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 Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Praise for Just Mercy “[A] searing, moving and infuriating memoir…Bryan Stevenson may, indeed, be America’s Mandela. For decades he has fought judges, prosecutors and police on behalf of those who are impoverished, black or both….Injustice is easy not to notice when it affects people different from ourselves; that helps explain the obliviousness of our own generation to inequity today. We need to wake up. And that is why we need a Mandela in this country.” —N ICHOLAS K RISTOF , The New York Times “Unfairness in the justice system is a major theme of our age….This book brings new life to the story by placing it in two affecting contexts: Stevenson’s life’s work and the deep strain of racial injustice in American life. You don’t have to read too long to start cheering for this man. Against tremendous odds, Stevenson has worked to free scores of people from wrongful or excessive punishment, arguing five times before the Supreme Court….The book extols not his nobility, but that of the cause, and reads like a call to action for all that remains to be done. The message of this book, hammered home by dramatic examples of one man’s refusal to sit quietly and countenance horror, is that evil can be overcome, a difference can be made. Just Mercy will make you upset and it will make you hopeful….Bryan Stevenson has been angry about [the criminal justice system] for years, and we are all the better for it.” —T ED C ONOVER , The New York Times Book Review “A riveting, even shocking narrative…Throughout, though, Stevenson lingers on small moments of grace, forgiveness, encouragement, and kindness.” — The Boston Globe “Brilliant…The experiences [Stevenson] shares are universal.” — The Philadelphia Inquirer “Valuable and compelling…ought to be required reading in law school.” — The Seattle Times “There is nobody in America who is doing more of God’s work with less acclaim than Bryan Stevenson….He is taking on the incompetence, inequities, and the simple, confounded clumsiness of an overworked system that grinds up too many people and delivers far too little of what it’s supposed to deliver, both to the people caught up in it, and to the country that takes such unwarranted pride in it.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Gadsden police had stopped Mr. Ruffin one night because they said his car was swerving. Police discovered that his license had expired a few weeks earlier, so he was taken into custody. When he arrived at the city jail badly bruised and bleeding, Mr. Ruffin told the other inmates that he had been beaten terribly and was desperately in need of his inhaler and asthma medication. When I started investigating the case, inmates at the jail told me they saw officers beating Mr. Ruffin before taking him to an isolation cell. I heard from other families about loved ones who had died or been killed at the jail. Despite the reforms of the 1970s and early 1980s, inmate death in jails and prisons was still a serious problem. Suicide, prisoner-on-prisoner violence, inadequate medical care, staff abuse, and guard violence claimed the lives of hundreds of prisoners every year. I soon received other complaints from people in the Gadsden community. The parents of a black teenager who had been shot and killed by police told me that their son had been stopped for a minor traffic violation after running a red light. Their young son had just started driving and became very nervous when the police officer approached him. His family maintained that he reached down to the floor where he kept his gym bag to retrieve his newly issued driver’s license. The police claimed he was reaching for a weapon—no weapon was ever found—and the teen was shot dead while he sat in his car. The officer who shot the boy said that the teen had been menacing and had moved quickly, in a threatening manner. The child’s parents told me their son was generally nervous and easily frightened but was also obedient and would never have hurt anyone. He was very religious and a good student, and he had the kind of reputation that allowed the family to persuade civil rights leaders to push for an investigation into his death. Their pleas reached our office, and I was looking into the case along with the jail and prison cases. Figuring out Alabama civil and criminal law while managing death penalty cases in several other states kept me very busy. The additional prison conditions litigation meant a lot of long-distance driving and extremely long hours. My weathered 1975 Honda Civic was struggling to keep up. The radio had stopped working consistently a year earlier; it would come to life only if I hit a pothole or stopped suddenly enough to violently shake the car and spark a connection.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. Now we say, the law itself is the key of knowledge. For it was both a shadow and a figure of the righteousness of Christ, therefore it became the Lawyers, as instructors of the Law of Moses and the words of the Prophets, to reveal in a certain measure to the Jewish people the knowledge of Christ. This they did not, but on the contrary detracted from the divine miracles, and spoke against His teaching, Why hear ye him? So then they took away the key of knowledge. Hence it follows, Ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entered in ye hindered. But faith also is the key of knowledge. For by faith comes also the knowledge of truth, according to that of Isaiah, Unless ye have believed, ye will not understand. (Isa. 7:9. LXX.) The Lawyers then have taken away the key of knowledge, not permitting men to believe in Christ. AUGUSTINE. (de qu. Ev. l. ii. q. 23.) But the key of knowledge is also the humility of Christ, which they would neither themselves understand, nor let be understood by others. AMBROSE. Those also are even now condemned under the name of Jews, and made subject to future punishment, who, while usurping to themselves the teaching of divine knowledge, both hinder others, and do not themselves acknowledge that which they profess. AUGUSTINE. (de con. Ev. lib. ii. c. 75.) Now all these things Matthew records to have been said after our Lord had come into Jerusalem. But Luke relates them here, when our Lord was yet on His journey to Jerusalem. From which they appear to me to be similar discourses, of which Matthew has given one, Luke the other. BEDE. But how true were the charges of unbelief, hypocrisy, and impiety, brought against the Pharisees and Lawyers they themselves testify, striving not to repent, but to entrap the Teacher of truth; for it follows, And as he said these things to them, the Pharisees and Lawyers began to urge him vehemently. