects of an encounter group experience. I was discussing recently with colleagues the rich data we have, in personal letters and contacts, of the frequently far-reaching effects of even a weekend group. Here is a case in which those effects can be shown in a series of “snapshots,” starting with the original experience of one of the workshop participants, and ending with a letter I received from her nine years later. “The Security Guard” is one of several fascinating examples of the kind of energy that emanates from a community-building experience. We influence, in unknown ways, people who have no direct contact at all with the workshop. Here is a clear instance of that influence. “A Kids’ Workshop” brings us back to hard reality. In addition to a rewarding account of how young children respond to a person-centered climate, it clearly

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  WHAT ARE THE PERSONAL RESULTS? What are the results? I would like first to give some living pictures of what happens when these attitudes exist, and then turn to the research findings. Dr. Anderson is a high school teacher whom I have come to know well. She teaches in a school that is a cross section of an urban community. She seems to be without pretense or façade or defensiveness. You can’t talk with her for five minutes without realizing that she thinks high school students are “the greatest.” I have a suspicion that she likes the troublemakers best of all. And the way she can move sensitively and empathically (in her blunt, direct manner) into the feelings and reactions of her students is uncanny. Her courses have been titled Psychology, Human Relations, and the like, but they would be better labeled Learning Experiences. The students discuss anything that concerns them—drugs, family problems, sex, contraception, pregnancy, abortion, dropping out, getting a job, the grading system—literally any topic. They have learned to trust her and one another, and the level of honesty and self-disclosure is amazing. At this point, some of you may be thinking, “O.K., O.K., perhaps they get help in their personal adjustment, but do they actually learn anything?” They do indeed. Miss Anderson is a tremendous reader, and her enthusiasm for books is contagious. Her students are literally “turned on” by the chance to read the books they want on the subjects that interest them. And what books they choose! Some of the students are classed as slow learners, but they are reading Martin Buber, Sóren Kierkegaard, Erich Fromm, my books, Philip Slater, Wilhelm Reich, John Holt, A. S. Neil (Summerhill)—you name it, they have read it. People tell her that these books are far too advanced for high school students: she just laughs and says that they love to tackle difficult challenges. They also choose the films they want to see, and plan community trips. They are excited, personally involved learners. Miss Anderson has received the oddest and most flattering compliment a teacher could receive. In her school, if a student is found to have any connection with drugs, he or she is suspended and not permitted to attend school. There are quite a number of these. But they have found that if they skirt the parking lot, go in a back door, and take a circuitous route, they can reach Miss Anderson’s room without being observed. They know she won’t throw them out, so they sneak

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

  "We boast of our common schools; Calvin was the father of popular education, the inventor of the system of free schools. We are proud of the free States that fringe the Atlantic. The pilgrims of Plymouth were Calvinists; the best influence in South Carolina came from the Calvinists of France. William Penn was the disciple of the Huguenots; the ships from Holland that first brought colonists to Manhattan were filled with Calvinists. He that will not honor the memory, and respect the influence of Calvin, knows but little of the origin of American liberty. "If personal considerations chiefly win applause, then, no one merits our sympathy and our admiration more than Calvin; the young exile from France, who achieved an immortality of fame before he was twenty-eight years of age; now boldly reasoning with the king of France for religious liberty; now venturing as the apostle of truth to carry the new doctrines into the heart of Italy, and hardly escaping from the fury of papal persecution; the purest writer, the keenest dialectician of his century; pushing free inquiry to its utmost verge, and yet valuing inquiry solely as the means of arriving at fixed conclusions. The light of his genius scattered the mask of darkness which superstition had held for centuries before the brow of religion. His probity was unquestioned, his morals spotless. His only happiness consisted in his ’task of glory and of good;’ for sorrow found its way into all his private relations. He was an exile from his country; he became for a season an exile from his place of exile. As a husband he was doomed to mourn the premature loss of his wife; as a father he felt the bitter pang of burying his only child. Alone in the world, alone in a strange land, he went forward in his career with serene resignation and inflexible firmness; no love of ease turned him aside from his vigils; no fear of danger relaxed the nerve of his eloquence; no bodily infirmities checked the incredible activity of his mind; and so he continued, year after year, solitary and feeble, yet toiling for humanity, till after a life of glory, he bequeathed to his personal heirs, a fortune, in books and furniture, stocks and money, not exceeding two hundred dollars, and to the world, a purer reformation, a republican spirit in religion, with the kindred principles of republican liberty." CHAPTER XIV.CALVIN’S THEOLOGY.§ 111. Calvin’s Commentaries.

