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 Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  25. Anne Knight, photographed by Victor Franck, c.1855, brandishes a placard reading ‘By tortured millions, By the Divine Redeemer, Enfranchise Humanity, Bid the Outraged World, BE FREE’. The campaign against slavery provided the cue, the righteous anger and, perhaps crucially, a successful result: in the end, not merely the British legislation against slavery but a hard-fought military victory against the slave-holding Confederate cause in the American Civil War of the 1860s. From the 1820s there blossomed a variety of campaigns in both Britain and the worldwide Anglosphere that particularly concerned women. They appealed to as wide a constituency as possible by framing themselves as struggles for family welfare in the face of male misbehaviour: the purity and restraint of women against the unruly passions of men. Especially in the USA, the activity was at first closely linked with high-temperature Evangelical enthusiasm, drawing on a renewed wave of revival from the 1790s that later came to be termed ‘the Second Great Awakening’. Often such revivals might seem to reverse the general trend of Western Christianity towards dominance by women, since church membership after many revivals revealed a rather higher minority percentage of men than was usually the case. It might be more realistic to view such a result as chastened menfolk paying more attention to the fervent exhortations of their wives and daughters, at least for a while. [13] * The 1820s thus saw the founding of various themed pressure groups that supplemented the traditional Evangelical call to conversion by spelling out that the next steps after conversion must be very specific lifestyle changes. The war on drunkenness – temperance or ‘total abstention’ – became the flagship of family-centred protest, with greater extrovert élan in revivalist America than in Britain. In 1873, ladies of Hillsboro (Ohio) were so enthused by their temperance meeting that they marched together to a local saloon to pray and sing hymns, which cast a damper on the convivial atmosphere; similar actions led to the majority of saloon proprietors in town ceasing to sell liquor. The resulting sensation led to the creation of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874: the largest female-led organization the USA had ever known, and in close touch with its British equivalent. Such activism became not just cross-confessional but interfaith, as Catholic and Jewish women formed parallel institutions. Amid highly coloured personal testimony and exhortation to fight against alcohol, fidelity to the biblical message was not always absolute. The Gospel story of Jesus’s miracle at the Wedding in Cana inconveniently puts a premium on superior-quality wine to make the party go with a swing; temperance preachers needed a good deal of exegetical wriggling to explain that this wine was not alcohol as known and hated by campaigners. [14] Temperance led the way, yet social evils had a habit of being interlinked, and one of the most salient was urban prostitution.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  [10] Wilberforce and other male abolitionists who echoed him were absolutely correct in their foreboding; they were witnessing the birth of what has been termed ‘first-wave feminism’, the beginning of profound and permanent change in Western culture, in parallel to the feminism of Catholic Europe (above, Chapter 16). If they quoted misogynist scripture, it was adroitly countered by female campaigners who used to feminine advantage all the current commonplaces of separate gender spheres: were not women more open to the voice of God and Christian morality than men, and should they not therefore preach fearlessly? English Dissent and Methodism – and their American denominational equivalents – had already given women guidance in how to push the boundaries of male assumptions about female initiative within institutions. Rhetorical constructs of society for public consumption were always capable of being manipulated within the complexities of private reality. [11] Some abolitionist men, such as the prominent north American campaigner against slavery William Lloyd Garrison, did draw the conclusion that women had earned their place in politics on an equal basis with men. Yet most stayed with Wilberforce, as became painfully apparent in 1840, when the World Anti-Slavery convention convening in London proposed that women should not occupy the platform, nor even the main hall; a fierce row on the first day did not sway the organizers, and women were left as spectators in the gallery. American delegates to the London Convention, outraged, organized their own Convention on Women’s Rights in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848; it included both female and male delegates, mostly Quakers, and called for women’s full legal equality with men. The veteran English Quaker campaigner Anne Knight also found the London Convention a galvanizing moment towards her wider conclusion about gender equality: she was even drawn into the revolutionary upheavals in Paris in 1848, where the appeal for women’s rights fell on equally deaf male ears. In 1851, back in Britain, Knight (now in her mid-sixties) founded the first organization to campaign for women’s suffrage, the Sheffield Female Political Association, confronting the British House of Lords with a petition on the subject. Among other pioneering consumer gambits were her branded envelope labels in a scheme of bright colours to be displayed on campaigning letters. [12]

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  25. Anne Knight, photographed by Victor Franck, c .1855, brandishes a placard reading ‘By tortured millions, By the Divine Redeemer, Enfranchise Humanity, Bid the Outraged World, BE FREE’. The campaign against slavery provided the cue, the righteous anger and, perhaps crucially, a successful result: in the end, not merely the British legislation against slavery but a hard-fought military victory against the slave-holding Confederate cause in the American Civil War of the 1860s. From the 1820s there blossomed a variety of campaigns in both Britain and the worldwide Anglosphere that particularly concerned women. They appealed to as wide a constituency as possible by framing themselves as struggles for family welfare in the face of male misbehaviour: the purity and restraint of women against the unruly passions of men. Especially in the USA, the activity was at first closely linked with high-temperature Evangelical enthusiasm, drawing on a renewed wave of revival from the 1790s that later came to be termed ‘the Second Great Awakening’. Often such revivals might seem to reverse the general trend of Western Christianity towards dominance by women, since church membership after many revivals revealed a rather higher minority percentage of men than was usually the case. It might be more realistic to view such a result as chastened menfolk paying more attention to the fervent exhortations of their wives and daughters, at least for a while. [13] * The 1820s thus saw the founding of various themed pressure groups that supplemented the traditional Evangelical call to conversion by spelling out that the next steps after conversion must be very specific lifestyle changes. The war on drunkenness – temperance or ‘total abstention’ – became the flagship of