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 Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  S. H. Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam (Princeton, 2008). A masterly study of the crisis caused by the Mongols with a wider perspective than its already wide title implies is P. Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 1221–1410 (Harlow, 2005). Richly enjoyable in its no-nonsense sifting of probability from wishful thinking in Ethiopian Church history is S. Munro-Hay, The Quest for the Ark of the Covenant: The True History of the Tablets of Moses (London, 2006). PART IV: THE UNPREDICTABLE RISE OF ROME (300–1300) General Reading Quite magnificent in its originality and powers of synthesis is the work of the doyen of the field, P. Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity AD 200–1000 (Oxford, 1997). From a master of a previous generation comes a fine introduction, R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (London, 1970). An introduction which usefully draws on social and economic history, and which takes no prisoners, is R. Collins, Early Medieval Europe 300–1000 (Houndmills, 1991). 9: The Making of Latin Christianity (300–500) For the beginning of the period, see the reading for Chapter 6, but to those works should be added the particular focus on the city of Rome in J. R. Curran, Pagan City and Christian Capital: Rome in the Fourth Century (Oxford, 2000), also against the wider background presented with concise brilliance in P. Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (London, 1981). Much profit and entertainment can be derived from the essayists of A. Momigliano (ed.), The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century: Essays (Oxford, 1963). Augustine is perhaps the only Father of the Church whom non-Christians can read for pleasure, at least in two key works, H. Bettenson and D. Knowles (eds.), Augustine: Concerning the City of God against the Pagans (London, 1967), and R. S. Pine-Coffin (ed.), Saint Augustine: Confessions (London, 1961). Two splendid lives of this most central of Western theologians are G. Bonner, Saint Augustine of Hippo: Life and Controversies (2nd edn, Norwich, 1963) and P. Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (London, 1969). An absorbing effort to squeeze as much as possible out of the limited evidence, although there have been archaeological discoveries

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  since, is C. Thomas, Christianity in Roman Britain to AD 500 (London, 1981). 10: Latin Christendom: New Frontiers (500–1000) The period is well served for general introductions, such as G. R. Evans, The Church in the Early Middle Ages (London, 2007), J. Herrin, The Formation of Christendom (London, 1989), F. D. Logan, A History of the Church in the Middle Ages (London, 2002), T. F. X. Noble and J. M. H. Smith (eds.), The Cambridge History of Christianity 3: Early Medieval Christianities, c. 600–c. 1100 (Cambridge, 2008), and C. Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 (London and New York, 2009) – the last providing a wide sweep of perspectives including emphasis on the social and economic background. An eloquent and absorbing study, weighted before 1000, is R. Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe: From Paganism to Christianity 371–1386 AD (London, 1997). On a key figure, an excellent starter is R. A. Markus, Gregory the Great and His World (Cambridge, 1997), and there are fine essays on another key personality in J. Story (ed.), Charlemagne: Empire and Society (Manchester, 2005). J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church (Oxford, 1983), is a substantial study of the section of the Western Church which transformed religious patterns on a much wider scale. H. Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England (3rd edn, London, 1991) delightfully introduces the subject, in the nature of things owing much to an equally delightful work by an only slightly more venerable historian, L. Sherley- Price and R. E. Latham (eds.), Bede: A History of the English Church and People (rev. edn, London, 1968). More classic hagiographies of the period, some by Bede himself, are to be encountered in J. F. Webb (tr.) and D. H. Farmer (ed.), The Age of Bede (London, 1983). 11: The West: Universal Emperor or Universal Pope? (900–1200) After the general introductions to the whole period listed above, a refreshingly iconoclastic perspective is R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford, 1987), expanded into a more general survey in R. I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215 (Oxford, 2000). K. G. Cushing, Reform and the Papacy in the Eleventh Century: Spirituality and Social Change (Manchester and New York, 2005), presents a clear overview of the Gregorian Revolution, and is usefully

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  In all, twelve Americans walked on the Moon between 1969 and 1972. And that was it. Since Apollo 17, humankind has never returned. —It has been fifty years since Apollo 8 flew to the Moon. Many of the key managers at NASA who made the mission happen have since died, including former administrators James Webb and Thomas Paine; Director of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center Robert Gilruth; Chief of Astronaut Division Deke Slayton; Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight George Mueller; Director of NASA’s Apollo Manned Lunar Landing Program Samuel Phillips; and rocket mastermind Wernher von Braun. All three astronauts who served as CapComs during Apollo 8—Mike Collins, Ken Mattingly, and Jerry Carr—are still living. Collins went to the Moon as part of Apollo 11, Mattingly on Apollo 16, both as command module pilots. Carr became a commander on Skylab, America’s first space station, in 1973–74. Apollo 8’s lead flight director, Cliff Charlesworth, died in 1991. The mission’s other two flight directors, Glynn Lunney and Milton Windler, are retired. At age ninety-five (as of 2019), Chris Kraft remains as sharp and feisty as ever. After a long and distinguished career at NASA, he retired as the director of the Johnson Space Center in 1982, then served as a consultant for several major corporations. He still has strong opinions on the space program, still remembers—vividly—watching Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig hit home runs in the early 1930s. George Low, the mastermind