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 Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Bolt shrugged. “It’s kind of hazy. I’m really just the most experienced guy in set-up, but they sort of treat me like gang boss, too.” Duffy nodded. “The company will argue about which side you’re on in order to delay the elections and use the time to intimidate people. I think you already know which side you’re on, but you have to make it real clear. If you work hard to bring the union in, itll make our argument easier that you should be in.” Bolt shook Duffy’s hand. “Do you think we’re gonna win?” Duffy smiled and nodded. “Yeah. But itll take a fight. We got strong people in each department. If we had mote like Jess, we’d win it hands down. I trust Jess. She’s proved she’s for the union 100 percent.” Everything happened in slow motion. When I heard Duffy say she I turned in horror, my jaw dropped. Frankie slapped her forehead with her palm 224 = Leslie Feinberg and shook her head. The guys looked from Duffy to me and back again. I stormed out of the VFW post and headed for my motorcycle. “Jess, wait!” I heard Duffy shouting. He caught up to me and grabbed my arm. I yanked it away. “Thanks a lot, Duffy.” Seeing tears in his eyes made it worse. “I’m so sorry, Jess. It just jumped out. I didn’t mean it.” I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what you meant to do. ’m out of this job now.” He shook his head. “We'll work it out, Jess. You could stay. I'll talk to the guys.” I laughed bitterly. “You don’t get it, do your Which bathroom you think ’'m going to use on Monday, Duffy?” Duffy put his hand on my arm. I glared at him. “Jess, Pd never do anything to hurt you. You know that.” I pushed his hand off my arm. “Well, you did.” I turned and walked away. “Jess, wait up!” It was Frankie. “Jess, I know you're mad. That was really fucked up. But it was a mistake. He’s really upset.” “Leave me alone, Frankie. You don’t understand, either.” Frankie look stunned. “What’s your fuckin’ problem with me? Are you really gonna cut another butch loose just because you can’t deal with who turns me on?” I wished someone had muzzled me because I was so worked up I couldn’t control my mouth. “What makes you think you're still a butch?” I asked her sarcastically. Her smile was cruel and defensive. “What makes you think you're still a butch?” she countered. I spun around and stormed off. Part of me was hoping that Frankie or Duffy wouldn’t let me go. But they did. Stone Butch Blues 225 THE LEAF WAS BIG AND WET and glowed with the oranges and reds of autumn. I found it stuck to the seat of my Harley on Saturday morning. It made me sad when the leaves began to fall. I wanted another beginning, another chance,

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  highly emotional when challenged about the emotional roots of their decisions. They are incapable of introspection and learning. Their mistakes make them increasingly defensive. It is important to understand that rationality is not some means of transcending emotion. Pericles himself valued bold and adventurous action. He loved the spirit of Athena and the inspiration she brought. He wanted Athenians to feel love for their city and empathy for their fellow citizens. What he envisioned was a state of balance—a clear understanding of why we feel the way we do, conscious of our impulses so that we can think without being secretly compelled by our emotions. Pericles wanted the energy that comes from impulses and emotions to serve our thinking self. That was his vision of rationality, and our ideal. Fortunately, to acquire rationality is not complicated. It simply requires knowing and working through a three-step process. First, we must become aware of what we shall call low-grade irrationality . This is a function of the continual moods and feelings that we experience in life, below the level of consciousness. When we plan or make decisions, we are not aware of how deeply these moods and feelings skew the thinking process. They create in our thinking pronounced biases that are so deeply ingrained in us that we see evidence of them in all cultures and all periods of history. These biases, by distorting reality, lead to the mistakes and ineffective decisions that plague our lives. Being aware of them, we can begin to counterbalance their effects. Second, we must understand the nature of what we shall call high-grade irrationality . This occurs when our emotions become inflamed, generally because of certain pressures. As we think about our anger, excitement, resentment, or suspicion, it intensifies into a reactive state—everything we see or hear is interpreted through the lens of this emotion. We become more sensitive and more prone to other emotional reactions. Impatience and resentment can bleed into anger and deep distrust. These reactive states are what lead people to violence, to manic obsessions, to uncontrollable greed, or to desires to control another person. This form of irrationality is the source of more acute problems—crises, conflicts, and disastrous decisions. Understanding how this type of irrationality operates can allow us to recognize the reactive state as it is happening and pull back before we do something we regret. Third, we need to enact certain strategies and exercises that will strengthen the thinking part of the brain and give it more power in the eternal struggle with our emotions. The following three steps will help you begin on the path toward rationality. It would be wise to incorporate all three into your study and practice in human nature. Step One: Recognize the Biases Emotions are continually affecting our thought processes and decisions, below the level of our awareness. And the most common emotion of them all is the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of

