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 Sister Outsider (1984)

  Before this I had not given much thought to the Nation of Islam because of their attitude toward women as well as because of their nonactivist stance. I’d read Malcolm’s autobiography, and I liked his style, and I thought he looked a lot like my father’s people, but I was one of the ones who didn’t really hear Malcolm’s voice until it was amplified by death. I had been guilty of what many of us are still guilty of — letting the media, and I don’t mean only the white media — define the bearers of those messages most important to our lives. When I read Malcolm X with careful attention, I found a man much closer to the complexities of real change than anything I had read before. Much of what I say here tonight was born from his words. In the last year of his life, Malcolm X added a breadth to his essential vision that would have brought him, had he lived, into inevitable confrontation with the question of difference as a creative and necessary force for change. For as Malcolm X progressed from a position of resistance to, and analysis of, the racial status quo, to more active considerations of organizing for change, he began to reassess some of his earlier positions. One of the most basic Black survival skills is the ability to change, to metabolize experience, good or ill, into something that is useful, lasting, effective. Four hundred years of survival as an endangered species has taught most of us that if we intend to live, we had better become fast learners. Malcolm knew this. We do not have to live the same mistakes over again if we can look at them, learn from them, and build upon them. Before he was killed, Malcolm had altered and broadened his opinions concerning the role of women in society and the revolution. He was beginning to speak with increasing respect of the connection between himself and Martin Luther King, Jr., whose policies of nonviolence appeared to be so opposite to his own. And he began to examine the societal conditions under which alliances and coalitions must indeed occur. He had also begun to discuss those scars of oppression which lead us to war against ourselves in each other rather than against our enemies. As Black people, if there is one thing we can learn from the 60s, it is how infinitely complex any move for liberation must be.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Although he didn’t realize it, Haggis was being drawn into the church through a classic, four-step “dissemination drill” that recruiters are carefully trained to follow. The first step is to make contact, as Jim Logan did with Haggis in 1975. The second step is to disarm any antagonism the individual may display toward Scientology. Once that’s done, the task is to “find the ruin”—that is, the problem most on the mind of the potential recruit. For Paul, it was a turbulent romance. The fourth step is to convince the subject that Scientology has the answer. “Once the person is aware of the ruin, you bring about an understanding that Scientology can handle the condition,” Hubbard writes. “It’s at the right moment on this step that one ... directs him to the service that will best handle what he needs handled.” At that point, the potential recruit has officially been transformed into a Scientologist. Paul responded to every step in an almost ideal manner. He and his girlfriend took a course together and, shortly thereafter, became Hubbard Qualified Scientologists, one of the first levels in what the church calls the Bridge to Total Freedom. HAGGIS WAS BORN in 1953, the oldest of three children. His father, Ted, ran a construction company specializing in roadwork—mostly laying asphalt and pouring sidewalks, curbs, and gutters. He called his company Global, because he was serving both London and Paris—another Ontario community fifty miles to the east. As Ted was getting his business started, the family lived in a small house in the predominantly white town. The Haggises were one of the few Catholic families in a Protestant neighborhood, which led to occasional confrontations, including a schoolyard fistfight that left Paul with a broken nose. Although he didn’t really think of himself as religious, he identified with being a minority; however, his mother, Mary, insisted on sending Paul and his two younger sisters, Kathy and Jo, to Mass every Sunday. One day, she spotted their priest driving an expensive car. “God wants me to have a Cadillac,” the priest explained. Mary responded, “Then God doesn’t want us in your church anymore.” Paul admired his mother’s stand; he knew how much her religion meant to her. After that, the family stopped going to Mass, but the children continued in Catholic schools. Ted’s construction business prospered to the point that he was able to buy a much larger house on eighteen acres of rolling land outside of town. There were a couple of horses in the stable, a Chrysler station wagon in the garage, and giant construction vehicles parked in the yard, like grazing dinosaurs. Paul spent a lot of time alone. He could walk the mile to catch the school bus and not see anyone along the way. His chores were to clean the horse stalls and the dog runs (Ted raised spaniels for field trials).

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  But she talked most movingly of the history of the women of Uzbekistan, a history which deserves more writing about than I can give it here. The ways in which the women of this area, from 1924 on, fought to come out from behind complete veiling, from Moslem cloister to the twentieth century. How they gave their lives to go bare-faced, to be able to read. Many of them fought and many of them died very terrible deaths in this battle, killed by their own fathers and brothers. It is a story of genuine female heroism and persistence. I thought of the South African women in 1956 who demonstrated and died rather than carry passbooks. For the Uzbeki women, revolution meant being able to show their faces and go to school, and they died for it. A bronze statue stands in a square of Samarkand, monument to the fallen women and their bravery. Madam went on to discuss the women of modern Uzbekistan and how there was now full equality between the sexes. How many women now headed collective farms, how many women Ministers. She said there were a great many ways in which women governed; there was no difference between men and women now in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I was touched by these statistics, of course, but I also felt that there was a little more to it than met the eye. It sounded too easy, too pat. Madam spoke of the daycare centers, of kindergartens where children could be cared for on collective farms. The kindergartens are free in large cities like Moscow and Tashkent. But in Samarkand, there’s a nominal fee of about two rubles a month, which is very little, she said. I asked her one question, whether “men are encouraged to work in the kindergartens to give the children a gentle male figure at an early age.” Madam Izbalkhan hesitated for a moment. “No,” she said. “We like to believe that when the children come to the kindergarten they acquire a second mother.” Madam Izbalkhan was a very strong and beautiful and forthright woman, excellently in charge of her facts, with a great deal of presence, and I returned from my meeting with her almost overwhelmed and over-graped. The grapes in Uzbekistan are incredible fruit. They seem to have a life of their own. They’re called “the bridesmaid’s little finger,” and that’s about the size of them. They’re very long, and green, and they’re absolutely the most delicious. I came away with revolutionary women in my head. But I feel very much now still that we, Black Americans, exist alone in the mouth of the dragon. As I’ve always suspected, outside of rhetoric and proclamations of solidarity, there is no help, except ourselves. When I asked directly about the USSR’s attitude toward American racism, Madam said reproachfully that of course the USSR cannot interfere in the internal affairs of any other nation. I wish now I had asked her about Russian Jews.

