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 The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  The key is to first convince yourself that you deserve good and better things in life. Once you feel that, you can start by training yourself to speak up or even talk back to people in everyday situations, if they are proving to be insensitive. You are learning to defend yourself. You might call people on their passive- aggressive behavior, or not be so timid in expressing an opinion that they may not share or in telling them what you really think of their bad ideas. You will often come to realize that you have less to fear in doing this than you had imagined. You might even gain some respect. You try this out in small ways every day. Once you lose your fear in these less dramatic encounters, you can start to ramp it up. You can make greater demands on people that they treat you well, or honor the quality work that you do. You do this without a complaining or defensive tone. You make it clear to bullies that you are not as meek as you seem, or as easily manipulated as others. You can be as relentless as they are in defending your interests. In negotiations, you can train yourself not to settle for less but to make bolder demands and see how far you can push the other side. You can apply this growing boldness to your work. You will not be so afraid to create something that is unique, or to face criticism and failure. You will take reasonable risks and test yourself out. All of this must be built up slowly, like a muscle that has atrophied, so that you don’t risk a large-scale battle or aggressive reaction before you have toughened yourself up. But once you develop this muscle, you will gain the confidence that you can meet any adversity in life with a fearless attitude. Anger: It is natural and healthy for you to feel anger at certain types of people—those who unfairly block your advancement, the many fools who have power but are lazy and incompetent, the sanctimonious critics who espouse their clichés with so much conviction and attack you without understanding your views. The list could go on forever. Feeling such anger can be a powerful motivating device to take some kind of action. It can fill you with valuable energy. You should embrace it and use it throughout your life for such a purpose. What might make you hold back or tamp down your anger is that it can seem to be such a toxic and ugly emotion, as it often is in our culture.

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

  116The History of Christianity II õCopernicus’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. õIn 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. õBut 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. õGalileo 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. õEven 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. õIn 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. õAs 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 In the Dream House (2019)

  People keep asking who you are. You grin and place your hands in front of your eyes, the Weeping Angel’s signature pose. No one gets it. “What is she?” someone asks, pointing to your girlfriend. “A Dalek.” “What’s that?” “The most evil aliens in the entire Doctor Who universe. They committed genocide against the Time Lords, and the Time Lords against them. They basically destroyed each other.” You are definitely the most uncool person ever to attend this MFA program. The woman from the Dream House, as a Dalek, can barely move through the crowd. People keep knocking into her costume.21 You want to tell her a joke—“Start yelling ‘Exterminate!’ People will move!”—but she wouldn’t get it. You watch her down one drink, then another. After an hour, she walks home drunk and furious. You follow her for blocks, watching her bump along ahead of you, not certain what to do because you have the keys to your house. She has a colander on her head, like a conspiracy theorist—a true tinfoil hat. You’d been angry with her before, but there is something so tender and vulnerable about a grown woman, in a disintegrating costume of a character from a show she does not watch, stumbling back to a house in drunken anger. You think, this will be a good story, one day. A wasted undergrad happens across your path. “A ghost,” he says, his eyes widening. “A ghost!”22 He tries to touch you. You tell him to go fuck himself, dip away from his grasp, and unlike that time in Savannah, she does not rescue you. When you get to the house, she is kicking the door. The knobs of her Dalek costume are falling off into the grass. You approach her. “I have the keys,” you say, wearily. She jumps, and then begins to scream. “Why would you scare me like that? What the fuck is wrong with you?” She is still yelling as you go inside. “Why did you want to make such a fancy dinner?” she says. “You fucked everything up, this whole night you fucked up. We just have this weekend together and you have fucked everything up.” She is still yelling as you begin the laborious process of washing your face, your skin emerging in patches through the makeup. “What the fuck are you supposed to be, anyway?” She is still yelling as you stand in the shower, the temporary hair dye swirling creamily down the drain. She is still yelling as you put on your pajamas. In bed, she says, “I want to fuck,” and you say, “Maybe tomorrow,” and turn into your pillow. Maybe next Halloween will be better.