Anger

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 Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  It is because people of color know what it means to live in a Eurocentric society where their very survival requires them to learn how to navigate laws, customs, traditions, and idiosyncracies designed to protect the power and privilege of the dominant culture. Although people of color know what it means to be marginalized within a Euroamerican culture, those with power and privilege have no conception of what it means to belong to a disenfranchised group. In fact, most Euroamericans can achieve success without having to know anything about, or associate with, people on the margins. The same cannot be said if the roles were reversed. Because those who are marginalized know how to exist in both their world and the world where they lack a voice, they can bring an expanded and raised consciousness to the reading of the Bible. THE CENTER-MARGIN DICHOTOMY As the disenfranchised read the Bible from the margins, that is, from their social location, their empowering interpretation unmasks and critiques oppressive structures. Reading the Bible from the margins implies that at times the Bible is read to the center. Often in fact, the text is read from the social location of those who occupy the center of society, those with power and privilege. Hence, the Bible is read from the center toward the margins in order to teach those who are less fortunate what they must do to occupy privileged space. Yet Jesus's audience was primarily the outcasts of society. This is why it is important to understand the message of Jesus from the perspective of the disenfranchised. The marginalized of Jesus’ time occupied the privileged position of being the first to hear and respond to the gospel. By making the disenfranchised recipients of the Good News, Jesus added a political edge to his message. Jesus used parables that resonated with the lives of the poor, the tax collectors, the prostitutes—in short, the marginalized. God's self-revelation to humanity does not occur from the centers of world power but in the margins of society. It is not from the court of Pharaoh that God's laws are revealed to humanity but from their slaves. Nor does the incarnation occur in the imperial palace of Caesar, or to the household of the high priest in Jerusalem. Rather, God is made flesh among the impure Galileans, impure because they were seen by the center as half-breeds, from a territory peopled by Arabs, Greeks, Asians, Phoenicians, Syrians, and Jews, a region where the unclean Gentiles outnumbered the Jews. Paul attests to this phenomenon in his first letter to the Corinthians when he writes: God chose the foolish things of the world so that the wise might be shamed, and God chose the weak things of the world so that God might shame the strong. God chose the lowborn of the world and those despised, and those who are nothing so that God can bring to nothing those that are. (1 Cor.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  People from the margins insist that Christians move beyond an abstract belief in Jesus to a material response to those who are hungry, thirsty, naked, alien, sick, and incarcerated. The task for those seeking eternal life must go beyond an intellectual understanding of Jesus Christ to the actual doing of Christlike actions—not because salvation is achieved by those actions but because they serve as witness to the empowering grace given by God. To continue worshiping Christ apart from any commitment to those who are the least contributes to maintaining our present structures of oppression along gender, race, and class lines. To ignore the cry of those who are marginalized is to deny Christ's message, regardless of whether or not we confess our belief in him and proclaim his name with our lips. While people on the margins often connect the responsibility of those who benefit by the way society is structured with the process of salvation, those accustomed to a privileged lifestyle usually dismiss such a theological perspective. A faith solely based on individual belief and disconnected from public responsibilities and actions allows the rich young rulers of our time to claim to be followers and disciples. If the words of Jesus are as true today as they were two thousand years ago, then “how hard it is for those [of the dominant culture] to enter into the reign of God. For it is easier for a camel to go through an eye of a needle than for [those of the privileged center] to enter into the reign of God” (Luke 18:24–25). More Than Just Climbing Sycamore Trees It seems as if the author of Luke knew that readers would try to spiritualize the story of the rich young ruler. To counteract the attempt to harmonize the story of the rich young ruler with the lifestyle of today's wealthy, numerous homilies preached at prestigious congregations throughout this country have maintained that Jesus really did not mean to bind the salvation of the privileged with their actions toward the disenfranchised. Yet Luke 19:1–10 continues his Gospel by recounting the story of the rich sinner Zacchaeus. According to Luke, Zacchaeus was a senior tax collector, a post that made him a very wealthy man. In the Roman Empire, contracts to collect taxes were farmed out to wealthy persons who in turn hired local residents, like Zacchaeus, to do the actual collecting of funds. These individuals became personally responsible for paying Rome its taxes, although they were provided with the power of Rome to collect extra taxes from the masses in order to make a profit. Theft and fraud abounded as tax collectors attempted to appropriate the maximum amount a person could bear. Their dealings with Gentiles made Jewish tax collectors ritually unclean, and their dealings with Rome made them collaborators with the occupying colonizers and traitors to their own people.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Pop Single A year before I was born, the band ’Til Tuesday, led by Aimee Mann, came out with the single “Voices Carry.” The breathy, haunting song about an abusive relationship was a top-ten hit in the United States. In the music video—which was in heavy rotation in the early days of MTV—the boyfriend is, for lack of a better word, ridiculous. A meathead in gold chains and a muscle shirt, he delivers his aggressively banal dialogue with the subtlety of an after-school special. Throughout the video, he dismantles Aimee piece by piece. At first, he compliments her music and her new hair—punky and platinum, with a rattail. Later, in a restaurant that looks like it was borrowed from a sitcom set, he removes her elaborate earpiece and replaces it with a more traditional earring before playfully chucking her under the chin. There is a shot of Mann behind a gauzy curtain, her face pressed into it with desperation, which cuts to her leaving for band practice. Here he confronts her on the steps of their brownstone; when he grabs her guitar case, she tears out of his grasp. When she returns, he scolds her for her lateness. “You know, this little hobby of yours has gone too far. Why can’t you for once do something for me?” When she speaks for the first time—“Like what?” she asks, tilting her chin upward in a challenge—he attacks her, pushing her against the stairs and forcibly kissing her. At the end of the video, they are sitting in a theater audience at Carnegie Hall. The boyfriend puts his arm around a now-polished Mann—sitting quietly, strung with pearls—before discovering her intact rattail and curling his lip in disgust. Mann begins to sing—softly at first, and then louder as she tears a stylish fascinator off her head. Then she stands up and is screaming, she is scream-singing—“He said ‘Shut up’ / He said ‘Shut up’”—and everyone is turning to look at her. This final scene, Mann said in an interview years later, was inspired by Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much , when Doris Day’s character lets loose a bloodcurdling scream during a symphony performance, to foil an assassination. Long after the video came out, in 1999 the song’s producer revealed that the initial demo of the song had used female pronouns—in the original version, Mann was singing about a woman. “The record company was predictably unhappy with such lyrics,” he wrote, “since this was a very powerful, commercial song and they would prefer as many of its components as possible to swim in the acceptable mainstream. I wasn’t certain what to think about the pressure to change the gender of the love interest, but eventually thought that it didn’t matter any to the impact of the song itself. Would a quasi-lesbian song have had any effect on the liberation of such homosexuals, then as now several difficult steps behind the gays on the path towards broad social acceptance?