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

  2. But whence did Calvin and the other Reformers derive their authority to reform the old Catholic Church and to found new Churches? Here we must resort to a special divine call and outfit. The Reformers belong not to the regular order of priests, but to the irregular order of prophets whom God calls directly by his Spirit from the plough or the shepherd’s staff or the workshop or the study. So he raises and endows men with rare genius for poetry or art or science or invention or discovery. All good gifts come from God; but the gift of genius is exceptional, and cannot be derived or propagated by ordinary descent. There are divine irregularities as well as divine regularities. God writes on a crooked as well as on a straight line. Even Paul was called out of due time, and did not seek ordination from Peter or any other apostle, but derived his authority directly from Christ, and proved his ministry by the abundance of his labors. In the apostolic age there were apostles, prophets, and evangelists for the Church at large, and presbyter-bishops and deacons for particular congregations. The former are considered extraordinary officers. But their race is not yet extinct, any more than the race of men of genius in any other sphere of life. They arise whenever and wherever they are needed. We are bound to the ordinary means of grace, but God is free, and his Spirit works when, where, and how he pleases. God calls ordinary men for ordinary work in the ordinary way; and he calls extraordinary men for extraordinary work in an extraordinary way. He has done so in times past, and will do so to the end of time.424 Hooker, the most "judicious" of Anglican divines, says: Though thousands were debtors to Calvin, as touching divine knowledge, yet he was to none, only to God." § 74. The Open Rupture. An Academic Oration. 1533. Calv. Opera, X. P. I. 30; XXI. 123, 129, 192. A very graphic account by Merle D’Aubigné, bk. II. ch. xxx. (vol. II. 264–284). For a little while matters seemed to take a favorable turn at the court for reform. The reactionary conduct of the Sorbonne and the insult offered to Queen Marguerite by the condemnation of her "Mirror of a Sinful Soul,"—a tender and monotonous mystic reverie,425 — offended her brother and the liberal members of the University. Several preachers who sympathized with a moderate reformation, Gérard Roussel, and the Augustinians, Bertault and Courault, were permitted to ascend the pulpit in Paris.426 The king himself, by his opposition to the German emperor, and his friendship with Henry VIII., incurred the suspicion of aiding the cause of heresy and schism. He tried, from political motives and regard for his sister, to conciliate between the conservative and progressive parties. He even authorized the invitation of Melanchthon to Paris as counsellor, but Melanchthon wisely declined.

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

  "His last days were of a piece with his life. His whole course has been compared by Vinet to the growth of one rind of a tree from another, or to a chain of logical sequences. He was endued with a marvellous power of understanding, although the imagination and sentiments were less roundly developed. His systematic spirit fitted him to be the founder of an enduring school of thought. In this characteristic he may be compared with Aquinas. He has been appropriately styled the Aristotle of the Reformation. He was a perfectly honest man. He subjected his will to the eternal rule of right, as far as he could discover it. His motives were pure. He felt that God was near him, and sacrificed everything to obey the direction of Providence. The fear of God ruled in his soul; not a slavish fear, but a principle such as animated the prophets of the Old Covenant. The combination of his qualities was such that he could not fail to attract profound admiration and reverence from one class of minds, and excite intense antipathy in another. There is no one of the Reformers who is spoken of, at this late day, with so much personal feeling, either of regard or aversion. But whoever studies his life and writings, especially the few passages in which he lets us into his confidence and appears to invite our sympathy, will acquire a growing sense of his intellectual and moral greatness, and a tender consideration for his errors.’ G. G. Herrick, D. D. Congregational Minister of Mount Vernon Church, Boston. From Some Heretics of Yesterday. Boston, 1890, pp. 210 sqq. "Calvin gathered up the spiritual and intellectual forces that had been started by the Reformation movement, and marshalled and systematized them, and bound them into unity by the mastery of his logical thought, as the river gathers cloud and rill, and snow-drift and dew-fall, and constrains them through its own channel into the unity and directness of a powerful current. The action of Luther was impulsive, magnetic, popular, appealing to sentiment and feeling, that of Calvin was logical and constructive, appealing to understanding and reason. He was the systematizer of the Reformation....