behind sending Apollo 8 to the Moon, became NASA’s deputy administrator in late 1969. After retiring from the agency in 1976, he became the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In 1984, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work with America’s space program. He died the next day, of cancer, at age fifty-eight. In one of the last interviews of his life, in 2011, Neil Armstrong called Apollo 8 “an enormously bold decision” that catapulted the American space program forward. Harrison Schmitt, one of the two last people to set foot on the Moon as part of the crew of Apollo 17, said of the flight, “It was probably the most remarkable effort that the NASA team down here ever put together.” When asked to compare Apollo 8 to his historic flight, astronaut Mike Collins said, “I think Apollo 8 was about leaving and Apollo 11 was about arriving, leaving Earth and arriving at the Moon. As you look back one hundred years from now, which is more important? I’m not sure, but I think probably you would say Apollo 8 was of more significance than Apollo 11.” Astronaut Ken Mattingly said, “Of all of the events to participate in, you know, I was lucky because I could do Apollo 11 as well as 8 and then 13.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  The famed British astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell, who’d been critical of the mission and its myriad risks, expressed deep admiration for the flight. Pope Paul VI said the mission brought honor to these pioneers of mind and adventure. Only a few naysayers popped up, most notably Samuel Shenton, founder of the England-based Flat Earth Society, who said the public was being hoodwinked by NASA. “How does that grab you, Frank?” Carr asked during his report of the headlines. “It doesn’t look too flat from here, but I don’t know, maybe something is wrong with our vision,” Borman replied. Carr finished by describing the scene at the astronauts’ homes—the Christmas trees, wreaths, red bows, even the fake snow on the lawns. It was nearly 7:30 A .M . in Houston on Christmas morning, and all through the Borman, Lovell, and Anders homes, the children were awakening to celebrate. An hour later, Susan Borman, her sons, and Frank’s parents were in church. Susan was dressed in a powder blue boatneck dress with a white coat, and she held a thin, square cardboard box containing a reel-to-reel tape. She had the recording played for the congregation. It was a prayer for peace that Frank had read from space, and the verses from Genesis that had been read by the crew. Reporters had followed the Bormans to church, and Susan paused to speak with them on the way out. She told them she hadn’t opened any of the presents under her tree, and she didn’t intend to until Frank came home. “We’ll be each other’s big present,” she said. At the Lovell home, the children scrambled over each other to unwrap their gifts, many of which were delivered by a family friend wearing a Santa suit. When young Jeffrey ran outside to show the gathered reporters the toys he’d received, Marilyn noticed a photographer from the Associated Press, one of the nicer members of the press corps who’d been covering the family, standing in the cold. She walked outside to talk to him. “Why don’t you go home to your family?” she asked. “It’s Christmas.” “I can’t until I get a picture,” he replied. “Okay, wait a minute,” Marilyn said, then went back into her house. A few minutes later, the Lovell children came outside, each holding a new toy—a pogo stick, race cars, a yellow helicopter. The photographer snapped away. When he finally had his fill, Marilyn wished him a merry Christmas—and gently urged him on his way. Although she was sure the man had gone, the doorbell rang again. This time the man standing before her was finely dressed and wearing a chauffeur’s cap. Parked behind him was a Rolls-Royce. In his arms he held a box from the Neiman Marcus department store, beautifully wrapped in blue foil and decorated by two sequined spheres, one colored like the Earth, the other like the Moon. When Marilyn looked closer, she could see a little toy spaceship hovering over the lunar surface.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  One night, he and his family were honored at a crowded dinner at the regal restaurant in Moscow’s famed Metropole Hotel. One of the cosmonauts in attendance, Alexei Leonov, was struck by a piece of Borman’s attire—in place of a traditional necktie, he wore a bolo tie set with a bright blue stone. “Everyone wanted to stand near to him,” Leonov would later write of the evening. “To touch him.” Borman congratulated Leonov on his 1965 spacewalk and described how the Moon had appeared close up, then showed slides of his lunar journey to a rapt audience. Although Borman had considered the Soviet Union an enemy, he liked the Russian people and held the cosmonauts in the highest regard—no westerner better understood the rigors of their training, or the great risks they took for their country. Susan took a ring from her finger and gave it to a cosmonaut, a gift from her family to theirs. By trip’s end, Borman saw the cosmonauts as he saw the astronauts—a group of test and fighter pilots, all of whom wanted more than anything else to help their country succeed. And he admired their candor—to a man, they seemed generous in acknowledging that America had won the race to the Moon. —On July 16, 1969, NASA launched Apollo 11 from Cape Kennedy. On board were astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins. Orbiting the Moon, Armstrong gave a shout-out to Apollo 8. “We’re over Mount Marilyn at the present time,” he radioed to Houston. A day later, July 20, Apollo 11’s lunar module set down on the lunar surface, at one of the sites at the Sea of Tranquillity scouted by Apollo 8. “The Eagle has landed,” Armstrong radioed to Mission Control. Six and a half hours later, Armstrong exited the spacecraft, climbed down its ladder, and set foot on the Moon. “That’s one small step for [a] man; one giant leap for mankind,” Armstrong told the world. Aldrin followed onto the lunar surface several minutes later. Just eight years after a young president had pledged to do the impossible by decade’s end, America had made good on his promise. Men had landed on the Moon. —In early August 1969, the atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair and her affiliated group brought a lawsuit against NASA and its chief, Thomas Paine, for allowing the reading of the first lines of Genesis by the crew of Apollo 8 during lunar orbit. That action, O’Hair claimed, abridged her First Amendment right to be free from religion and violated the First Amendment by establishing Christianity as a state religion. Further, she alleged that NASA had chosen Christmas for Apollo 8’s mission for religious reasons. She asked the court to prevent NASA, a public agency, from future religious displays or readings. A United States district court judge threw out the lawsuit; the United States Supreme Court refused to hear O’Hair’s appeal. By the time Apollo 11 had returned from its historic mission, some shuffling had gone on with Apollo crews.