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 My People (2022)

  Part VI: Honoring the Ancestors A Love Affair That Lasted for Fifty-Six Years Black Muslim Temple Renamed for Malcolm X Columbia’s Overdue Apology to Langston Hughes Remembering John Lewis and the Significance of Freedom Rides Mandela’s Birthday and Trayvon Martin’s Loss Postscript: Julian Bond The Death of a Friend Inspires Reflections on Mortality When I Met Dr. King Nelson Mandela, the Father Epilogue: Reasons for Hope amid America’s Racial Unrest Acknowledgments About the Author Also by Charlayne Hunter-Gault Copyright About the Publisher ForewordI first met Charlayne Hunter-Gault in 2016 when I shared the stage with her in New York City during a panel on covering race held for the George Polk Awards. I am not a journalist who has ever cared about how my profession can give access to celebrity, but meeting Charlayne Hunter-Gault for the first time rendered me—for lack of a better word—starstruck. It is seldom that one gets an opportunity to sit in conversation with someone whose life, activism, and career quite literally made it possible for you to live yours as you have, but for me, Ms. Hunter-Gault embodies that rarest of people. I did not feel worthy of sharing the stage with an icon of the civil rights movement, someone who integrated the all-white University of Georgia—and therefore its all-white journalism program that would one day award us both the Peabody—someone who had helped integrate newsrooms, someone who had been cataloguing the beauty and triumphs, struggles and resistance, of Black people across the diaspora for longer than I had been alive. It’s a scary and vulnerable thing to meet your heroes, and yet, Ms. Hunter-Gault treated me with the grace and generosity that she is known for even as I told her repeatedly how honored I was to meet her and talk with her. So when an email from her popped up in my inbox asking me to write the foreword for her new book, I took it as such a tremendous honor. In the aptly named My People , the veteran journalist compiles decades of reporting from the various news organizations lucky enough to have employed her, reports that begin with her own experiences integrating the University of Georgia, stretching throughout the South—the ancestral land of Black Americans—to the urban North, where she established the Harlem Bureau for the New York Times , and crossing the Atlantic to chronicle the freedom struggles of Black people on the African continent. In each story, Ms. Hunter-Gault brings the determination to analyze the fruits of the racial caste system that she was born into while also documenting the humanity, the striving, the joy, and the creativity of her people—our people. As she writes in part 5 , she wanted to focus on reporting she “didn’t see much of in the magazine (or anywhere else) at the time—the experience of ordinary Black people in the segregated South, like my dear grandmother.

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

  After this period of hermit life he began his labors in behalf of the monastery proper. In that mountainous region he established in succession twelve cloisters, each with twelve monks and a superior, himself holding the oversight of all. The persecution of an unworthy priest caused him, however, to leave Subiaco and retire to a wild but picturesque mountain district in the Neapolitan province, upon the boundaries of Samnium and Campania. There he destroyed the remnants of idolatry, converted many of the pagan inhabitants to Christianity by his preaching and miracles, and in the year 529, under many difficulties, founded upon the ruins of a temple of Apollo the renowned cloister of Monte Cassino,374 the alma mater and capital of his order. Here he labored fourteen years, till his death. Although never ordained to the priesthood, his life there was rather that of a missionary and apostle than of a solitary. He cultivated the soil, fed the poor, healed the sick, preached to the neighboring population, directed the young monks, who in increasing numbers flocked to him, and organized the monastic life upon a fixed method or rule, which he himself conscientiously observed. His power over the hearts, and the veneration in which he was held, is illustrated by the visit of Totila, in 542, the barbarian king, the victor of the Romans and master of Italy, who threw himself on his face before the saint, accepted his reproof and exhortations, asked his blessing, and left a better man, but fell after ten years’ reign, as Benedict had predicted, in a great battle with the Graeco-Roman army under Narses. Benedict died, after partaking of the holy communion, praying, in standing posture, at the foot of the altar, on the 21st of March, 543, and was buried by the side of his sister, Scholastica, who had established, a nunnery near Monte Cassino and died a few weeks before him. They met only once a year, on the side of the mountain, for prayer and pious conversation. On the day of his departure, two monks saw in a vision a shining pathway of stars leading from Monte Cassino to heaven, and heard a voice, that by this road Benedict, the well beloved of God, had ascended to heaven. His credulous biographer, Pope Gregory I., in the second book of his Dialogues, ascribes to him miraculous prophecies and healings, and even a raising of the dead.375 With reference to his want of secular culture and his spiritual knowledge, he calls him a learned ignorant and an unlettered sage.376 At all events he possessed the genius of a lawgiver, and holds the first place among the founders of monastic orders, though his person and life are much less interesting than those of a Bernard of Clairvaux, a Francis of Assisi, and an Ignatius of Loyola.377 § 44. The Rule of St. Benedict.