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

  116 The History of Christianity II õ Copernicus’s Christian interpreters were careful to label his inconvenient discoveries as hypotheses. That way church authorities could let them slide. This sort of equivocation irritated Galileo. Galileo was a pious Catholic, but he also thought the church could not hold a doctrine that contradicted science. õ In 1615, he marched off to Rome to make his case. The pope’s consultants called Galileo’s work “foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical.” It was because of Galileo’s fuss that they decided to put Copernicus’s book, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, on the index of prohibited books—more than 60 years after it was published. Inquisitors summoned Galileo and demanded that he recant and promise to quit making trouble, which he did. õ But pretty soon he was back to his old ways, now obsessed with working out a theory to explain the oceanic tides by linking them to the earth’s revolution. In 1632, he published a book called Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World , which was basically one long diatribe against the medieval view of the universe and a vindication of Copernicus. õ Galileo was nearly 70 years old at this point, but Rome was sufficiently worried about this ornery old man to summon him again. The inquisitors forbade him from all teaching and publishing and placed him under house arrest for the rest of his life. õ Even if Galileo went looking for trouble, the Vatican authorities behaved pretty shamefully. But too often people take the wrong lesson from this episode. They come away thinking that the Catholic Church saw scientific learning as the work of the devil, to be stamped out wherever it appeared. This is not true at all. õ In Galileo’s time, there was no greater sponsor of scientific research than the Catholic Church. Several holy orders, particularly the Jesuits, considered such work part of their vocation. The Jesuits sported among their ranks the notable inventor and polymath Athanasius Kircher. 117Lecture 12—The Church and the Scientific Revolution One scholar examined all the papers contributed by priests to the periodical of the Academy of Sciences in Paris up to the year 1720 and found that most of them concerned math and astronomy. õ As long as scientists paid lip service to the church’s authority and didn’t go out of their way to emphasize discrepancies or errors they found in church teaching, they could do their work without too much trouble, and even use Rome’s money to do it, all in the name of exploring God’s creation.