family-centred protest, with greater extrovert élan in revivalist America than in Britain. In 1873, ladies of Hillsboro (Ohio) were so enthused by their temperance meeting that they marched together to a local saloon to pray and sing hymns, which cast a damper on the convivial atmosphere; similar actions led to the majority of saloon proprietors in town ceasing to sell liquor. The resulting sensation led to the creation of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874: the largest female-led organization the USA had ever known, and in close touch with its British equivalent. Such activism became not just cross-confessional but interfaith, as Catholic and Jewish women formed parallel institutions. Amid highly coloured personal testimony and exhortation to fight against alcohol, fidelity to the biblical message was not always absolute. The Gospel story of Jesus’s miracle at the Wedding in Cana inconveniently puts a premium on superior-quality wine to make the party go with a swing; temperance preachers needed a good deal of exegetical wriggling to explain that this wine was not alcohol as known and hated by campaigners. [14] Temperance led the way, yet social evils had a habit of being interlinked, and one of the most salient was urban prostitution.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  I shake with rage at the thought of a smug, self-satisfied Woody, sitting in Thailand—with its amazingly old and diverse culinary culture, and its many rightfully proud cooks—insisting on eating only the same raw salad day after day. And the thought that Woody's peculiar worldview might spread, like some destructive virus, fills me with horror. If anything, I've become even more hyperbolic on the subject since I wrote this piece, once even referring to Raw as "the most evil document since Mein Kampf (which might, admittedly, be a little over-the-top). Poor Charlie Trotter, who's been nothing but kind and generous to me in the past, has unfortunately born the full weight of my sense of betrayal and rage. Roxanne Klein's Larkspur eatery thankfully closed. But the pernicious spread of raw food continues, and its prodigiously farting adherents continue to multiply. They must be stopped. IS ANYBODY HOME? The food writing "community" is a swamp. A petri dish of logrolling, cronyism, mendaciousness, greed, envy, collusion, corruption, and willful self-deception, in which nearly all of us are hopelessly compromised. This piece was a reaction to a momentary episode of profound disgust. It was also my way of acknowledging the growing realization that I'd been beating up on Emeril far too long. Early on, making fun of him had been a cheap, easy laugh—a crowd-pleasing shtick. But in the years since referring to him as an "Ewok" I'd seen so much worse. And I had never really acknowledged that unlike so many of the "celebrity chefs" who'd followed, and will undoubtedly one day replace him in the country's favors, Emeril actually paid his dues. I'd long come to believe the man deserved a lot more respect than I'd been giving him, regardless what I thought of his shows. This was my way of apologizing. BOTTOMING OUT This was a pretty harsh, unforgiving editorial I turned in when asked by the Los Angeles Times to comment on Robert Downey's most recent arrest. Writing it, I was pretty damn sure that he was a goner. And I was quick—too quick as it turns out—to write him off. Another dead guy, another dead junkie. The predictable, almost inevitable, end to the same old story. Since writing this piece, a very good friend who I had similarly written off, turned my back on, and left for dead —after decades of hard drug use—has managed to turn his life around. And Downey continues to survive and prosper and do good works with considerable charm and self-awareness. I wish them both well, and apologize for thinking the worst. Sometimes it's nice to be wrong. FOOD TERRORISTS Things only got worse since I wrote this impassioned defense of an embattled friend. Foie gras is under fire, or soon to be illegal, in California, Chicago, and even New York.

• From Soaking Wet: Lesbian Sex Stories (2014)

  A cold, gloved hand reaches round and flips open the buttons of my trousers. Then my trousers are dragged down round my ankles. My assailant—whom I now know to be a woman—hoists my vest and jacket into a bundle around my shoulder blades. The chill air is like a slap to my whole body. My skin creeps up into gooseflesh. I’m naked, exposed, tied to a tree. I wonder how many people can see the luminous white of my flesh in the darkness, watching me just as I watched them. Leathermen, big daddies, bikers, circling around me with their cocks out, stroking themselves to hardness. I can feel the zip of her jeans and hard metal of her belt buckle pressing into my bare arse and burning with the cold. Her hands reach round and grab the erect tips of my nipples as my legs are kicked apart—as wide as the trousers shackling my ankles will allow. She just spreads me wide and helps herself. My nipples are being plucked and pinched and teased into aching points of chafed skin. Then the pressure against my arse recedes and all my thoughts are concentrated in my nipples being worked so hard and grazed against the rough skin of the tree. My cunt is dripping wet as I feel the cold tip of something long and very thick pressing tantalizingly against it. I try to open my legs wider but fail and I let out a visceral grunt of frustration. The freezing silicone head is rubbed up and down across the opening to my cunt, nudging up to my erect clit and slowly back down again to rest against the tight pucker of my arsehole. “Maybe I should take you right here,” she says, “like the little gay boy that you are, cruising around in the woods, looking for sex. Well, you’ve found it.” The head of her dick pushes against my clenched arsehole. “No,” I hear myself saying, “I’ve never been taken there.” Can’t she read the signs? I’m a top. I do not take it up the arse. “Forbidding me, are you?” she croons. “We’ll see.” Before I can reply she slams the thick dick she’s packing into my cunt. Opening and stretching me, she gives my tight hole no time to adjust to the length and thickness. My cunt aches as she rams against the top of my cervix with her blunt, thick head, pulling nearly all the way out of me before thrusting back deep inside me. All I can feel is her in my cunt and her leather and metal bruising my buttocks. Anger at my enforced and unusual passivity and the sheer force of her cruel and energetic pounding begins to warm me.