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

  Paul’s original position on the ethnic aspect of our problem, at least if we are to believe Gal 5:11, was that of an open-ethnic perspective, which allowed for non-Jews to join the Jewish ethnos as they opted to seek the favor of the God of the Jews22: “Why am I still being persecuted, if I am still preaching circumcision? In that case, the offense of the cross has been neutralized (NRSV: ‘removed’; katargeō).” The Paul we know from the letters, however, turned rather violently against those who declined to undergo the same change of mind he himself did, asking them to cut it all off rather than unsettle those whom he counted among his (Gentile) friends (Gal 5:12). In the Pauline world, as it also emerges in 1 Cor 7:17–18, it is of utmost importance that the ekklēsia reflects the diversity of the world as he knows it, divided up in two parts: Israel and the Gentiles (cf. Rom 3:29–31). Those who were called as Jews must remain Jews,23 and the same Community (Chicago, IL: Chicago University press, 1994); David C. Sim, The Gospel of Matthew and Christian Judaism: The Historical and Social Setting of the Matthean Community (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998). 20 On Matthew, see e.g., Matthias Konradt, Israel, Church and the Gentiles in the Gospel of Matthew (trans. Kathleen Ess; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014); John Kampen, Matthew within Sectarian Judaism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). On Paul see, e.g., Matthew Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (New Haven, CT: Yale University press, 2017. 21 On this, see Runesson, “Was there a Christian Mission?” and idem, “Judging Gentiles in the Gospel of Matthew: Between Othering and Inclusion,” in Jesus, Matthew’s Gospel and Early Christianity: Studies in Memory of Graham Stanton (ed. Daniel M. Gurtner et al.; London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 133–51. 22 For our purposes in this essay, I will leave open the question of whether this approach belonged to Paul’s previous or current life in Judaism, respectively; the point here is the (major) shift from one position to another. 23 Circumcision implying full Torah observance; cf. Gal 5:3. 104 104 Paul and Matthew among Jews and Gentiles goes for the Gentiles. If people began changing their status as a consequence of their newfound cultic loyalties, it would imply that neither Christ nor God had done a very careful job when the Spirit was poured over new members regardless of their ethnic (or other) status.24 Indeed, a self-imposed obligation to make changes in one’s status, post-Spirit, would be tantamount to a rejection of the Christ-event itself; it would place the member outside Christ (cf. Gal 5:4). 25 Paul’s change of mind is thus best described as a move toward a closed-ethnic position, refusing, on theo-ethnic grounds, non-Jews entry into the Jewish people. Instead, Paul creates an overarching category, a globalized Christ, as it were, in which a salvific “unity in diversity” may be found.