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

  Azzam did not make up this theory out of whole cloth. He followed al-Shafii, the eighth-century scholar who had ruled that when the Dar al-Islam was invaded by a foreign power, jihad could become fard ayn, the responsibility of every fit Muslim who lived near the frontier. Modern transport now made it possible for all Muslims to reach the border of Afghanistan, so jihad, Azzam reasoned, was “compulsory upon each and every Muslim on earth.” Once they had liberated Afghanistan, the Arab-Afghans should go on to recover all the other lands wrested from the ummah by non-Muslims—Palestine, Lebanon, Bokhara, Chad, Eritrea, Somalia, the Philippines, Burma, South Yemen, Tashkent, and Spain.10 In his lectures and writings, Azzam depicted the Afghans somewhat idealistically as untouched by the brutal mechanization of modern jahiliyyah; they represented pristine humanity. Fighting the Soviet Goliath, they reminded him of David when he was but a shepherd boy. His tales of the Afghans and Arabs who died as martyrs in this war inspired Muslim audiences worldwide. But Azzam’s martyrs were not suicide bombers or terrorists of any kind. They did not cause their own deaths or kill civilians: they were regular soldiers killed in battle by Soviet troops. Azzam was in fact adamantly opposed to terrorism, and on this point he would eventually part company with Bin Laden and the Egyptian radical Ayman al-Zawahiri. Azzam insistently maintained the orthodox view that killing noncombatants or fellow Muslims like Sadat violated fundamental Islamic teaching. In fact, he believed that a martyr could be a “witness” to divine truth even if he died peacefully in bed.11 Azzam’s classical jihadism was condemned by some scholars, but it had strong appeal for young Sunnis who were embarrassed by the success of the Shii revolution in Iran. Yet not all the volunteers were devout; some were not even observant, although in Peshawar many would be influenced by such hard-line Islamists as Zawahiri, who had suffered arrest, torture, and imprisonment in Egypt for alleged involvement in the Sadat assassination. And so Afghanistan became a new Islamist hub. Young militants from East Asia and North Africa were sent to the front to increase their commitment, and the government of Saudi Arabia actually encouraged its own young to volunteer.12

• From The Art of Memoir

  he recently told me he cared about nothing so much as veracity. He’d gone half nuts trying to write it, his wife coming home to find him in a chair surrounded by wadded up yellow legal-pad pages, and then, “I finally gave myself a kind of permission that I’d been reluctant to give to write about certain things. Now it sounds so pompous to say it—a truth telling.” While other reporters went out with troops for short stints, then came in to wire stories on deadline, Herr had no deadlines. He’d stay embedded for months, and all that time, he was cramming his notebook, capturing dialogue that still prowls my head—“‘We had this gook, and we was gonna skin him’ (a grunt told me). ‘I mean he was already dead and everything.’” Herr’s talent rests in weaving together conflicting voices, juxtaposing dialogue from all over, the tender and the monstrous side by side. He speaks in rock-and-roll lyrics, hippie aphorisms, hep-cat ebonics, army acronyms, and the pop religion of redneck grunts, and lacing it all together is his own elegiac longing for some solid ground he never really finds. This talent for capturing unforgettable dialogue no doubt grew from a childhood of innocent curiosity about strangers. Playing detective as a kid, he mastered memorizing the spoken word at an age when his peers were fixated on their Little League swings: “I was a voyeur. . . . I trained myself to eavesdrop while looking out the train window and not to miss a word. I used to walk around when I was twelve and follow people home. This would involve even taking bus rides with them. I just wanted to see where and how they lived” (Los Angeles Times, April 15, 1990). The fractured poetry of American idiom naturally enthralled him, and he cultivated an ear for the small majesty of the average human unit speaking. Herr confesses that much of Dispatches was pieced together. But he stands by the quotes that ring so true: “Very few lines were literally invented.” In other words, the voices that transfix us—and for me form the core of his talent—may be the closest to verbatim reportage. Plus his lack of historical method is moot anyway. We read Herr not to nail down external events—the date of this bombing raid or that regimental movement—but to share the journey of the