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Then I stole money from them. At first I took only small change, to buy Cokes and ice cream, but later I stole fifty-cent pieces and even dollar bills. I stashed the money in an ammunition box under one of the barracks. My idea was to steal enough to run away. I was ready to do anything to get clear of Dwight. I even thought of killing him, shooting him down some night while he was picking on my mother. I not only carried newspapers, I read them, and reading them had taught me that you can kill a man and get away with it. You just had to appear in the right role, like Cheryl Crane when she stabbed Johnny Stampanato to death for threatening Lana Turner. Sometimes I took the Winchester down when I heard Dwight start in on my mother, but his abuse was more boring than dangerous. She didn’t respect him. She looked down on him. He was doing just fine until we came along. Who did she think she was? Mainly I wanted to shoot him just to quiet him down. Dwight wasn’t wrong when he called me a liar and a thief, but these accusations did not hurt me, because I did not see myself that way. Only one of his charges had stinging power—that I was a sissy. My best friend was a thoroughbred sissy, and because of our friendship I worried that others might think the same of me. To put myself in the clear I habitually mocked Arthur, always behind his back, imitating his speech and way of walking, even betraying his secrets. I also got into fights. I didn’t fight Arthur again, but I had learned from him the trick of going crazy when insulted. I had also learned that getting hit a few times wouldn’t kill me and that other people, even Dwight, would treat me with a certain deference for a few days after a fight. And of course it made other boys think twice about their words, to know that they were accountable for them. All of Dwight’s complaints against me had the aim of giving me a definition of myself. They succeeded, but not in the way he wished. I defined myself by opposition to him. In the past I had been ready, even when innocent, to believe any evil thing of myself. Now that I had grounds for guilt I could no longer feel it. WHILE PEARL AND I waited in the car we did our best to get on each other’s nerves. Pearl hummed. Her humming had nothing to do with music. It held to no pattern of melody or rhythm but spun itself out endlessly, moronic as me cracking my knuckles, which was what I did to get her goat. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. We could keep this up for quite a while.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  I heard a steady howling all around me as I thrashed on the floor. Other sounds. Then I was sitting on the couch, drenched in sweat, and my mother was trying to calm me. It was all over, she said. This was it, this was the last time. We were getting out of here. I LEFT FIRST . After all the years of thinking about leaving, I actually did it. My mother talked to Chuck Bolger’s parents and they agreed to let me live with them in Van Horn for the next few months, until the end of the school year. By then my mother hoped to have a job in Seattle. Once she started work and found a place to live I would follow her down. Mr. Bolger had serious doubts at first. He suspected that I was partly to blame for Chuck’s wildness. But Chuck had been wild for years and Mr. Bolger was too smart a man not to know it, and too good a man to turn down a request for asylum. He did make certain conditions. I would help out in his store, and go to church with the rest of his family. I would accept his authority. I would neither smoke nor drink nor swear. I gave my word on all counts. Chuck drove up to get me. He and Pearl and my mother helped me carry my things out to the car while Dwight sat in the kitchen. When we were about to leave, Dwight came outside and watched us. I could tell he wanted to make it up with me. He already had a bad reputation in the camp, and to have one of his family leave his house like this would disgrace him. He knew I would tell people he had bullied me in my invalid condition. And though my mother had said nothing to him of her own plans to go, he must have known that with me out of the way there was nothing left to hold her, nothing but threats. I could see him gearing up for an approach. Finally he walked over and said we ought to talk about things. I had planned to make some hurtful answer when this moment came, but all I did was shake my head and look away. I kissed my mother good-bye and told Pearl I’d see her in school. Then I got in the car. Dwight came up to the window, and said, “Well, good luck.” He put out his hand. Helpless to stop myself, I shook it and wished him good luck too. But I didn’t mean it any more than he did. We hated each other. We hated each other so much that other feelings didn’t get enough light. It disfigured me. When I think of Chinook I have to search for the faces of my friends, their voices, the rooms where I was made welcome. But I can always see Dwight’s face and hear his voice.