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  guests did not include Mary, and chief in honour among them was Thecla. Naturally Mary has already frequently appeared as an essential theological presence in our story. Her role as mother of Jesus was the cornerstone of the Nicene theological case for the co-equality and co-eternality of Jesus with the Father in the Trinity that over the course of the fourth century defeated the ‘Arian’ party in the imperial Church; it encouraged pious meditation on her place in God’s plan for human salvation (‘he who is not a Marian, is an Arian’ according to a later English aphorism). In the 380s and 390s, Ambrose, as we have seen, enlisted her as an ally in his championing of virginity. At the beginning of the fifth century, Mary was equally central to the dispute that engulfed all Christianity within and without the Empire over the relationship between the divinity and the humanity of Christ. The poison in the row centred on whether one should call Mary ‘Bearer of God’ ( Theotokos ), a description strongly contested by Bishop Nestorios of Constantinople, a theologian in the tradition of Antioch who had a strong sense of the distinctness of these divine and human natures in the Second Person of the Trinity. He argued that a more precise description of Mary to do her proper honour would be Christotokos , ‘Bearer of Christ’; by doing so, he stirred up a formidable combination of enemies. This theological dispute was so bitter that it became a matter of imperial security to solve it. In 451, a major Council of bishops was summoned by the Emperor Marcian (and his rather more imperious wife Pulcheria) to Chalcedon near Constantinople: strategically near enough to the capital for imperial troops to reach it quickly if necessary, yet far enough away to prevent angry mobs coming from the city to intimidate the bishops. The Council not only condemned Nestorios and deposed him from office but produced a lengthy compromise ‘Definition’ of the natures of Christ. At the heart of it is contradictory language about those two natures – ‘without confusion, without change, without division, without separation’ – designed to get on board as many of the contenders as possible. Yet, as is often the way with compromises, Pulcheria and Marcian’s ‘solution’ left Nicene Christianity split three ways between imperial defenders of the Chalcedonian Definition and those standouts on either side who refused to accept it: ‘Miaphysite’ (or Monophysite) believers in Christ’s full divinity and full humanity in ‘one nature’; and ‘Dyophysites’ (or Nestorians), who affirmed Christ’s one substance, but in ‘two natures’. Such terminology may baffle Western Christians now; however, it still represents passionate belief among the successor-communities of these ancient disputes. [77] Despite the lack of agreement at the Council of Chalcedon, it was in no one’s interest amid these schisms to dishonour Mary as Mother and Virgin, and she was embarked on the spiritual journey that would make her ‘Our Lady’ to countless generations of Christians.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  That would explain a lot. While Marvin was in the front of the house nursing his drink, back in the kitchen at Saint Germain, the mood was even uglier. Paul Kelly, Rob's chef de cuisine, had just broken the bad news to the crew, all of whom sat on the cutting boards of their work stations, looking very unhappy. "What the fuck you mean—no Christmas bonuses?! That's bullshit, man! That's totally fucked up!" said Kevin, the saucier. He pounded his fist against the stainless-steel worktable and shook his head back and forth. "No way!" insisted Thierry, the highly paid patissier who Rob had lured away from an uptown four-star. "Zees is boolsheet!" Michelle didn't say anything. She just hopped off her board and began wiping down her station. That really worried Paul as he suspected that Michelle, being not only the best of the cooks but also the smartest, knew that any wailing and whining was useless and that there was truly nothing to be done. He tried to make eye contact, read her expression. They were close, after all. They'd even slept together once, and stayed friends afterward. But Michelle avoided his gaze. The cat was on the roof, Paul decided. She'd already made up her mind. A week, two weeks from now and she'd be giving notice. You can't bullshit her. She knew about this business. Manuel, Juan, Omar, Jaime, and Rigoberto—the Puebla Posse—said nothing. They weren't going anywhere. They'd been with Rob since the beginning, were well paid and well appreciated, and, most importantly, had been fucked over so many other times at so many other places they were used to it, and probably saw it all as inevitable. God love them, thought Paul. When I die, I want to come back as a Mexican, a Poblano, a fucking grown-up. As the familiar smell of Terminal Restaurant Syndrome gathered about the room, who better deserved to go home to their families with fat bonus checks than these guys? Paul hated himself for the dishonesty of the situation. He would have loved to have just said, "Okay, vatos! El restaurante esta finite. Grab a stove! Grab a freezer! Manuel? You get the Pacojet—let's sell this shit off before the consultants and the marshals get here! Vamanos! I recommend the crystal. Don't waste your time on the pinchay camarones!" But he couldn't do that. Once again the skipper of a sinking ship, he had to keep the crew at their stations. So he gave the standard inspirational "don't worry, things will turn around" speech, complete with general hints and expressions of future goodwill.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Pius IX’s ideological war on liberalism led him into some dubious moral decisions, one of which was his blanket hostility to that characteristic feature of post-Revolutionary Europe, the reintroduction of civil marriage. Protestant Britain, which was far from sharing the Revolutionary heritage, introduced civil marriage in England and Wales in 1836, to accommodate the significant proportion of its population who were not part of its established Churches: Nonconformist and Methodist Protestants, but also Roman Catholics, none of whom wished to sully their marriages with a ceremony in the parish church. Pius simply denounced civil marriage as adultery, raising a host of historical and practical questions, not least when the devoutly Catholic Habsburg Emperor instituted civil marriage in his dominions in 1868. [32] Worst of all was the Pope’s moral obtuseness about what in other circumstances he would have denounced as an attack on the family: the effective kidnap of a Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara. In 1858, Mortara was born to Jewish parents in Bologna in the Papal States, a sickly baby: the teenage nurse summoned to the apparently dying child took it on herself to give him an emergency baptism as a Christian. Six years later the Roman Inquisition learned of the case and forcibly seized Edgardo from his parents, took him to Rome and gave him a Catholic education, which took him into the priesthood; he lived until 1940, loudly defending Pope Pius IX in the interest of converting Jews to Christianity. Mortara’s abduction nevertheless caused outrage at the time on either side of the Atlantic: there were protests from devout and thoughtful Catholics as exalted as the French Emperor Napoleon III (nephew of the great Napoleon). The Pope was unmoved, and liberals noted his intransigence. [33] The new mood in Rome included official rehabilitation of Thomas Aquinas as the guide theologian for Roman Catholicism after fluctuations in his posthumous fortunes and much neglect in Enlightenment Catholicism. In the Counter-Reformation, the Society of Jesus and Aquinas’s own Dominican Order had both structured their teaching around his works, and now they set aside centuries of rivalry in jointly championing Thomism once more. As ‘neo-Thomism’, the teaching of Aquinas was given explicit backing by Pope Leo XIII in 1879. Thereafter, for nearly a century, it remained the vital force in Catholic theological training and reflection, despite the inconvenience of Aquinas’s reflections on ensoulment in relation to the Immaculate Conception. Contrary intellectual exploration, including attempts to examine the history of the Church or to explore some of the complications of biblical textual history exposed by Protestant scholarship, faced rigorous repression and elimination from any Catholic educational institution. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Pope Pius X denounced all such research as ‘Modernism’, a term whose vagueness suggested a sinister foe like early Christian coinages such as ‘encratism’ or ‘messalianism’, conveniently applied to anyone whom the authorities did not like. [34] This vigorous if selectively ultramontane affirmation of tradition had as its centrepiece the first Vatican Council of worldwide bishops in 1869–70.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  inadvertently revived a form of Christian sub-Trinitarian theology chased out of the mainstream Christian Churches in the second and third centuries CE . Termed ‘modalist Monarchianism’ in the forbidding jargon of Church historians, ‘Oneness’ or ‘Jesus-Only’ Pentecostal belief now infuses the joyful faith of around a quarter of Pentecostalism’s vast constituency worldwide. [4] It is hardly surprising that in the early years of Pentecostalism, Evangelicals generally detested Pentecostals as much as they had once despised Quakers. After all, the essence of Evangelicalism is an affirmation of the clarity and comprehensibility of the Word of God in Scripture, rather than the wordless sighs of the Spirit of God (once praised in passing by Paul of Tarsus himself, Rom. 8.26). Cerebral Fundamentalism like this is a particularly awkward fit for the Pentecostal outlook. An opposite problem was the closeness of much Pentecostal belief to some of the theological innovations made by nineteenth- century Evangelical Protestantism – like quarrelsome siblings, they could bicker over the finer points of for instance ‘Spirit Baptism’ or ‘Dispensationalism’ – terms that would generally provoke blank looks in other parts of the Christian family. Moreover, the extrovert style of Pentecostal revivalism was irritatingly familiar to Evangelicals, while the Pentecostal penchant for giving women dramatic leadership roles was embarrassingly reminiscent of female freedoms that most wings of Evangelicalism spent the nineteenth century closing down (above, Chapter 15). [5] Nevertheless, the widening global success of Pentecostalism could not fail to impress Evangelicals. One important commonality was their shared growing suspicion of liberal Protestantism, particularly when it centred itself on a ‘Social Gospel’ of justice and political action that seemed to them a dangerous distraction to the task of evangelism. A crucial moment came in 1943 when a major component of the Pentecostal Movement in the USA, the Assemblies of God, agreed to join the National Association of Evangelicals. [6] It was a time when American Evangelicalism seemed especially vulnerable and in need of allies. In the inter-war period, it had suffered dual blows on the national scene, first in widespread ridicule after a set-piece confrontation over the teaching of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in the school curricula in Tennessee and Oklahoma, and then in the abject failure of its attempt to impose compliance with Prohibition on the nation’s drinkers. The favourite cause of ‘first-wave feminism’ met its match in the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 by the Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a Congress dominated by (overwhelmingly male) Democrats. The Pentecostal–Evangelical pact grew in strength after 1943. It meant that theological education for both parties fell into conservative patterns set by the Evangelicals, who were generally better financed. Styles of worship evolved in similar ways. The burgeoning Christianity of Africa found Pentecostalism’s celebratory and spontaneous forms of worship more congenial than older European liturgies whether Protestant or Catholic; so did the emerging indigenous Christianities of Asia from India to Korea. Celebration of God’s love was often the only celebration that desperately poor people could count on. In much of this still rapidly growing new Christianity, one would often be hard put to label any single congregation as specifically Pentecostal, Charismatic or Evangelical, yet over the last half-century they are likely to display one common characteristic: an angry alarm at what the liberal West is saying and doing about sex and sexual expression. That has stemmed from one of the greatest and most rapid revolutions in human behaviour in recorded history. CONDOMS , SHEATHS AND

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  [64] The legal statistics from Florence during this same period are exceptionally rich, thanks to the detailed archives of a city court set up with a specific brief on sodomy in 1432. This system actually represented an easing of the savagely punitive systems developed in southern Europe over the previous two centuries, suggesting a situation that had become too frequent for excessive repression. Offenders in Florence numbered in the thousands over a century, and it has been estimated that between 1459 and 1502, one in every two young Florentine males between twelve and twenty years old had been named before the ‘Officers of the Night’, characteristically as passive partners of older men. [65] It was testimony to the strength of a male-bonding culture in a Renaissance city, and was linked to the unusual sexual constraints on marriage arising from social custom. Male marriage-age was remarkably late in Florence in this period, early thirties on average, and connected to severe restrictions on available young women. Indeed, throughout the Italian cities of the period an astonishing and steadily increasing number of young elite women were sent off to nunneries, to save the rising cost of marriage dowries – in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Milan it would eventually comprise three-quarters of their number. The picture was similar in other southern Mediterranean societies concerned to stop family resources being dissipated in marriages; that often resulted in a great many reluctant and discontented young nuns, as well as many frustrated young men. [66] Corroborating Bernardino’s splenetic but well-informed observations, this suggests a classic case of life-cycle behaviour on the part of unmarried youth, for few of them occur in later records as offenders, but it is combined with the fact that a high proportion of the older men involved remained unmarried, in a city which in any case exhibited an unusually high proportion of permanently unmarried men. That was a move away from the Classical model of same- sex activity. It might suggest (as Bernardino indeed maintained, in agreement with Peter Damian) that ‘sodomy’ could be both innate and learned behaviour. The new abundance of documentary evidence also suggests a contrary development with great significance for the future (below, Chapter 15): the ‘Mediterranean’ pattern of unequal-age sexual activity is not nearly so apparent in fifteenth-century northern European cities, where the cases revealed (in what is also a much smaller overall number of prosecutions) were more a matter of partners of equal age, many of whom returned repeatedly to their desires. [67] One answer to such realities was for authorities in Church and society to find an accommodation with another phenomenon emerging from the medieval West’s urban, monetized culture: women offering transactional sex. That covers a multitude of sexual activities, summed up in an unavoidably judgemental word as prostitution, even though they were not all necessarily straightforwardly in return for money.