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

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

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

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

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Everyone at the table stiffened, but no one answeted her. I bent the straw into a circle. “Be careful, Grant,” I warned her. “You're looking at your own reflection.” Grant laughed. “T ain’t like you. I didn’t do the change.” My anger was greater than the situation called for. I could taste it, bitter on my tongue. I leaned forward. Everyone held their breath. My voice was low and menacing. “How far are you willing to go, Grant? How much of yourself are you willing to give up in order to distance yourself from me?” Grant’s face betrayed her. She had felt my power for a moment and it aroused her. I knew it had, I could see it in her eyes. I knew a secret about Grant’s desire and I wanted to wield it like a weapon. I wanted butchness to be quantity, not a quality, so I could out- butch her. Grant stirred her drink with her finger. Her face flushed. Edna and Jan stared at their laps. I could feel Frankie silently pleading with me to let Grant off the hook. I refocused on Grant and saw a beaten butch, preserved in alcohol. I could smell her humiliation. I remembered how she forced the men in the factories to show her some respect. Slowly her belief that she deserved it had eroded. And suddenly my own words echoed in my ears: How much of myself was I willing to give up to distance myself from her? “You know what I remember, Grant?” Everyone looked up at me. “I remember when we unloaded frozen food on the docks near the lake.” I glanced at Edna. The faint smile on her lips was a gift for me. Grant nodded. “Yeah, those were the good old days, weren't they?” I shook my head. “Some of it was a nightmare. I sure wouldn’t want to go back to the bar raids and the drunken fights. They’re only good old days ’cause I don’t have to live them anymore.” Grant leaned forward. “You wouldn’t want to go back to those days?” Stone Butch Blues 309 I laughed. “Not even at gunpoint. The only things I miss are the ways we stood up for each other, how we tried to make a home for each other. And we could do that right here.” It was time to change the subject. I glanced over at Edna. “Did Jan tell you ’m trying to find out what happened to Al?” Edna looked up at Jan, not at me. Jan dropped her eyes. “Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea, kid.” Edna watched the anger flare in my eyes.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Stone Butch Blues We met that night in a working-class bar on the outskirts of Buffalo. It had been a long time since I'd been in a bar with lesbians. It was still early in the evening, so the place wasn’t packed yet. There were about twenty or thirty women in the front room. I figured they’d move into the backroom to dance soon. Was it my imagination or were a few of the young women butch, a few femme? Everybody looked at me, and then each other, when I walked in, but nobody stopped me. I peeked in the backroom, hoping that Edna wouldn’t be there with Jan. She was. They were sitting at a table with Frankie and Grant. Jan rose as I approached the table, “Jess!” I guessed she still didn’t know. Edna dropped her eyes as I formally kissed her cheek. Frankie and I hugged. Grant shook my hand. “Well, Pll be damned. Look who’s here!” She signaled the waitress. “What’s everybody drinking?” Grant asked. “Just a ginger ale for me,” I said. I wanted to be clear-headed, especially with Edna at the table. “You too good to have a drink with us anymore?” Grant challenged. “A whiskey,” Frankie interrupted. “Straight up, so to speak.” 308 = Leslie Feinberg “Two beers, here,’ Jan said. “Right, honey?” Edna stared at her lap and nodded. We all sat in the uncomfortable silence. Jan filled me in. “We’re talking about what happened to all the old butches and femmes.” “T think we’re sort of underground,” I said quietly. My heart was in the conversation Edna and I weren't having. “Waiting for a time when it’s safer to come out.” Grant sighed bitterly. “But some of these young kids you can’t even tell what they are—goddamn green hair and safety pins in their faces.” We all sighed collectively. “Grant,” I shrugged, “who cares?” “Tt just isn’t right,” Grant slapped the tabletop. I laughed, which made her angrier. “Grant, that’s what they said about us!” “Well, that’s different,’ Grant said with a wave of her hand. I leaned toward her. “There’s a lot of things I couldn’t accept when I was younger, Grant, like the fact that there’s lots of different ways for butches to be.” I watched her expression change. Frankie audibly sucked in her breath. “But now I’m trying to accept people as they are.” Jan tried to change the subject. She leaned over and stroked the arm of my leather jacket. “Nice,” she said. Edna shot me an alarmed look. I fingered the soft, worn leather of Rocco’s armor. “Thank you.” I closed the subject. Edna exhaled in relief. “T’m sure glad I didn’t do those hormones,” Grant announced. I bit down hard on the plastic bar straw in my mouth. “Why’s that, Grant?” I braced myself. “Well you’re sort of stuck now, aren’t your I mean you're not a butch or a guy. You look like a guy.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  When you finally do, you discover two things: you’ve been out there for almost two hours, and your girlfriend has called and texted you half a dozen times. Where are you, where are you, where are you, she asks, and just as you lift the phone to your ear to call her back, the front door of the building opens and a herd of scorers begins to pour out, including her. You give the woman you’ve been talking to your phone number, tell her to call you if she needs anything, and then dart across the lawn. Your girlfriend is glowering. Your new friend is running next to her, looking a little anxious and breathless, and gets to you first. “She was just worried about you,” your new friend says, with such preemptive anxiety that you are taken aback. The three of you get in your car, and your girlfriend is radiating fury. You drive silently to the friend’s house. When you get there, she seems almost reluctant to get out of the car, and once she’s out she lingers, like there’s something she wants to say. But then she goes inside. As you pull away from the curb, your girlfriend slams her hand on the dashboard as hard as she possibly can. “Where the fuck were you?” You explain about the woman in the bathroom, what she said to you, how you couldn’t text because she was talking and you didn’t want to interrupt her. You fully expect this explanation to deflate her rage—you even expect her to apologize—but somehow she gets even angrier. She continues to pound the dashboard. “You are the most inconsiderate fucking person I’ve ever met, and how fucking dare you just walk out of the building with no explanation like that.” Every time you bring up the woman she starts yelling again. A few blocks from your house, you pull over. “Don’t talk to me like that,” you say. Then, horrifyingly, you start to cry. “I had to make a decision, and I feel confident that I made the right decision.” She unbuckles her seat belt, and leans very close to your ear. “You’re not allowed to write about this,” she says. “Don’t you ever write about this. Do you fucking understand me?” You don’t know if she means the woman or her, but you nod. Fear makes liars of us all.10