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  She’d spoken with the school nurse and immediately asked the vice-principal what he thought he was doing, hauling me around by the ears. He said that was beside the point, Mrs. Wolff, let’s not muddy the water here, but she said, No, to her it wasn’t beside the point at all. She faced him across his desk. She was erect, pale, and unfriendly. The point, he told her, was that I had violated school property and the law. Not to mention decency. My mother looked over at me. I saw how tired she was, and she must have seen the pain I was in. I shook my head. “You’re mistaken,” she told him. He laughed disagreeably. Then he set out his case, which consisted of eyewitness testimony by two boys who had been in the lavatory at the time the obscene words in question were inscribed on the wall. “What obscene words?” she asked. He hesitated. Then, demurely, he said, “Fuck you.” “That’s one obscene word,” my mother said. He pondered this. He said that, given the particular context, he considered you to be an obscene word as well. I said I didn’t do it. “If he says he didn’t do it, he didn’t do it,” my mother said. “He doesn’t lie.” “Well, I don’t either!” The vice-principal rocked forward onto his feet. He opened the door and beckoned to the weed fiends, who were waiting in the outer office. They came in together and after a hangdog glance in my direction serially mumbled their dismal narrative at the floor, while I looked at them with brazen incredulity. When they were done the vice-principal gave them passes and sent them out. He was acting very much in control now, very much on top of the situation. “They’re lying,” I said. His placidity fell off like a mask. “Why?” he asked. “Give me one reason.” “I don’t know,” I said, “but they are.” “We’re not getting anywhere,” my mother said. “I think I’d better talk to the principal.” The vice-principal said that he had been given full authority in this case. He was in charge. We’d better realize that what he said went. But my mother would not be moved. And in the end we got in to see the principal. The principal was a furtive, whey-faced man who feared children and avoided us by staying in his office all day. He was right to avoid us. He wore his weakness in a way that excited belligerence and cruelty. When my mother and I came into his office, he insisted on making small talk with her as if she had just dropped by to see how things were going. At one point he leaned over and peered at my fingers. “Is that nicotine?” he asked. “No sir.” “I hope not.” He leaned back. His jacket parted, revealing green suspenders. “Let me tell you a story,” he said. “Take it for what it’s worth.

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

  319Lecture 32—Liberation Theologies in Latin America õOne of the most interesting things they suggested was something they called small basic communities, or base ecclesial communities, to empower rural grassroots Catholics. Base communities had begun years earlier, particularly in Brazil, as a pragmatic solution to an old problem: How do you evangelize people and nurture Christians who live far away from the nearest church or priest? õIn Brazil, bishops had realized that their priest shortage was especially bad, so they encouraged laypeople to take a leading role in Catholic life. They formed small groups that were a combination of Bible study, adult education, child care, and so on. õBase communities jibed with one of the big themes of Vatican II, which was the promotion of laypeople’s role in the church. Yet many in the upper levels of the church hierarchy, especially in Rome, started to worry that base communities were actually undermining the church because they were linked with liberation theology. LIBERATION THEOLOGY õMost liberation theologians would say they’re simply putting into practice one of the oldest themes in the Bible: the idea that God is on the side of the oppressed and suffering. God wants justice, and God’s message challenges the corrupt powers of this world. In the late 19 th century, the Vatican took up this message and published encyclicals calling out the injustices of global capitalism’s robber barons. õBut in the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation of theologians took this very old idea and blended it with insights drawn from the Latin American context and the Marxist tradition of social criticism. One of these theologians was a Dominican priest from Peru named Gustavo Gutiérrez. 320The History of Christianity II õIn 1971, Gutiérrez published a book called A Theology of Liberation in which he lambasted the capitalist system as un-Christian—at least in its current form. He attacked the church’s role in holding up the structures of an unjust economy. õThe context here is the Cold War. Liberation theologians were not dogmatic Marxists—it would be more accurate to call them Marxian, since they drew on Marx’s ideas as a set of tools, but rejected his atheism. But they were certainly more critical of Western-style capitalism than they were of the Soviet command economy, since it was Western businesses and governments, particularly the United States, that were usually interfering in Latin American affairs. õTo conservatives, liberation theology was basically communist propaganda in disguise. In the 1980s, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger—who would later become Pope Benedict XVI—published some very stern words against the movement. He called it a “severe deviation” from orthodoxy that confused the Kingdom of God with worldly political movements, and called for hating “class enemies” rather than the universal love that Jesus advocated.