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

  Athanasius is the theological and ecclesiastical centre, as his senior contemporary Constantine is the political and secular, about which the Nicene age revolves. Both bear the title of the Great; the former with the better right, that his greatness was intellectual and moral, and proved itself in suffering, and through years of warfare against mighty, errors and against the imperial court. Athanasius contra mundum, et mundus contra Athanasium, is a well-known sentiment which strikingly expresses his fearless independence and immovable fidelity to his convictions. He seems to stand an unanswerable contradiction to the catholic maxim of authority: Quod sem per, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditum est, and proves that truth is by no means always on the side of the majority, but may often be very unpopular. The solitary Athanasius even in exile, and under the ban of council and emperor, was the bearer of the truth, and, as he was afterwards named, the "father of orthodoxy."1926 On a martyrs’ day in 313 the bishop Alexander of Alexandria saw a troop of boys imitating the church services in innocent sport, Athanasius playing the part of bishop, and performing baptism by immersion.1927 He caught in this a glimpse of future greatness; took the youth into his care; and appointed him his secretary, and afterwards his archdeacon. Athanasius studied the classics, the Holy Scriptures, and the church fathers, and meantime lived as an ascetic. He already sometimes visited St. Anthony in his solitude. In the year 325 he accompanied his bishop to the council of Nicaea, and at once distinguished himself there by his zeal and ability in refuting Arianism and vindicating the eternal deity of Christ, and incurred the hatred of this heretical party, which raised so many storms about his life. In the year 3281928 he was nominated to the episcopal succession of Alexandria, on the recommendation of the dying Alexander, and by the voice of the people, though not yet of canonical age, and at first disposed to avoid the election by flight; and thus he was raised to the highest ecclesiastical dignity of the East. For the bishop of Alexandria was at the same time metropolitan of Egypt, Libya, and Pentapolis.

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

  In the formation of his religious character his mother Nonna, one of the noblest Christian women of antiquity, exerted a deep and wholesome influence. By her prayers and her holy life she brought about the conversion of her husband from the sect of the Hypsistarians, who, without positive faith, worshipped simply a supreme being; and she consecrated her son, as Hannah consecrated Samuel, even before his birth; to the service of God. "She was," as Gregory describes her, "a wife according to the mind of Solomon; in all things subject to her husband according to the laws of marriage, not ashamed to be his teacher and his leader in true religion. She solved the difficult problem of uniting a higher culture, especially in knowledge of divine things and strict exercise of devotion, with the practical care of her household. If she was active in her house, she seemed to know nothing of the exercises of religion; if she occupied herself with God and his worship, she seemed to be a stranger to every earthly occupation: she was whole in everything. Experiences had instilled into her unbounded confidence in the effects of believing prayer; therefore she was most diligent in supplications, and by prayer overcame even the deepest feelings of grief over her own and others’ sufferings. She had by this means attained such control over her spirit, that in every sorrow she encountered, she never uttered a plaintive tone before she had thanked God." He especially celebrates also her extraordinary liberality and self-denying love for the poor and the sick. But it seems to be not in perfect harmony with this, that he relates of her: "Towards heathen women she was so intolerant, that she never offered her mouth or hand to them in salutation.1967 She ate no salt with those who came from the unhallowed altars of idols. Pagan temples she did not look at, much less would she have stepped upon their ground; and she was as far from visiting the theatre." Of course her piety moved entirely in the spirit of that time, bore the stamp of ascetic legalism rather than of evangelical freedom, and adhered rigidly to certain outward forms. Significant also is her great reverence for sacred things. "She did not venture to turn her back upon the holy table, or to spit upon the floor of the church." Her death was worthy of a holy life. At a great age, in the church which her husband had built almost entirely with his own means, she died, holding fast with one hand to the altar and raising the other imploringly to heaven, with the words: "Be gracious to me, O Christ, my King!" Amidst universal sorrow, especially among the widows and orphans whose comfort and help she had been, she was laid to rest by the side of her husband near the graves of the martyrs. Her affectionate son says in one of the poems in which he extols her piety and her blessed end: "Bewail, O mortals, the mortal race; but when one dies, like Nonna, praying, then weep I not."