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  —As the weeks passed, the Apollo 8 astronauts got to know not just the spacecraft and the mission, but also one another. Borman and Lovell already knew they flew well together. Anders was the newcomer—and a revelation to the other two men. In his six years at NASA, Borman had never seen a harder worker, or a man of deeper integrity, than Anders. It was true that Anders had his own ideas about what was important, and didn’t always agree with Borman on mission priorities, but he never went around Borman’s authority or took a shortcut to anything. To Borman, character and competence counted more than most anything else, and Anders had plenty of both. Borman could think of no other astronaut in the entire program, longtime veterans included, he would have chosen over Anders for systems engineer. Lovell, too, thought the team lucky to have Anders, and for many of the same reasons. He admired the way Anders had handled his initial disappointment with Apollo 8’s change in assignment, one that likely meant he’d never set foot on the Moon. And he appreciated that Anders saw adventure and exploration in the chance to make man’s first lunar journey. To both of them, going to the Moon wasn’t just about beating the Soviets. It was a chance to do something incredible. For his part, Anders felt welcomed by this old NASA duo. Like many, he considered Lovell a hail-fellow-well-met, just the kind of easy hand you’d want along on a six-day trip, whether to a fishing hole or to the Moon. Borman was another matter. Anders saw much of himself in the commander—the all-business demeanor, the intensity of approach, the swiftness and certainty of opinion. Sometimes when Borman barked an order at Anders, it was as if Anders was hearing it from himself. But that didn’t mean he always had to sit there and take it, even if Borman outranked him. “Look, Frank,” Anders said one day, “my job is to make sure this spacecraft works, and I guarantee you that I’m going to know whether it’s going to work or not. So you spend your time worrying about the mission and the rocket, and I’ll worry about the spacecraft.” Borman respected that. Character and competence . The crew only got better after that. Despite the synergy and good teamwork, it seemed to Lovell and Anders that Borman might be dealing with a private stress, one not shared by his crewmates. Borman had a short fuse when planners tried to add superfluous tasks to Apollo 8; he angrily rejected NASA’s idea of opening the hatch in space and adding a spacewalk to the flight. More than anything, Borman seemed willing to die on small hills—a rejection of NASA’s new food, a refusal to allow a TV camera on board the spacecraft.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  After more than a decade at the helm, Borman resigned as the company’s chairman in 1986. No longer bound to Miami, the Bormans moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where their son Fred owned a car dealership. While there, Frank and Susan enjoyed one of the easiest and happiest stretches of their marriage. Frank served on corporate boards, invested in the car dealership with Fred, and stayed close to their other son, Ed, who’d become a helicopter test pilot. Frank did a lot of flying of small aircraft, still a foundational pleasure. Susan designed and rebuilt a home in the desert. After more than a decade in New Mexico, Frank and Susan moved to Montana, following their son Fred, who’d purchased a cattle ranch. Frank continued to fly in Montana’s big skies and attended air shows across the country with Susan. To this day, he thinks about a time in 1951 when, as an Air Force pilot, he ruptured an eardrum and was grounded permanently by order of the flight surgeon. Lying heartbroken in bed in the Philippines, he told Susan he’d leave the military and get a job as an aeronautical engineer. Susan had every reason to rejoice: She was a 21-year-old new mother with another baby on the way; Frank could earn a decent wage as a civilian; and the family could finally have a normal life, not one in which fighter pilots often died. Instead, Susan told her husband, “You will not do that. Flying means too much to you. You’ll go see Major McGee and show him you can fly.” Frank hardly knew what to say. But at Susan’s urging, he asked Charles McGee, one of the original Tuskegee Airmen, to give him a shot. McGee didn’t hesitate, putting Frank in an airplane and checking him out. When the flight surgeon found out that the legendary McGee had given his blessing, Frank was back in the cockpit. It’s a story Borman seldom tells to others, but decades later he still can’t get over what Susan did to save his career, and him. People still recognize Frank in Montana sometimes. Some ask if he still looks up into the sky at the Moon and thinks about having gone there. He smiles, but tells the truth: “I suppose I do, but not often.” —Shortly after Apollo 13’s safe return in 1970, political heavyweights in Wisconsin approached Jim Lovell about running as a Republican for United States Senate in his home state. He demurred, but that didn’t stop Vice President Spiro Agnew, then President Nixon himself, from stepping in to press the recruiting effort. The election was just six months away; even with a war chest from the party, Lovell still had no structure, no party history. He passed. The decision pleased Marilyn. She knew Jim would make a fine senator but also knew that politics could tear a person’s life and family apart. To her, going to the Moon had been a safer bet than going to Washington.