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  His arms fell like leaves to his side, while his face softened from its angry glare. He quietly reflected. Placing his sword back into its sheath, he bowed to the teacher in reverence. “And this,” the master replied again with equal calm, “is heaven.” Here the samurai, his sword held high at the peak of feeling full of rage (and at the moment before executing the prepared-for action), learned to hold back and restrain his rage instead of mindlessly expressing it. In refraining (with the master’s quick guidance) from making his habitual emotional expression of attack, he transformed his “hell” of rage to a “heaven” of peace. One could also speculate on what unconscious thoughts (and images) were stirred when the master provoked the swordsman’s ire. Perhaps the samurai was startled and at first even agreed with the characterization that he was ugly and untalented. This strong reaction to this insult (we might hypothesize) derived from his parents, teachers and others who humiliated him as a child. Perhaps he had a mental picture of being shamed in front of his school classmates. And then the other micro-fleeting “counter thought”—that no one would dare to call him that again and make him feel small and worthless. This thought and associated (internal) picture, coupled with a momentary physical sensation of startle, triggered the rage that led him down the compulsive, driven road to perdition. That was, at least, until his “Zen therapist,” precisely at the peak of rage, kept him from habitually expressing this “protective” emotion (really a defense against his feelings of smallness and helplessness) and forced him to the ownership of his real power and peaceful surrender. In the examples of Pouncer and the Zen master, choice occurred at the critical moment before executing attack. With the Zen master’s critical intervention, the samurai held back and felt the preparation to strike with his sword. In this highly charged state he paused and was able to restrain and transmute his violent rage into intense energy and a state of clarity, gratefulness, presence and grace. It is the ability to hold back, restrain and contain a powerful emotion that allows a person to creatively channel that energy. Containment (a somatic rooting of Freud’s “sublimation”) buys us time and, with self-awareness, enables us to separate out what we are imagining and thinking from our physical sensations. And this fraction of a second of restraint, as we just saw, is the difference between heaven and hell. When we can maintain this “creative neutrality,” we begin to dissolve the emotional compulsion to react as though our life depends on responses that are largely inappropriate. The uncoupling of sensation from image and thought is what diffuses the highly charged emotions and allows them to transform fluidly into sensation-based gradations of feelings.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  The Flexible Mind—Self-strategies You find it frustrating when people resist your good ideas out of sheer stubbornness, but you are largely unaware of how the same problem—your own stubbornness—afflicts you and limits your creative powers. As children our minds were remarkably flexible. We could learn at a rate that far surpasses our adult capacities. We can attribute much of the source of this power to our feelings of weakness and vulnerability. Sensing our inferiority in relation to those older than us, we felt highly motivated to learn. We were also genuinely curious and hungry for new information. We were open to the influence of parents, peers, and teachers. In adolescence many of us had the experience of falling under the sway of a great book or writer. We became entranced by the novel ideas in the book, and because we were so open to influence, these early encounters with exciting ideas sank deeply into our minds and became part of our own thought processes, affecting us decades after we absorbed them. Such influences enriched our mental landscape, and in fact our intelligence depends on the ability to absorb the lessons and ideas of those who are older and wiser. Just as the body tightens with age, however, so does the mind. And just as our sense of weakness and vulnerability motivated the desire to learn, so does our creeping sense of superiority slowly close us off to new ideas and influences. Some may advocate that we all become more skeptical in the modern world, but in fact a far greater danger comes from the increasing closing of the mind that afflicts us as individuals as we get older, and seems to be afflicting our culture in general. Let us define the ideal state of the mind as one that retains the flexibility of youth along with the reasoning powers of the adult. Such a mind is open to the influence of others. And just as you use strategies to melt people’s resistance, you must do the same on yourself, working to soften up your rigid mental patterns. To reach such an ideal, we must first adopt the key tenet of the Socratic philosophy. One of Socrates’s earliest admirers was a young man named Chaerephon. Frustrated that more Athenians did not revere Socrates as he himself did, Chaerephon visited the Oracle of Delphi and posed a question: “Is there a wiser man than Socrates in all of Athens?” The oracle answered no. Chaerephon felt vindicated in his admiration of Socrates and rushed to tell his mentor the good news. Socrates, however, being a humble man, was not at all pleased to hear this and was determined to prove the oracle wrong. He visited many people, each eminent in their own field—politics, the arts, business—and asked them many questions. When they kept to knowledge of their field, they seemed quite intelligent. But then they would expatiate on all kinds of subjects about which they clearly knew nothing. On such subjects