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

  Gibbon: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ch. 49. J. Ellendorf: Die Karolinger und die Hierarchie ihrer Zeit. Essen., 1838, 2 vols. Hegewisch: Geschichte der Regierung Kaiser Karls des Gr. Hamb., 1791. Dippolt: Leben K. Karls des Gr. Tub., 1810. G. P. R. James: The History of Charlemagne. London, 2nd ed. 1847. Bähr: Gesch. der röm. Lit. im Karoling. Zeitalter. Carlsruhe, 1840. Gfrörer: Geschichte der Karolinger. Freiburg i. B., 1848, 2 vols. Capefigue: Charlemagne. Paris, 1842, 2 vols. Warnkönig et Gerard: Hist. des Carolingians. Brux. and Paris, 1862, 2 vols. Waitz: Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, vols. III. and IV. W. Giesebrecht: Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit. Braunschweig, 1863 sqq. (3rd ed.). Bd. I., pp. 106 sqq. Döllinger: Kaiserthum Karls des Grossen, in the Munchener Hist. Jahrbuch for 1865. Gaston: Histoire poetique de Charlemagne. Paris, 1865. P. Alberdinck Thijm: Karl der Gr. und seine Zeit. Munster, 1868. Abel: Jahrbucher des Fränkischen Reichs unter Karl d. Grossen. Berlin, 1866. Wyss: Karl der Grosse als Gesetzgeber. Zurich, 1869. Rettberg: Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands, I. 419 sqq., II. 382 sqq. Alphonse Vétault: Charlemagne. Tours, 1877 (556 pp.). With fine illustrations. L. Stacke: Deutsche Geschichte. Leipzig, 1880. Bd. I. 169 sqq. With illustrations and maps. Comp. also Milman: Latin Christianity, Book IV., ch. 12, and Book V., ch. 1; Ad. Ebert: Geschichte der Literatur des Mittelalters im Abendlande (1880), vol. II. 3–108. Of French writers, Guizot, and Martin, in their Histories of France; also Parke Godwin, History of France, chs. xvi. and xvii. (vol. I. 410 sqq.). With the death of Pepin the Short (Sept. 24, 768), the kingdom of France was divided between his two sons, Charles and Carloman, the former to rule in the Northern, the latter in the Southern provinces. After the death of his weaker brother (771) Charles, ignoring the claims of his infant nephews, seized the sole reign and more than doubled its extent by his conquests. Character and Aim of Charlemagne. This extraordinary man represents the early history of both France and Germany which afterwards divided into separate streams, and commands the admiration of both countries and nations. His grand ambition was to unite all the Teutonic and Latin races on the Continent under his temporal sceptre in close union with the spiritual dominion of the pope; in other words, to establish a Christian theocracy, coëxtensive with the Latin church (exclusive of the British Isles and Scandinavia). He has been called the "Moses of the middle age," who conducted the Germanic race through the desert of barbarism and gave it a now code of political, civil and ecclesiastical laws. He stands at the head of the new Western empire, as Constantine the Great had introduced the Eastern empire, and he is often called the new Constantine, but is as far superior to him as the Latin empire was to the Greek. He was emphatically a man of Providence.

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

  His best exegetical labors are those on the Prophets (Particularly his Isaiah, written A.D. 408–410; his Ezekiel, A.D. 410–415; and his Jeremiah to chap. xxxii., interrupted by his death), and those on the Epistles to the Galatians, Ephesians, and Titus, (written in 388), together with his critical Questions (or investigations) on Genesis. But they are not uniformly carried out; many parts are very indifferent, others thrown off with unconscionable carelessness in reliance on his genius and his reading, or dictated to an amanuensis as they came into his head.2117 He not seldom surprises by clear, natural, and conclusive expositions, while just on the difficult passages he wavers, or confines himself to adducing Jewish traditions and the exegetical opinions of the earlier fathers, especially of Origen, Eusebius, Apollinaris, and Didymus, leaving the reader to judge and to choose. His scholarly industry, taste, and skill, however, always afford a certain compensation for the defect of method and consistency, so that his Commentaries are, after all, the most instructive we have from the Latin church of that day, not excepting even those of Augustine, which otherwise greatly surpass them in theological depth and spiritual unction. He justly observes in the Preface to his Commentary on Isaiah: "He who does not know the Scriptures, does not know the power and wisdom of God; ignorance of the Bible is ignorance of Christ."2118 Jerome had the natural talent and the acquired knowledge, to make him the father of grammatico-historical interpretation, upon which all sound study of the Scriptures must proceed. He very rightly felt that the expositor must not put his own fancies into the word of God, but draw out the meaning of that word, and he sometimes finds fault with Origen and the allegorical method for roaming in the wide fields of imagination, and giving out the writer’s own thought and fancy for the hidden Wisdom of the Scriptures and the church.2119 In this healthful exegetical spirit he excelled all the fathers, except Chrysostom and Theodoret. In the Latin church no others, except the heretical Pelagius (whose short exposition of the Epistles of Paul is incorporated in the works of Jerome), and the unknown Ambrosiaster (whose commentary has found its way among the works of Ambrose), thought like him. But he was far from being consistent; he committed the very fault he censures in Eusebius, who in the superscription of his Commentary on Isaiah promised a historical exposition, but, forgetting the promise, fell into the fashion of Origen. Though he often makes very bold utterances, such as that on the original identity of presbyter and bishop,2120 and even shows traces of a loose view of inspiration,2121 yet he had not the courage, and was too scrupulously concerned for his orthodoxy, to break with the traditional exegesis. He could not resist the impulse to indulge, after giving the historical sense, in fantastic allegorizing, or, as he expresses himself, "to spread the sails of the spiritual understanding."2122