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  In 1969 Jeb Magruder came to San Clemente for a job interview in the Nixon administration. The man giving the interview was Bob Haldeman, chief of staff. Haldeman was very earnest, completely devoted to the Nixon cause, and impressed Magruder with his honesty, sharpness, and intelligence. But as they left the interview to get in a golf cart for a tour of San Clemente, Haldeman suddenly became frantic—there were no carts available. He railed at those in charge of the carts, and his manner was insulting and harsh. He was almost hysterical. Magruder should have seen this incident as a sign that Haldeman was not what he appeared, that he had control issues and a vicious streak, but charmed by the aura of power at San Clemente and wanting the job, he chose to ignore this, much to his later dismay. In everyday life people can often do well at disguising their character flaws, but in times of stress or crisis these flaws can suddenly become very apparent. People under stress lose their normal self-control. They reveal their insecurities about their reputation, their fear of failure and lack of inner resilience. On the other hand, some people rise to the occasion and reveal strength under fire. There’s no way to tell until the heat is on, but you must pay extra attention to such moments. Similarly, how people handle power and responsibility will tell you a lot about them. As Lincoln said, “If you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” On the way to gaining power, people will tend to play the courtier, to seem deferential, to follow the party line, to do what it takes to make it to the top. Once at the top, there are fewer restraints and they will often reveal something about themselves you had not noticed before. Some people stay true to the values they had before attaining a high position—they remain respectful and empathetic. On the other hand, far more people suddenly feel entitled to treat others differently now that they have the power. That is what happened to Lyndon Johnson once he attained a position of ultimate security in the Senate, as Senate majority leader. Tired of the years he had to spend playing the perfect courtier, he now relished the power he had to upset or humiliate those who had crossed him in the past.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  What do I care what Alabama thinks about me. This is a new and unusual attitude for me. I’m practicing being snotty, in anticipation of being dumped by my husband when I get back to Iowa. I swagger from the gas pump to the store, I don’t even care if my boobs are roaming around inside my shirt, if my hair is a freaky snarl, if I look defiant and uppity. There’s nothing to be embarrassed of. I bring my coffee cup along and fill it at the counter. Various men, oldish and grungy, sit at tables eating eggs with wadded-up toast. They stare at me carefully while they chew. I ignore them and pay the woman at the counter. She’s smoking a cigarette so I envy her. “Great day, huh?” I ask her. She counts out my change. “It is, honey,” she says. She reaches for her cigarette and takes a puff, blows it up above my head. “Wish I wudn’t in here .” “Well, it’s getting hotter by the minute,” I tell her. I’ve adopted an accent in just four weeks, an intermittent drawl that makes me think I’m not who everyone thinks I am. “Y’all think this’s hot?” she says idly. “This ain’t hot.” When I leave, the men are still staring at me in a sullen way. I get in, rearrange all my junk so I have everything handy that I need, choose a Neil Young tape and pop it in the deck, fasten the belt, and then move back out on the highway. Back to the emerald carpet and the road home. Iowa is creeping toward me like a panther. All I do is sing when I drive. Sing and drink: coffee, Coke, water, juice, coffee. And think. I sing and drink and think. On the way down I would sing, drink, think, and weep uncontrollably, but I’m past that now. Now I suffer bouts of free-floating hostility, which is much better. I plan to use it when I get home. A car swings up alongside me so I pause in my singing until it goes past. People who sing in their cars always cheer me up, but I’d rather not be caught doing it. On the road, we’re all singing, picking our noses, embarrassing ourselves wildly; it gets tiresome. I pause and hum, but the car sticks alongside me so I glance over. It’s a guy. He grins and makes a lewd gesture with his mouth. I don’t even want to say what it is, it’s that disgusting. Tongue darting in and out, quickly. A python testing its food. I hate this kind of thing. Who do they think they are, these men? I’ve had my fill of it. I give him the finger, slowly and deliberately. He picked the wrong day to mess with me, I think to myself. I take a sip of coffee. He’s still there. I glance over briefly and he’s making the gesture with his tongue again.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  Interpreters and scholars again attached blackness to the curse even though, in the case of both Cain and Canaan, no mention was made of their skin color. The mark or curse placed upon them could easily have been whiteness. However, because the dominant culture has defined blackness as evil and whiteness as pure, it only made sense to attach blackness to Cain's mark and Ham's curse. During the Age of Exploration in the 1500s, white Christians began in earnest to profit from the slave trade. The transoceanic journey, known as the Middle Passage, represents the largest migration (forced or voluntary) in modern history, with estimates somewhere between nine and fifty million Africans over a four-century period. These Africans were needed to tame the land of the so-called New World, but first they had to be tamed. The domestication of Africans could not occur until the center was theologically able to justify this form of oppression. One response was to advocate the existence of pre-Adam races. Blacks, like the beasts of the fields, were created prior to Adam.2 This also helps explain from where Cain's wife came. If there were only two people in the world, Adam and Eve, and they had two sons, Cain and Abel, where did Cain's future wife or, for that matter, the village mentioned in Genesis 4:17 come from? Thus, it was theorized that this village was composed of blacks, a pre-Adam race, a type of subhuman classification. This raised interesting theological questions. Did blacks have souls? Could