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  In 1968, they were at last about to make public their findings; they had concluded that there was no good argument for banning contraceptive devices. [17] The Pope was alarmed. He enlarged the commission and changed the criteria for those entitled to vote, hoping for a different outcome: instead, it was reinforced. So, finally, he ignored the commission’s work and instead accepted a conservative minority recommendation reaffirming Casti Connubii . Just to emphasize how much the spirit of 1930 lived on, this minority report specifically pointed to the Anglican Communion’s reverse of direction on birth control, and observed that for the Catholic Church to follow suit would imply that the Holy Spirit was active outside the Roman obedience. [18] On this basis, Paul VI issued his own statement in 1968: the encyclical Humanae Vitae (‘Of Human Life’), which gave no place for artificial contraception in a Catholic family. To his astonishment and dismay, the case was not closed when Rome had spoken. What the Pope had not appreciated was that Catholic laity had already been quietly thinking for themselves on this issue, and indeed had re-evaluated their Catholicism on the basis of their conclusions. A sensitive analysis of opinion among American Catholics in the 1960s speaks of a new sense among them of ‘moral autonomy – a process nearly always connected to agonizing over contraception’. [19] There were open and angry protests both lay and clerical all over the Catholic world, and, worse still, demographics soon revealed that millions of Catholic laity were paying no attention to the papal ban – as emphatic a rejection as the earlier reaction to Anglican efforts to limit the sale of contraceptives. Paul VI never really recovered from the shock and took no initiatives of significance in the remaining decade of his pontificate. [20] It was the first time that the Catholic faithful – and Catholic families in particular – had so consistently scorned a major papal pronouncement intended to structure intimate parts of their lives, but it has not been the last sexual topic on which Catholic laypeople have parted company with the authority of the Church as presented to them. NEW

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The general move in the sixteenth century against officially regulated brothels had done little to suppress the sex trade in major cities; it was a particularly notorious feature of eighteenth-century London, complete with meticulously maintained published directories for the discriminating client. [15] Further dramatic urban growth in nineteenth-century Europe, coupled with the huge expansion in standing armies (and navies in the case of Britain’s maritime empire), encouraged a return to official management of prostitution, as in the medieval West. Napoleonic France led the way in 1802, but during the century more or less every European urban society established regulatory systems, even the Ottoman Empire; likewise, the Russian Empire built up regulation from 1843, mostly for its urbanizing European territories. Supervision in Russia included the stipulation (patchily enforced) that brothels should not be situated near churches or synagogues. Just as in the medieval Bishop of Winchester’s ‘Stews’ in Southwark, Russian customers were not to be accommodated on Orthodox holy days or before the Sunday liturgy; moreover, brothels should not ornament their facilities with loyal portraits of the Tsar or imperial family, defenders of the Orthodox faith. [16] In this era of masculine self-assertion, there was no greater gulf between male and female outlooks than on prostitution. As early as the 1830s, respectable American ladies would ostentatiously gather as a group outside town brothels and note down the names of the clients, which they would then publish in a magazine designed for the purpose. [17] No one was more forceful than the English Evangelical Josephine Butler, daughter of a reform-minded Whig MP, and married to a scholarly Anglican clergyman. She applied her father’s hatred of slavery in the Empire to slavery at home. Her fury targeted parliamentary legislation of the 1860s, the Contagious Diseases Acts, that ordered the compulsory medical regulation of prostitutes in the interest of their male clients’ health (the concern being fighting efficiency among Britain’s soldiers and sailors). Often local police singled out poverty-stricken women for bullying and humiliation regardless of any evidence of prostitution, just because they could. It was the gender double standard at its worst. Butler reminisced about hearing a woman’s cry outside her comfortable Oxford home: ‘a woman aspiring to heaven and dragged back to hell – and my heart was pierced with pain. I longed to leap from the window, and flee with her to some place of refuge.’ Instead, she concentrated on more systematic and effective campaigns against male indifference to the impossible situation of women who ended up selling their bodies. Shocked males deplored a well- brought-up married lady speaking on public platforms about venereal disease: ‘That dreadful woman, Mrs Butler’, fumed one leading Oxford High Churchman, Canon Henry Liddon. Yet she won; in 1886, Parliament repealed the Contagious Diseases Acts. Her triumph was in line with a clear development in transatlantic Protestantism: female activism begun by radical dissenting groups moved into the ultra-respectable mainstream and was now shaping the narrative of all society.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The common stereotype of the witch as a gnarled old woman does not reflect the reality that the accused were characteristically prosperous or significant figures in their community, though commonly not the most peaceable. If they were indeed elderly women, there was often a long history of accusations against them – and a sudden lack of male protection when their husbands died. [112] A high incidence of witchcraft prosecutions was often found in western European regions, both Protestant and Catholic, that had effective systems of court discipline which people living under them would find it difficult to challenge. Individual powerful personalities might then make all the difference. Some of the worst persecutions were in the Archbishopric of Cologne after it was secured for the Catholic ducal family of Bavaria, the House of Wittelsbach. Ferdinand, Archbishop of Cologne from 1612, was a typical product of the radical Counter-Reformation self-discipline characterizing both the Wittelsbachs and their allies the Habsburgs. It has been plausibly suggested that these devoutly Catholic rulers were fighting more than the Protestantism that certainly obsessed them: their Jesuit mentors gave them a preoccupation with sin and judgement, now strengthened for the clergy among them by the new demands of a clerical celibacy much more conscientiously maintained than in the pre-Reformation Church. As an array of conscientious Counter- Reformation bishops struggled with their own temptations, witches became symbols of the general temptations that Satan used to torment society. Among Protestants, the mid-seventeenth-century Church of Scotland distinguished itself by one of