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  In Nevada, a little boy had written to Santa asking him to come in through the front door since his family had no chimney. “You will have to kick the bottom a little bit because it sticks,” he warned. Near Palm Springs, California, a rabbi volunteered to serve as police chief for the day so the regular chief, a Methodist, could spend Christmas with his family. In Moscow, a Soviet scientist predicted Apollo 8 would open the door to more cooperation between his country and the United States. In Cuba, Radio Havana rebroadcast the Voice of America program, allowing everyone there to learn of Apollo 8 and of the historic words spoken by the crew. Christmas shoppers in London crowded department stores and pubs to watch coverage of the lunar journey. The famed British astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell, who’d been critical of the mission and its myriad risks, expressed deep admiration for the flight. Pope Paul VI said the mission brought honor to these pioneers of mind and adventure. Only a few naysayers popped up, most notably Samuel Shenton, founder of the England-based Flat Earth Society, who said the public was being hoodwinked by NASA. “How does that grab you, Frank?” Carr asked during his report of the headlines. “It doesn’t look too flat from here, but I don’t know, maybe something is wrong with our vision,” Borman replied. Carr finished by describing the scene at the astronauts’ homes—the Christmas trees, wreaths, red bows, even the fake snow on the lawns. It was nearly 7:30 A.M. in Houston on Christmas morning, and all through the Borman, Lovell, and Anders homes, the children were awakening to celebrate. An hour later, Susan Borman, her sons, and Frank’s parents were in church. Susan was dressed in a powder blue boatneck dress with a white coat, and she held a thin, square cardboard box containing a reel-to-reel tape. She had the recording played for the congregation. It was a prayer for peace that Frank had read from space, and the verses from Genesis that had been read by the crew. Reporters had followed the Bormans to church, and Susan paused to speak with them on the way out. She told them she hadn’t opened any of the presents under her tree, and she didn’t intend to until Frank came home. “We’ll be each other’s big present,” she said.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  seen, by a coalition of Greek city-states led by Athens. Greek democracy and the culture that went with it were saved. One Greek from Asia Minor, Herodotos of Halikarnassos, decided to write a work which would climax in an account of these Persian Wars, the greatest known clash between Greek and non-Greek, but it would also encompass all that he could find out about other peoples and places, which he would try to visit in person (often he succeeded). He called this enterprise a historia: an inquiry, in which any form of knowledge he could gather might contribute towards the great whole. Hesiod and the ‘mythographers’ had developed the method to understand the stories of the gods, but we know of no one before Herodotos who had tried to gather memories and documents together on such a scale to tell a connected story about the past. It was a very brave undertaking: the Persian Wars had finished around the time of his birth and had been over for more than a generation by the time he was writing. We owe Herodotos so much that, for all his unreliability and untidiness, it would be unjust to pick up the gibe made about him by some ancient authors who, following the lead of a prolonged and peevish attack on him by the later historian Plutarch, claimed that he was the Father of Lies rather than the Father of History.22 Plutarch’s anger with him stemmed from the fact that Herodotos was too entranced by the glorious mess of history to turn it into edifying and improving stories for the young. Modern historians should sympathize with Herodotos’s engaging unwillingness to ignore the inconvenient, or to mistake moralizing for morality. Herodotos’s work in history was taken further by Thucydides, a leading Athenian whose career in his city’s affairs was ruined by a further round of warfare during the later fifth century BCE, this time among the Greeks themselves. This ‘Peloponnesian War’ was as great a disaster for Athenian confidence and self-respect as the Persian Wars had been a triumph, and it ultimately destroyed their power. The defeat of Persia left Athens at the head of a victorious group of city-states, the Delian League. The Athenians yielded to the temptation of using their leading role to turn the League into an empire for themselves. Their sudden access of wealth and power stimulated and funded some of their most striking achievements in art, but it also attracted jealousy and resentment, especially from the rival polis of Sparta. Sparta was very different from Athens: a small minority of its people ruled a conquered and cowed population through military force and deliberately sustained terror, keeping themselves in permanent armed readiness by means of a tradition of brutal training for their male elite.23 When Plato, an Athenian alienated from his own democratic culture, portrayed his authoritarian and supposedly ‘beautiful city’ in The Republic, his Athenian readers would have recognized his mixture of

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Patriarch Aleksii II. Born in the Baltic republic of Estonia but with a Russian mother, Aleksii brought a new energy to the patriarchate, yet his instincts in renewing the life of the Church were to return it to a selective vision of the past. He scorned the ecumenism which his Church had been tentatively exploring at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was a particular point of fury for Moscow that liberalization brought with it the re-emergence in 1989 of the Greek Catholic Church of the Ukraine from its enforced union with Moscow, and the continuing squabbles between the two Churches over property restitution and jurisdiction have mirrored the tense relationship between the newly independent Ukraine and the Russian Federation.77 It has been remarked that as the Soviet Union finally disintegrated in 1991, the Russian Orthodox Church was left as ‘arguably the most “Soviet” of all institutions’ remaining in Russia.78 One symbol of this is the remarkable circumstance that the FSB, the Russian intelligence service which has rather seamlessly succeeded the Soviet KGB, has lovingly restored a Moscow parish church for itself. In 2002 the Church of the Holy Wisdom was