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  My mother was with me again. The nuts were all husked and drying in the attic. What did I need trouble for? I was inclined to let it go. But I didn’t like being laughed at, and I didn’t like comments about my hands. Arthur had made other such comments. He was bigger than me, especially around the middle, but I factored out this weight as blubber. I could take him, I felt sure. I had provocation, and I had witnesses to carry the news. It seemed like a good time to make a point. I started things off by calling him Fatso. Arthur continued to smile at me. “Excuse me,” he said, “but has anyone ever told you that you look exactly like a pile of wet vomit?” We went on like this, and then I called him a sissy. The smile left his face. And at that moment it came to me that although everyone referred to Arthur as a sissy, I had never heard anyone actually use the word in front of him. And in the same moment, seeing how everything about him changed after the word was spoken, how suddenly red and awful his face became, I understood that there must be a reason for this. A crucial bit of history I should have known about, and didn’t. His first swing caught me dead on the ear. There was an explosion inside my head, then a continuous rustling sound as of someone crumpling paper. It lasted for days. When he swung again I turned away and took his fist on the back of my head. He threw punches the way he threw balls, sidearm, with a lot of wrist, but he somehow got his weight behind them before they landed. This one knocked me to my knees. He drew back his foot and kicked me in the stomach. The papers in my bag deadened the blow but I was stunned by the fact that he had kicked me at all. I saw that his commitment to this fight was absolute. His dog barked in my face. When I got up Arthur rushed me, arms flailing, fists raining on my shoulders. He almost knocked me down again but I surprised us both by landing one on his eye. He stopped and roared. The eye was already closing up, his face gone scarlet, his nostrils streaming gouts of snot. When I saw his eye I got worried. I was ready to stop, but he wasn’t. He flew at me again. I closed with him and got him in a hug to keep his arms still. We staggered over the road like drunken dancers, and then he hooked my leg and tripped me and we rolled off the shoulder and down the long muddy embankment, both of us flailing and kicking with our knees and screaming gibberish in each other’s ears.

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

  129Lecture 13—The Enlightenment Quest for Reasonable Faith õThey demanded the right to question everything, even their society’s most sacred authorities, the crown and the church. Here’s how Diderot put it in his famous work, the Encyclopédie: “Facts may be distributed into three classes: the acts of divinity, the phenomena of nature, and the actions of men. The first belong to theology, the second to philosophy, and the last to history properly speaking. All are equally subject to criticism.” õThe French radicals believed the Church had kept Europe in chains. Its bishops had a long history of muzzling geniuses like Galileo and serving as willing pawns in the hands of power-hungry and bloodthirsty kings. õIt’s probably best to call Voltaire a Deist, but he was far more critical of Christianity than most English Deists were. He told Frederick the Great that it was “the most absurd and bloody religion which has ever infected this world.” He published The Bible Finally Explained in 1776, in which he argued scripture was irrational and cruel. The book hit a nerve. It went through nine editions in two years. A NEW MORAL FOUNDATION õThe radical philosophes devoted their careers to searching for alternatives to Christianity as a moral foundation for society. Some found solace in ancient philosophy and believed that the self-denying morality of Greek and Roman Stoicism held the key to peaceful society. õMany Enlightenment thinkers— from iconoclasts like Diderot and Rousseau to radicals like David Hume—also wrote reams and reams about the role of sympathy. Hume gave us a helpful definition of what they meant by sympathy: 130The History of Christianity II He said sympathy is “the propensity to ... receive by communication [the] inclinations and sentiments” of other people, “however different from, or even contrary to our own” those sentiments might be. õIn other words, Hume noted our remarkable ability to step into another person’s shoes, even if that person sees the world in a very different way, and to understand what they think and feel. This capacity, many philosophes believed, lays the groundwork for our moral imagination. Sympathy binds humans together and provides a non-theological basis for treating each other in ethical ways. SUGGESTED READING Pagden, The Enlightenment. Pincus, 1688. Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER äHow does national politics inf luence the work and attitudes of intellectuals? äWhy were so many theologians so keen to prove that Christianity is “reasonable”? äIs the philosophes’ notion of “sympathy” a viable substitute for the moral law of traditional religions?