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. Now this urging is taken to mean pressing upon Him, or threatening Him, or waxing furious against Him. But they began to interrupt His words in many ways, as it follows, And to force him to speak of many things.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Men, too, were deprived of access to divorce, with one all- important excep- tion: female infi delity. In late antiquity the exception clauses uttered by Je- sus in the Gospel of Matthew were taken to mean that a husband could dismiss an unfaithful wife. Even John would accept it, with a little tergiver- sation. “An adulteress is not really even a wife.” Th e most he could fi nd to say for such a rule was that it prevented bloodshed in the house. But what emerges so clearly from his sermons is the way that the church forcefully sought to alleviate the sexual double standard while importing a new double standard in the rules of divorce.  Th e homiletic corpus of the late fourth and early fi fth centuries provides abundant and vivid testimony to the intense war on fornication that trailed the mainstreaming of Christianity. Th e sermons of Chrysostom were heard by rich and poor, powerful and powerless, free and slave, men and women. He truly hoped that he might transform Antioch or Constantinople into a Christian city through the diligent reform of one house hold at a time. But prostitution was a particularly formidable challenge to this agenda, even in the late empire. A fourth- century cata log of the urban amenities of Rome still included some forty- fi ve public brothels (listed between the public grain mills and the public latrines); it is telling that prostitution remained part of the offi cial, public face of civic life in the early phases of the Chris- CHURCH, SOCIETY, AND SEX IN THE AGE OF TRIUMPH  tian empire. It is not surprising, then, that prostitution became a par tic u lar preoccupation of leaders like John Chrysostom, and that through his eyes we can see the anger and despair of a Christian preacher working amid a society where prostitution remained a vibrant part of the sexual economy.  Chrysostom’s sermon is only the tip of the iceberg in his own extensive homiletic corpus and those of his contemporaries. In the moment of Chris- tian triumph, the leadership of the church began to recognize that prostitu- tion was part of an entrenched social system that encouraged the sexual use of dishonored women. Th e bishops of the later fourth century articulated with unpre ce dented clarity the structural mechanics of the Greco- Roman sexual economy.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘Anyway, we got in the car, put on our seatbelts; I made a little grab for him, which he didn’t seem to mind—I just had to get a feel of it, you know. Then he calmly reaches in his jacket pocket, as it might be for a fag, and hoiks out this kind of fob, and says, very pleased with himself indeed, “You might as well drive round to the station, I’m a police officer.” ’ I was quite speechless and James was shaking from the recollection and from having brought off his story. I had been with him all the way at a nodding, trainer’s distance and then he had knocked me out. But it wasn’t quite over. ‘I didn’t say a word, but started the car, and of course just as I did so my bleep went. Then I saw the evening was inevitable in a different way, and the irony was all working overtime in that hideous way it can do. So it was my turn to grope in my breast pocket for my little professional accoutrement. I tried to make something of this with what now seems a fantastic gallantry and said how neither of us was what he seemed. I needn’t have fucking bothered. He changed completely and became all textbook—not actually taken down and used in evidence et cetera, but calling me sir and not giving an inch (as it were) …’ ‘James,’ I had become angry. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t say anything about this for obvious reasons. I have had that man—Colin he’s called, isn’t he?’ He nodded. ‘I picked him up on the Tube, ages ago, just after we’d seen him at the baths. He followed me off the train, almost invited himself back to my place. I fucked him. He fucked me. He’s as queer as—whatever is very, very queer: me, you. He can’t possibly get away with this pretty policeman thing.’ James looked at me very closely. Under no other circumstances could all this have been good news to him.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  This exchange continued to bother me long after the paper appeared in 1997. How many of these adaptive hypotheses, I wondered, would I have to test before I could conclude that any given display trait was arbitrary—that is, that it lacked information about any quality other than its attractiveness? When would I ever be done with this task? Even if I were able to test every adaptive explanation they could think of, pleasing one set of reviewers would only be the first of my hurdles. Their reasoning implied that I would have to test other hypotheses in order to satisfy other skeptical reviewers, and then others, ad infinitum. Because there would be no end to the creative imaginations of the reviewers, there would be no end to the process of trying to demonstrate that any specific trait is arbitrary. I was trapped. The prevailing standard of evidence meant it would be impossible for me to ever conclude that any trait had evolved to be arbitrarily beautiful. It had actually become impossible to be a contemporary Darwinian. I realized that it was Alan Grafen’s standard of evidence that had put me in this bind: “To believe in the Fisher-Lande process as an explanation of sexual selection without abundant proof is methodologically wicked.” Of course, Grafen was not the first to deploy the “abundant proof” standard, which has a long, respected history in science. In the 1970s, in regard to paranormal psychology, Carl Sagan claimed, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” This famous “Sagan Standard” can actually be traced back to the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace, who wrote, “The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.” Thus, whether