they be saved? Did they have the capacity for salvation? Some slaveholders viewed Africans to be like other farm animals, which were capital commodities and did not have souls, while more liberal-minded slaveholders maintained that blacks might have souls but were simply too brutish to undergo Christian instruction or catechism. Either way, slaveholders required total authority and unlimited power, including the right to mutilate slaves by detaching limbs needed for escape, to physically torture slaves, as in whippings, eye gouging, tongue slitting, branding, and castration, depending on the slave's “offense,” and to kill slaves with impunity. These rights insured a social order that secured the position of whites within society. In the early 1700s laws were passed throughout the colonies forbidding the baptism of slaves lest their freedom in Christ be interpreted other than spiritually. Many slaveholders feared Christianity would lead slaves to the dangerous conclusion that they had dignity due to Christ's salvific act, making them “uppity” if not downright rebellious. Evangelists interested in reaching the slave population for Christ first had to assure the slaveholders that the conversion of their “livestock” was in their best interest because it would create more obedient and humble slaves who would now labor for the master as for Christ. When it was determined that slaves were somewhat worthy of salvation, the institution of slavery turned into a means by which the gospel could be spread, and thus became justifiable.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  obedience to their all-powerful teachers. Suddenly freed from all that, they remained just as emotionally tied to the past. The teachers still seemed all-powerful, but now as scheming counterrevolutionaries. The students’ repressed resentment at having to be so obedient now boiled over into anger and the desire to be the ones doing the punishing and oppressing. When the teachers confessed to crimes they mostly had never committed, to avoid the escalating punishments, that only seemed to confirm the students in their paranoia. They had shifted roles from obedient students to oppressors, but their thinking had become even more simplistic and irrational, the opposite of Mao’s intentions. In the power vacuum that Mao had now created, another timeless group dynamic emerged: those who were naturally more assertive, aggressive, and even sadistic (in this case Fangpu and Little Bawang) pushed their way forward and assumed power, while those who were more passive (Jianhua, Zongwei) quietly receded into the background, becoming followers. The aggressive types at YMS now formed a new class of elites, doling out perks and privileges. Similarly, amid all the confusion the Cultural Revolution had spawned, the students became even more obsessed with status within the group. Who was in the red category among them, and who in the black, they wondered? Was it better now to come from the peasantry or the proletariat? How could they finagle membership in the Red Guards and garner that beautiful red armband that signified revolutionary elite status? Instead of naturally inclining toward a new egalitarian order, the students kept straining to occupy superior positions. Once all forms of authority were removed and the students ran the school, there was nothing to stop the next and most dangerous development in group dynamics—the split into tribal factions. By nature, we humans reject attempts by anyone to completely monopolize power, as Fangpu tried to do. This cuts off opportunities for other ambitious, aggressive people. It also creates large groupings in which individual members can feel somewhat lost. Almost automatically, groups will split into rival smaller factions and tribes. In the rival tribe, a new, charismatic leader (Mengzhe in this case) can assume power and members can identify more easily with the smaller number of comrades. The bonds are tight and made even tighter by the struggle against the tribal enemy. People may think they are joining because of the different ideas or goals of this tribe or the other, but what they want more than anything is the sense of belonging and a clear tribal identity. Look at the actual differences between the East-Is-Red Corps and the Red Rebels. As the battle between them intensified, it was hard to say what they were fighting for, except to assume power over the other group. One strong or vicious act of one side called for a reprisal from the other, and any type of violence seemed totally justified. There could be no middle ground, nor any questioning of

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  17Lecture 2—Luther and the Dawn of Protestantism õOn the other hand, he taught that secular vocations like barkeepers and merchants could be a way of serving God. This was a simple but powerful message that lent Luther’s theology much of its popular appeal. RELIGION AND POLITICS õLuther began reforming the curriculum at the University of Wittenberg, where he taught, because he wanted to change the way young men were learning the core ideas of Christian theology. But his message was not confined to the classroom. õIn 1524, German peasants took up Luther’s teachings as part of their revolt against upper-class landlords who treated tenants unfairly. They reasoned that if Luther is right, and the church hierarchy is wrong, then perhaps the economic hierarchy is wrong too. Their violent uprising is known as the German Peasants’ War. õLuther was displeased and wrote a pamphlet in which he accused the peasants of doing the devil’s work; he urged their landlords to go ahead and kill them “in good conscience.” We can’t dismiss the violence of his language here, but Luther was working out a broader political theology. He drew on an old Christian idea called the two kingdoms doctrine. He believed that there is an earthly kingdom and a spiritual kingdom, and liberation in Christ, in the spiritual kingdom, does not mean political liberation. õLuther didn’t want to rock the social boat. He realized that working with secular princes who controlled much of Germany was to his advantage if he wanted local churches to start doing things his way. õLuther was conservative in several ways: He wanted to maintain a church hierarchy with bishops. He also saw the value of icons in promoting piety, and he wanted to maintain a fairly formal liturgy (the order of the rituals performed in a religious service).