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  But when she stands, she does look drunk. How will you get home? You reach for your wallet, but you have no cash, and after a few minutes one of the poets comes up to you. “I’m so sorry,” he says a few times, his speech slurred, though sorry for what he does not specify—but then he presses a twenty-dollar bill into your hand for a cab. You tell him you’ll pay him back, but now that you think about it, you never did. When the cab pulls away from the bowling alley, you see her car gleaming in the parking lot and pray that it doesn’t get towed before morning. In the back of the cab, she closes her eyes, begins to mutter a monologue that lasts for the entire drive home. You fucking cunt I fucking hate you goddamn you Carmen fuck you fuck your mother fuck everything you cunt you goddamn fucking slut fuck you … The sensation of pulling a sheet from the bed is terrible. You will sleep on the couch. That’s what people do, when they’re mad at the person who would otherwise sleep next to them. You’ve never done it but you have heard of it happening. You’ve seen it in movies. You can’t find your pajamas. You go out to the living room, strip down to your underwear, and curl up on the broken couch with the springs pressing into your side. You pull the sheet around you. It’s that soft, wonderfully stretchy jersey fabric, the same type you had in college. She peels the sheet away from your body; you shiver.30 “What are you doing?” she asks, standing over you. You don’t say anything. Then, when she doesn’t move, you tell her, “I’m angry, and I’d like to sleep alone, please.” She kneels at the side of the couch like a supplicant with an offering. You think maybe she is going to try to kiss you, or maybe fuck you, though you won’t let her, though you won’t let her you won’t let her you won’t— She leans over and begins to scream directly in your ear, like she’s pouring acid out of her mouth and into you. You try to scramble away, but she is pushing on your body, howling like a wounded bear, like an ancient god. (An ancient bear; a wounded god.)

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Things that you remember sparked her anger: the time you made popcorn with your cousin and sprinkled parmesan cheese on it; the time you and your cousin tried to make watercolors out of flower petals at your grandmother’s house; the time you started to describe the movie Return to Oz to your cousin. (It was too scary, apparently, even though the same cousin had read, and described to you in great, horrifying detail, the entire plot of Needful Things the night before as you clutched your stuffed dog and stared at her in the darkness.) In middle school, when you were always fighting with your mother, your aunt told you over AOL instant messenger that if your parents got divorced it’d be your fault, and she threatened to cut your father’s balls off. (Years later, after your parents’ toxic, miserable marriage came to an end, you traced back to that moment as the first time you felt the tiniest twinge of sympathy for your aunt, who had gone through a divorce of her own and never remarried.) Your mother explained away her behavior with any number of facts. Your aunt was a single mom, she said, a nurse who worked very hard to support her kids. She had a disease called endometriosis and was often in pain. (Years later, when the condition bloomed in your own body, you observed that you managed to get through the worst of it without screaming at small children, or anyone for that matter.) Your aunt met the woman from the Dream House, once. Your cousin, her daughter, was graduating from college in a nearby midwestern town, and the two of you attended a party thrown in her honor. Your aunt was stiff and polite, your cousin utterly delighted. Later, you felt ugly with regret: Why was the only girlfriend you took to Wisconsin the one who’d reinforce all of your conservative Catholic relatives’ perceptions of queer women? After that, when your grandmother passed away, you went for a drive with your scary aunt and your mother. Your scary aunt said, apropos of nothing, “I don’t believe in gay people,” and from the back seat—empowered by adulthood—you said, “Well, we believe in you.” Your mother said nothing at all.18 [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 17. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type S72, Cruel aunt.18. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type S12.2.2, Mother throws children into fire.Dream House as World BuildingPlaces are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert. It is activated by point of view.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  “By the time I joined the military at eighteen, I was angry and filled with hatred for authority. I had a burning need to outrun the anxiety and depression that haunted me—the memories, the trauma. I stayed high on my adrenaline and fueled it with my anger and aggression. I was always ticked off and messed up every relationship I had with a woman. I overreacted to everything and pushed everybody away who tried to get close to me. I was defensive and needed to be right; if anybody intimidated me, I gave it back tenfold. I was a real success at boot camp. I did my fair share of running extra miles, getting my rear end chewed out by the sergeant, and, basically, having a horrible time. Until I decided I wanted to win and get even and be at the top of the heap. “Somewhere along the line, I had the idea I was going to be a pilot and be the best fighter pilot the military ever saw. I would prove everyone wrong. Yeah, my dreams came true, but I was miserable. Until I met a girl. She has been my wife for nearly forty-five years. If it wasn’t for her, I would probably be dead. She loved me for some crazy reason. I wasn’t good to her. But she is the one who showed me the love of God and led me to the Lord. An older woman mentored her and it was this woman who helped me grow up and get sober from the alcohol I abused and the porn I was hooked on. I went on to get my Ph.D. in psychology and have spent my life helping other guys like me find redemption. “Buckle your seat belts gentlemen. I have seen hundreds of men healed from this drug called porn, but I have also seen plenty of guys who thought they could whip this dragon by themselves crash and burn up everything that mattered to them. “Here’s what we are going to do, gentlemen. We are going to tell our stories. The reason we do this is that your story will uncover what happened to you and why you do what you do. You didn’t just fall off of a turnip truck and end up hooked on porn and acting out in ways that aren’t good for you. Your history has impacted you, just like mine did me. Most men want to deny it and believe if they just ignore it all, it will just go away. Everything is fine. Baloney. It doesn’t work that way. And so we are going to look at your story from every side, because if you have a pebble in your shoe and you don’t remove it, eventually it tears a hole in your foot and lodges itself in your flesh—then it gets infected and inflamed.