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

  Objection 3: Further, drunkenness fetters the reason; whereas it is conducive to anger. Therefore anger does not require an act of reason. On the contrary, The Philosopher says (Ethic. vii, 6) that “anger listens to reason somewhat.” I answer that, As stated above [1420](A[2]), anger is a desire for vengeance. Now vengeance implies a comparison between the punishment to be inflicted and the hurt done; wherefore the Philosopher says (Ethic. vii, 6) that “anger, as if it had drawn the inference that it ought to quarrel with such a person, is therefore immediately exasperated.” Now to compare and to draw an inference is an act of reason. Therefore anger, in a fashion, requires an act of reason. Reply to Objection 1: The movement of the appetitive power may follow an act of reason in two ways. In the first way, it follows the reason in so far as the reason commands: and thus the will follows reason, wherefore it is called the rational appetite. In another way, it follows reason in so far as the reason denounces, and thus anger follows reason. For the Philosopher says (De Problem. xxviii, 3) that “anger follows reason, not in obedience to reason’s command, but as a result of reason’s denouncing the injury.” Because the sensitive appetite is subject to the reason, not immediately but through the will. Reply to Objection 2: Dumb animals have a natural instinct imparted to them by the Divine Reason, in virtue of which they are gifted with movements, both internal and external, like unto rational movements, as stated above ([1421]Q[40], A[3]). Reply to Objection 3: As stated in Ethic. vii, 6, “anger listens somewhat to reason” in so far as reason denounces the injury inflicted, “but listens not perfectly,” because it does not observe the rule of reason as to the measure of vengeance. Anger, therefore, requires an act of reason; and yet proves a hindrance to reason. Wherefore the Philosopher says (De Problem. iii, 2,27) that whose who are very drunk, so as to be incapable of the use of reason, do not get angry: but those who are slightly drunk, do get angry, through being still able, though hampered, to form a judgment of reason. Whether anger is more natural than desire?Objection 1: It would seem that anger is not more natural than desire. Because it is proper to man to be by nature a gentle animal. But “gentleness is contrary to anger,” as the Philosopher states (Rhet. ii, 3). Therefore anger is no more natural than desire, in fact it seems to be altogether unnatural to man. Objection 2: Further, reason is contrasted with nature: since those things that act according to reason, are not said to act according to nature. Now “anger requires an act of reason, but desire does not,” as stated in Ethic. vii, 6. Therefore desire is more natural than anger.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  The three parables recorded in Luke 15 were not voiced by Jesus for the benefit of the “unsaved,” that is, the lost sheep, the lost coin, or the prodigal son; rather the parables were intended for the religious center, the Pharisees and scribes who were murmuring. It is to this group that Jesus narrates the three parables. Yet all too often, when the dominant culture interprets these same parables, it focuses on those of the margins, who are usually perceived as lost. But as Jesus reached out to the margins of society, the center became upset that its constructed religious views might become jeopardized with the inclusion of “the people of the land.” They were concerned that the addition of these “undesirables” would pollute their theological perspectives and their ornate temples. Their disdain for the margins is best illustrated in the prayer of the Pharisee as recorded in Luke: “The Pharisee was standing, praying to himself these things: God, I thank you that I am not as the rest of men, rapacious, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector. I fast twice a week and tithe everything I receive” (18:11–12; emphasis added). While I am not questioning the concern God has for the lost, we misinterpret these parables when we ignore the subject of the narratives. Jesus was challenging the center to make room for those residing on the margins not because those on the margins require tutelage but rather, like the Pharisees and scribes of old, because there is much that the center needs to learn from the disenfranchised. During my seminary years, many Euroamerican churches wanted to offer me positions (at about a quarter of what other ministers were being paid) to start a Hispanic mission somewhere in the basement. There was a sincere desire to “reach out to the lost,” but when these Latino/as came to the church, they were ushered to the fellowship hall, where they could worship among themselves. The hope was that they would form a missionary church, some place else. The message was clear: you are not welcomed in our sanctuary—get saved and move on! It is always difficult for those at the center to listen to those who reside at the margins of society. The latter's interpretation of God's movement in the world challenges what society has always taught to be normative. Yet Jesus was able and willing to learn from the margins of his times. We sometimes forget that Jesus was human as well as divine. As a human, he had to learn how to overcome human frailties. As a child, Jesus had to learn how to walk, talk, and read. As an adult, he had to overcome the temptation of sin, specifically the human desire for fame and riches. Satan, according to Matthew 4:1–11, tempted Jesus with possessions (bread), privilege (jumping off the Temple and not being hurt because of who Christ is), and power (all the kingdoms of the earth).