• From Branded: Brainwashed Inside NXIVM (2020)

  But soon Raniere will face a bigger scandal closer to home-- a revolt from his own female members. [Narrator] For nine years, NXIVM member and Keith Raniere lover Barbara Bouchey has looked the other way when it came to her leader's numerous paramours. But in 2009, she reaches her breaking point for a different reason. Barbara is financially ruined by Keith. [Narrator] Raniere has drained his lover's account of roughly $1.6 million, trading stock in his name. I don't know that she'll ever financially recover, at least not to where she was beforehand. [Narrator] That April, Bouchey and eight other women in Raniere's inner circle decide to leave the group for good. [Paige] They were like, he's lying to all of us, and we're gonna make him pay. They then kind of make it their mission to tell people about what's going on, to try and reveal what's happening. [Narrator] The NXIVM Nine, as they're called, claim the organization is psychologically abusive. Despite the sensational nature of the claims, few take notice. There were reports in the Times Union for years about NXIVM. Nothing was done. Nobody seemed to want to go after this huge group, which is now widely viewed as a cult. And many attorneys in the capital region were either afraid to go after them or were actually representing them. The NXIVM Nine were powerful people in our organization. So when they left, they created this sort of exodus. A lot of people left at that point. I didn't leave, because... I believed Keith's story. [Narrator] Despite the string of defections, Raniere is still riding high, thanks in large part to a devoted group of followers such as Smallville actress Allison Mack. [Paige] Allison Mack is someone who has been successful. She was a on a long-running TV show in a main series role. She's very good looking. She's visible. People know her name. She's kind of the perfect person that they would want for a group like this. [Narrator] Mack is not only one of Raniere's many lovers, but one of his most devoted followers and a top NXIVM recruiter. [Dr. Lauch] The recruiters are very good at what they do, what we call love bombing. They will make you feel very special. You'll think you've just met the greatest group of people. You'll see other people there that you know and respect. And so then they'll ask you to come back. And because you had such a great time, and because they made you feel so good, you feel a little obligated, as well as curious, to come back again. [Narrator] Mack first joins NXIVM nine years earlier in 2006 after attending a two-day session of a program called Jness. [Allison] Jness, the women's organization that I work with, we use these tools and these structures in order to organize, uh, situations and circumstances for women to come together and create incredible relationships.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  9 Alfred Plummer, The Church of the Early Fathers, 4th ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1890), 2. 10 N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1992), 194, 247. 11 Ibid., 247. Although in his more recent work on Paul Wright no longer stresses the purportedly ethnocentric/particularistic nature of the Judaism that Paul rejects, the idea still persists, as seen, for instance, in his claim that Israel’s “meta-sin” is believing that its election and vocation are its “exclusive privilege”: Paul and the Faithfulness of God (2 vols.; Minneapolis,MN: Fortress, 2013), 1:38. Remapping Paul89 89 It is a kind of fundamentalism which can only safeguard the correctness of its belief by persecuting those who disagree or by seeking to eliminate (through conversion or otherwise) those who hold divergent views. That sort of exclusivism can produce a complete spectrum of violence, from the most subtle of social pressure to outright force. It was that sort of “attitude to the law” which Paul came to abhor. 12 Whereas Baur’s concern for particularism arose within the context of the nationalistic project of unifying Germany, Wright and Dunn write within the context of concern over and repudiation of British and Western colonialism and racism. Nonetheless, all of these narratives about Paul situate him in relation to Judaism in a fundamentally antagonistic way: Paul opposes Judaism because of some fault within it. These accounts find something wrong or lacking in Judaism, something that Christianity, or at least Pauline Christianity, sets right. According to this reading, Judaism is particularistic and ethnocentric with regard to its treatment and view of non-Jews. As John Gager observes, though, such arguments revert to an “outmoded, unhistorical dichotomy between Jewish particularism and Christian universalism.” 13 Of course to make such sweeping comparisons between Judaism and Christianity requires scholars to turn both early Judaism and early Christianity into monolithic entities. And herein lies part of the problem. Paula Fredriksen puts it well: “Judaism ... did not have views of Gentiles; Jews did. Their encounter with other nations, across cultures and centuries, resulted in a jumble of perceptions, prejudices, optative descriptions, social arrangements, and daily accommodations that we can reconstruct from the various literary and epigraphical evidence only with difficulty.” 14 The Diversity of Jewish Thought Regarding Gentiles Christian theologians and New Testament (NT) scholars alike face the temptation of using Judaism as a foil for Jesus, or Paul, or Christianity. 15 When considering the scholarly output of Terry Donaldson, then, it is remarkable to see the way in which he has continually fought against this temptation, striving to do justice to the diversity of 12 James D. G. Dunn, The New Perspective on Paul (rev. ed.; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 417 (cf. 35, 205). Elsewhere Dunn calls the idea that gentiles should Judaize a form of “Jewish ideological and nationalistic imperialism”: The Theology of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (NTT; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 267.