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

  William Lindsay Alexander, D. D., F. R. S. E. (1808–1884). Professor of Theology and one of the Bible Revisers. Congregationalist. From Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed. vol. IV. (1878) p. 721. "Calvin was of middle stature; his complexion was somewhat pallid and dark; his eyes, to the latest clear and lustrous, bespoke the acumen of his genius. He was sparing in his food and simple in his dress; he took but little sleep, and was capable of extraordinary efforts of intellectual toil. His memory was prodigious, but he used it only as the servant of his higher faculties. As a reasoner he has seldom been equalled, and the soundness and penetration of his judgment were such as to give to his conclusions in practical questions almost the appearance of predictions, and inspire in all his friends the utmost confidence in the wisdom of his counsels. As a theologian he stands on an eminence which only Augustin has surpassed; whilst in his skill as an expounder of Scripture, and his terse and elegant style, he possessed advantages to which Augustin was a stranger. His private character was in harmony with his public reputation and position. If somewhat severe and irritable, he was at the same time scrupulously just, truthful, and steadfast; he never deserted a friend or took an unfair advantage of an antagonist; and on befitting occasions he could be cheerful and even facetious among his intimates." Testimonies of American Divines. Dr. Henry B. Smith (1815–1877). Professor of Theology in the Union Theological Seminary, New York. Presbyterian. From his Address before the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, St. Louis, 1855, delivered by request of the Presbyterian Historical Society. See Faith and Philosophy, pp. 98 and 99. "Though the Reformation, under God, began with Luther in the power of faith, it was carried on by Calvin with greater energy, and with a more constructive genius, both in theology and in church polity, as he also had a more open field. The Lutheran movement affected chiefly the centre and the north of Europe; the Reformed Churches were planted in the west of Europe, all around the ocean, in the British Isles, and by their very geographical site were prepared to act the most efficient part, and to leap the walls of the old world, and colonize our shores. "Nothing is more striking in a general view of the history of the Reformed Churches than the variety of countries into which we find their characteristic spirit, both in doctrine and polity, penetrating. Throughout Switzerland it was a grand popular movement. There is first of all, Zwingli, the hero of Zurich, already in 1516 preaching against the idolatrous veneration of Mary, a man of generous culture and intrepid spirit, who at last laid down his life upon the field of battle. In Basle we find Oecolampadius, and also Bullinger [in Zurich], the chronicler of the Swiss reform. Farel aroused Geneva to iconoclasm by his inspiring eloquence.