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  When Jesus cried out for Jerusalem in Matthew 23:37, his han was so deep that the Gospel writer uses a feminine metaphor, having Jesus refer to himself as a mother hen attempting to gather her brood under her protective wing.26 A GAY CHRIST On October 6, 1998, in the small Wyoming city of Laramie, a twenty-one-year-old college freshman majoring in political science, named Matthew Shepard, entered the Fireside Bar for a Heineken. He entered the bar alone around ten o'clock, coming from a dinner meeting with friends from the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Alliance. There he met two individuals to whom Shepard revealed his homosexuality. The two individuals said that they too were gay and invited Shepard to leave with them. A little after midnight, they piled into a pickup truck and Shepard's assault began. He was later found pistol-whipped with a .357 magnum and left for dead, strung up on a split-rail fence along an old dirt road. He died several days later, never recovering from a coma. During the memorial service, bomb-sniffing dogs combed the church while SWAT teams and police in riot helmets were needed to keep the peace. Anti-gay protestors from different churches chose Shepard's funeral to protest what they perceived to be too much tolerance and too many concessions to the gay community. “We want to inject a little sanity and Gospel truth into what is shaping up to be an orgy of homosexual lies and propaganda” said the Reverend Fred Phelps, a Baptist preacher from Topeka, Kansas, who came with several members of his congregation to protest the memorial service. These church members waved antigay signs, shouted anti-gay slogans, and engaged mourners in loud and nasty debates. One protestor yelled, “Matthew was wicked!” Some of the signs read, “No Fags in Heaven,” “God Hates Fags,” and “No Tears for Queers.” One young girl, too young to even understand the message she held, carried a sign that read, “Fag = Anal Sex.”27 No doubt, many within the overall Christian church have strong negative attitudes toward gays and lesbians. Some Christians encourage violence toward gays and lesbians when they reduce sexual orientation to a disease or sin and encourage a crusade against those whom they perceive God hates. Violence is further advocated when Christians remain silent in the face of the violence experienced by the Shepards of our community. Perpetrators of gay bashing feel themselves justified in enforcing the rules of God and nature, administering justice to those whom God hates. Christians become complicit with the violence they breed due to their attitudes, words, and actions toward “the least of my people.” Historically, biblical texts have been used as clubs to submit gays and lesbians to conformity. Some of the most verbal (and physical) attacks upon gays and lesbians have been generated from the conservative Christian community, as demonstrated during Shepard's funeral. Yet Jesus warns that anyone who calls someone rhaka will be liable to the Sanhedrin or even hell's fire (Matt. 5:22).