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

  Allgemeine Geschichte der christlichen Kirche, continued by Vater (Braunschweig, 1788–1820, 9 vols.), the church appears not as the temple of God on earth, but as a great infirmary and bedlam. August Neander. (Professor of Church History in Berlin, d. 1850), the "father of modern church history," a child in spirit, a giant in learning, and a saint in piety, led back the study of history from the dry heath of rationalism to the fresh fountain of divine life in Christ, and made it a grand source of edification as well as instruction for readers of every creed. His General History of the Christian Religion and Church begins after the apostolic age (which he treated in a separate work), and comes down to the Council of Basle in 1430, the continuation being interrupted by his death.26 It is distinguished for thorough and conscientious use of the sources, critical research, ingenious combination, tender love of truth and justice, evangelical catholicity, hearty piety, and by masterly analysis of the doctrinal systems and the subjective Christian life of men of God in past ages. The edifying character is not introduced from without, but naturally grows out of his conception of church history, viewed as a continuous revelation of Christ’s presence and power in humanity, and as an illustration of the parable of the leaven which gradually pervades and transforms the whole lump. The political and artistic sections, and the outward machinery of history, were not congenial to the humble, guileless simplicity of Neander. His style is monotonous, involved, and diffuse, but unpretending, natural, and warmed by a genial glow of sympathy and enthusiasm. It illustrates his motto: Pectus est quod theologum facit. Torrey’s excellent translation (Rose translated only the first three centuries), published in Boston, Edinburgh, and London, in multiplied editions, has given Neander’s immortal work even a much larger circulation in England and America than it has in Germany itself. Besides this general history, Neander’s indefatigable industry produced also special works on the Life of Christ (1837, 4th ed. 1845), the Apostolic Age (1832, 4th ed. 1842, translated by J. E. Ryland, Edinburgh, 1842, and again by E. G. Robinson, N. York, 1865), Memorials of Christian Life (1823, 3d ed. 1845, 3 vols.), the Gnostic Heresies (1818), and biographies of representative characters, as Julian the Apostate (1812), St. Bernard (1813, 2d ed. 1848), St. Chrysostom (1822, 3d ed. 1848), and Tertullian (1825, 2d ed. 1849). His History a Christian Doctrines was published after his death by Jacobi (1855), and translated by J. E. Ryland (Lond., 1858).27 From J. C. L. Gieseler (Professor of Church History in Göttingen, d. 1854), a profoundly learned, acute, calm, impartial, conscientious, but cold and dry scholar, we have a Textbook of Church History from the birth of Christ to 1854.28 He takes Tillemont’s method of giving the history in the very words of the sources; only he does not form the text from them, but throws them into notes.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  In psychotherapy it often takes some gentle coaxing before clients shift their attention away from the details of a sexual experience and focus instead on feelings of increased self-worth or admiration for their partners. So I wasn’t sure what, if anything, The Group might say about giving and receiving validation in their stories. As it turns out, without any prompting they regularly pepper their tales with spontaneous praise for their partners and themselves. Twenty-nine percent of their peak encounters contain clear statements of approval such as: “She was the sexiest women I’ve ever been with.” “A masterful lover!” “I was really hot that night—and not afraid to show it.” “He made me feel beautiful.” “She was a precious jewel to me.” Women are more likely to make affirmative statements (35 percent) than men (23 percent). Lesbians and gay men make these sorts of comments about themselves or their partners with exactly the same frequency as they mention sensual or orgasmic intensity (64 percent of the lesbians and 35 percent of the gay men), indicating that for them validation is an exceedingly important dimension of fulfilling sex. The Group is even more likely to give and receive affirmation in their favorite fantasies (42 percent), with men more likely to do so (46 percent) than the women (37 percent). In fact, giving or receiving validation is the single most frequent subjective response to fantasy among The Group as a whole and all the male subgroups, including straight men (43 percent) and gay men (67 percent). I don’t know why, but lesbians include affirmative statements in their fantasies only about half as often as they do in their stories of actual encounters. Remember, I didn’t specifically ask The Group how they felt about themselves or their partners. These are completely spontaneous expressions. I’m convinced that truly satisfying encounters and fantasies virtually always bolster the worth of the participants. The high degree of self-disclosure in positive sex—which reveals your nakedness in more ways than one—increases the significance of whatever responses you give or receive. Connie, age twenty-nine, offers a powerful example of the role of affirmation in a loving encounter that also marks the transition to a deeper level of caring: After attending a lecture, Mary returned to my apartment for tea and talk. The feeling was cozy and intimate. I asked him to sleep over but said I didn’t want to have sex. At first he said he’d leave because it would be too frustrating to sleep with me and not have me but then he changed his mind and stayed. Up to this point our relationship had been mostly sexual with a little personal conversation. The lecture, discussion, and willingness to sleep together nonsexually was a new dynamic. In retrospect, I think part of me was testing to see if he wanted me for more than sex, though I wasn’t aware of this at the time.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  It was not surprising that Hubbard would hire as his personal assistant Richard de Mille, son of the legendary producer and director Cecil B. DeMille, who had started Paramount Pictures and was in some ways responsible for the creation of Hollywood itself. In 1955, a year after the church’s founding, an editorial in Ability, a publication affiliated with the church, urged Scientologists to recruit celebrities. A long list of desirable prospects followed, including Marlene Dietrich, Walt Disney, Jackie Gleason, John Ford, Bob Hope, and Howard Hughes. “If you want one of these celebrities as your game, write us at once so the notable will be yours to hunt without interference,” the editorial promised. “If you bring one of them home you will get a small plaque as your reward.” Author William Burroughs and actor Stephen Boyd were drawn into the church in its early days. Scientology was a religion rather perfectly calibrated for its time and place, since American culture, and soon the rest of the world, was bending increasingly toward the worship of celebrity, with Hollywood as its chief shrine. At the end of the sixties, the church established its first Celebrity Centre, in Hollywood. (There are now satellites in Paris, Vienna, Düsseldorf, Munich, Florence, London, New York, Las Vegas, and Nashville.) The object was to “make celebrities even better known and to help their careers with Scientology,” Hubbard wrote. “By accomplishing this Major Target I know that Celebrity Centres can take over the whole acting-artists world.” Hubbard was particularly interested in stars whose careers had crested but still had enough luster that they could be rehabilitated and made into icons of Scientology. The prototype was Gloria Swanson, one of the greatest stars of the silent movie era, who personified the lavish glamour of that era. Although she never regained the international fame she had known before the talkies, she continued acting on television and in occasional movies—most memorably, as Norma Desmond in the 1950 classic Sunset Boulevard. Hubbard’s top auditor, Peggy Conway, a South African entertainer, ardently cultivated Swanson, calling her “My Adorable Glory,” in her many letters to the star, although she saves her highest praise for Hubbard, who was also her auditor: “The Master did his Sunday best on me,” she wrote Swanson in 1956. “He never went to bed—we talked the clock around—day after day—night after night—I was six thousand light years above Arcturus—what a genius is our Great Red Father!”