the most statistically intense persecutions in Europe, which was not unconnected to the Scottish clergy’s constant struggle to assert their authority against secular authority in the kingdom. The Scots Kirk had the distinction of inventing that form of torture still popular in the contemporary world, sleep deprivation, in order to extract confessions. [113] Curiously neither here nor in other jurisdictions that employed torture did interrogator or putative witch make much effort to link witchcraft to that other work of the Devil, sodomy: clearly the satanic had agreed on a division of labour. [114] In both Protestantism and Catholicism, the impulse to encourage popular fear of witches began to fade in elite circles in the late seventeenth century, and so deprived persecutors of public legal backing. An oddity was the curiously late transatlantic outcrop around Salem in Massachusetts in 1692, leading to nineteen executions. Less frequently remembered by ghoulish modern tourists is the exactly contemporary hysteria in Stamford, Connecticut: it petered out without eventual fatalities after careful probing by its courts under English common law procedure, and some conscientious reconsideration by the pastors. [115] Back in Europe, an independent-minded Dutch Reformed minister, Balthasar Bekker, denounced witch-hunting in an influential book, Bewitched World (1691). His Church did not thank him for it, but after a sequence of sceptical literary treatments of witch-hunting over the previous 150 years, this was the one that finally shamed many Protestant authorities in north-west Europe into giving up witch trials.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  their base in Evangelicalism; it was too narrow a springboard for populist action given the erosion of churchgoing in the UK. In overheated debates on sexuality in the Church of England General Synod in 1987, John Taylor, the Bishop of St Albans, argued that ‘the Church would gain popularity by taking a firmer line against homosexuality.’ [25] This betrayed the myopia of a traditionalist Evangelical bishop: homophobia might be a crowd-pleaser in some parts of the diminishing constituency of churchgoers, but it soon became evident that it was worse than useless with most of the British public. Conservative moral campaigning in western Europe generally was now primarily part of intra-Church politics: a pale echo of some much more effective deployments of conservative outrage at sexual change in the USA, which in turn were part of global conservative movements that are still unfolding. Throughout the modern world, the most easily heard tone in religion (not just in Christianity) is one of angry conservatism. Why? The anger centres on a profound shift in gender roles traditionally given a religious significance and validated by religious traditions. It embodies the hurt of men at cultural changes that have handed a share of power to women and made room for a variety of sexual and gender identities. That threatens to marginalize heterosexual men and deprive them of dignity, hegemony or even much usefulness – not merely those who already enjoy male privilege, but those who in traditional cultural systems would expect to inherit it. Sociologists of religion have observed that the most extreme forms of conservatism found in modern world religions, conservatisms which in a borrowing from Christianity have been termed ‘fundamentalism’, attract ‘literate but jobless, unmarried male youths marginalized and disenfranchised by the juggernaut of modernity’ – those whom modernity has created, only to fail to offer them any worthwhile purpose. [26] In the now ubiquitous para-world of social media and virtual ‘influencing’, this variety of impressionable young man may be co-opted into toxic misogyny, with homophobia as a side-dish. It is not surprising that male homosexuality should be a major threat to insecure male egos. Lesbianism has not proved so salient in conservative anger: men, including male theologians, have historically never been much interested in what women do with other women, apart from out of prurience. The same themes emerge in religious settings as apparently contrasting as the fundamentalist Islam of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Orthodox Christianity of nationalist Russians, or those who take seriously the ‘Make America Great Again’ rhetoric that has seized so much of the American Republican Party. Within Christianity, those caught up in such furies often make common cause with historical foes, so that the propaganda machine of ex-KGB President Putin, with its rhetoric of Russian Orthodox traditionalism, can use social media to link up with formerly anti- Soviet MAGA activists, or reach out to conservative Catholics in Europe and the USA.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  The AntiFluorides file past the well singing as each dips up a drink from the oaken bucket.... "The old oaken bucket, the gold oaken bucket The glublthulunnubbeth..." A. J. had tampered with the water, inserting a South American vine that turns the gums to mush. (I hear about this vine from an old German prospector who is dying of uremia in Pasto, Columbia. Supposed to grow in the Putumayo area. Never located any. Didn't try very hard.... The same citizen tells me about a bug like a big grasshopper known as the Xiucutil: "Such a powerful aphrodisiac if one flies on you and you can't get a woman right away you will die. I have seen the Indians running around pulling themselves off from the contact with this animal." Unfortunately I never score for a Xiucutil....) On opening night of the New York Metropolitan, A. J., protected by bug repellent, released a swarm of Xiucutils. Mrs. Vanderbligh swatting at a Xiucutil: "Oh!... Oh!...OOOOOOOOOOOH!1!" Screams, breaking glass, ripping cloth. A rising crescendo of grunts and squeals and moans and whimpers and gasps.... Reek of semen and cunts and sweat and the musty odor of penetrated rectums,... Diamonds and fur pieces, evening dresses, orchids, suits and underwear litter the floor covered by a writhing, frenzied, heaving mass of naked bodies. A. J. once reserved a table a year in advance Chez Robert where a huge, icy gourmet broods over the greatest cuisine in the world. So baneful and derogatory is his gaze that many a client, under that withering blast, has rolled on the floor and pissed all over himself in convulsive attempts to ingratiate. So A. J. arrives with six Bolivian Indians who chew coca leaves between courses. And when Robert, in all his gourmet majesty, bears down on the table, A. J. looks up and yells: "Hey, Boy! Bring me some ketchup." (Alternative: A. J. whips out a bottle of ketchup and douses the haute cuisine. ) Thirty gourmets stop chewing at once. You could have heard a s oufflé drop. As for Robert, he lets out a bellow of rage like a wounded elephant, runs to the kitchen and arms himself with a meat cleaver.... The Sommelier snarls hideously, his face turning a strange iridescent purple.... He breaks off a bottle of Brut Champagne... '26.... Pierre, the Head Waiter, snatches up a boning knife. All three chase A. J. through the restaurant with mangled inhuman screams of rage.... Tables overturn, vintage wines and matchless food crash to the floor.... Cries of "Lynch him!" ring through the air. An elderly gourmet with the insane bloodshot eyes of a mandril, is fashioning a hangman's knot with a red velvet curtain cord....