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

  õ But by this point, conservative Christians had realized that if they wanted to protect their vision of the traditional family, sexual ethics, gender roles, and the all-around authority of scripture as they interpreted it, then they had to get involved with the United Nations because it had enormous global influence. õ One of the founding principles of the UN charter is equality between men and women. Since the 1970s, the United Nations has convened periodic conferences to discuss the empowerment of women around the world, and in 1995, one of these happened in Beijing. õ As reports from the conference filtered out, some activists in the Christian right did not like what they heard, especially the call for national governments to treat men and women as socially equal, able to fill equivalent roles in the workplace, public sphere, and at home. õ Evangelicals, Catholics, and Mormons got organized. At the United Nations’ follow-up conference on women’s issues in New York five years later, some people passed out fliers that warned of the spread of the “homosexual agenda” and “widespread abortion.” õ One of the leaders of this bloc of conservative Christian organizations was a man named Austin Ruse, who ran the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (now called the Center for Family and Human Rights). õ Ruse realized he could prevent the conference from reaching consensus on women’s issues by creating a “pro-family” voting bloc of conservative, religious countries that did not want to be bossed around by Westerners. That alliance included the Vatican—which sent a representative to the conference—and also Sudan, Iran, Libya, and Syria. õ These countries are not exactly renowned for their records on human rights—particularly the rights of Christians. But the American activists were pragmatists, and the strategy worked. They kept the New York conference stuck in debates over abortion and homosexuality, and prevented serious discussion of poverty and violence against women. 310 The History of Christianity II õ The Christian right got a boost in this global alliance building when George W. Bush won the 2000 presidential election. Bush appointed conservative Christians to key leadership positions in government and at the United Nations. Conservative think tanks and ministries like Focus on the Family—which had started out only concerned about the American culture wars—started devoting money and time to building international networks of likeminded activists. SUGGESTED READING Butler, Born Again. Jenkins, The New Faces of Christianity. Kruse, One Nation Under God. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER ä When Americans use the phrase “the Christian right,” what do they mean? ä Why did conservative activists argue that liberals’ defense of women’s equality in foreign countries is a kind of cultural imperialism? ä How might the Christian right’s campaign to build international alliances influence America’s domestic culture wars? Lecture 31—Culture Wars and the Christian Right 311 312

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

  FUNDAMENTALIST OPPOSITION õ Today, Pentecostalism is a thriving international branch of Christianity. A 2011 Pew study estimated that more than 580 million people worldwide practice Pentecostal Christianity or its cousin, Charismatic Christianity. õ But 100 years ago, most Christians found Pentecostal beliefs and practices totally outrageous. Much anti-Pentecostal backlash came from the diverse subculture of conservative Protestants who were, by the turn of the 20th century, beginning to think of themselves as fundamentalists. They believed they were the only Christians left who really stood by the fundamentals of the faith. õ This conflict between fundamentalists and modernists hinged on the question of how Western Protestants ought to respond to the big changes of the 19th century. Such changes include intellectual developments like the theory of evolution, but also social and economic changes too: the growth of noisy, smelly cities; the influx of immigrants, many of whom were not Protestant or even Christian; and the rise of first-wave feminism. õ The fundamentalists were those Protestants who strongly opposed these developments and fought against efforts to back away from a literal reading of, for example, Genesis. They fought against the drive to embrace modern scholarly methods and even to entertain the thought that other religions might be valid ways to know the divine. õ Fundamentalists found all that outrageous, and they fought hard to keep control of their churches, seminaries, and missions organizations between roughly 1900 and 1930. In most cases, they lost. Many—although not all—of them broke away to found their own denominations. õ The fundamentalists’ exact beliefs varied between Baptist fundamentalists, Presbyterians, or Mennonite fundamentalists. But in general, they shared some basic things with the Pentecostals. Lecture 23—Fundamentalism and Pentecostalism 225 They believed that the Bible was wholly free of error. They believed that modern scholarship usually couldn’t be trusted. They believed God was all-powerful. And many of them believed that the world was ending soon. õ Below is a list of five key fundamentalist doctrines, though it is not an exhaustive list of fundamentalist beliefs: 1. The miracles in the Bible really did happen. They were not optical illusions, or myths, as renegade modernist scholars in Germany and elsewhere had argued. 2. Jesus died on the cross for our sins. 3. Jesus experienced bodily resurrection after crucifixion. 4. Jesus came from a virgin birth. 5. The Bible is completely without error, even when it comes to historical fact. 226 The History of Christianity II