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

  "In intellect, as in personal features, the one was grand, massive, and powerful, through depth and comprehension of feeling, a profound but exaggerated insight, and a soaring eloquence; the other was no less grand and powerful, through clearness and correctness of judgment, vigor and consistency of reasoning, and weightiness of expression. Both are alike memorable in the service which they rendered to their native tongue—in the increased compass, flexibility, and felicitous mastery which they imparted to it. The Latin works of Calvin are greatly superior in elegance of style, symmetry of method, and proportionate vigor of argument. He maintains an academic elevation of tone, even when keenly agitated in temper; while Luther, as Mr. Hallam has it, sometimes descends to mere ’bellowing in bad Latin.’ Yet there is a coldness in the elevation of Calvin, and in his correct and well-balanced sentences, for which we should like ill to exchange the kindling though rugged paradoxes of Luther. The German had the more rich and teeming—the Genevan the harder, more serviceable, and enduring mind. When interrupted in dictating for several hours, Beza tells us that he could return and commence where he had left off; and that amidst all the multiplicity of his engagements, he never forgot what he required to know for the performance of any duty. "As preachers, Calvin seems to have commanded a scarcely less powerful success than Luther, although of a different character—the one stimulating and rousing, ’boiling over in every direction’—the other instructive, argumentative, and calm in the midst of his vehemence (Beza: Vita Calv.). Luther flashed forth his feelings at the moment, never being able to compose what might be called a regular sermon, but seizing the principal subject, and turning all his attention to that alone. Calvin was elaborate and careful in his sermons as in everything else. The one thundered and lightened, filling the souls of his hearers now with shadowy awe, and now with an intense glow of spiritual excitement; the other, like the broad daylight, filled them with a more diffusive though less exhilarating clearness.... "An impression of majesty and yet of sadness must ever linger around the name of Calvin. He was great and we admire him. The world needed him and we honor him; but we cannot love him. He repels our affections while he extorts our admiration; and while we recognize the worth, and the divine necessity, of his life and work, we are thankful to survey them at a distance, and to believe that there are also other modes of divinely governing the world, and advancing the kingdom of righteousness and truth. "Limited, as compared with Luther, in his personal influence, apparently less the man of the hour in a great crisis of human progress, Calvin towers far above Luther in the general influence over the world of thought and the course of history, which a mighty intellect, inflexible in its convictions and constructive in its genius, never fails to exercise."

• From Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)

  At the moment of the ad, Benglis’s artistic labor was valued and acknowledged—indeed, in the same issue, a reviewer painstakingly wrote about her sculpture work—affording her the opportunity, financially and otherwise, to question and play with that recognition, while daring her audience to see or interpret something else. As Frazier points out, for so many Black and working-class artists, such institutional recognition and financial compensation remain elusive in the first place. Artist and filmmaker Tourmaline’s first solo show took place in January 2021. Along with her world-renowned short film Salacia—which reimagines the life of Mary Jones, a Black trans sex worker who lived in 1800s New York City, and whose life’s record was, before Tourmaline’s intervention, all but lost to a few court records—she debuted five self-portraits, “drawing on Victorian-era pornography and turning it inside out,” as Tiana Reid wrote in 4Columns. Reid goes on, “the photographs of Pleasure Garden, taken together, emote possibility, construct a horizon of the limitlessness, disrupt received narratives about what black trans women are expected to endure. There are entire academic and artistic disciplines about how blackness and gender are co-constitutive (or co-disruptive). Salacia is in conversation with this rich dialogue about how blackness undermines normative articulations of gender.” Tourmaline’s self-portraiture is stunning and carefully evocative of, in her own words, “Black-owned pleasure gardens. Places where Black people, in this moment before 1827 when slavery was still legal in New York, would go and be able to be with each other in nature, and have some sociality with each other.” Unlike Benglis, Tourmaline interrogates a social positioning in which Black trans women have frequently been denied recognition of their womanhood, pushed to conform to cis standards of femininity so as to be easily legible to dominant culture, and disproportionately subjected to gendered interpersonal and state violence. In March 2021, New York finally repealed what had colloquially become known as the “walking while trans” law; ostensibly a tool to fight prostitution, the law gave cops wide latitude to arrest anyone they perceived to be “loitering with intent to commit prostitution.” This empowered police to target, in particular, trans women of color, whom they presume, usually incorrectly, to be selling sex. Arrested under the statute in 2018 when she was just talking to her friends, a twenty-three-year-old trans woman from the Bronx—given the pseudonym “Raquel” for privacy—explained to The Cut, “People always think of a trans woman: ‘You have to sell sex. That’s your dominant job.’ And that’s not what everybody does.” In a conversation published by Document Journal, with friends and fellow musicians Juliana Huxtable and Nomi Ruiz, on the joys and meaning of the underground club scene, and the kinds of work available to trans women in New York, DJ Honey Dijon explains,