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  That was my peek down the rabbit hole. The other Isaac, like the other mother in Coraline . He’s at thirty- three pieces. He’s pretty good. “Maybe that’s why you’re here,” he says, without looking up. “Because you were honest.” I wait awhile before I say-”What do you mean?” Fifty “I saw the hype around your book. I remember walking into the hospital and seeing people reading it in waiting rooms. I even saw someone reading it at the grocery store once. Pushing her cart and reading like she couldn’t put it down. I was proud of you.” I don’t know how I feel about him being proud of me. He barely knows me. It feels condescending, but then it doesn’t. Isaac isn’t really a condescending guy. He’s equal parts humble and slightly awkward about receiving praise. I saw it in the hospital. As soon as anyone started saying good things about him, his eyes would get shifty and he’d look for an escape route. He was all clickety-clack, don’t look back. Sixty two pieces. “So how did that get me here?” “Thirty minutes,” he says. “What?” “It’s been thirty minutes. Time for a shot.” He stands up and opens the cabinet where we keep the liquor. We keep finding hidden bottles. The rum was in a Ziploc bag in the sack of rice. “Whiskey or rum?” “Rum,” I say. “I’m sick of whiskey.” He grabs two clean coffee mugs and pours our shots. I drink mine before he’s even had time to pick up his mug. I smack my lips together as it rolls down my throat. At least it’s not the cheap stuff. “Well?” I demand. “How did it get me here?” “I don’t know,” he finally says. He finds the piece he’s looking for and joins it to the ear of his deer. “But I’d be stupid to think this wasn’t a fan. It’s that or there is one other option.” His voice drops off and I know what he’s thinking. “I don’t think it was him,” I rush. I pour myself a voluntary shot. I don’t have much of an alcohol tolerance and I haven’t eaten anything today. My head does a little flipsy doosey as the alcohol runs down my throat. I watch his fingers slide, clip into place, slide, search, slide… 100 pieces. I pick up my first piece, the one with the bulldog. “You know,” Isaac says. “My bike never did grow wings.” The rum has curbed my vinegar and loosened the muscles in my face. I fold my features into a version of shock mock and Isaac cracks up. “No, I don’t suppose it did. Birds are the only things that grow wings. We’re just left to muck through the mire like a bunch of emotional cave men.” “Not if you have someone to carry you.”

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

  The arrival of Columba at Iona was the beginning of the Keltic church in Scotland. The island was at that time on the confines of the Pictic and Scotic jurisdiction, and formed a convenient base for missionary labors among the Scots, who were already Christian in name, but needed confirmation, and among the Picts, who were still pagan, and had their name from painting their bodies and fighting naked. Columba directed his zeal first to the Picts; he visited King Brude in his fortress, and won his esteem and co-operation in planting Christianity among his people. "He converted them by example as well as by word" (Bede). He founded a large number of churches and monasteries in Ireland and Scotland directly or through his disciples.85 He was involved in the wars so frequent in those days, when even women were required to aid in battle, and he availed himself of military force for the overthrow of paganism. He used excommunication very freely, and once pursued a plunderer with maledictions into the sea until the water reached to his knees. But these rough usages did not interfere with the veneration for his name. He was only a fair type of his countrymen. "He had," says Montalembert, "the vagabond inclination, the ardent, agitated, even quarrelsome character of the race." He had the "perfervidum ingenium Scotorum." He was manly, tall and handsome, incessantly active, and had a sonorous and far-reaching voice, rolling forth the Psalms of David, every syllable distinctly uttered. He could discern the signs of the weather. Adamnan ascribes to him an angelic countenance, a prophetic fore-knowledge and miracles as great as those performed by Christ, such as changing water into wine for the celebration of the eucharist, when no wine could be obtained, changing bitter fruit into sweet, drawing water from a rock, calming the storm at sea, and curing many diseases. His biography instead of giving solid facts, teems with fabulous legends, which are told with childlike credulity. O’Donnell’s biography goes still further. Even the pastoral staff of Columba, left accidentally upon the shore of Iona, was transported across the sea by his prayers to meet its disconsolate owner when he landed somewhere in Ireland.86 Columba died beside the altar in the church while engaged in his midnight devotions. Several poems are ascribed to him—one in praise of the natural beauties of his chosen island, and a monastic rule similar to that of St. Benedict; but the "regula ac praecepta" of Columba, of which Wilfrid spoke at the synod of Whitby, probably mean discipline or observance rather than a written rule.87