reconsecrated with full Orthodox pomp by no less a figure than Patriarch Aleksii, who, during the course of the day, presented the FSB’s director, Nikolai Patrushev, with an icon of his name-saint, Nikolai. Stalin might have blanched – but, then again, perhaps not.79 The recovery of Orthodox tradition has its exhilarating stories. It is difficult not to admire the blossoming of one of Russia’s most important and historic nunneries, Novodevichy, on the outskirts of Moscow, under the wise guidance of a quite exceptional personality, Mother Serafima. Born into the nobility as Varvara Vasilevna Chichagova, she had been inspired by her grandfather, a former tsarist general turned priest, who was secretly consecrated an archbishop during Stalin’s purges, in which he was one of the hundreds of thousands to die. Chichagova managed to pursue a distinguished scientific career without joining the Communist Party. When the Soviet Union collapsed, now a widow and taking monastic vows, she was able to bring life back to the great semi-derelict monastic complex. Previously the brief concessions to the Church brought about by the Second World War had enabled only one chapel and a small publishing office to reopen in Novodevichy, a faint echo of all the centuries of worship, charity and education that had flourished there before 1917. Before Mother Serafima died in 1999, aged eighty-five, this tiny elderly lady had in five years galvanized an infant community with no resources. To begin with, its nuns had been forced to go on living in their old apartments round the city; now the monastery was a place of hope for women struggling with the miseries of post- Soviet life, sustaining craft shops and a farm, and at the centre of it were the refuges provided by its restored cathedrals and quiet holy places.80

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography 2 I have often wondered why the farthest-out position always feels so right to me; why extremes, although difficult and sometimes painful to maintain, are always more comfortable than one plan running straight down a line in the unruffled middle. What I really understand is a particular kind of determination. It is stubborn, it is painful, it is infuriating, but it often works. My mother was a very powerful woman. This was so in a time when that word-combination of woman and powerful was almost unexpressable in the white american common tongue, except or unless it was accompanied by some aberrant explaining adjective like blind, or hunchback, or crazy, or Black. Therefore when I was growing up, powerful woman equaled something else quite different from ordinary woman, from simply “woman.” It certainly did not, on the other hand, equal “man.” What then? What was the third designation? As a child, I always knew my mother was different from the other women I knew, Black or white. I used to think it was because she was my mother. But different how? I was never quite sure. There were other West Indian women around, a lot in our neighborhood and church. There were also other Black women as light as she, particularly among the low-island women. Redbone , they were called. Different how ? I never knew. But that is why to this day I believe that there have always been Black dykes around—in the sense of powerful and women-oriented women—who would rather have died than use that name for themselves. And that includes my momma. I’ve always thought that I learned some early ways I treated women from my father. But he certainly responded to my mother in a very different fashion. They shared decisions and the making of all policy, both in their business and in the family. Whenever anything had to be decided about any one of the three of us children, even about new coats, they would go into the bedroom and put their heads together for a little while. Buzz buzz would come through the closed door, sometimes in english, sometimes in patois, that Grenadian poly-language which was their lingua franca. Then the two of them would emerge and announce whatever decision had been arrived upon. They spoke all through my childhood with one unfragmentable and unappealable voice. After the children came, my father went to real-estate school, and began to manage small rooming-houses in Harlem.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  force that causes them to dance and sing. They also glimpse the far side of the Moon, a view unavailable from Earth. Now, seventy-five years after Verne had penned his science fiction masterpieces, rocket engineers were saying that an actual trip to the Moon might be possible. Jim paid attention to that. By the time he began at Milwaukee’s Juneau High School, Jim had determined to learn all there was to know about rocketry. He discovered a report written by Goddard and published in 1919, A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, and was fascinated by the vision in Goddard’s mathematical calculations and his thinking about rocket fuels. The New York Times had ridiculed Goddard for suggesting that a rocket could operate in the vacuum of space or carry payloads to the Moon. “He only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools,” the newspaper wrote. Goddard responded by saying, “Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realized, it becomes commonplace.” To fourteen-year-old Jim Lovell, Goddard had more than vision. He had courage. In June 1944, the summer after his sophomore year, Jim took a job baling hay on a farm in Plymouth, Wisconsin, an hour north of Milwaukee. The pay wasn’t much, about ten cents an hour, but after work, he and the other young farmhands piled into trucks for a ride to the local lake, where they swam late into the night. Lying on his back beneath crystalline Wisconsin skies, Jim could pick out the Big Dipper, the North Star, and Cassiopeia, all of which he’d learned to use for navigation. All through the summer, celestial bodies moved across Jim’s nights, calling to him from their black canvas. — Working as a server of hot foods in the cafeteria during his junior year, Jim spotted Marilyn Gerlach, a pretty freshman he’d admired all year. He decided to ask her to the prom. “I don’t know how to dance,” she said. “I don’t either,” Jim replied. “We’ll learn together.” He went to Marilyn’s house, introduced himself to her parents, and played his record albums in her living room as they practiced their dance