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Had he lost her trust? On occasion, she looked at him harshly or even upbraided him in the thunderous style of her father. No, the queen would not be easy to manage, and slowly he found himself working harder than ever to impress her. As part of his plan for the men to slowly take over power, he made sure that all correspondence from foreign governments would be first routed to his desk. He would keep the queen in the dark on several important matters. Then he discovered that the queen had learned of this and behind his back had ordered all diplomatic correspondence to go through her. It was like a chess game, and she was playing several moves ahead. He got angry and accused her of undermining him in his work, but she stood her ground and had a very logical response: unlike Cecil, she spoke and read all of the major European languages and understood their nuances, and it would be better for all if she personally conducted diplomacy and brought the ministers up to date on foreign affairs. It was useless to argue, and he soon realized that when it came to handling such correspondence and meetings with diplomats, Elizabeth was a master negotiator. Slowly his resistance wore down. Elizabeth would remain in charge, at least for the first few years of her reign. But then she would marry and produce the necessary heir for England, and her husband would take over. It was unnatural for her to continue in this role as an unwed ruler. It was rumored that she had confided in several friends that she would never marry, and that she had an overwhelming fear of marriage based on what she had seen with her father. But Cecil could not take this seriously. She kept telling everyone that all that mattered was the greater good of England, but to keep England without an heir apparent was to risk a future civil war. Surely she could see the logic in this. His goal was simple: to get the queen to agree to marry a foreign prince in order to forge an alliance that would benefit England in its weakened state. Preferably this would be a Protestant prince, but as long as he was not a Catholic fanatic, Cecil would approve the choice. The French were dangling before her a marriage with their fourteen-year-old king, Charles IX, and the Habsburgs were promoting a marriage with Archduke Charles of Austria.

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

  Of these two texts the former is especial y interesting for us since it places the word σινδών in the mouth of the iconic, some would say paradigmatic, Nazirite Samson, that is, in the mouth of one of those “young men” (ἐκ τῶν νεανίσκων) whom the Lord anointed to be Nazirites (Amos 2:11–16) and whom the people of Israel led astray. In Judg 14 it is one of the primary objects by which Samson’s enemies, the Amorites, the very people whom the Lord had vanquished according to Amos 2, shame him. Judges 83 For commentary, see Harper, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Amos and Hosea, 63. 84 Kuruvil a points to difficulties in the connection of our passage to Amos 2 ( “Naked Runaway,” 531), but misses the connections that we highlight. 85 The Hebrew word that it translates (סָדִ֣ין) is found elsewhere only in Isa 3:23. A further study of Isa 3:23 might bear fruit. 173 Mark 14:51–52 173 14 depicts well the violent wrath of this wild and chaotic “young man” who, inspired by the Lord’s spirit, repays his shame by wreaking violence on an Amorite vil age before he returns, his anger unabated, to his father’s house. 86 καὶ ἥλατο ἐπ’ αὐτὸν πνεῦμα κυρίου καὶ κατέβη εἰς Ἀσκαλῶνα καὶ ἐπάταξεν ἐξ αὐτῶν τριάκοντα ἄνδρας καὶ ἔλαβεν τὰ ἱμάτια αὐτῶν καὶ ἔδωκεν τὰς στολὰς τοῖς ἀπαγγείλασιν τὸ πρόβλημα καὶ ὠργίσθη θυμῷ Σαμψων καὶ ἀνέβη εἰς τὸν οἶκον τοῦ πατρὸς αὐτοῦ (14:19).87 The language in fact graphical y narrates the very kind of violence used by the Lord in the dispossession of that same land of the Amorites in Amos 2 in order to give it to Israel.88 It may even echo the violence of Nazirites, like Samson, who played a significant role in that dispossession as recorded by Amos. Again, we suggest that it is not coincidental that this is the same kind of violent, anger-fueled, and divinely directed chaos that is prophetical y announced in Mark 13, that is on display in the garden in Mark 14 including vv. 51–52,89 and that continues through to the end of Mark’s gospel. True, the connection is not made explicit through logical rationales provided to connect the dots for unlearned readers, because the astute reader only needs a few choice intertextural y charged clues to “understand.” 90 86 Josephus’s rendering of the account of the birth of Samson also is suggestive in that Samson’s mother receives the announcement of Samson’s birth from an “angel” who is described in Ant. 5.8.2 as a νεανίας and in 5.8.3 as a νεανίσκος. See Collins, Mark, 795–6 n. 222. 87 In Amos 2:9–10 the Amorites are mentioned twice as those who kept the land from Israel and those whom God destroyed to give the land to Israel. It may not be clear from Judges that the peoples described in Amos are the same ones described in Judg 14; however, in Judg 14 the