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

  157Lecture 16—Religion and Revolution in the 18 th Century õFinally, the revolutionary government closed the churches altogether to convert them into buildings like stables and warehouses. And they didn’t stop there—if a street was named for a Christian saint, it got a new republican name. The revolutionaries even ditched the seven-day week, with its Christian day of rest on Sunday, for a new 10-day week. They were really trying to scrub every last trace of Catholicism from t he cou nt r y. õThe approach of the left-wing leader Maximilien Robespierre was an interesting case. Robespierre was happy to guillotine any Catholic priest in the interest of his cause, but he didn’t want France to become a godless country. Like the American Founding Fathers, he believed religion had a social purpose. The people of France, whose lives had revolved around Catholic rituals and holidays for centuries, needed something to take the church’s place. õRobespierre’s solution was to found a new official state religion: the Cult of the Supreme Being. This religion stressed the immortality of the soul, because Robespierre was convinced that people are more likely to behave themselves when they believe they’ll face consequences after death. õThe Cult of the Supreme Being also offered the French people a God who supported the revolution and hated the king. As Robespierre himself put it:“[God] did not create priests to harness us, like vile animals, to the chariots of kings and to give to the world examples of baseness, pride, perfidy, avarice, debauchery, and falsehood.” 158The History of Christianity II õBut Robespierre fell from power in the summer of 1794, and his cult never quite caught on. Despite all that popular resentment against the church, extinguishing the Catholic faith was easier said than done. SUGGESTED READING Ellis, American Sphinx. Noll, America’s God. Schama, Citizens. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER äHow do 21 st -century Americans understand “religious freedom,” and how do their ideas compare to those of the 18 th century? äCould a political alliance between evangelicals and secular liberal politicians happen in America today? äWhat is at stake in debates about “secularism” and “religious freedom” in America and France? 159 LECTURE 17 THE SECOND GREAT AWAKENING T he Second Great Awakening was a wave of revivals that swept North America and Britain from the turn of the 19 th century. They f lamed up, died down, and f lamed up again for about 50 years. Evangelists who were brave enough to leave the more settled areas along the North American coast and travel inland learned that it was not easy to get pioneers to focus on worship and holy living when they were worried about just surviving. But the most talented and charismatic preachers found that if they were good at what they did, their revivals would be the only form of mass entertainment and social life available on the frontier.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  They do whatever is necessary to secure their position and crush any kind of competition or challenge. They do not like to share power. In dealing with this type, you will tend to become angry or fearful, enlarging their presence and playing into their hands. You obsess over their evil character and fail to pay close attention to what they are actually up to. What you often end up surrendering to is the appearance or illusion of strength that they project, their aggressive reputation. The way to handle them is to lower the emotional temperature. Start by looking at the individual, not the myth or legend. Understand their primary motivation—to gain control over the environment and the people around them. As with Rockefeller, this need for control covers up vast layers of anxieties and insecurities. You must see the frightened child within, terrified by anything unpredictable. In this way you can cut them down to size, diminishing their ability to intimidate you. They want to control your thoughts and reactions. Deny them this power by focusing on their actions and your strategies, not your feelings. Analyze and anticipate their real goals. They want to instill in you the idea that you have no options, that surrender is inevitable and the best way out. But you always have options. Even if they are your boss and you must surrender in the present, you can maintain your inner independence and plot for the day in which they make a mistake and are weakened, using your knowledge of their vulnerable points to help take them down. See through their narrative and their shrewd attempts at distraction. They will often present themselves as holier-than-thou or as the victim of other people’s malice. The louder they proclaim their convictions, the more certain you can be they’re hiding something. Be aware that they can sometimes seem charming and charismatic. Do not be mesmerized by such appearances. Look at their patterns of behavior. If they have taken from people in the past, they will continue to do so in the present. Never bring on such types as partners, no matter how friendly and charming they might seem. They like to piggyback on your hard work, then wrest control. Your realistic appraisal of their actual strength and their aggressive intentions is your best defense. When it comes to taking action against aggressors, you must be as sophisticated and crafty as they are. Do not try to fight with them directly. They are too relentless, and they usually have enough power to overwhelm you in direct confrontation. You must outwit them, finding unexpected angles of attack. Threaten to expose the hypocrisy in their narrative or the past dirty deeds they have tried to keep hidden from the public.