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  When, a little later, another man tried to call for Nibs, he was shushed by his neighbours; and by the time Kitty got round to her ballad and her bit of business with the rose the hall was on her side, attentive and appreciative.From my station at the side of the stage I watched her in wonder. When she stepped into the wing, weary and flushed, and her place was taken by a comic singer, I put my hand upon her arm and pressed it hard. Then Mr Bliss appeared with Mr Ling the manager. They had been watching from the front, and looked very satisfied; the former took Kitty’s hand in both of his and shook it, crying, ‘A triumph, Miss Butler! A triumph, if ever I saw one.’Mr Ling was more restrained. He gave Kitty a nod, then said, ‘Well done, my dear. A difficult crowd, and you handled it admirably. Once the band has grasped the pacing of your business and your strolls - well, you will be splendid.’Kitty only frowned. I had brought a towel with me from the change-room, and this she now caught up, and pressed to her face. Then she took her jacket off, and handed it to me, and unfastened the bow-tie at her throat. ‘It wasn’t so good,’ she said at last, ‘as I might have wished it. There was no — fizz, no sparkle.’Mr Bliss gave a snort, then spread his hands. ‘My dear, your first night in the capital! A theatre larger than you have ever worked before! The crowd will come to know you, word will spread. You must be patient. Soon they will be buying tickets just for you!’ At that I saw the manager glance his way through narrowed eyes; but Kitty, at least, allowed herself to smile. ‘That’s better,’ said Mr Bliss then. ‘And now, if you’ll permit me, ladies, I believe a light little supper would be welcome. A light little supper - and, perhaps, a heavy large glass with some of that fizz in it, Miss Butler, that you seem so keen on.’ The restaurant to which he took us was a theatre people’s one, not very far away, and filled with gentlemen in fancy waistcoats just like himself, and with girls and boys like Kitty, with streaks of greasepaint on their cuffs and crumbs of spit-black in the corners of their eyes. He seemed to have a friend at every table, every one of whom saluted him as he passed by; but he did not pause to chat with them, only waved his hat in general greeting, then led us to an empty booth and called to a waiter for a recitation of the bill of fare. When this was done, and we had made our choices, he beckoned the man a little closer and murmured something to him; the waiter withdrew, and returned a minute later with a champagne bottle, which Mr Bliss proceeded ostentatiously to uncork.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  She’s grown from “Cater to You” to “Don’t Hurt Yourself.” She’s grown from “Speechless” to “Listen” to “Sorry” to “Freedom” to “Boss.” I am fascinated by how culture shapes politics, how culture shapes our daily lives. Beyoncé takes responsibility for culture shaping and shifting. I love that every time she releases something, a thousand people need to write think pieces about what she means by it. I love the grace and precision with which she holds her responsibility in shaping culture and how she has dominated every corner of her field. I love that when I go to her concerts, they are self-love gatherings for the attendees. While the world outside rages, we come to these spaces that are centered on Black women loving themselves, and we find each other and find release. I love loving a Black woman pop star this unapologetically, in public, and still demand that anyone I meet takes me seriously in the work. Claiming Beyoncé opened up a path toward my wholeness. The following few pieces are some excerpts of my Beyoncé love notes. Beyoncé: The Conference Call Maryse.89 I heard some folks talking about burlesque, and, yes, what resonated with me was feeling like, yes, this is what I want to grind to. But also, as a former sex worker, it was so good seeing this woman who doesn’t have to show herself or her body to be successful, to make the choice to show herself in this way, powerful and liberated in her sexuality. She draws on stripper culture but in a way that is also respectful of people who actually do the work. While also at the same time being critical of all the things people have to go through to get to that place to do that work, to be desired. Mahogany. I just want to say this is great you are having this call, to get together as women and process a woman’s success and also have a safe space for talking about all this bottom bitch feminism, pardon my French. I love that she is talking about being sexy and being married women [chorus: Yes]. A lot of times, marriage is not explored as a safe space to be sexy. I get to show you how I love you, and I get be a freak with the person I am committed to. And, yes, there are some contradictions.

• From My People (2022)