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  A person who is deeply feeling is not a person who is habitually venting anger, fear or sorrow. Wise and fortunate individuals feel their emotions in the quiet of their interiors, learn from their feelings and are guided by them. They act intuitively and intelligently on those feelings. In addition, they share their feelings when appropriate and are responsive to the feelings and needs of others. And, of course, because they are human, they blow up from time to time; but also they look for the root of these eruptions, not primarily as being caused by another, but as an imbalance or disquiet within themselves. While physical feelings are both quantitatively and qualitatively distinguishable from emotions, both derive ultimately from the instincts. The five categorical emotional instincts described by Darwin are fear, anger, sorrow, disgust and joy. However, feelings, as the consciousness of a bodily attitude, come in a virtually infinite range and blend. These include the bittersweet longing for an absent friend or tender mirth at a child’s spontaneity. The Darwinian emotions correspond to distinct instincts, while feelings express a blending of (sensate-based) nuances and permutations. In addition, bodily feelings embody a relationship between an object or situation and our welfare. They are, in that sense, an elaboration of the basic affective valances of approach and avoidance. Feelings are the basic path by which we make our way in the world. In contrast, (fixated) emotional states derive from frustrated drives or engagement of the last-ditch mobilization of emergency (fight/flight/freeze). With the paucity of saber-toothed tigers, this critical reaction of last resort rarely makes sense in modern life. However, we are compelled to deal with a myriad of very different threats, such as speeding cars and overly eager surgeons, for which we lack much in the way of evolutionarily prepared protocols. Emotions are our constant companions, enhancing our lives and detracting from them. How we navigate the maze of emotions is a central factor in the conduct of our lives, for better or for worse. The question is: under what conditions are emotions adaptive—and conversely, when are they maladaptive? In general, the more that an emotion takes on the quality of shock or eruption, or the more that it is suppressed or repressed, the more prominent is the maladaptation. Indeed, often an emotion begins in a useful form and then, because we suppress it, turns against us in the form of physical symptoms or in a delayed and exaggerated explosion. Anger and resentment, when denied, can build to an explosive level. There is a popular expression that is apt here: “That which we resist, persists.” As damaging as emotions can be, repressing them only compounds the problem. However, let it be duly noted that the difference between repression/suppression and restraint/containment is significant though elusive. Remember once more how the samurai warrior delicately, but definitively, arrested his compulsion to strike, allowing him to feel his (former) murderous rage simply as pure energy—and ultimately as the bliss of feeling alive.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  You get in your car, drive to a distant street, and pull over. You don’t have the space in your brain to cry. You pick up your phone and see that, on Freecycle, someone is giving away catalog cards from a defunct library. You drive to a local Panera, take a stack of cards from a very nice woman who is probably wondering why you look like you’ve been forced to eat dog shit at gunpoint. Back at your house you calmly add the pile of cards to your scrap collection because you think you’d like to make a collage. Very late, your girlfriend—or is she?—appears at your house and says she has to get back to Bloomington. Where has she been this whole time? She doesn’t say, but she kisses you. “I think we’re meant to get through this,” she says. “Don’t worry. Promise me you won’t worry.” Dream House as Natural DisasterI get bad heartburn. It’s the Zoloft, which takes the edge off my anxiety but brings along a bunch of awful side effects, like a good friend who can’t shed a bad lover. Every so often, I take my nightly meds and within a few minutes feel as though a hot poker has been shoved down my esophagus. I chew antacids and walk to the bathroom. Often the pain, or the force of the neutralization, makes me vomit. I become, functionally, everyone’s favorite science fair project. When I bend over the toilet, I think a lot about how my heart is a volcano, like that quote from Kahlil Gibran. It’s dumb but it moved me—spoke to my shifting tectonic plates—and I wrote it down on a Post-it I stuck on my desk: “If your heart is a volcano how shall you expect flowers to bloom in your hands?” It stayed there until a bad day, working on this book, when I suddenly loathed the quote with every ember of my being and crumpled it up and threw it away. Reader, do you remember that ridiculous movie Volcano, the one with Tommy Lee Jones? Do you remember how they stopped eruption in the middle of downtown Los Angeles? They diverted it with cement roadblocks and pointed fire hoses at it, and rerouted the lava to the ocean, and everything was fine? Sweet reader, that is not how lava works. Anyone can tell you that. Here is the truth: I keep waiting for my anger to go dormant, but it won’t. I keep waiting for someone to reroute my anger into the ocean, but no one can. My heart is closer to Dante’s Peak of Dante’s Peak. My anger dissolves grandmas in acid lakes and razes quaint Pacific Northwest towns with ash and asphyxiates jet engines with its grit. Lava keeps leaking down my slopes. You should have listened to the scientist. You should have evacuated earlier.