Grafen’s abundant proof standard should be invoked depends on our perceptions of the strangeness of the Darwin-Fisher theory of mate choice. But what dictates the strangeness of a hypothesis? Should we allow our gut feelings about the way the world should work to dictate our scientific investigation of the way it does? Grafen argued that the comforting “rhyme and reason” of Zahavi’s handicap principle should compel us to reject the terrible strangeness of arbitrary mate choice. Of course, it’s human nature to want to believe in a universe that is rational and orderly. No less a scientist than Albert Einstein backed away from quantum mechanics—for which he had laid much of the intellectual groundwork himself—because it brought uncertainty and unpredictability into the world of physics. In rejecting quantum mechanics, Einstein famously wrote, “God does not play dice.” But eventually quantum mechanics triumphed despite its enduring strangeness, because the predictive power of the theory was too great to ignore. Our understanding of the physical laws of the universe has progressed immeasurably since then. Physics was forced to embrace a stranger universe.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  This investment in our youngest children of divorce is something we would celebrate in future years. These little ones are the most vulnerable. Their feelings of pain, anger, and abandonment endure into adulthood. They need special protection. I also want to amplify another finding of this study having to do with support for higher education. Children who would have received financial help for their college educations should not, at age eighteen, feel they’re paying for their parents’ divorce with the forfeiture of their future careers. This is an intolerable injustice. The children will never forgive their parents for this betrayal, nor should they. If parents cannot afford to pay for college, children understand that just fine. But if a parent has the means to help pay tuition but says he or she is not “obligated,” then the child has every right to be furious—at the parent and even more at a society that has sanctioned the child’s heavy loss with its divorce laws. When a stingy parent gives priority to a new family—new spouse, new children, new life—the child of divorce is doubly wounded. Professors in several law schools have suggested that money for college along with other funds for the children be set aside at the time of the breakup—before the community property is divided. 2 For families with the means to do so, trust funds would assure that children are able to get the educations they deserve. Although a few states have enacted legislation that enables the court to order support for college under certain circumstances, most states have no laws that extend child support beyond age eighteen. Surely all children deserve the same legal protection and the financial and emotional support and encouragement that is critical to their future. The children who would benefit from such legislation, as usual, have no voice, no constituency, no power to influence their futures. But the rest of us can and should speak up for them. For Society IF WE WANT to improve our divorce culture, we can begin with better services for families that are breaking up. Our focus should not be on parental rights but on what needs to be done to protect each individual child in each household. Such services could be offered under court auspices, clinics, or independently by a new agency. Basically this new agency would be a place for divorcing parents to come and make long-term plans for their children—not just for this year or next but for many years into the future. Parents can be helped to anticipate the changes that lie ahead and to learn critical skills for protecting their children. This new agency would represent a significant expansion of mediation and parent education services that already exist in several states. It would provide education, counseling, and mediation to divorced and remarried families.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. But our Lord, Who knew all things before they came to pass, knowing that His messengers would not be received by the Samaritans, nevertheless commanded them to go before Him, because it was His practice to make all things conduce to the good of His disciples. Now He went up to Jerusalem as the time of His suffering drew near. In order then that they might not be offended, when they saw Him suffer, bearing in mind that they must also endure patiently when men persecute them, He ordained beforehand as a kind of prelude this refusal of the Samaritans. It was good for them also in another way. For they were to be the teachers of the world, going through towns and villages, to preach the doctrine of the Gospel, meeting sometimes with men who would not receive the sacred doctrine, allowing not that Jesus sojourned on earth with them. He therefore taught them, that in announcing the divine doctrine, they ought to be filled with patience and meekness, without bitterness, and wrath, and fierce enmity against those who had done any wrong to them. But as yet they were not so, nay, being stirred up with fervid zeal, they wished to bring down fire from heaven upon them. It follows, And when his disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord, will thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, &c. AMBROSE. For they knew both that when Phineas had slain the idolaters it was counted to him for righteousness; (Numb. 25:8, Ps. 107:31) and that at the prayer of Elijah fire came down from heaven, that the injuries of the prophet might be avenged. (2 Kings 1:10, 12.) BEDE. For holy men who well knew that that death which detaches the soul from the body was not to be feared, still because of their feelings who feared it, punished some sins with death, that both the living might be struck with a wholesome dread, and those who were punished with death might receive harm not from death itself but from sin, which would be increased were they to live. AMBROSE. But let him be avenged who fears. He who fears not, seeks not vengeance. At the same time the merits of the Prophets are likewise shewn to have been in the Apostles, seeing that they claim to themselves the right of obtaining the same power of which the Prophet was thought worthy; and fitly do they claim that at their command fire should come down from heaven, for they were the sons of thunder. TITUS BOSTRENSIS. (v. Theophyl. in loc.) They thought it much juster that the Samaritans should perish for not admitting our Lord, than the fifty soldiers who tried to thrust down Elijah.