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

  "Thus lived and died Calvin, a great, intense, and energetic character, who, more than any other of that great age, has left his impress upon the history of Protestantism. Nothing, perhaps, more strikes us than the contrast between the single naked energy which his character presents and of which his name has become symbolical, and the grand issues which have gone forth from it. Scarcely anywhere else can we trace such an impervious potency of intellectual and moral influence emanating from so narrow a centre. "There is in almost every respect a singular dissimilarity between the Genevan and the Wittenberg reformer. In personal, moral, and intellectual features, they stand contrasted—Luther with his massive frame and full big face and deep melancholy eyes; Calvin, of moderate stature, pale and dark complexion, and sparkling eyes, that burned nearly to the moment of his death (Beza: Vita Calv.). Luther, fond and jovial, relishing his beer and hearty family repasts with his wife and children; Calvin, spare and frugal, for many years taking only one meal a day, and scarcely needing sleep. In the one, we see a rich and complex and buoyant and affectionate nature touching humanity at every point, in the other, a stern and grave unity of moral character. Both were naturally of a somewhat proud and imperious temper, but the violence of Luther is warm and boisterous, that of Calvin is keen and zealous. It might have been a very uncomfortable thing, as Melanchthon felt, to be exposed to Luther’s occasional storms; but after the storm was over, it was pleasant to be folded once more to the great heart that was sorry for its excesses. To be the object of Calvin’s dislike and anger was something to fill one with dread, not only for the moment, but long afterwards, and at a distance, as poor Castellio felt when he gathered the pieces of driftwood on the banks of the Rhine at Basel.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  At the same time the eros they admire is a force that has been safely caged in matrimony—if just barely. The novels are conservative, but hardly frigid. The novels unabashedly celebrate sex itself. The romances are idealizing. The lovers are noble in blood and mien, their passion is pure and true. Even the men are usually faithful, physically; emotionally, it is imperative that they remain committed. The mutual attraction between two lovers, married or about to be so, represented a new space for literate cultural idealism around domestic bliss and private fulfillment. The social and moral logic that underwrites the genre is shared between texts, even if the individual authors regard it with different levels of reverence. The social logic of the romances transcends the genre; the raw material of the romance is preliterary, essentially folkloric. 9 Structurally the romances are stories of adversity and adventure that resolve happily in marriage. In the prelude to the final book of his romance, Chariton signaled the shift from misadventure to resolution in revealing terms: “No longer shall we have piracy and slavery, trials and battles, grisly suicide, war or captivity, but righteous passions and legitimate marriages.” Throughout the narrative the heroine faces grave dangers that call into question her status. The heroine of romance is a recognizable social type; her essence precedes her individuality. She is beautiful, of free and noble birth, and in the prime of her marriageable years. Preferably the heroine is superlatively beautiful and impeccably wellborn. Callirhoe, for instance, was the daughter of the leading citizen of Syracuse, and she was the “glory of all Sicily,” with a “beauty that was not human but divine.” Anthia, at fourteen, was “in the very bloom of her body’s beauty,” a beauty that “was an astonishment, far beyond all the other virgins.” In Leucippe and Clitophon, we first encounter Leucippe through the eyes of her lover, Clitophon, who dilates on the experience of such superhuman beauty. In Daphnis and Chloe, the drama revolves around the fact that the protagonists were exposed as infants and raised by simple peasants; Chloe, even as a sheepherder, is supremely if naively charming, but it is only in the very last sequence of the story that her true identity, as a daughter of the town’s gentry, was revealed. In fact, once she was literally scrubbed of her rural grime and properly dressed, it was indisputably obvious that her rustic parents did not in reality produce “such a maiden as that.” 10 The heroine is free, but her status is not merely an external attribute describing her current condition. Though the heroine is routinely subjected to enslavement, she retains her free nature. The heroine’s freedom is objective, a quality of her being that is apparent even to other characters in the romance. When tomb raiders abducted Callirhoe, they were worried that it would be obvious from her appearance that they had kidnapped a free person. “Her beauty isn’t human and won’t go unnoticed.