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

  Augustine, the man with upturned eye, with pen in the left hand, and a burning heart in the right (as he is usually represented), is a philosophical and theological genius of the first order, towering like a pyramid above his age, and looking down commandingly upon succeeding centuries. He had a mind uncommonly fertile and deep, bold and soaring; and with it, what is better, a heart full of Christian love and humility. He stands of right by the side of the greatest philosophers of antiquity and of modern times. We meet him alike on the broad highways and the narrow footpaths, on the giddy Alpine heights and in the awful depths of speculation, wherever philosophical thinkers before him or after him have trod. As a theologian he is facile princeps, at least surpassed by no church father, scholastic, or reformer. With royal munificence he scattered ideas in passing, which have set in mighty motion other lands and later times. He combined the creative power of Tertullian with the churchly spirit of Cyprian, the speculative intellect of the Greek church with the practical tact of the Latin. He was a Christian philosopher and a philosophical theologian to the full. It was his need and his delight to wrestle again and again with the hardest problems of thought, and to comprehend to the utmost the divinely revealed matter of the faith.2160 He always asserted, indeed, the primacy of faith, according to his maxim: Fides praecedit intellectum; appealing, with theologians before him, to the well-known passage of Isaiah vii. 9 (in the LXX.): "Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis." But to him faith itself was an acting of reason, and from faith to knowledge, therefore, there was a necessary transition.2161 He constantly looked below the surface to the hidden motives of actions and to the universal laws of diverse events. The metaphysician and the Christian believer coalesced in him. His meditatio passes with the utmost ease into oratio, and his oratio into meditatio. With profundity he combined an equal clearness and sharpness of thought. He was an extremely skilful and a successful dialectician, inexhaustible in arguments and in answers to the objections of his adversaries. He has enriched Latin literature with a greater store of beautiful, original, and pregnant proverbial sayings, than any classic author, or any other teacher of the church.2162 He had a creative and decisive hand in almost every dogma of the church, completing some, and advancing others. The centre of his system is the free redeeming grace of God in Christ, operating through the actual, historical church. He is evangelical or Pauline in his doctrine of sin and grace, but catholic (that is, old-catholic, not Roman Catholic) in his doctrine of the church. The Pauline element comes forward mainly in the Pelagian controversy, the catholic-churchly in the Donatist; but each is modified by the other.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] Uncle Earle was my favorite of all my uncles. He was known as Black Earle for three counties around. Mama said he was called Black Earle for that black black hair that fell over his eyes in a great soft curl, but Aunt Raylene said it was for his black black heart. He was a good-looking man, soft-spoken and hardworking. He told Mama that all the girls loved him because he looked like Elvis Presley, only skinny and with muscles. In a way he did, but his face was etched with lines and sunburned a deep red-brown. The truth was he had none of Elvis Presley’s baby-faced innocence; he had a devilish look and a body Aunt Alma swore was made for sex. He was a big man, long and lanky, with wide hands marked with scars. “Earle looks like trouble coming in on greased skids,” my uncle Beau laughed. All the aunts agreed, their cheeks wrinkling around indulgent smiles while their fingers trailed across Uncle Earle’s big shoulders as sweetly and tenderly as the threadlike feet of hummingbirds. Uncle Earle always seemed to have money in his pockets, some job he was just leaving and another one he was about to take up. His wife had left him around the time Lyle Parsons died, because of what she called his lying ways. He wouldn’t stay away from women, and that made her mad. Teresa was Catholic and took her vows seriously, which Earle had expected, but he had never imagined she would leave him for messing around with girls he would never have married and didn’t love. His anger and grief over losing her and his three daughters gave him an underlying bitterness that seemed to make him just that much more attractive. “That Earle’s got the magic,” Aunt Ruth told me. “Man is just a magnet to women. Breaks their hearts and makes them like it.” She shook her head and smiled at me. “All these youngsters playing at being something, imagining they can drive women wild with their narrow little hips and sweet baby smiles, they never gonna have the gift Earle has, don’t even know enough to recognize it for what it is. A sad wounded man who genuinely likes women—that’s what Earle is, a hurt little boy with just enough meanness in him to keep a woman interested.” She pushed my hair back off my face and ran her thumb over my eyebrows, smoothing down the fine black hairs. “Your real daddy…” She paused, looked around, and started again. “He had some of that too, just enough, anyway, to win your mama. He liked women too, and that’s something I can say for him. A man who really likes women always has a touch of magic.”

• From My People (2022)