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  AUGUSTINE. (Tr. xli. 1) As if to say: Whereas ye have now belief, by continuing, ye shall have sight. (xl. 9.). For it was not their knowledge which made them believe, but rather their belief which gave them knowledge. Faith is to believe that which you see not: truth to see that which you believe? By continuing then to believe a thing, you come at last to see the thing; i. e. to the contemplation of the very truth as it is; not conveyed in words, but revealed by light. The truth is unchangeable; it is the bread of the soul, refreshing others, without diminution to itself; changing him who eats into itself, itself not changed. This truth is the Word of God, which put on flesh for our sakes, and lay hid; not meaning to bury itself, but only to defer its manifestation, till its suffering in the body, for the ransoming of the body of sin, had taken place. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. liv. 1) Or, ye shall know the truth, i. e. Me: for I am the truth. The Jewish was a typical dispensation; the reality ye can only know from Me. AUGUSTINE. (de Verb. Dom. Serm. xlviii. ἐλευθερώσες) Some one might say perhaps, And what does it profit me to know the truth? So our Lord adds, And the truth shall free you; as if to say, If the truth doth not delight you, liberty will. To be freed is to be made free, as to be healed is to be made whole. This is plainer in the Greek; in the Latin we use the word free chiefly in the sense of escape of danger, relief from care, and the like. THEOPHYLACT. As He said to the unbelievers alone, Ye shall die in your sin, so now to them who continue in the faith He proclaims absolution. AUGUSTINE. (iv. de Trin. c. 18) From what shall the truth free us, but from death, corruption, mutability, itself being immortal, uncorrupt, immutable? Absolute immutability is in itself eternity. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. liv. 1) Men who really believed could have borne to be rebuked. But these men began immediately to shew anger. Indeed if they had been disturbed at His former saying, they had much more reason to be so now. For they might argue; If He says we shall know the truth, He must mean that we do not know it now: so then the law is a lie, our knowledge a delusion. But their thoughts took no such direction: their grief is wholly worldly; they know of no other servitude, but that of this world: They answered Him, We be Abraham’s seed, and were never in bondage to any man. How sayest Thou then, we shall be made free? As if to say, They of Abraham’s stock are free, and ought not to be called slaves: we have never been in bondage to any one.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  In this way, the concept of a sexually antagonistic coevolutionary arms race is really misleading because the “war of the sexes” is highly asymmetrical. Males evolve weapons of control, while females are merely coevolving defenses that create opportunity for choice. It’s not a fair fight, because only males are really at war. However, as ducks show, female sexual autonomy can still win. — In March 2013, shortly after Barack Obama was inaugurated for his second term, negotiations between congressional Republicans and the White House over the U.S. federal budget broke down once again, and Republicans turned their attention to one of their favorite subjects: wasteful government spending. And that’s how the research that Patty Brennan and I had done on sexual conflict and the evolution of duck genital anatomy became the focus of a mini-scandal about government excess, which propelled the topic of duck sex into the maelstrom of the political news cycle, where it was catchily dubbed Duckpenisgate by Mother Jones. Our duck genital evolution research had been funded by a 2009 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), with money coming from the aptly named “stimulus” package—the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). For purposes of transparency, ARRA established an independent website, Recovery.gov, which allowed citizens to “track the money” and see where their stimulus tax dollars were going. This is how, as I imagine it, some enterprising intern at Cybercast News Service (CNS), a conservative news website, came across our grant just a few months before it was due to expire. When a CNS news story describing our grant was posted on its blog, a conservative Twitter storm of outrage ensued. For example, the columnist Michelle Malkin tweeted, “Pass me the mind bleach. Blech.” (Of course, why would you retweet a story you were supposedly so eager to forget?) The CNS story was quickly followed up on by Fox News, and the story went into heavy rotation for the week. The Fox News anchorwoman Shannon Bream introduced a weeklong series of investigations into federal government waste with the following question: Did you know that $385,000 of your tax dollars were being spent to study duck…anatomy? You heard that correctly—$385,000 of your money to study the private parts of ducks. It’s part of President Obama’s stimulus plan, and it’s just one example of the kind of spending decisions that have added up to massive debt and deficits.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Objection 3: Further, a gloss on Prov. 29:22, “An angry [Douay: ‘passionate’] man provoketh quarrels,” says: “Anger is the door to all vices: if it be closed, peace is ensured within to all the virtues; if it be opened, the soul is armed for every crime.” Now no capital vice is the origin of all sins, but only of certain definite ones. Therefore anger should not be reckoned among the capital vices. On the contrary, Gregory (Moral. xxxi, 45) places anger among the capital vices. I answer that, As stated above ([3578]FS, Q[84], A[3],4), a capital vice is defined as one from which many vices arise. Now there are two reasons for which many vices can arise from anger. The first is on the part of its object which has much of the aspect of desirability, in so far as revenge is desired under the aspect of just or honest*, which is attractive by its excellence, as stated above [3579](A[4]). [*Honesty must be taken here in its broad sense as synonymous with moral goodness, from the point of