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  His wife, after a trying day herself, wishes to make some contact with her husband. She wants him to share something about his day or how he is feeling and asks if anything is wrong. He utters, “Nothing, I’m just tired,” and turns his attention to the raw, sour, burning taste of gastric juices in his throat. Jane smolders, accusing him of being distant and remote. She laments that she cannot get a feel for where he is at; she complains that she “cannot feel him.” He withdraws further. Alternatively, they might have an attacking/counterattacking fight that culminates in her remembering something he did to upset her two years ago ... To this perceived blaming he replies that he doesn’t even remember what she is talking about; and so far as he is concerned it never even happened. “What is wrong with you?” he murmurs under his breath. He is unaware that (1) when a woman becomes (emotionally) activated, she remains stressed for a much longer time than a man. The woman’s pounding heart and racing thoughts remain stuck. And (2) in her racing thoughts, Jane tries to locate an explanation for her runaway heart, believing that if she can find the cause (identifying it as a real external threat—as is biologically intended), then she could settle down. In scanning her memory banks in this activated state, she stumbles across the time when (she perceived) Bob hurt her. Seizing on this “explanation” for her distress, she feels compelled to act upon it, “throwing it in Bob’s face.” In this way, Jane is doing what her physiology compels while he perceives that “she is blaming him for nothing.” This dance of daggers intensifies his defensiveness and seething anger. Locked in mortal combat, they both reach for a Valium. As the Valium (which relaxes their muscles) kicks in, they both feel better—it seems to both of them that the blowup was over nothing. Bob hopes that tomorrow will be a clean slate, and Jane wonders why in the world she dragged up that two-year- old event, no less beating Bob over the head with it. However, when they awake the next morning, they are disconnected physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. Furthermore, research shows that this type of unresolved conflict impairs the couple’s immune system, depressing it and reducing the capacity for wound healing over the next several days. ‖ Rewind and replay: Bob comes into the house. Faced with the chaos, he feels angry, but neither suppresses nor explodes. This time, supported by his wife’s centered, calm presence, he attends tentatively to his body. He notices his heart racing, while the muscles of his arms, shoulders, back, neck and jaw are tightening. After sharing his awareness with his wife, Bob has the fleeting glimpse of a bomb ready to explode.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  For accomplishing great things, we can forgive them their occasional harsh and assertive behavior. What you need to determine is whether you are dealing with chronic aggressors, people who cannot tolerate criticism or being challenged on any level, whose desire for control is excessive, and who will swallow you up in their relentless quest to have more. Look for some telltale signs. First, if they have an unusually high number of enemies whom they have accumulated over the years, there must be a good reason, and not the one they tell you. Pay close attention to how they justify their actions in the world. Aggressors will tend to present themselves as crusaders, as some form of genius who cannot help the way they behave. They are creating great art, they say, or helping the little man. People who get in their way are infidels and evil. They will claim, as Rockefeller did, that no one has been criticized or investigated as much as they have; they are the victims, not the aggressors. The louder and more extreme their narrative, the more you can be certain you are dealing with chronic aggressors. Focus on their actions, their past patterns of behavior, much more than anything they say. You can look for subtler signs as well. Chronic aggressors often have obsessive personalities. Having meticulous habits and creating a completely predictable environment is their way of holding control. Obsessing over an object or a person indicates a desire to swallow it whole. Also, pay attention to the nonverbal cues. We saw with Rockefeller that he could not stand to be passed by anyone in the street. The aggressor type will show such physical obsessions— always