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Always being rational can be tiresome. But for some people, this makes them terribly uncomfortable. They experience this primitive thinking as softness, as mysticism, as contrary to science and technology. Everything must be clear and analytical in the extreme. They become devout atheists, not realizing that the concept of God cannot be proven or disproven. It is a belief either way. The repressed, however, always return. Their faith in science and technology has a religious air to it. When it comes to an argument, they will impose their ideas with extra intellectual heft and even a touch of anger, which reveals the stirring of the primitive within and the hidden emotional need to bully. At the extreme, they will indulge in a love affair that is most irrational and contrary to their image—the professor running off with the young model. Or they will make some bad career choice, or fall for some ridiculous financial scheme, or indulge in some conspiracy theory. They are also prone to strange shifts in mood and emotional outbursts as the Shadow stirs. Bait them into just such overreactions to prick their bubble of intellectual superiority. True rationality should be sober and skeptical about its own powers and not publicize itself. The Snob: These types have a tremendous need to be different from others, to assert some form of superiority over the mass of mankind. They have the most refined aesthetic tastes when it comes to art, or film criticism, or fine wines, or gourmet food, or vintage punk rock records. They have amassed impressive knowledge of these things. They put a lot of emphasis on appearances—they are more “alternative” than others, their tattoos are more unique. In many cases, they seem to come from very interesting backgrounds, perhaps with some exciting ancestry. Everything surrounding them is extraordinary. Of course, it later comes out that they were exaggerating or downright lying about their background. Beau Brummell, the notorious snob and dandy of the early nineteenth century, actually came from a staunch middle-class background, the opposite of what he peddled. The family of Karl Lagerfeld, the current Chanel creative director, did not inherit its money but made it in the most bourgeois fashion, contrary to the stories he has told. The truth is that banality is part of human existence. Much of our lives is spent doing the most boring and tedious tasks. For most of us, our parents had normal, unglamorous jobs. We all have mediocre sides to our character and skills. Snobs are especially sensitive about this, greatly insecure about their origins and possible mediocrity.