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Yes, to his dying day the inhabitant of apartment no. 84 on the eighth floor should be grateful to the late Berlioz, chairman of Massolit, for having fallen under a tram-car, and that the memorial gathering had been appointed precisely for that evening. The critic Latunsky was born under a lucky star—it saved him from meeting Margarita, who that Friday became a witch. No one opened the door. Then Margarita raced down at full swing, counting the floors, reached the bottom, burst out the door and, looking up, counted and checked the floors from outside, guessing which precisely were the windows of Latunsky’s apartment. Undoubtedly they were the five dark windows at the corner of the building on the eighth floor. Convinced of it, Margarita rose into the air and in a few seconds was stepping through an open window into an unlit room, where only a narrow path from the moon shone silver. Margarita ran down it, felt for the switch. A moment later the whole apartment was lit up. The broom stood in a corner. After making sure that no one was home, Margarita opened the door to the stairs and checked whether the name plate was there. The name plate was in place. Margarita was where she wanted to be. Yes, they say that to this day the critic Latunsky turns pale remembering that terrible evening, and to this day he utters the name of Berlioz with veneration. It is totally unknown what dark and vile criminal job would have marked this evening—returning from the kitchen, Margarita had a heavy hammer in her hands. Naked and invisible, the lady flier tried to control and talk sense into herself; her hands trembled with impatience. Taking careful aim, Margarita struck at the keys of the grand piano, and a first plaintive wail passed all through the apartment. Becker’s drawing-room instrument, not guilty of anything, cried out frenziedly. Its keys caved in, ivory veneer flew in all directions. The instrument howled, wailed, rasped and jangled. With the noise of a pistol shot, the polished upper soundboard split under a hammer blow. Breathing hard, Margarita tore and mangled the strings with the hammer. Finally getting tired, she left off and flopped into an armchair to catch her breath. Water was roaring terribly in the bathroom, and in the kitchen as well. ‘Seems it’s already overflowing on the floor . . .’ Margarita thought, and added aloud: ‘No point sitting around, however.’ The stream was already running from the kitchen into the corridor. Splashing barefoot through the water, Margarita carried buckets of water from the kitchen to the critic’s study and emptied them into his desk drawers. Then, after smashing the door of the bookcase in the same study with her hammer, she rushed to the bedroom.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  He waves the Jolly Roger listlessly. A.J., surrounded and fighting against overwhelming odds, throws back his head and makes with the hog-call. Immediately a thousand rutting Eskimos pour in grunting and squealing, faces tumescent, eyes hot and red, lips purple, fall on the American women. (Eskimos have a rutting season when the tribes meet in short Summer to disport themselves in orgies. Their faces swell and lips turn purple.) A House Dick with cigar two feet long sticks his head in through the wall: "Have you got a menagerie in here?" Hassan wrings his hands: "A shambles! A filthy shambles! By Allah I never see anything so downright nasty!" He whirls on A.J. who is sitting on a sea chest, parrot on shoulder, patch over one eye, drinking rum from a tankard. He scans the horizon with a huge brass telescope. Hassan: "You cheap Factualist bitch! Go and never darken my rumpus room again!" CAMPUS OF INTERZONE UNIVERSITY Donkeys, camels, llamas, rickshaws, carts of merchandise pushed by straining boys, eyes protruding like strangled tongues -- throbbing red with animal hate. Herds of sheep and goats and long-horned cattle pass between the students and the lecture platform. The students sit around on rusty park benches, limestone blocks, outhouse seats, packing crates, oil drums, stumps, dusty leather hassacks, mouldy gym mats. They wear Levis -- jellabas... hose and doublet -- drink corn from mason jars, coffee from tin cans, smoke gage (marijuana) in cigarettes made of wrapping paper and lottery tickets... shoot junk with a safety pin and dropper, study racing forms, comic books, Mayan codices.... The Professor arrives on a bicycle carrying a string of bull heads. He mounts the platform holding his back (crane swings a bellowing cow over his head). PROF: "Fucked by the Sultan's Army last night. I have dislocate the back in the service of my resident queen.... Can't evict that old gash. Need a licensed brain electrician disconnect her synapsis by synapsis and a surgical bailiff put her guts out on the sidewalk. When Ma move in on a boy bag and buggage he play Hell dispossess that Gold Star Boarder...." He looks at the bull heads humming tunes from the 1920s. "The nostalgia fit is on me boys and will out willy silly... boys walk down the carny Midway eating pink spun sugar... goose each other at the peep show... jack off in the Ferris Wheel throw sperm at the moon rising red and smoky over the foundries across the river. A Nigra hangs from a cotton wood in front of The Old Court House... whimpering women catch his sperm in vaginal teeth.... (Husband looks at the little changeling with narrow eyes the color of a faded grey flannel shirt.... 'Doc, I suspect it to be a Nigra.'