  But while I didn’t know about the Freedom Riders’ stop at that time, I did know about those who were engaged in the struggle for justice—as they were only seventy-three miles away in Atlanta, my hometown. On weekends, I used to travel there to practice what would ultimately become my lifelong profession as I helped out on the Atlanta Inquirer , a small newspaper started to accurately cover the Atlanta Student Movement, which the all-white newspaper in the city didn’t do and which the Black newspaper didn’t do fully, due to constraints by its white advertisers. One of two editors on the Inquirer was Julian Bond, a local student from the all-Black Morehouse College who later teamed up with John to push for voting rights; and an English professor, M. Carl Holman, from the all-Black Clark College. Julian divided his time between getting out the paper and working with the Atlanta students, including helping write their manifesto called the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights. They swore to go to jail without bail until their demands were met. And some did, in fact, go to jail, along with Martin Luther King Jr., who had joined them. Like today, the young ones had ideas of their own about how to confront injustice, but respect for elders in the movement and the road they had traveled led to a coalition of the generations that ultimately proved successful. That decade is where the passing of John Lewis took me to. For while Hamilton Holmes and I were alone as Black students on the UGA campus, part of our ability to survive that lonely and sometimes challenging journey was the example of people like John Lewis and Julian Bond and so many others who were confronting violence—beyond the silent violence we were being exposed to daily and being the horrified victims of it—all to make America live up to its promise and to understand its potential greatness. And while these protests were aimed at achieving equality for people who looked like me—darker or lighter—and were led by people my age and even younger, they were joined by people of all ages, races, creeds, and colors who were on board with the ultimate goal of freedom for all. John Lewis and his moral crusade continued until he became our latest ancestor last week. We all have an obligation to ensure his life was not in vain. How do we do that, in a nation so divided that we can’t even agree on how to protect ourselves and each other from this latest pandemic? We need to figure out how to share our history, especially with our young, because there is evidence that some 85 percent of our schools are not teaching all of it.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  He began with the idea that man is basically good. Even a criminal leaves clues to his crime, because he wishes for someone to stop his unethical behavior, Hubbard theorized. Similarly, a person who has accidentally hurt himself or gotten ill is “ putting ethics in on himself” in order to lessen the damage he does to others or to his environment. These were testaments to the basic longing of all people to live decent, worthy lives. Good and evil actions can be judged only by understanding what Hubbard termed the Eight Dynamics. The First Dynamic is the Self and its urge toward existence. The Second Dynamic is Sex, which includes the sexual act as well as the family unit. The Third Dynamic is the Group—any school, or class, organization, city, or nation. The Fourth Dynamic is Mankind. The Fifth Dynamic is the urge toward existence of all living creatures, including vegetables and grass—“anything directly and intimately motivated by life.” The Sixth Dynamic is the matter, energy, space, and time that compose the reality we live in. The Seventh Dynamic is the Spiritual, which must be obtained before expanding into the Eighth Dynamic, which is called Infinity or God. The Scientology mantra for judging ethical behavior is “ the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics”—a formula that can excuse quite a number of crimes. Every individual or group moves through stages, which Hubbard calls Ethics Conditions, that incline toward either survival or collapse. They range from the highest state, Power, to the lowest, Confusion. The way to determine what condition one is in at any given moment is through statistics, compiled each Thursday at two p.m. For a Scientology church, the relevant statistic might be how much money it is bringing in. The “org” that brings in less money week after week is in a condition of Non-Existence, which, plotted on a graph, is represented as a steeply plummeting line. A level or slightly declining line indicates a condition of Emergency. Slightly up is Normal; sharply up is Affluence. Every Scientology organization, and every member of its staff, henceforth would be judged by the implacable weekly statistics. Hubbard warned his charges, “ You have to establish an ethics presence hard. Otherwise, you’re just gonna be wrapped around a telegraph pole.” The years at sea were critical ones for the future of Scientology. Even as Hubbard was inventing the doctrine, each of his decisions and actions would become enshrined in Scientology lore as something to be emulated— his cigarette smoking, for instance, which is still a feature of the church’s culture at the upper levels, as are his 1950s habits of speech, his casual misogyny, his aversion to perfume and scented deodorants, and his love of cars and motorcycles and Rolex watches. More significant is the legacy of his belittling behavior toward subordinates and his paranoia about the government. Such traits stamped the religion as an extremely secretive and sometimes hostile organization that saw enemies on every corner.

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

  98 The only true conquest was personal submission to what Ashoka called dhamma: a moral code of compassion, mercy, honesty, and consideration for all living creatures. Ashoka inscribed similar edicts outlining his new policy of military restraint and moral reform on cliff faces and colossal cylindrical pillars throughout the length and breadth of his empire. 99 These edicts were intensely personal messages but could also have been an attempt to give the far-flung empire ideological unity; they may have even been read aloud to the populace on state occasions. Ashoka urged his people to curb their greed and extravagance; promised that, as far as possible, he would refrain from using martial force; preached kindness to animals; and vowed to replace the violent sport of hunting, the traditional pastime of kings, with royal pilgrimages to Buddhist shrines. He also announced that he had dug wells, founded hospitals and rest houses, and planted banyan trees “which will give shade to beasts and men.” 100 He insisted on the importance of respect for teachers, obedience to parents, consideration for slaves and servants, and reverence for all sects—for the orthodox Brahmins as well as for Buddhists, Jains, and other “heretical” schools. “Concord is to be commended,” he declared, “so that men may hear one another’s principles.” 101 It is unlikely that Ashoka’s dhamma was Buddhist. This was a broader ethic, an attempt to find a benevolent model of governance based on the recognition of human dignity, a sentiment shared by many contemporary Indian schools. In Ashoka’s inscriptions, we hear the perennial voice of those repelled by killing and cruelty who have, throughout history, tried to resist the call to violence. But even though he preached “abstention from killing living beings,” 102 he had tacitly to acknowledge that, as emperor and for the sake of the region’s stability, he could not renounce force; nor in these times could he abolish capital punishment or legislate against the killing and eating of animals (although he listed species that should be protected). Moreover, despite his distress about the plight of the Kalingans who had been deported after the battle, there was no question of repatriating them since they were essential to the imperial economy. And as head of state, he could certainly not abjure warfare or disband his army. He realized that even if he abdicated and became a Buddhist monk, others would fight to succeed him and unleash more havoc, and as always, the peasants and the poor would suffer most. Ashoka’s dilemma is the dilemma of civilization itself. As society developed and weaponry became more deadly, the empire, founded on and maintained by violence, would paradoxically become the most effective means of keeping the peace. Despite its violence and exploitation, people looked for an absolute imperial monarchy as eagerly as we search for signs of a flourishing democracy today.