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  FRANK BORMAN Frank Frederick Borman first left Earth at age five, in 1933, when his father took him on a trip from their home in Gary, Indiana, to an airfield in Ohio. There, a barnstorming pilot wedged father and son into the front seat of a Waco biplane and flew them over the countryside. Five-year-old Frank could hardly process the freedom of it all—the open cockpit, the wind in his face, nothing between him and the rest of the world as the machine growled and swooped through an endless sky. The pilot asked for five dollars when the airplane finally settled back on Earth, a fortune during the Great Depression, and the greatest bargain Frank could imagine. Not long after, Frank’s family moved to Tucson, Arizona. His father, Edwin Borman, leased a Mobil service station and tried to make a go of it. The Bormans didn’t have much—just a rented two-bedroom home and a 1929 Dodge with creaky wooden spokes. As the Depression moved into the 1930s, Edwin’s business suffered and he lost his gas station lease. It was then that Frank saw his dad live by the mantra he’d been preaching forever: Do not quit, stay in there and pitch. Edwin took a job changing tires at another garage, then found work driving a laundry truck. Frank’s mother opened their house to boarders to make extra money. At school, Frank’s teachers observed him to be bossy and headstrong, a report that didn’t surprise his parents. Since the day Frank could walk, he had moved in straight lines and with shoulders pinned forward, a kid compelled to arrive. Not everyone knew where Frank was going, not even his mom and dad sometimes, but it seemed to them a mistake to label the boy rude or abrupt just for pushing past people and things that slowed him down. They’d always told Frank he could be the best at whatever he chose if he did things the right way, with excellence and integrity, no shortcuts. Edwin and Frank often sat together at their living room card table

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  his work with America’s space program. He died the next day, of cancer, at age fifty-eight. In one of the last interviews of his life, in 2011, Neil Armstrong called Apollo 8 “an enormously bold decision” that catapulted the American space program forward. Harrison Schmitt, one of the two last people to set foot on the Moon as part of the crew of Apollo 17, said of the flight, “It was probably the most remarkable effort that the NASA team down here ever put together.” When asked to compare Apollo 8 to his historic flight, astronaut Mike Collins said, “I think Apollo 8 was about leaving and Apollo 11 was about arriving, leaving Earth and arriving at the Moon. As you look back one hundred years from now, which is more important? I’m not sure, but I think probably you would say Apollo 8 was of more significance than Apollo 11.” Astronaut Ken Mattingly said, “Of all of the events to participate in, you know, I was lucky because I could do Apollo 11 as well as 8 and then 13. But being part of Apollo 8, it made everything else anticlimactic.” For Chris Kraft, it was simple: “It took more courage to make the decision to do Apollo 8 than anything we ever did in the space program.” — Weeks after the return of Apollo 8, Frank Borman went to work pumping gas at a local Gulf service station in Webster, Texas. He did it for free, along with his two sons, in exchange for use of the station’s garage bay and lift, where the Bormans could work on their cars. The station was owned by a family friend, Toke Kobayashi, a man who also raised world- class tomatoes for sale to restaurants in Chicago. Dressed in grimy jeans and a greasy T-shirt, Borman was almost unrecognizable to customers. One man who pulled in for gas began giving Borman a hard time, and for no good reason. Nearby, Borman’s younger son, fifteen-year-old Ed, knew this was trouble—his father never started a fight but wouldn’t take guff from anyone. Soon the men were near blows. Ed ran over and had to separate them, and it took every bit of his two- hundred-pound frame to do it. Even as Ed moved the belligerents apart, he found himself thinking: This guy has no idea he’s fighting with a man who just got back from the Moon.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  ‘perhaps the greatest religious leader the American Episcopal Church ever produced’.63 Hobart had a dramatic preaching style worthy of the Methodists, and he was the inspiration in founding in New York the General Theological Seminary, the first Anglican equivalent of the Catholic Tridentine seminary. This was a vital springboard for the world mission which the Episcopal Church launched alongside its English counterpart. Yet what was especially significant about Hobart, besides his exceptional practical abilities, was the reasoning behind his vigorous defence of episcopacy. He saw it as the surest foundation for proper continuity with the earliest Christians: those who had struggled for their faith in a hostile empire before Constantine had favoured the Church. This was an example for the Episcopal Church in his own day, its established status gone, coming to terms with its role as a minority in the new republic. For Hobart, his Episcopal Church had a very different destiny from that of the United Church of England and Ireland as by Law Established.64 What the Americans first experienced and both the Church of England and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland then had to face up to was the discovery that a Church needs to make decisions for itself, whether or not it clings in some form to establishment – something obvious to European Protestant Radicals and English Dissenters from their earliest sixteenth-century stirrings. In that respect, the Oxford Movement could integrate successfully in an initially hostile Church, because it offered a positive answer to a problem more widely felt. With its insistence on the continuity in succession of bishops right back to the Apostles, and the role of the bishop as guardian of the sacraments, it provided a coherent view of what a bishop was and what he should do (although High Churchpeople’s view of episcopacy tended to become more nuanced if a bishop forbade them to do what they wanted). Even those who were not High Churchpeople approved of the Church gradually gaining a forum for its own debate, first in the revival of the Convocations of Canterbury and York in 1852 and 1861, and then in the creation of a series of Church assemblies which paid steadily more attention to the opinions of laypeople. It was also clear that the High Church commitment to liturgy and episcopal government gave coherence to the worldwide and hitherto unlabelled Church which was emerging from British imperial conquest and American Revolution. In fact it was in New Zealand, under the guidance of a notable High Churchman who later returned to an English diocese, Bishop George Selwyn, that the first Anglican experiments in lay participation in Church government took place, furnishing precedents to the Church of England.65 The term which Tractarians had revived for their own party purposes, ‘Anglicanism’, was now conveniently appropriated to describe a new beast with a reach across the globe: ‘the Anglican