• From Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)

  [During] my formative years in New York, nightlife, clubs, and music were safe havens for the creative community. Not just trans people, but a lot of different types of artists, and a lot of different types of gender expression … There were a lot of different ways to make your money without doing sex work or dealing drugs. That’s why I’m so vocal about it: Club culture, for me, is not just entertainment. Still, the profiling by law enforcement persists. Of the “walking while trans” statute, Melissa Gira Grant writes, “Sex workers and anyone perceived to be a sex worker are believed to always be working, or, in the cops’ view, always committing a crime.” The material and social outcomes of such fabricated perception are severe. Of Pleasure Garden, Tourmaline told Artforum, Part of this exhibition has been the experience of me going to Chapter Gallery’s pop-up location on Madison Street, which is literally just three blocks away from the mutual aid society that started Seneca Village and this place owned by the Lyons family that was a refuge for Black sailors. And I’m there, watching people look at this exposed version of me … Tourmaline watches people watch her; watches people take in what are, in fact, exquisite nudes—museum-quality-nudes—and accept or shy away from the pleasure she offers them. She is in control of her image, inviting her own visibility and voyeurism. The art world strives to de-sexualize even its most erotic works; people take such pains to view sexually evocative art seriously and sterile-ly, as though it were impossible for sex to be both hot and serious, for art to be both weighty and wet. Tourmaline’s work is astonishing precisely because it is an invitation to fall softly into the messy erotics of it all; warm and inviting, her images are a party, not a doctor’s appointment. Further, she attacks the glass ceiling of a market oversaturated with nudes; by shifting their context, hers go for tens of thousands of dollars a pop. In preparation for the show, Tourmaline’s gallery sent her a first draft of image descriptions for her self-portraits. In Swallowtail, she reclines in dry grass, corset pulled down and skirt pulled up, pearls caught in her teeth. Her legs are open, and her dick rests between them, peeking out from beneath the white fabric of her gown. I sat with her as she looked over them, visiting her high-rise studio to chat about nothing and look at the city, as I often do. The image description for Swallowtail referenced a visible “phallus”; “I don’t know if I want to use that word,” she said. I asked what she wanted to use, and she said, “What sounds the most fun?” Tourmaline is disinterested in both respectability and—its relative—the discursive sanitizing of the body; I believe she and Benglis have this in common. After all, Benglis says, “I think artists create their own rules—or break them.”

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  That Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man , also published in The Library of Theological Ethics, represents a twentieth-century theological classic, there has been little question since its publication in the early forties. Yet Niebuhr’s corpus as a whole represents, I think it fair to say, the most significant theological response in America to the tumultuous historical events of the century. Correspondingly, Niebuhr’s work became important to the younger generation who came to maturity during those years of crisis and who became in subsequent decades participants in American theological and moral thought, political theory, and ethical, social, and historical reflection. If the latter generation produced few classics, at least they possessed a splendid inheritance to pass along. In this introduction I hope to situate the book before you, Moral Man and Immoral Society , within the tumult of the century and the developments in Niebuhr’s thought. If one had asked in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s who was the best known and most respected theologian in America, the answer would almost certainly have been Reinhold Niebuhr, professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York. In the middle of the 1950s he suffered a serious stroke, and inevitably his influence waned—and, incidentally, it was then that his friend and colleague, Paul Tillich, became the leading theological voice. Both of them had in those years a very wide influence on American culture. In fact, for two decades they were perhaps the leading reflective figures—philosophy had, so to speak, opted out of cultural affairs—Tillich in art, psychotherapy, and philosophy; Niebuhr in political theory, ethics, and social affairs. Each, especially Niebuhr, had enthusiastic secular followers, most of whom sought to appropriate the obvious wisdom of these theologians without their (to me) essential religious dimension. The reason for Niebuhr’s secular prominence was that he was a brilliant social and political analyst, and also a very influential political activist. He established and edited the liberal journal, Christianity and Society , and in 1946 he helped to found the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a liberal yet noncommunist group which was very important politically for the next twenty-five years. I began my own theological studies in 1945 as a student of these two transcendent figures in both our theological and our cultural lives. Most of us expected that this wide and important cultural role—in art or in politics—was perfectly possible for any good theologian. Little did we realize until later, when we tried it, how exceedingly rare it was! Niebuhr had become prominent in the early 1930s with the publication in 1932 of Moral Man and Immoral Society , offered now in The Library of Theological Ethics, and in 1934 of Reflections on the End of an Era .