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  Such a reading is based on the reader's self-centeredness. Self-centeredness begins with the fall of humanity, the original disobedience of Adam and Eve. In their act of eating the forbidden fruit, the mango, from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they committed sin, a sin rooted in the central idea of usurping God's authority as Creator.1 The original sin of humanity is the pride of attempting to become “like gods” (Gen. 3:5). Self-centeredness is the endeavor of replacing God with humans, expressed today as the drive for power and privilege. Through unlimited power and privilege, those in the center with sufficient economic privilege have the opportunity of becoming gods, usually at the expense of those who live in the periphery of society. For example, due to the high consumption of grain-fed livestock by residents of the United States, enough food is consumed by them to feed over a billion people in poor countries. According to Oxford economist Donald Hay, a mere 2 percent of the world's grain harvest is sufficient, if shared, to eliminate world hunger and malnutrition. Yet, ironically, in a world where over thirty-four thousand children die each day of hunger and preventable diseases, the number of overweight adults in the United States increased from 26 to 34 percent between 1988 and 1991. The United States, the world's center, consumes so much of the world's resources that its people now spend billions of dollars annually trying to lose weight in a world where the majority of its inhabitants go to bed hungry. In fact, the dollar value of the food thrown into North American garbage cans each year equals one-fifth of the total annual income of all the Christians living in Africa.2 This self-centeredness believes in its moral right to accumulate while others go hungry, never connecting the relationship between having and not having. The accumulation of wealth is understood as the product of “hard work.” The sharing of goods and possessions, each according to his or her needs, is usually attributed to Karl Marx, and most Christians believe this phrase to be a Marxist dictum. In reality, it is a biblical principle for the Christian church, one established early in its formation. The book of Acts states, “And the believers together, holding all things in common, sold their goods and possessions and distributed them to all, according to each one's need” (2:44–45). Yet this concept, dangerously reminiscent of some type of socialism, is rejected by those of us who live in a capitalist society, because we have been taught that communism/socialism is evil or possibly that it is a good idea that simply does not work. Our capitalist system takes precedence; we rarely think of how those who are economically disenfranchised understand passages like the one found in Acts 2. In spite of the dominant culture's rhetoric of succeeding through hard work, seldom have the rich or powerful worked as hard as a migrant laborer.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  White Christians were able to support slavery because it provided the “heathen” Africans an opportunity to hear the gospel and obtain eternal life. Their salvation (the spiritual) took precedence over their physical bondage (the material). To the Eurocentric mind-set, salvation was not the only benefit slave-bound Africans received. Additionally, they were taught civilization, how to distinguish good from evil, and basic reasoning abilities that elevated them from the “bestial sloth” of their existence. Slavery was as beneficial to the Africans as to the Euroamerican masters who were charged with their tutelage—if not more so. The Great Awakening, a pietistic movement that emphasized the need for a personal experience of conversion, swept throughout the colonies in the mid-1730s. This religious phenomenon served as a watershed for the conversion of many to Christianity, including Africans. Nevertheless, the motif of liberation found in the Bible had to be reconciled with the slaveholders’ desire to convert their property into obedient Christians. Slaves could be Christianized as long as it was recognized that the New Testament did not speak out against slavery; hence, Old Testament references to slavery remained authoritative. If Jesus Christ would have considered slavery to be a sin, surely he would have directly said so. Consequently, slaves were cautiously proselyted.3 In spite of slaveholders’ attempts to ignore the liberative motif of the Gospels, some slaves were radicalized by the victory of the resurrection of Christ, and many took up arms against their oppressors as a Christian action to gain a physical liberation that would match their spiritual freedom. Blacks were at all costs discouraged from reading the Bible lest they equate liberation in Christ with liberation in the world. Hence, white society, specifically Protestant white society, found itself censoring the Bible by determining what its slave population could and could not hear. Crucial to the maintenance of the American slavocracy was the overall systematic prohibition for blacks, slaves, and free Africans to learn how to read the Bible, or any other book for that matter. Laws forbade anyone from providing scholastic instruction to African slaves, and the general teaching of freed slaves was discouraged. Such restrictions prevented those of African descent from exploring the world outside their confined social location and made them dependent on white society to define and interpret reality for them, a reality that included the Bible. The norm of keeping African Americans uneducated continued for a century after legislation ended slavery. It was not until the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Topeka Board of Education that the purpose of segregation was unmasked and the right of African Americans to education was established, a right that has yet to be fulfilled half a century later. The response of most white churches to the “threat” of integration is worth noting. Many Christian schools (K through 12) were established by churches during this era of public-school desegregation. The dominant culture's Christian response was often to provide an alternative to desegregation, masked under the cloak of providing a “Christian” education.