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  public relations stunt arranged by NASA, but he changed his mind after hearing the passion in Lindbergh’s questions about Apollo 8. After a few minutes, the four men—and Anne, also a pilot—were immersed in conversation about flying. Not one of the astronauts resented the imposition on his time. By now, there wasn’t any sense in cramming more pages from a flight manual or checklist; with twenty hours to go until launch, you either knew your stuff or you didn’t. The conversation turned to spacewalking, and how it compared to the old barnstorming stunt of wing-walking. The Lindberghs were interested to hear that one’s sensation of altitude decreased as one flew higher, until it hardly seemed to register in space (where the familiar scenery that helped people judge distance from the ground all but disappeared), and to learn that in space there was no up or down. The astronauts were equally interested to learn of a conversation Lindbergh once had in the 1930s with Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocket engineering. It was theoretically possible, Goddard had told Lindbergh, to design a rocket powerful enough to reach the Moon, but the money required to build it—as much as a million dollars—would likely keep such a wonder in the realm of science fiction. The astronauts had a good laugh at that one. Lindbergh performed a back-of-napkin calculation after learning how much fuel the Saturn V required to send Apollo 8 to the Moon. “In the first second of your flight,” Lindbergh said, “you’ll burn more than ten times as much as I did flying the Spirit of St. Louis all the way from New York to Paris.” — Later that day, Anders’s childhood priest arrived at crew quarters. Father Dennis Barry had come to give Anders—a devout Catholic since childhood—communion. This visit annoyed Borman, who was growing edgier as the hours to launch counted down. The longer Father Barry stayed, the more irritated Borman grew. Finally, Borman snapped. “Are you gonna take communion every thirty seconds before the flight?” Borman asked. “No, Frank. He’s just visiting,” Anders said.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Texas-sized Who the hell does he think he is? For the crew of Apollo 8, there was a silver lining—a last, unexpected chance to kiss their wives goodbye. — As the astronauts flew to the White House, the family of one of the thirty thousand Americans killed so far during the fighting in Vietnam prepared for their own visit to the nation’s capital. On October 31, 1967, just a month before he was to return home, Captain Riley L. Pitts of the U.S. Army led his company on an assault of a Vietcong position in the dense jungle of Ap Dong, South Vietnam. After enduring withering fire, Pitts threw his body on top of an enemy hand grenade and waited to die. When the grenade failed to explode, Pitts moved his company forward, putting himself in the direct line of enemy fire until he was cut down in a hailstorm of bullets. As the crew of Apollo 8 arrived with their wives at the White House, Capt. Pitts’s widow, Eula, laid out a dark suit and a bow tie for her five- year-old son, Mark, and a fine white blouse for her seven-year-old daughter, Stacie, at their home in Oklahoma City. The next day, the president would make her husband the first African American officer ever to receive the nation’s highest military decoration, the Congressional Medal of Honor. Millions of Americans considered astronauts to be the epitome of American courage. To Borman, Lovell, and Anders, that label better belonged to men like Pitts. Joining the crew of Apollo 8 and their wives at the black tie gala were twenty other astronauts, Chris Kraft and Wernher von Braun, and former NASA chief James Webb, who was to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom later in the evening. Also present was Charles Lindbergh, who’d stunned the world when he flew nonstop from New York to Paris in 1927. To many at NASA, despite his controversial political views, Lindbergh was a pinnacle aviation hero, a man who had taken to the skies to do the impossible. Before dinner, a small concert was staged in the East Room. When Valerie Anders took her place in the audience, she was dismayed to hear dozens of people coughing and sneezing. This is so stupid, she thought.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  given up flying for health reasons.) And it was moving to hear, through my headset, the admiration paid to Borman by a young flight controller in Montana, who seemed in awe that he was giving clearance to the first man who’d ever reached the Moon. On my behalf, Borman called Chris Kraft, one of the titans of NASA, and a man as responsible as anyone for the success of the American space program. A few weeks later, I was in Houston meeting with Kraft, already in his nineties and possessing enough energy to go back and run Mission Control (which he invented). Kraft gave me two full days of interviews, and helped me reach other NASA veterans who lived in and around Houston. My week there was immensely rewarding in the company of these pioneers. On my last day in Houston, I took my thirteen-year-old son to the Johnson Space Center to see the Saturn V rocket, still the most powerful machine ever built. Everyone I’d spoken to, from astronauts to NASA personnel to technical experts, warned that the immensity of the Saturn V couldn’t quite be described, that one had to be in its presence to believe it. We paid our admission, admired the Space Shuttle, took turns in a simulator that twisted and shook. Then, we found the rocket. It was laid on its side, 363 feet long end-to-end, bursting