view of decorum; Cf. Q[145], A[1]]. The second is on the part of its impetuosity, whereby it precipitates the mind into all kinds of inordinate action. Therefore it is evident that anger is a capital vice. Reply to Objection 1: The sorrow whence anger arises is not, for the most part, the vice of sloth, but the passion of sorrow, which results from an injury inflicted. Reply to Objection 2: As stated above (Q[118], A[7]; Q[148], A[5]; Q[153], A[4]; [3580]FS, Q[84], A[4]), it belongs to the notion of a capital vice to have a most desirable end, so that many sins are committed through the desire thereof. Now anger, which desires evil under the aspect of good, has a more desirable end than hatred has, since the latter desires evil under the aspect of evil: wherefore anger is more a capital vice than hatred is. Reply to Objection 3: Anger is stated to be the door to the vices accidentally, that is by removing obstacles, to wit by hindering the judgment of reason, whereby man is withdrawn from evil. It is, however, directly the cause of certain special sins, which are called its daughters. Whether six daughters are fittingly assigned to anger?Objection 1: It would seem that six daughters are unfittingly assigned to anger, namely “quarreling, swelling of the mind, contumely, clamor, indignation and blasphemy.” For blasphemy is reckoned by Isidore [*QQ. in Deut., qu. xvi] to be a daughter of pride. Therefore it should not be accounted a daughter of anger. Objection 2: Further, hatred is born of anger, as Augustine says in his rule (Ep. ccxi). Therefore it should be placed among the daughters of anger.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  I don’t know how to explain it, Judy. I guess I just did it from within. I decided I wanted to have a family and kids and I wanted a good job, so I applied to a community college and got back into school. I didn’t want to ask anyone for help, not my mom and certainly not my dad. There was no one. I’ve been working my way through college, paying for everything by myself.” I tried to keep from rubbing my eyes in disbelief as Larry went on to talk about his father in a more balanced way than I had ever heard. “You’re talking very differently about your dad than you used to, Larry.” “When I was younger,” he said, “I used to see him on weekends. In the beginning it was fun, but after a while I began to realize it wasn’t really a father-son relationship. We never really talked.” With a sudden flash of anger Larry said, “And finally I realized that he had been leading me on about everything my whole life. Suddenly I knew that I meant nothing to him, just nothing. What an asshole I had been, a goddamn monkey on a string. When I calmed down, I suddenly saw him for the pathetic creep that he was, a drunk who hits helpless women, who picks on my little sister her whole life, and who lies to his son. That’s who he really is. And that was who I was becoming. And I hated that.” Larry’s words were now spilling out nonstop. “Do you want to know what’s getting me through school, working seven days a week, going to work every night at midnight at the most boring job in the country, and coming back at six to get ready for school, earning minimum wage? Sometimes I’m so lonely I feel like I could die. But every time I think of quitting, I see my dad’s face and I say, ‘If you quit, that’s how you’ll end up.’ And that keeps me going.” As I listened to the changes in his words and way of speaking and saw how different he looked, it occurred to me that in all our previous conversations Larry had disclosed only one side of himself and his history. He’d told me a hundred times over about his anger at his mother and how little he had gotten from her, how heartsick he was at the divorce. But it was now becoming clear to me that there were reserves of strength and resilience that I had not seen. “I understand, Larry, why you’ve given up on your dad and what a terrible blow it was for you to be turned down when you had pinned your hopes on living with him. But where did your plans come from?

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Screaming, pleading, grounding, and taking away privileges had no effect. Paula stomped out as soon as her mother left for work and returned when she felt like it. At age fifteen, she took her sister’s car and totaled it. Paula was on a tear and out of control. Paula hit adolescence filled with anger about having been abandoned as a little girl. She craved love, attention, and above all, she wanted to be noticed and taken seriously. At the same time, she had long-standing and growing doubts about her value and desirability as a person and as a woman. She was afraid of being alone and had little or no internal sense of direction, confidence, pride in achievement, or ability. She was singularly vulnerable to the dangerous temptations of sex and drugs. She had no reason or resources to resist their lure. Sex was a sure ticket to being noticed and sought after. Screwing boys provided the illusion of being held and loved. Drugs and alcohol numbed troubled, empty feelings, inflated shaky self-esteem, and made her feel confident and powerful. As a young teenager Paula was intoxicated with feeling important and powerful for the first time, and she resentfully pushed away any doubts about her behavior. At the end of that ten-year interview, she responded to my genuine concern about what she would do if she got expelled (as she was sure to be). “I’m just confused most of the time,” she admitted. “I don’t know why. I don’t like to think about things unless they happen. If I get into trouble again, I guess the police will solve it for me. Most of my trouble is during the day when Mom’s away. Coming home to an empty house got me into drugs and alcohol. I couldn’t stand the emptiness.” I continue to be struck by the poignancy of this statement. She was indeed confused. She had absolutely no sense that she had any control over herself. She assumed that control had to come from the outside, from the police if necessary. She did connect her trouble to years of having no parent really being there for her, but her attachment to her parents wasn’t rich enough or strong enough to keep her safe —and she remained angry at both. Very early Paula crossed the boundary from childhood into pseudoadulthood. She became attached to and increasingly dependent on sex and drugs as ways to feel better, to express her anger, and to feed her loneliness. Their power over her was irresistible, and she was on a dangerous and potentially fatal path into her future. Rebellion ONE IN FOUR of the children in this study started using drugs and alcohol before their fourteenth birthdays. By the time they were seventeen years old, over half of the teenagers were drinking or taking drugs. This number compares with almost 40 percent of all teenagers nationwide. Of those who used drugs, four in five admitted that their schoolwork suffered badly as a result.