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  you all the more as they sense this tolerant attitude in you. Second, the Laws will make you a master interpreter of the cues that people continually emit, giving you a much greater ability to judge their character. Normally, if we pay attention to people’s behavior, we are in a rush to fit their actions into categories and to hurry to conclusions, so we settle for the judgment that suits our own preconceptions. Or we accept their self-serving explanations. The Laws will rid you of this habit by making it clear how easy it is to misread people and how deceptive first impressions can be. You will slow yourself down, mistrust your initial judgment, and instead train yourself to analyze what you see. You will think in terms of opposites—when people overtly display some trait, such as confidence or hypermasculinity, they are most often concealing the contrary reality. You will realize that people are continually playing to the public, making a show of being progressive and saintly only to better disguise their shadow. You will see the signs of this shadow leaking out in everyday life. If people take an action that seems out of character, you will take note: what often appears out of character is actually more of their true character. If people are essentially lazy or foolish, they leave clues to this in the smallest of details that you can pick up well before their behavior harms you. The ability to gauge people’s true worth, their degree of loyalty and conscientiousness, is one of the most important skills you can possess, helping you avoid the bad hires, partnerships, and relationships that can make your life miserable. Third, the Laws will empower you to take on and outthink the toxic types who inevitably cross your path and who tend to cause long- term emotional damage. Aggressive, envious, and manipulative people don’t usually announce themselves as such. They have learned to appear charming in initial encounters, to use flattery and other means of disarming us. When they surprise us with their ugly behavior, we feel betrayed, angry, and helpless. They create constant pressure, knowing that in doing so they overwhelm our minds with their presence, making it doubly hard to think straight or strategize. The Laws will teach you how to identify these types in advance, which is your greatest defense against them. Either you will steer clear of them or, foreseeing their manipulative actions, you will not be blindsided and thus will be better able to maintain your emotional balance. You will learn to mentally cut them down to size and focus on the glaring weaknesses and insecurities behind all of their bluster. You will not fall for their myth, and this will neutralize the intimidation they depend on. You will scoff at their cover stories and elaborate explanations for their selfish behavior. Your ability to stay calm will infuriate them and often push them into overreaching or making a mistake.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  I am left free to traipse around in my own psychic landscape. When we have fights he has a tendency to reply in baby-talk, which causes me to go berserk. I rant, then I rave, berating him in such florid terms that no one can keep a straight face. We get sheepish, we make up. The years tick by. My lifelong addiction to books wanes, leaving me feeling bored and bereft. Some time later I discover that I’ve left off reading them because I’ve decided to write them instead. He thinks this is a fine idea and supports it unconditionally, but finds that he is unable to read what I write because drowsiness overtakes him. I watch him several nights running as he nods and dozes, tries with an enormous effort to focus, and finally gives up. We agree without much discussion that it isn’t necessary for him to read my writing. His own work is too consuming, he doesn’t need one more task piled on top of the others. The match stops flaring, the bong stops bubbling, the old familiar chords of “Secret Agent Man” no longer bounce like tennis balls around the room. The dogs skulk into their corners. His own work. Political organizing that begins on a power-to-the-people grassroots level and gradually works its way up to power-to-the-person. He educates the sheep and then becomes the shepherd. It’s a rush to have them all listening, paying attention, laying down their votes. Another case where reefer has led to the hard stuff. We’re on the slippery slope now, it’s only a matter of time. It’s women galore. He begins to look at me with an appraising eye. Familiarity, that good friend of contempt, makes me seem plain as dishwater. Once when we fight over something and apologize later, he admits that he might have been a bit stern with me. For hours the word hangs in the air above my head like a grand piano. Stern. He might have been stern with me. I realize that one of the reasons he doesn’t want children is that he thinks he already has one. I start listening to how he talks to others compared to how he talks to me. In a crowded room one night I catch myself getting ready to take him by the necktie and heave him up against the wall. I feel like a rabid dog, but I smile placidly and make idle chat with the wife of his best friend, the future chiseler. In the car on the way home I say to him in the most dangerous tone I can come up with, “You havegot to treat me like an equal.” The wiper blades clock back and forth, car lights bear down and then pass.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  9Lecture 1—Prophets of Reform before Protestantism õBoth men challenged the authority of the pope, and they both believed that with proper guidance, humans didn’t need a king—they could govern themselves. Pico and Savonarola wanted to see the Catholic Church change. Savonarola wrote letters to kings across Europe calling for a council to depose his nemesis, Pope Alexander. He called the pope “an illegal vicar of Christ” who sold church offices and “led an immoral life and was an unbeliever.” õPico also called on the pope to reform moral behavior throughout the church, warning against the institution’s corruption. The point here is not that either man wanted to break apart the Catholic Church. But they do show us that powerful criticism of the church predates the Reformation. õThe next 500 years of Christian history showed that the friendship of Pico and Savonarola was not a f luke. It was just one small example of how these paradoxical impulses are woven together: Christians in many times and places have appealed to both reason and divine charisma, and have tried to purify their churches while also drawing on the ideas and cultures they find around them. A BAD ENDING õThe ends of these two friends’ stories are not pretty. Pico fell ill when he was just 31 with a mysterious sickness. When the king of France heard about it, he sent his best doctors to Italy to try to save him, but they arrived too late. Historians now think that he died of arsenic poisoning. A goon of the Medici family probably killed him. The Medici family had started to become tired of Savonarola and were irked at Pico for defending him. 10The History of Christianity II õAs for Savonarola, in the spring of 1497, Pope Alexander excommunicated him from the Catholic Church for continuing to spread “pernicious dogma.” (Alexander was also angry because Savonarola had refused to steer Florence into joining the pope’s political alliance against France.) õThe pope warned that anyone who had contact with Savonarola would get excommunicated too. He even threatened to place Florence under interdict if they kept supporting their hometown prophet; this would have forbidden celebrating Mass and other sacraments at most churches in the city. The excommunication helped give Savonarola’s enemies the upper hand, and the following spring, a Florentine court found him guilty of heresy, schism, and “preaching innovation.”