out of its own building. A decade-and-a-half into the twenty-first century, it’s near impossible to find a piece of technology from the past that can impress a thirteen-year-old who owns an iPhone, an Xbox, and a quad-core computer. My son stood beside the five F-1 engines at the base of the rocket. He didn’t look at his phone or check his texts. He didn’t take a picture. He just kept staring at the nozzles of these engines, each more than twelve feet tall, and after staying still for several minutes, he asked if we could stay some more. I made one more trip to Montana after that, to see Borman. After several days, we wrapped up by going to dinner at one of his favorite barbeque restaurants. We’d been seated only a few minutes when a bartender rushed up to him holding a newspaper. “Frank, the paper says you’re one of Montana’s most famous residents!” she said. The woman couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. It wasn’t clear she had any idea who Borman was or why he was famous, but he smiled and said “Thank you very much” all the same.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  in the universe, though he did so without public drama.101 ‘I never gave up Christianity till I was forty years of age … It is not supported by evidence,’ he responded to uncourteously persistent questioning a few months before his death in 1882. Still he was given a funeral in Westminster Abbey, with a grave near that unconventional Christian, Sir Isaac Newton, and with two dukes and an earl among those bearing his coffin.102 An article in The Times of London in 1864 had spoken of the conflict between science and religion, and the idea of this conflict became one of the clichés of Western public discourse. Marx clearly believed in it, for in admiration he sent Darwin a signed copy of Das Kapital (it remained uncut in Darwin’s library).103 Many, like Darwin, identified themselves as not prepared definitely to pronounce on matters of divinity. They called themselves ‘agnostics’, yet another of those newly minted words which were signs of nineteenth-century struggles to describe phenomena with no precedent, in this case a coinage of 1869 from Darwin’s extrovert and aggressive friend Thomas Huxley. A few were driven by nineteenth-century seriousness to reject God in an almost religious fashion, giving that ancient insult ‘atheist’ a new resonance, and borrowing the word ‘humanist’ from its previous incarnation as an attitude to a branch of learning. They founded atheist or humanist associations with the sort of improving activism which one might expect from contemporary Protestant Free Churches: Sunday Schools, lectures, social activities, even hymn books. Perhaps their beliefs were the ultimate form of Protestant dissent. Some who felt that science had won the struggle with Christianity were driven to explore the great religions of eastern Asia. A curious construct of religious belief newly named ‘Theosophy’ (from its emphasis on the search for divine wisdom) gained an enthusiastic anglophone middle-class following during the 1890s; it was one of the earliest expressions of that major component of modern Western religion, ‘New Age’ spirituality. One of the most dramatic of the many dramatic conversion experiences of the nineteenth century was that of the former Anglican country parson’s wife Mrs Annie Besant, who after years as president of the National Secular Society, horrified her fellow secularists by her transfer in 1889 to Theosophy. Soon she was once more exercising her lifelong gift for leadership by presidency of the Theosophical Society, sharing her new ministry with an even more exotic exponent of the New Age, Madame Blavatsky.104 It is no coincidence that several eminent late-nineteenth-century researchers in physics and chemistry were affected by the allied craze for spiritualism. This was a movement imported from the United States, which seemed able to restore the connection between the material and the spiritual in ‘seances’ which closely resembled the method of the scientific experiment. Darwin despised spiritualism,

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  professor Carl Sagan invited Borman and Susan to his home for a roundtable with students. The Bormans accepted, then were treated to an evening of attacks on America and its conduct in Vietnam, all of it encouraged by Sagan, whom Borman would never forgive for the treatment. After Apollo 9 and Apollo 10 flew successful missions in March and May 1969, Borman and his family boarded a plane for another goodwill trip, this one to Russia. The Soviet ambassador to Washington had extended the invitation, and President Nixon thought it a positive step toward easing tensions between the two nations. With the president’s permission, Borman and Susan brought their sons. As the first astronaut ever to visit Russia, Borman was given first-class treatment and shown some of the Soviet Union’s proudest sites. He was given a tour of the highly secret “Star City” near Moscow, where cosmonauts lived and trained; laid wreaths at the resting places of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin and cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin; sampled wines in Yalta; and met with a top Soviet physicist. One night, he and his family were honored at a crowded dinner at the regal restaurant in Moscow’s famed Metropole Hotel. One of the cosmonauts in attendance, Alexei Leonov, was struck by a piece of Borman’s attire—in place of a traditional necktie, he wore a bolo tie set with a bright blue stone. “Everyone wanted to stand near to him,” Leonov would later write of the evening. “To touch him.” Borman congratulated Leonov on his 1965 spacewalk and described how the Moon had appeared close up, then showed slides of his lunar journey to a rapt audience. Although Borman had considered the Soviet Union an enemy, he liked the Russian people and held the cosmonauts in the highest regard—no westerner better understood the rigors of their training, or the great risks they took for their country. Susan took a ring from her finger and gave it to a cosmonaut, a gift from her family to theirs. By trip’s end, Borman saw the cosmonauts as he saw the astronauts—a group of test and fighter pilots, all of whom wanted more than anything else to help their country succeed. And he admired their candor—to a man, they seemed generous in acknowledging that America had won the race to the Moon. —