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

  67 This is Benedetto Croce’s summary, in The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (trans. R. G. Collingwood; New York, NY: Macmillan, 1913), 157, of passages from Vico’s Scienza Nuova (1744), accessible in English in Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch, eds., The New Science of Giambattista Vico (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948), such as l.vii (59); II.iv (127–128), and III (330). Paul without Judaism39 39 “The Announcement” he lays out to his groups lacked any Judaean requirements and required no biblical knowledge. Third, in response to those who thought that he should include Judaean content, he responded with a firm “No.” This was not because he had a different Judaism or because his groups were Gentiles. It was because, for him, being in Christ rendered every nomos, of Greeks or of Judaeans, a dead letter. Moses’ law too had served only until Christ. Paul was emphatically not “under law.” Fourth, Paul declared as vividly as one could imagine his abandonment of the zeal he formerly had for his ancestral traditions. Fifth, he was happy to eat with non-Judaeans in a way that leading Judaean Christ-followers—Peter, Paul’s associate Barnabas, and a group from Jesus’ brother James—could not accept. Sixth, as word about these points got around, from Rome to Jerusalem, Paul’s Announcement caused deep offence to other Judaeans, whether Christ-followers or not. Seventh, Paul faced a rough reception from Judaeans everywhere, which included repeated whippings, because of The Announcement. These indications present a fairly unified picture, though still beginning and partial, of one Judaean who consciously abandoned his ancestral custom. He did this not for the more common reasons of laxity, intermarriage, or attraction to the ways of another ethnos, however, but because he claimed an encounter with the resurrected figure of Jesus Christ, which in his view displaced the ethnos-polis-nomos foundations of ancient identity. This radical departure from the long-established, essential-seeming categories of life would require successive generations of Christ-followers in Paul’s trajectory—by no means the only Christian trajectory—to explain themselves, when Christ did not return to evacuate them. Their predicament remained awkward until perhaps already Tertullian and Origen in anticipation, but certainly Eusebius and his successors, managed to turn the tables and reform the social-political lexicon in light of Christianity’s ascendancy, so as to value this faith-based identity over ethnos- and polis-affiliation. 40 40

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  In contrast, (fixated) emotional states derive from frustrated drives or engagement of the last-ditch mobilization of emergency (fight/flight/freeze). With the paucity of saber-toothed tigers, this critical reaction of last resort rarely makes sense in modern life. However, we are compelled to deal with a myriad of very different threats, such as speeding cars and overly eager surgeons, for which we lack much in the way of evolutionarily prepared protocols. Emotions are our constant companions, enhancing our lives and detracting from them. How we navigate the maze of emotions is a central factor in the conduct of our lives, for better or for worse. The question is: under what conditions are emotions adaptive—and conversely, when are they maladaptive? In general, the more that an emotion takes on the quality of shock or eruption, or the more that it is suppressed or repressed, the more prominent is the maladaptation. Indeed, often an emotion begins in a useful form and then, because we suppress it, turns against us in the form of physical symptoms or in a delayed and exaggerated explosion. Anger and resentment, when denied, can build to an explosive level. There is a popular expression that is apt here: “That which we resist, persists.” As damaging as emotions can be, repressing them only compounds the problem. However, let it be duly noted that the difference between repression/suppression and restraint/containment is significant though elusive. Remember once more how the samurai warrior delicately, but definitively, arrested his compulsion to strike, allowing him to feel his (former) murderous rage simply as pure energy—and ultimately as the bliss of feeling alive. As the successful parent knows, this strategy works well with children. Rather than suppress the child, encouraging a habit of repression, these parents help the child by providing a timely interruption, while guiding the child to feel his anger and source his needs and desires. This is what healthy aggression is about. On the other hand, we have the permissive parent who lets the child go out-of-control with temper tantrums, as the samurai was about to do but with lethal consequences. The effective parent, however, provides and channels the child’s aggression in a useful way. They do this by both allowing the child to feel her anger and then helping the child to understand what she is mad about. If emotions are not too extreme and are approached with a certain stance, they can serve the function of guiding our behaviors—even moving them toward positive goals. Here’s an example with which most of us can identify. Bob comes home from work and finds his house in chaos. He is furious and wants to yell at Jane and the kids, but he “stuffs” his rage. By bedtime he cannot unwind and has an acute attack of gastric reflux.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

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

• From In the Dream House (2019)

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

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

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

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

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

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

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

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

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

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

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

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

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

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

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

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

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