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  Even those who benefit from oppression are welcome to participate in this solidarity! Salvation for the dominant culture is linked to those who are oppressed. The crucified people become Jesus Christ in the here and now. Their suffering has the potential of redeeming the dominant culture by providing it with an opportunity to interact with Christ manifested in the lives and struggle of those living on the margins of society. As those with power die to their privilege and seek solidarity with those who suffer under oppressive structures, they begin to discover Christ. In a culture that privileges those who are male, those who are wealthy, and those who are white, solidarity with Christ—who forsook his own equality with God to take the form of a human—requires Christ's disciples also to “take up their cross” and follow him. In short, it requires dying to whatever creates privilege and prevents solidarity with the crucified people of today. Salvation, as liberation, requires crucifying maleness, riches, and whiteness—in other words, the active dismantling of any social structure designed to privilege one group at the expense of another. For example, as a male, I recognize that society privileges me solely because I am male. All things being equal, I as male prevail over women in the marketplace and in the church community, whether I like it or not. Being a feminist and reciting pro-women rhetoric is insufficient as long as my complicity with the status quo continues to privilege me. Salvation for me, then, becomes linked to ending my old life, a life where I enjoyed the advantages of being male. I die to my maleness—that is, I crucify my old life—only by the praxis (actions) I undertake to dismantle the very structures designed to benefit me. Through this process of working to end not only my individual participation in oppression but also my society's participation in oppression, I work out my salvation “in fear and trembling.” CHAPTER 7Can't We All Just Get Along?On March 3, 1991, a bystander videotaped the scene of four white Los Angeles police officers beating a subdued black man named Rodney King. Before that night, police brutality, a reality among people of color, was mostly ignored by the dominant culture, who refused to believe such things existed. Now the brutality was captured on tape and embedded in the nation's consciousness. To this day, the beating of Rodney King remains a symbol of police brutality and racial conflict. A year later, the four officers responsible for the savage beating of Rodney King were acquitted. The suppressed anger of Los Angeles's disenfranchised community exploded with violence in one of the worst race riots ever to grip a U.S. city. By May 2, 1992, as the smoke from thousands of fires lessened, fifty-five people lay dead, 2,382 people were injured, and over $1 billion in property damage had occurred.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  Because anyone can “make it” in this country, those who fail (live in poverty) have no one to blame but themselves. And worst, we associate their lack of blessings in labor to be a clear sign of God's rejection of them. The emphasis, then, is placed upon saving souls. If the person in poverty is first saved, then God's blessings will follow. Missing from the discourse is how poverty is caused—specifically, how through classism a certain segment of the population must be kept poor so that the dominant culture can benefit and maintain its level of luxury. A functional analysis of poverty shows that, in most cases, the wealth of the rich is directly related to the poverty of the poor. First, poverty ensures that a segment of the population (which coincidently is mainly composed of people of color) does the undesirable work of the society, work that is physically dangerous or dirty. They occupy menial, dead-end, underpaid jobs. A low-wage labor pool provides unprecedented profits for different industries, such as agriculture and segments of the garment industry, whose profits are dependent on the economic exploitation of the poor. Second, the low wages paid to those who are poor subsidize middle- and upper-class lifestyles. This includes cheap labor in the form of domestic help, such as nannies, gardeners, and maids, who provide the affluent with free time to participate in more enriching activities—social clubs, parties, and charity events. Additionally, because those who are poor pay a higher proportion of income and property taxes, they also subsidize local and state government services that are geared to benefit more affluent groups. Third, poverty creates jobs—not just dysfunctional jobs like drug dealing, the production and sale of cheap liquor, pawn shops, and prostitution—but respectable professional jobs in penology, criminology, public-health work, social work, and the social sciences. Fourth, the poor extend the economic usefulness of goods by buying what others do not want, including expired food items, secondhand clothes, and run-down houses and automobiles. Poverty also provides numerous social and physiological benefits to the affluent, including, but not limited to, the self-construction of the wealthy as hard workers who earned their riches, a permanent measuring rod for status, an object for the benevolence of the wealthy, and a group to blame for the downward mobility of the middle class, victims of an ever-expanding income gap.14 In a world that contains about 6 billion people, the World Bank estimates that 1.3 billion live in dire poverty while another 2 billion simply live in poverty. More than 3 billion people, the majority of the world, live on less than two dollars a day. According to the United Nations, 1.45 billion people lack health services, 1.33 billion lack safe drinking water, and 2.25 billion lack proper sanitation, crucial needs when we consider that children are 60 percent less likely to die when these services are provided. Each year 17 million people die from preventable parasitic diseases caused mainly by a lack of these services.