  But one suspects that the talk, for years to come, will be of how they went to Washington and, for all practical purposes, “stood on Eastland’s toes.” For the urban-rural types, who were in a transitional position to begin with, the frustrations inherent in the system became only more apparent. Already leaning toward urban-type militancy, their inclinations were reenforced by the treatment that even the nonviolent received when those in control grew weary of them and their cause. The urban people did not learn anything that they hadn’t already known. Except, perhaps, about the differences that exist between them and their Southern brothers. They expected nothing, they gave little, and they got the same in return. Resurrection City was not really supposed to succeed as a city. It was supposed to succeed in dramatizing the plight of the poor in this country. Instead, its greatest success was in dramatizing what the system has done to the black community in this country. And in doing so, it affirmed the view taken by black militants today—that before black people can make any meaningful progress in the United States of America, they have to, as the militants say, “get themselves together.” Part IIMy SistersFrom my earliest years, Black women helped me on my journey into journalism. My first mentor in high school was Elsie Foster Evans, the advisor to the school paper, the Green Light . Being Black, she was forced to leave the South to obtain a degree available in the South only to white educators. She obtained her master’s degree at the University of Michigan but returned to Atlanta and worked for a brief time as a reporter for the local Black newspaper, the Atlanta Daily World , the oldest Black daily in the country. She shaped and molded me during those two years with her gentle guidance. And it was she who helped me along my path to realizing my dream. Part of that dream was finding women like those who had inspired me throughout my life, but who often didn’t get the kind of attention they deserved from the mainstream—that is, white—media. In 1972 this dream led me to persuade my New York Times editors to allow me to fly from New York, where I was based, to Chicago to cover a group of some two hundred Black women who traveled there from all over the country to “have dialogue” over the concerns that they felt distinguished their interests from those of the white women’s liberation movement. I was particularly impressed with their understanding that while Black women had been trailblazers throughout their history, it was more often than not that their opinions were not sought nor their voices heard.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  amb. You’re one of the first people that leapt to mind for this project. I want your voice in here for lots of different reasons. Outside of the Audre Lorde Project (ALP),32 just as a healer, as someone who has been shaping the way people who do change work think about being in their bodies, and being in our collective bodies, for a long time. It feels like, yes, Cara. I literally heard your voice. I was, like, who do I want to read this audiobook? Cara.33 And then Audre Lorde. “Uses of the Erotic” is a seed text for this book. It’s the first thing I read and heard that was like, “Holy shit! You can talk about that?” Just the fact you could talk about it was my first response. And it really stuck with me. That metaphor she talks about, the little golden color pellet inside the margarine, and kneading it, and feeling like, oh, you’ve been spread all through with actual aliveness. You can’t go back to suffering. I just thought, oh, that’s actually what we need to be doing. That’s what our movements should be doing. It’s such a core text, and I’m interested in how her work has echoed through time in your work. Before you came even to the Audre Lorde Project. What are the ways that you feel she’s interacted with you? Cara. In 1991 when I was twenty-one years old, I met Audre Lorde. I was one of the organizers on the Audre Lorde Cele-Conference. We embraced her while she was alive; it was very intentional, to celebrate her while she was living. And that was very powerful, right? And then my senior year, which would have been the following year, I did a series of performances, and one of them (my whole thesis in undergrad) was “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” using political theater and performance to claim body and spirit.34 And it was very much infused with that entire essay, “The Uses of the Erotic,” because it was my medicine. Alongside Toni Cade Bambara, especially The Salt Eaters. I would say Sister Outsider and The Salt Eaters changed my life.35 And around that time I met Toni Cade Bambara and Audre Lorde. I spent a long day in Iowa with Toni Cade Bambara in the airport. And we talked about sex and pleasure! So, going back to Audre Lorde, yes, I became very moved by the relationship to transforming your fear into erotic power. And transforming desire into transformative action.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  One day Smith talked to me of Emerson and confessed he had got an introduction to him and had sent it on to the philosopher with a request for an interview. He wished me to accompany him to Concord: I consented, but without any enthusiasm: Emerson was then an unknown name to me; Smith read me some of his poetry and praised it highly though I could get little or nothing out of it. When young men now show me a similar indifference, my own experience makes it easy for me to excuse them. They know not what they do! is the explanation and excuse for all of us. One bright fall day Smith and I went over to Concord and next day visited Emerson. He received us in the most pleasant, courteous way: made us sit and composed himself to listen. Smith went off at score, telling him how greatly he had influenced his life and helped him with brave encouragement: the old man smiled benignantly and nodded his head, ejaculating from time to time: “Yes, yes!” Gradually Smith warmed to his work and wanted to know why Emerson had never expressed his views on sociology or on the relations between Capital and Labor. Once or twice the old gentleman cupped his ear with his hand; but all he said was: “Yes, Yes! or I think so” with the same benevolent smile. I guessed at once that he was deaf; but Smith had no inkling of the fact for he went on probing, probing while Emerson answered pleasant nothings quite irrelevantly. I studied the great man as closely as I could. He looked about five feet nine or ten in height, very thin, attenuated even, and very scrupulously dressed: his head was narrow though long, his face bony; a long, high, somewhat beaked nose was the feature of his countenance:—a good conceit of himself, I concluded, and considerable will-power, for the chin was well-defined and large; but I got nothing more than this and from his clear steadfast gray eyes, an intense impression of kindness and good will, and why shouldn’t I say it? of sweetness even, as of a soul lifted high above earth’s carking cares and stragglings. “A nice old fellow”, I said to myself, “but deaf as a post.” Many years later his deafness became to me the symbol and explanation of his genius. He had always lived “the life removed” and kept himself unspotted from the world: that explains both his narrowness of sympathy and the height to which he grew! His narrow, pleasantly smiling face comes back to me whenever I hear his name mentioned.

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

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

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

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

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

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

• From My People (2022)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• From The Art of Memoir

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