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

  II. The Praefatio et Vitae in the first vol. of the ed. of Maffei, and Migne (tom. i. 125 sqq.). Hieronymus: De viris illustr. c. 100. Tillemont (tom. vii.); Ceillier (tom. v.); and Butler, sub Jan. 14. Kling, in Herzog’s Encykl. vi. 84 ff. On the Christology of Hilary, comp. especially Dorner, Entwicklungsgeschichte, i. 1037 ff. Hilary of Poitiers, or Pictaviensis, so named from his birth-place and subsequent bishopric in Southwestern France, and so distinguished from other men of the same name,2080 was especially eminent in the Arian controversies for his steadfast confession and powerful defence of the orthodox faith, and has therefore been styled the "Athanasius of the West." He was born towards the end of the third century, and embraced Christianity in mature age, with his wife and his daughter Apra.2081 He found in the Holy Scriptures the solution of the riddle of life, which he had sought in vain in the writings of the philosophers. In the year 350 he became bishop of his native city, and immediately took a very decided stand against Arianism, which was at that time devastating the Gallic church. For this he was banished by Constantius to Phrygia in Asia Minor, where Arianism ruled. Here, between 356 and 361, he wrote his twelve books on the Trinity, the main work of his life.2082 He was recalled to Gaul, then banished again, and spent the last years of his life in rural retirement till his death in 368. We have from him, besides the theological work already mentioned several smaller polemic works against Arianism, viz., On Synods, or the Faith of the Orientals (358); fragments of a history of the Synod of Ariminum and Seleucia; a tract against the Arian emperor Constantius, and one against the Arian bishop Auxentius of Milan. He wrote also Commentaries on the Psalms (incomplete), and the Gospel of Matthew, which are partly a free translation of Origen,2083 and some original hymns, which place him next to Ambrose among the lyric poets of the ancient church.

• From The Art of Memoir

  Speak, Memory (1951), and Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957). Nabokov was publishing excerpts in France starting in 1936, and McCarthy in the New Yorker in 1946, but for my money, it was Wright who first won an audience in book length without being wildly famous first. Wright started shaping the form as we think of it today. (The next generation featured Maya Angelou and Frank Conroy, who no doubt learned from the aforementioned first- timers.) Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery had previously been a national best seller, but Washington had been a major figure before. Wright was the first African American to ride from oblivion onto the New York Times best-seller list. Not the last, though, for Malcolm X (1965) and Angelou (1969) bobbed in his wake. As a little white girl in segregated Texas, I found such books showed me racism as we were all still gagging on it. Today I even wonder if those memoirs didn’t partly fuel the civil rights movement. Without them, black experience would’ve been rendered solely in sociopolitical speak. Wright’s refusal to shuffle Uncle Tom–like down the page trying to cull favor was a revolutionary act at his time in history, and it reads as true in that context. Of course, his voice can also transport with its poetry: Each event spoke with a cryptic tongue. And the moments of living slowly released their coded meanings. There was the wonder I felt when I first saw a brace of mountainlike, spotted, black-and-white horses clopping down a dusty road through clouds of powdered clay. There was the delight I caught in seeing long straight rows of red and green vegetables stretching away in the sun to the bright horizon. But such tender moments stand in stark relief to the brutal facts of the Jim Crow South and segregated Chicago. He starts off Black Boy with a distracted, aimless rage; deciding to set the family house on fire: My idea was growing, blooming. Now I was wondering just how the long fluffy white curtains would look if I lit a bunch of [broom] straws on fire and held it under them. Would I try it? Sure.

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

  Athens, partly through its ancient renown and its historical traditions, partly by excellent teachers of philosophy and eloquence, Sophists, as they were called in an honorable sense, among whom Himerius and Proaeresius were at that time specially conspicuous, was still drawing a multitude of students from all quarters of Greece, and even from the remote provinces of Asia. Every Sophist had his own school and party, which was attached to him with incredible zeal, and endeavored to gain every newly arriving student to its master. In these efforts, as well as in the frequent literary contests and debates of the various schools among themselves, there was not seldom much rude and wild behavior. To youth who were not yet firmly grounded in Christianity, residence in Athens, and occupation with the ancient classics, were full of temptation, and might easily kindle an enthusiasm for heathenism, which, however, had already lost its vitality, and was upheld solely by the artificial means of magic, theurgy, and an obscure mysticism.1941 Basil and Gregory remained steadfast, and no poetical or rhetorical glitter could fade the impressions of a pious training. Gregory says of their studies in Athens, in his forty-third Oration:1942 "We knew only two streets of the city, the first and the more excellent one to the churches, and to the ministers of the altar; the other, which, however, we did not so highly esteem, to the public schools and to the teachers of the sciences. The streets to the theatres, games, and places of unholy amusements, we left to others. Our holiness was our great concern; our sole aim was to be called and to be Christians. In this we placed our whole glory."1943 In a later oration on classic studies Basil encourages them, but admonishes that they should be pursued with caution, and with constant regard to the great Christian purpose of eternal life, to which all earthly objects and attainments are as shadows and dreams to reality. In plucking the rose one should beware of the thorns, and, like the bee, should not only delight himself with the color and the fragrance, but also gain useful honey from the flower.1944 The intimate friendship of Basil and Gregory, lasting from fresh, enthusiastic youth till death, resting on an identity of spiritual and moral aims, and sanctified by Christian piety, is a lovely and engaging chapter in the history of the fathers, and justifies a brief episode in a field not yet entered by any church historian.