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  Paul’s restriction of Moses’ law to a bygone period goes a long way toward explaining his repeated floggings by Judaean compatriots (2 Cor 11:24). Moses’ law was the foundation of Judaean life everywhere: the law that Judaean minority communities in many places had a hard-won permission to observe, exempting them from being subject to the prevailing laws in many poleis.59 Yet outside writers occasional y enjoyed ridiculing Moses as a supposed outcast from Egypt: a magician, leper, or deeply antisocial.60 Judaeans did not need one of their own now seeming to join in such deprecations, just as they did not need Antiochus of Antioch undermining their legitimacy there (Josephus, War 7, earlier), especial y given that Paul was basing his claims on the post-mortem appearances of a Judaean crucified in Jerusalem. Even Acts, though general y a calming and homogenizing narrative, claims that when Judaeans from Asia spotted Paul near Jerusalem’s temple, they were outraged because he was “teaching everyone everywhere against the people, the law, and this place” (Acts 21:28). The same text claims that Christ-following Judaeans, who insisted on maintaining Judaean law, were under the impression that Paul was teaching “all Judaeans living among the nations defection from Moses: advising them not to circumcise their children or continue in the customs” (21:21). These impressions 58 Porphyry (vel sim.) in Macarius Magnes, Apocr. 4.2; in Hoffmann, Against the Christians, 68–9. 59 Virtual y every page of Josephus’ Antiquities and Against Apion, composed for Roman audiences in the first instance, is about the excellence of Moses’ laws as those governing Judaean life. Outside observers never doubted that Moses was the lawgiver under whose ordinances Judaeans everywhere lived, e.g.: Hecataeus of Abdera in Diodorus 40.3.38; Apollonius Molon in Josephus, Apion 1.145; Diodorus 34–35.1.1–5; Strabo, Geog. 16.2.34–46; Tacitus, Hist. 5.2–4. 60 See Apollonius Molon in Josephus, Apion 1.145 and Tacitus, Hist. 5.2–4. 34 34 Paul and Matthew among Jews and Gentiles are difficult to explain historical y as the invention of this author. Left with only tiny fragments from Paul’s life, we do not have clear examples of what he said to other Judaeans, unless the letter to the Romans fits that bil . But already to the Corinthians he implies that he did talk with Judaeans when the opportunity arose, and when he did so he adapted his language for the sake of The Announcement: While being free from al , I have enslaved myself to al , so that I might win more.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Public Relations And haven’t men been gaslighting women, abusing their lovers, harassing their girlfriends, murdering their wives for as long as human history has existed? And isn’t their violence always a footnote, an acceptable causality? David Foster Wallace threw a coffee table at Mary Karr and pushed her out of a moving car, but no one ever really talks about it. Carl Andre almost certainly shoved Ana Mendieta out the thirty-fourth-story window of their Greenwich Village apartment and got away with it. 51 In Mexico, William Burroughs shot Joan Vollmer in the head; her death, he said later, made him into a writer. These stories are so common that they are no longer shocking in any meaningful sense; it is more surprising when there is no evidence of a talented man having hurt someone at all. (I confess, I never quite believe it; I just assume those men are better at hiding than most.) I have spent years struggling to find examples of my own experience in history’s queer women. I tore through book after book about the queer women of the past, pen poised over paper, wondering what would happen if they had let the world know they were unmade by someone with just as little power as they. Did Susan B. Anthony’s womanizing extend to psychological torment? What did Elizabeth Bishop really say to Lota de Macedo Soares when she’d been drinking heavily? Did their voices crawl with jealousy? Did they hurl inkwells and figurines? Did any of them gingerly touch their bruises and know that explaining would be too complicated? Did any of them wonder if what had happened to them had any name at all? I’ll never forget the gut punch I felt when one of the first lesbian couples married in Massachusetts got divorced five years later—a kind of embarrassed panic. I was recently graduated, newly out, trying to date women in Berkeley. I remember feeling dread, as though divorces weren’t the kind of thing happening all around me at every moment, as if they weren’t a complete nonentity. But that’s the minority anxiety, right? That if you’re not careful, someone will see you—or people who share your identity—doing something human and use it against you. The irony, of course, is that queer folks need that good PR; to fight for rights we don’t have, to retain the ones we do. But haven’t we been trying to say, this whole time, that we’re just like you? It’s not being radical to point out that people on the fringe have to be better than people in the mainstream, that they have twice as much to prove. In trying to get people to see your humanity, you reveal just that: your humanity. Your fundamentally problematic nature. All the unique and terrible ways in which people can, and do, fail. But people have trouble with this concept. It’s like how, after Finding Nemo , people who were ill equipped to take care of them rushed to buy clown fish and how the fish died. People love an idea, even if they don’t know what to do with it. Even if they only know how to do exactly the wrong thing. 51 . Andre was tried for, and acquitted of, Mendieta’s death. In his 911 call, Andre told the operator, “My wife is an artist, and I’m an artist, and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more, eh, exposed to the public than she was. And she went to the bedroom, and I went after her, and she went out the window.” Whenever Andre has an exhibition, protestors show up. They create outlines of bodies on the ground, as if someone has fallen from a great height. They leave animal viscera smeared on sidewalks. They ask, “¿Dondé está Ana Mendieta?”