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

  THEOPHYLACT. Or each one of the people is the vineyard, each likewise is the husbandman, for every one of us takes care of himself. Having committed then the vineyard to the husbandmen, he went away, that is, he left them to the guidance of their own judgment. Hence it follows, And went into a far country for a long time. AMBROSE. Not that our Lord journeys from place to place, seeing that He is ever present in every place, but that He is more present to those who love Him, while He removes Himself from those who regard Him not. But He was absent for a long time, lest His coming to require His fruit might seem too early. For the more indulgent it is, it renders obstinacy the less excusable. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. Or God took Himself away from the vineyard for the course of many years, for since the time that He was seen to descend in the likeness of fire upon Mount Sinai, He no longer vouchsafed to them His visible presence; though no change took place, in which He sent not His prophets and righteous men to give warning thereof; as it follows, And at the time of the vintage he sent a servant to the husbandmen, that they should give him of the fruit of the vineyard. (Exod. 19.) THEOPHYLACT. He says of the fruit of the vineyard, because not the whole fruit, but part only, He wished to receive. For what does God gain from us, but His own knowledge, which is also our profit. BEDE. But it is rightly written fruit, not increase. For there was no increase in this vineyard. The first servant sent was Moses, who for forty years sought of the husbandmen the fruit of the law which he had given, but he was wroth against them, for they provoked his spirit. Hence it follows, But they beat him, and sent him away empty. AMBROSE. And it came to pass that He ordained many others, whom the Jews sent back to him disgraced and empty, for they could reap nothing from them; as it follows, And again he sent another servant.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Such news made Blunt angry and envious. He was a loyal Englishman. With the success of the Mississippi Company, Paris was drawing in investment capital from all over Europe. If this continued, France would soon become the finance capital of the world, surpassing Amsterdam and London. Such newfound power for the French could only spell disaster for England, its archenemy, particularly if another war broke out between them. More personally, Blunt was a man of great ambition. He was the son of a humble shoemaker; from early on in his life he aimed to ascend to the highest levels of English society. His means of getting there, he believed, would be through the financial revolution sweeping Europe, which centered on the increasing popularity of joint-stock corporations like Law’s and like the South Sea Company. As opposed to building wealth through the traditional means of owning land, which was expensive to manage and highly taxable, it was relatively easy to earn money through purchasing stock, and profits were tax free. Such investments were all the rage in London. Blunt had plans to turn the South Sea Company into the biggest and most prosperous joint-stock company in Europe, but John Law had stolen his thunder with a bold venture, and with the full backing of the French government. Blunt would simply have to come up with something bigger and better, for his sake and for the future of England. The South Sea Company had been formed in 1710 as an enterprise that would handle and manage part of the English government’s enormous debts, in exchange for which the company was to be granted a monopoly on all English trade with South America. Over the years the company did almost no trading but served as an informal bank for the government. Through his leadership of the company, Blunt had forged relationships with the wealthiest and most powerful Englishmen, most notably King George I (1660–1727) himself, who became one of its biggest investors and was named governor of the company. Blunt’s motto in life had always been “Think big,” and it had served him well.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  great generals and the best artists, inventors, and tradesmen. Under her influence, a man or woman could see the world with perfect clarity and hit upon the action that was just right for the moment. For Athens, her spirit was invoked to unify the city, make it prosperous and productive. In essence, Athena stood for rationality, the greatest gift of the gods to mortals, for it alone could make a human act with divine wisdom. To cultivate his inner Athena, Pericles first had to find a way to master his emotions. Emotions turn us inward, away from nous , away from reality. We dwell on our anger or our insecurities. If we look out at the world and try to solve problems, we see things through the lens of these emotions; they cloud our vision. Pericles trained himself to never react in the moment, to never make a decision while under the influence of a strong emotion. Instead, he analyzed his feelings. Usually when he looked closely at his insecurities or his anger, he saw that they were not really justified, and they lost their significance under scrutiny. Sometimes he had to physically get away from the heated Assembly and retire to his house, where he remained alone for days on end, calming himself down. Slowly, the voice of Athena would come to him. He decided to base all of his political decisions on one thing— what actually served the greater good of Athens. His goal was to unify the citizenry through genuine love of democracy and belief in the superiority of the Athenian way. Having such a standard helped him avoid the ego trap. It impelled him to work to increase the participation and power of the lower and middle classes, even though such a strategy could easily turn against him. It inspired him to limit wars, even though this meant less personal glory for him. And finally it led to his greatest decision of all—the public works project that transformed Athens. To help himself in this deliberative process, he opened his mind to as many ideas and options as possible, even to those of his opponents. He imagined all of the possible consequences of a strategy before committing to it. With a calm spirit and an open mind, he hit upon policies that sparked one of the true golden ages in history. One man was able to infect an entire city with his rational spirit. What happened to Athens after he departed from the scene speaks for itself. The Sicilian expedition represented everything he had always opposed—a decision secretly motivated by the desire to grab more land, blinded to its potential consequences. Understand: Like everyone, you think you are rational, but you are not. Rationality is not a power you are born with but one you acquire through training and practice. The voice of Athena simply stands for a higher power that exists within you right now, a potential

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

  PIETY ON THE EVE OF 1776 õ From the 1720s onward, the religious revivals of the First Great Awakening were bringing sinners to Christ throughout the colonies. Yet for every ex-sinner who stayed in church, there were probably 10 or more who drifted back to their non-believing ways. õ As far as historians can tell, the revolutionary era was a real low point for organized religion in America. Several scholars, including the eminent evangelical historian Mark Noll, have found that less than 10% of Americans in the revolutionary era were formal members of local congregations, even if they may have affiliated with a Protestant denomination on paper. õ These pioneers had plenty of rebellious feelings, but in many cases their gripes had little to do with religion. They were mad about the increasing tax burden foisted on the colonies to pay for Britain’s wars against France and Spain, especially since the colonies were not represented in Parliament. Some drew inspiration from the ideas of English philosopher John Locke, particularly his notion that a government must have the consent of the governed to be legitimate. õ Despite relatively low church attendance, Protestant Christianity complemented the American colonists’ secular grievances and inflamed their passion. They fused Locke’s ideas with earlier Puritan theology that understood human nature as totally depraved, and so they concluded that one should never trust a human king with too much power. õ Another religious motivation was anti-Catholicism. Most American colonists thought of themselves as Protestants, even if they didn’t necessarily go to church. They were none too pleased with the crown’s insistence on tolerating the presence of a huge number of French Roman Catholics to the north in Quebec. 150 The History of Christianity II õ A handful of America’s founders, like John Witherspoon and Patrick Henry, had evangelical sympathies. But the more important ones, like Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin, were either lax about their faith or openly skeptical of Christianity. Some were apathetic Anglicans. Others were deists who believed in a distant God who set the universe in motion but was no longer involved in humans’ affairs. õ However, historians know that the founders did not want to strip Christianity out of American culture. They saw it as an important ethical resource for society. Even Thomas Jefferson, who was the most skeptical of all the founders, saw some value in the social influence of churches. He collaborated with evangelicals and respected their faith. Lecture 16—Religion and Revolution in the 18th Century 151