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  ere was much that Paul did not need to say. And as little as same-sex love occupies Paul’s attention in his extant letters, the fl ashes of vitriol were enough for subsequent Christians to locate their apostle indubitably outside the practices of mainstream society. Within a few de cades, the early Christians had contrived a new word to convey their unqualifi ed disapprobation of practices that had subsisted across the centuries. A compound word, paidophthoria, “the violation of children,” appears scattered throughout the earliest layers of Christian literature. It is utterly unattested before its appearance amid the literary debris of the primitive church. Th e word seems to be a deliberate transfi guration of pederasty, replacing eros, erotic love, with phthoria, violation, and thereby construing all sexual contact with the young as an act of corruption. Th e Christians reduced to a one- word slogan the more artful denunciations of Philo, but the sensibility was identical, as was the sense of where contemporary sexual culture strayed most egregiously from the divine will. As with porneia, the very novelty of Christian language mirrored the transformative logic of a distinctive sexual morality. Th e fact that the early Christians were forced to coin two terms— arsenokoitia and paidophthoria— merely to speak about same- sex eros is not a sign of cautious precision or hesitant refl ection on the exact nature of sexual sin. Rather, it refl ects the absence of an equivalent category in Greco- Roman culture and the grasping attempt to fi nd a language adequate to the moral disapprobation conveyed by the early Christian authors. Th eir attitude is most evident in the eternal torments imagined for same- sex lovers in the early apocalyptic lit- T H E W I L L A N D T H E WO R L D  erature, especially the Apocalypse of Peter. Considered authentic by many in the early church, the Apocalypse of Peter envisions a curious hell where sinners are punished according to their crime. Men who “pollute their own bodies, conducting themselves like women” and women who “copulate with each other as a man with a woman” were cast off a cliff , only to reas-cend it in an eternal cycle of punishment. In treating male and female homoeroticism as a singular transgression, the Apocalypse belongs to that handful of imperial- period testimonies that refl ect the fi rst stirrings of a concept with a long future, a sort of “unnatural” sexuality based strictly on gender preference. Th e grid of sexual confi gurations underlying the Apocalypse is not structurally dissimilar from the scientia sexualis we encounter in contemporary astrological and medical texts. But in the Christian scales of value, the licitness of penetration depends on the gender of the receptive fl esh. And instead of being relegated to a life on the margins of society, the sexual deviant in the Christian imagination would be relegated to an eternity of sensational torment.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  C H U R C H , S O C I E T Y, A N D S E X I N T H E A G E O F T R I U M P H  tian empire. It is not surprising, then, that prostitution became a par tic u lar preoccupation of leaders like John Chrysostom, and that through his eyes we can see the anger and despair of a Christian preacher working amid a society where prostitution remained a vibrant part of the sexual economy. Chrysostom’s sermon is only the tip of the iceberg in his own extensive homiletic corpus and those of his contemporaries. In the moment of Christian triumph, the leadership of the church began to recognize that prostitution was part of an entrenched social system that encouraged the sexual use of dishonored women. Th e bishops of the later fourth century articulated with unpre ce dented clarity the structural mechanics of the Greco- Roman sexual economy. Asterius of Amasea could see that the double standard of sexual behavior was rooted in a society where property and legitimacy were transmitted through monogamy: “If men consort with many women, they do no harm to their own hearth, but if women commit sexual sin, they introduce alien heirs into their house and their line.” John Chrysostom was hardly the only bishop to appreciate the role of Roman law in solidifying an alternative set of sexual norms. Augustine explicitly rejected the “law of the forum” in favor of the “law of heaven.” Salvian of Marseilles summarized Greco- Roman sexual policy in the pithiest, and most accurate, formulation on record: forbidding adulteries, building brothels. Prostitution was not simply tolerated— it was viewed as a way of protecting the honor of decent women. Ambrose despaired that his Christians could visit the brothel “as though it were a law of nature.” Christian leaders became desperately aware of the double standard, and the braver among them were perfectly willing to identify its origins. “Th e laws were made by men, and they are disposed against women.” Th e acerbic Jerome off ered a penetrating refl ection on the fundamentally distinct logics of classical and Christian sexual boundaries. “Among them [the Romans], the bridles of sexual restraint are unloosed for men. Th e Romans condemn only stuprum and adulterium, letting lust run wild through whore houses and slave girls, as though social status makes an off ense, and not sexual desire.” Although the bishops of this period recognized the place of prostitution in secular society and rejected it, they were slow to articulate an alternative social vision, and the residues of more ancient thought occasionally seeped into Christian discourse. Greeks and Romans had long held the idea that prostitution was a social necessity. It is not hard to fi nd expressions of the idea that prostitution was like a safety valve, a safe outlet for male sexual  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  If prostitution was an obstacle to Christianization, marriage was an opportunity