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Meet the Parents In the car from New York, your girlfriend is high and quiet. She reeks of weed, and is about to meet your parents for the first time. You are angrier than you’ve ever been with her. “We’re gonna meet my parents in, like, an hour. I don’t understand why you would do this.” “You’ve never had to meet someone’s parents when you’re the first girlfriend,” she snaps. “They look at you in this way and it’s unbearable.” You are silent. “They won’t be able to tell,” she says. “Now you can’t even help me drive,” you say. “I have to do this all on my own.” You inch through New York this way, the car filled with the silent, wavy heat of your respective angers. In Allentown, your parents are very nice to her. Dream House as Here Comes the Bride In DC, she meets your college friends, whose reactions to her range from sweet and excited to reserved. (Sam has gotten to them, you realize with a panic. You haven’t successfully contained the situation.) In Virginia, you ride horses through the woods and watch the sunrise over the Shenandoah mountains. The wedding is beautiful. At the reception, you all crowd into a photobooth. You don gloves. You hold a monocle over your eye. You cock a pipe against your lips. You drink, you dance. You love the way she bops on the dance floor, the dance of someone who has joy in her body. After the wedding you have to rip her little black dress off her body because the zipper is broken and you are both drunk and stoned and laughing. The next day, after you say good-bye to your friends, you sit in the car in the parking lot as she talks at you—your friends hate me, they’re jealous. An hour later you are still there, your head bent tearily against the window. The new bride walks by and notices you in your car. You see her slow down, her face crimped with puzzlement and concern. You shake your head ever so slightly, and she looks uncertain but mercifully she keeps walking so you can endure your punishment in peace. By the time you’ve wound out of the mountains and gotten back to a freeway, the bite of the fight has sweetened; whiskey unraveled by ice.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  emotions of others as a way to bind the group more tightly together —to feel joy or grief as one—or to remain united in the face of danger. To this day, we humans remain highly susceptible to the moods and emotions of those around us, compelling all kinds of behavior on our part—unconsciously imitating others, wanting what they have, getting swept up in viral feelings of anger or outrage. We imagine we’re acting of our own free will, unaware of how deeply our susceptibility to the emotions of others in the group is affecting what we do and how we respond. We can point to other such forces that emerged from this deep past and that similarly mold our everyday behavior—for instance, our need to continually rank ourselves and measure our self-worth through our status is a trait that is noticeable among all hunter- gatherer cultures, and even among chimpanzees, as are our tribal instincts, which cause us to divide people into insiders or outsiders. We can add to these primitive qualities our need to wear masks to disguise any behavior that is frowned upon by the tribe, leading to the formation of a shadow personality from all the dark desires we have repressed. Our ancestors understood this shadow and its dangerousness, imagining it originated from spirits and demons that needed to be exorcised. We rely on a different myth—“something came over me.” Once this primal current or force within us reaches the level of consciousness, we have to react to it, and we do so depending on our individual spirit and circumstances, usually explaining it away superficially without really understanding it. Because of the precise way in which we evolved, there are a limited number of these forces of human nature, and they lead to the behavior mentioned above— envy, grandiosity, irrationality, shortsightedness, conformity, aggression, and passive aggression, to name a few. They also lead to empathy and other positive forms of human behavior. For thousands of years, it has been our fate to largely grope in the shadows when it comes to understanding ourselves and our own nature. We have labored under so many illusions about the human animal—imagining we descended magically from a divine source, from angels instead of primates. We have found any signs of our primitive nature and our animal roots deeply distressing, something to deny and repress. We have covered up our darker impulses with all kinds of excuses and rationalizations, making it easier for some people to get away with the most unpleasant behavior. But finally we’re at a point where we can overcome our resistance to the truth about who we are through the sheer weight of knowledge we have now accumulated about human nature. We can exploit the vast literature in psychology amassed over the last one hundred years, including detailed studies of childhood and the impact of our early development (Melanie Klein, John Bowlby, Donald Winnicott), as well as works on the roots of narcissism

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  The poorest 60 percent of the world's population own only 6 percent of the world's wealth, and the richest 20 percent own 85 percent of the world's income, producing 66 percent of the world's greenhouse gasses and consuming 70 percent of the world's energy, 75 percent of the world's metals, and 85 percent of the world's wood. Yet we blame the strain in world resources on overpopulated areas like China or India. In reality, the 50 million people that will be added to the U.S. population over the next forty years will have the equivalent global impact (in terms of the consumption of the world's resources) of an additional 2 billion people in India.15 The world's rich minority, which controls a monopoly on the vast majority of the world's resources, is in need of liberation from the sin of hoarding. Reading the Bible from the margins is as concerned with the liberation of the vast majority of the world's population that lives in misery as it is with the salvation of the world's minority that lives in privilege. Five percent of the U.S. population gather around their tables and eat to their hearts’ content. The scraps they leave behind are more than what many of the world's inhabitants will eat that day. Yet the Gospel of Luke records Jesus saying, When you make dinner or supper, do not call your friends, nor your siblings, nor your relatives, nor your rich neighbors, lest they invite you in return and it becomes a repayment to you. But when you have a party, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, and the blind, and you will be blessed, for they cannot repay you. (14:12–14) Classism from the Margins Have you ever read a Gospel parable, only to think how unfair it was? For example, in Matthew 20:1–16 Jesus tells the story of a vineyard owner who early in the morning sets out to hire laborers. He goes to the local gathering place where laborers usually wait to be hired, negotiates a fair day's wages (a denarius), and sends them to his fields. Several hours later, mid-morning, he comes across some individuals who have yet to be hired, so he employs them and sends them to his fields. At noon, he finds more unemployed laborers and sends them to his fields. This process is again repeated in the mid- and late afternoon. When the day ends and it is time to pay the workers, the vineyard owner reverses the order and begins to pay those who were hired last and only worked a few hours. He begins by paying them the same amount he originally agreed to pay those first hired. When it is time to pay those who worked the entire day, he pays the same amount of money as those who only worked a few hours. Some worked all day, some just a few hours, yet everyone got the same amount of money. Now, is this fair?