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  A good example of this phenomenon can be seen in a later phase of the French Revolution. Doctrinaire disputes between the Jacobins and Girondins claimed thousands of lives through mass executions of ‘enemies of the revolution’ in one year. Safeguarding the Revolution justified whatever means were deemed necessary to this end. Marie-Jeanne Roland, a Girondist revolutionary activist who now found herself out of favour, was brought to the guillotine in 1793, where she spoke her famous final words: ‘liberty, what crimes are committed in your name.’ Liberty had been transcendentalised, becoming a sacred entity which justified such extreme violence in its defence. The historian Martin Marty identified five ‘features’ that he holds to be characteristic of religion; all five, he pointed out, are equally characteristic of political movements.38 Politics thus often morph into forms of religion, claiming the right to define the fundamental purpose and meaning of human life. The result is inevitable – a tendency towards intolerance and violence when these secular ‘objects of worship and devotion’ are challenged or threatened. Ontologically, they are secular; functionally, they are divine – and divisive. On Coping with DifferenceI noted earlier Charles Taylor’s remark that ‘understanding the “other”’ is the greatest social challenge that we face today. While I think he’s right, I’m not sure he offers us a solution to this problem – more a way of understanding how it arises, and how we might learn to live with it. It’s better than nothing. But dare we hope for more? The central problem is this: our defining beliefs – especially about ultimate questions, such as the nature of justice or the question of meaning in life – remain obstinately resistant to philosophical or scientific justification. There is no Archimedean point from which such beliefs can be evaluated. The modern period has witnessed a surge of alternative beliefs (often carefully packaged and presented as reliable certainties), rather than a solution to how we live with a plurality of informing and controlling beliefs, and cope with the social tensions that inevitably arise from this. Belief systems are often an extension or an essential component of what Hélène Cixous describes as ‘the battle for mastery’ that rages everywhere between social classes and people groups. Paradoxically, many of those who challenge their social, political or intellectual ‘masters’ simply propose an overcoming of those specific masters and their replacement with alternatives – a process that Julietta Singh describes as ‘an overcoming, a mastering of that which masters’.39 Singh’s concern is that this appears to concede ‘the inescapability of mastery as a way of life’.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  (As opposed to medical testing, which I reluctantly, very reluctantly, accept.) I own and utterly adore a mean, six-pound runt of a cat who I adopted from a shelter, and who essentially runs my household. However annoying or offensive or tone-deaf or silly the PETA folks look at times, I've always been glad they're there, to remind all of us the cost in life and in pain of the luxuries we enjoy. If they choose to picket, to advertise, to educate, to harangue, to use every interpretation of the first amendment to embarrass fashion designers, alter public perception, and change behavior, then God bless them. This is, presumably, a free country. And if they want to put up posters and billboards mocking Rudy Giuliani's cancer (GOT CANCER?), however grotesque that might be, he's a big boy. And it makes them look far worse than even the most uncharitable view of our former mayor. But terrorizing a chef and his family? Using what is essentially racketeering and extortion to frighten chefs into changing menus—in Manrique's case, walking away from a centuries-old Gascogne tradition? This is indefensible, atrocious, and portentous of bad things to come. Already, chefs Traci Des Jardins of Jardiniere and Charlie Trotter have made the craven and ail-too expedient decision to remove foie gras from their menus, not only knuckling under at the first whiff of opposition, but turning their backs on their peers and their profession when their support is needed most. I have seen foie gras being produced, the ducks and geese fed in identical fashion to the way that Manrique's suppliers do it. The animals are not bolted to a board. At mealtime, they are summoned or gently prodded, by the same feeder each day, and held between his legs. Their heads are tilted back and a long funnel is introduced into their mouths and down their throats. About a handful of feed is ground in a mill and poured into their stomachs. They do not generally struggle. Often, free of any physical encouragement, they come when summoned. Certainly it is not pretty. Watching the process causes an instinctive awareness of the gag reflex. But then any number of adult film stars cheerfully inspire the same reaction. It is, no doubt, cruelty of a sort. If any time discomfort is inflicted on another living thing defines the word, then that's what it is. But in the full spectrum of cruelty and horror in this wide world—and even in our own neighborhoods—there is far, far worse. There is cruelty and neglect and murder readily at hand on Bay Area streets.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  [10] Early readers of the Infancy Narratives were not slow to pick up the general implications of what they were saying. When Christians and Jews became increasingly at odds, some Jews hardened their perception into anti-Christian sexual polemic. John’s Gospel records what sounds like an early example of this, in an angry argument presented as directly between Jesus and ‘the Jews’: they sneer ‘We were not born of fornication, we have one Father, even God’ (John 8.41). A story arose, first surviving from a literary attack on Christianity by the late second-century Greek writer Celsus, that Jesus was the son of a Roman soldier called Pantera. Pantera is indeed a surname attested from the period – the gravestone of a legionary with the name can now be viewed in Bad Kreuznach in Germany. The tale may be not so much a malicious fabrication as a confusion, based on a genuine surname of Pantera in Joseph’s family; certainly, that was the contention of the occasionally reliable Christian polemicist Epiphanios in the fourth century, drawing as he claimed on an ancient tradition. [11] Given the nature of the Infancy Narratives as theological exposition, there is no contradiction between their theological claims and the historical untidiness that is likely to lie behind them. Both Gospel writers have built their stories round illegitimacy, a difficult premise that no one is likely to have created just for the sake of it. The New Testament repeatedly refers to the sinlessness of Jesus, but nowhere does it associate that with the circumstances of his birth, whether from a virgin or not. The ‘virgin’ element comes from Matthew. He prefaces his Infancy Narratives by quoting a saying of the prophet Isaiah, nine centuries before, that ‘a virgin shall conceive and bear a son’ (Isa. 7.14; Matt. 1.23). In fact, Matthew was reading his Isaiah in the Greek of the Septuagint, which has translated the ‘young woman’ of Isaiah’s Hebrew text ( ‘almah ) by the word which in Greek normally signifies a virgin ( parthenos ); he thus sparked a long and expanding Christian devotional tradition to Mary as virgin. [12] Yet is Matthew enunciating the doctrine of the virginal conception as understood by later Christians? He could equally well be seizing on the underlying idea of this Isaianic passage in the Septuagint that matches his overall message: in a time of crisis for the people of God, God chooses not a king or military genius to save a remnant, but the most vulnerable of young women and her infant son. [13] How does God do this? In Matthew and Luke, an angel describes the pregnancy respectively to an astonished Joseph and to Mary as of or by the Holy Spirit (Matt. 1.20, Luke 1.35). This is that same Spirit that according to the Hebrew Bible had moved on the face of the primeval waters in creation – as the breath of God’s mouth, the means by which he renews the earth.