for reformist ambitions. Chrysostom’s sermons reveal an ecclesiastical ambition to control the rituals of marriage as a means of gaining control over the meaning of marriage. It is telling that, across late antiquity, the ancient deductio in domum, a festive march from the bride’s house to the groom’s, remained the ordinary marriage ritual. The endurance of joyous, erotically charged wedding ceremonies testifies to the survival, beneath the spread of religious solemnity, of a sexual sensibility that is probably closer to Achilles Tatius than anything contrived by a Christian bishop. Nothing nettled Chrysostom so much as the “diabolical pomp,” which, he argued in vain, “dishonored” the marriage. The “whorish songs,” the “shameful speeches,” the “unrestrained laughter” were an immovable part of the rite for young men and women entering into the mysteries of conjugal love. Again, he invoked a fear of demons to accomplish through superstition what moral suasion could not. The “songs of Venus,” the hired entertainers—no more than “whores and she-men”—were an open invitation to demonic possession. What irked Chrysostom was that the same couple who indulged in the frankly erotic celebrations of an ancient wedding now expected the Christian priest to drop in, on the next day, to bless the union! But the preacher knew where he stood; the inhabitants of an ancient Mediterranean town were in no mood to surrender such a precious moment of release. “I know that I will seem severe and tiresome, urging you to uproot such an ancient custom … but where sin dares to surface, make no mention to me of ‘custom.’ ”50

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  C H U R C H , S O C I E T Y, A N D S E X I N T H E A G E O F T R I U M P H  hatred of male passivity, these would be suffi cient to explain the outburst of Constans. Th e contrasts with the law of 390 are telling. Th e mea sure of Th eodosius I ordering the incineration of the male prostitutes in Rome also deployed a vocabulary of Roman manhood that would have been not unfamiliar to Cicero. And though the mea sure of Th eodosius was aimed against male pros- titutes and thus might seem more narrowly constructed, there is good reason to regard it as a more portentous enactment. Th e immolation of male pros- titutes was not a vice- squad operation. As Firmicus shows, there was a tendency to assimilate open sexual passivity, infamia, and prostitution. Similarly, John Chrysostom slips inadvertently between discussion of same- sex eros and same- sex prostitution. Th e mental association was imponderably ancient. Th e incineration of male prostitutes was a malevolent and symbolic act, which might be seen as something like a proxy mea sure against male passivity altogether, conducted within the technological means of the Roman state. With Th eodosius I’s enactment, a state that had refrained from “witch hunts” was now explicitly trying to eradicate the “contamination” of sexual passivity. Th e sense of sexual deviance as a disease threatening to infect the body politic is subtly but ominously new in the legislative domain. Th is sensibility rests on the assumption, not indigenous to Roman legal tradition, that the people itself risked pollution by irregular sexual practices. Th e law is emphatic on this point. Th e drafter enunciates a concern that the plebs will become weakened if defi led. Th e holocaust was meant to be executed “with the populus watching.” Th is language refl ects a new style of social solidarity in late antiquity, in which the sexual behavior of “the people” might be the object of imperial concern. In earlier phases of Roman history, enormous social prejudice in combination with rigid stratifi cation of rank and citizenship allowed the state to stare past the inconsequential lives beneath its fi eld of vision. Christianity carried with it a sense of “the people” not only as a civic category but as the human collective itself. Th is solidarity, in the fi eld of sexual regulation, had unintended and at times violent consequences. Th e remarkable sexual persecution of 390 was further enabled by a very real sense of sexual deviance as a contaminatio. Th e conception of grave sexual crime as a sort of pollution made it an acute public worry. John Chrysostom spoke of same- sex eros as a “grievous and incurable disease,” and even  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  In 1997, I submitted a manuscript to the American Naturalist, a first-class science journal in ecology and evolutionary biology. The paper discussed both the arbitrary and the honest advertisement mechanisms of mate choice to try to determine which were operative in the evolution of certain avian courtship displays I had observed. In one section of the manuscript, I discussed a specific sequence of display behavior within a group of birds called manakins (which I discuss further in chapters 3, 4, and 7). Through a comparative examination of the display behaviors of multiple species within the group, I described how the males of one of the species, the White-throated Manakins, evolved a novel bill-pointing posture that replaced an ancestral tail-pointing posture that had been a routine part of the standard display repertoire. It was as though evolution had edited out the old posture with a cookie-cutter and pasted in the new one in the same exact position within the behavioral sequence. I proposed that this change was unlikely to have evolved because it provided better information about mate quality—if it did, then all of the manakin species would have evolved it—and more likely to have evolved in response to arbitrary, coevolved aesthetic mate preferences. In science, journal editors send your work out to anonymous peer reviewers—other scientists who often include your intellectual competitors. The reviewers’ comments on the work are used by the editor to help decide whether the work should be published and to guide the author on improvements to the work. In this case, the anonymous reviewers hated this section of the paper. They argued that I could not state that this new posture had evolved through arbitrary mate choice because I had not specifically rejected each of the many adaptive hypotheses that they could imagine. For example, I had not tested whether the bill-pointing White-throated Manakin males were revealing their superior vigor or disease resistance. I responded that standing motionless in one posture as opposed to another was unlikely to be able to communicate any additional information about vigor or genetic quality, unless we were to hypothesize that the tail-pointing posture in the ancestral birds had evolved in order to reveal whether they were infested with butt mites, and the bill-pointing posture must have evolved in order to reveal the possibility of some more recent problem in evolutionary history, such as infestations of throat mites. This seemed unlikely to me, but the reviewers insisted that the burden of proof was on me to demonstrate that the display traits were arbitrary. Of course, this made it impossible to “prove” my point, and I ultimately cut this section out of the manuscript in order to publish the paper.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  We had to worry about bombings and lynchings, racial violence of all kinds.” The racial terrorism of lynching in many ways created the modern death penalty. America’s embrace of speedy executions was, in part, an attempt to redirect the violent energies of lynching while assuring white southerners that black men would still pay the ultimate price. Convict leasing was introduced at the end of the nineteenth century to criminalize former slaves and convict them of nonsensical offenses so that freed men, women, and children could be “leased” to businesses and effectively forced back into slave labor. Private industries throughout the country made millions of dollars with free convict labor, while thousands of African Americans died in horrific work conditions. The practice of re-enslavement was so widespread in some states that it was characterized in a Pulitzer Prize–winning book by Douglas Blackmon as Slavery by Another Name. But the practice is not well known to most Americans. During the terror era there were hundreds of ways in which people of color could commit a social transgression or offend someone that might cost them their lives. Racial terror and the constant threat created by violently enforced racial hierarchy were profoundly traumatizing for African Americans. Absorbing these psychosocial realities created all kinds of distortions and difficulties that manifest themselves today in multiple ways. The third institution, “Jim Crow,” is the legalized racial segregation and suppression of basic rights that defined the American apartheid era. It is more recent and is recognized in our national consciousness, but it is still not well understood. It seems to me that we’ve been quick to celebrate the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement and slow to recognize the damage done in that era. We have been unwilling to commit to a process of truth and reconciliation in which people are allowed to give voice to the difficulties created by racial segregation, racial subordination, and marginalization. Because I was born during a time when the stigma of racial hierarchy and Jim Crow had real consequences for the ways my elders had to act or react to a variety of indignations, I was mindful of the way that the daily humiliations and insults accumulated. The legacy of racial profiling carries many of the same complications. Working on all of these juvenile cases across the country meant that I was frequently in courtrooms and communities where I’d never been before. Once I was preparing to do a hearing in a trial court in the Midwest and was sitting at counsel table in an empty courtroom before the hearing. I was wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and tie. The judge and the prosecutor entered through a door in the back of the courtroom laughing about something.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  We had to worry about bombings and lynchings, racial violence of all kinds.” The racial terrorism of lynching in many ways created the modern death penalty. America’s embrace of speedy executions was, in part, an attempt to redirect the violent energies of lynching while assuring white southerners that black men would still pay the ultimate price. Convict leasing was introduced at the end of the nineteenth century to criminalize former slaves and convict them of nonsensical offenses so that freed men, women, and children could be “leased” to businesses and effectively forced back into slave labor. Private industries throughout the country made millions of dollars with free convict labor, while thousands of African Americans died in horrific work conditions. The practice of re-enslavement was so widespread in some states that it was characterized in a Pulitzer Prize–winning book by Douglas Blackmon as Slavery by Another Name. But the practice is not well known to most Americans. During the terror era there were hundreds of ways in which people of color could commit a social transgression or offend someone that might cost them their lives. Racial terror and the constant threat created by violently enforced racial hierarchy were profoundly traumatizing for African Americans. Absorbing these psychosocial realities created all kinds of distortions and difficulties that manifest themselves today in multiple ways. The third institution, “Jim Crow,” is the legalized racial segregation and suppression of basic rights that defined the American apartheid era. It is more recent and is recognized in our national consciousness, but it is still not well understood. It seems to me that we’ve been quick to celebrate the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement and slow to recognize the damage done in that era. We have been unwilling to commit to a process of truth and reconciliation in which people are allowed to give voice to the difficulties created by racial segregation, racial subordination, and marginalization. Because I was born during a time when the stigma of racial hierarchy and Jim Crow had real consequences for the ways my elders had to act or react to a variety of indignations, I was mindful of the way that the daily humiliations and insults accumulated. The legacy of racial profiling carries many of the same complications. Working on all of these juvenile cases across the country meant that I was frequently in courtrooms and communities where I’d never been before. Once I was preparing to do a hearing in a trial court in the Midwest and was sitting at counsel table in an empty courtroom before the hearing. I was wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and tie. The judge and the prosecutor entered through a door in the back of the courtroom laughing about something.