front and center. In any event, the earlier you can spot the signs the better. Once you realize you are dealing with this type, you must use every ounce of your energy to disengage mentally, to gain control of your emotional response. Often what happens when you face aggressors is that you initially feel mesmerized and even paralyzed to some extent, as if in the presence of a snake. Then, as you process what they have done, you become emotional—angry, outraged, frightened. Once you are in that state, they find it easy to keep you reacting and not thinking. Your anger doesn’t lead to anything productive but rather melts into bitterness and frustration over time. Your only answer is to find a way to detach from their spell, bit by bit. See through their maneuvers, contemplate the underlying weakness that propels them, cut them down to size. Always focus on their goals, what they are really after, and not the distractions they set up. If battle with them is inevitable, never engage in direct confrontation or challenge them in an overt way.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  that they have no self to retreat to, no foundation for self-esteem, and are completely dependent on the attention they can get from others to make them feel alive and worthy. In childhood, if such narcissists are extroverts, they can function reasonably well, and even thrive. They become masters at attracting notice and monopolizing attention. They can appear vivacious and exciting. In a child, such qualities can seem a sign of future social success. But underneath the surface, they are becoming dangerously addicted to the hits of attention they stimulate to make them feel whole and worthy. If they are introverts, they will retreat to a fantasy life, imagining a self that is quite superior to others. Since they will not get validation of this self-image from others because it is so unrealistic, they will also have moments of great doubt and even self-loathing. They are either a god or a worm. Lacking a coherent core, they could imagine themselves to be anyone, and so their fantasies will keep shifting as they try on new personalities. The nightmare for deep narcissists generally arrives in their twenties and thirties. They have failed to develop that inner thermostat, a cohesive sense of self to love and depend upon. The extroverts must constantly attract attention to feel alive and appreciated. They become more dramatic, more exhibitionistic and grandiose. This can become tiresome and even pathetic. They have to change friends and scenes so that they can have a fresh audience. Introverts fall deeper into a fantasy self. Being socially awkward yet radiating superiority, they tend to alienate people, increasing their dangerous isolation. In both cases, drugs or alcohol or any other form of addiction can become a necessary crutch to soothe them in the inevitable moments of doubt and depression. You can recognize deep narcissists by the following behavior patterns: If they are ever insulted or challenged, they have no defense, nothing internal to soothe them or validate their worth. They generally react with great rage, thirsting for vengeance, full of a sense of righteousness. This is the only way they know how to assuage their insecurities. In such battles, they will position themselves as the wounded victim, confusing others and even drawing sympathy. They are prickly and oversensitive. Almost everything is taken personally. They can become quite paranoid and have enemies in all directions to point to. You can see an impatient or distant look on their face whenever you talk about something that does not directly involve them in some way. They immediately turn the conversation back to themselves, with some story or anecdote to distract from the insecurity behind it. They can be prone to vicious bouts of envy if they see others getting the attention they feel they deserve. They frequently display extreme self-confidence. This always helps to gain attention, and it neatly covers up their gaping inner emptiness and their fragmented sense of self. But beware if this confidence is ever truly put to the test.

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

  3 Gerd Theissen and Dagmar Winter, The Quest for the Plausible Jesus: The Question of Criteria (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002). Parting of the Ways149 149 New Testament The NT is our richest source of statements about Jews’ responses to Jesus and the Jesus movement. As is now well-recognized, the NT is a Jewish source in the sense that most of its authors were Jewish in an ethnic or genealogical sense. It is by no means a disinterested account, however, and, again, most scholars recognize that theNT’s christological focus and commitments have shaped its accounts of Jewish views and responses to Jesus and the Jesus movement. I turn now to two examples. For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea, for you suffered the same things from your own compatriots as they did from the Jews, [15]who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out; they displease God and oppose everyone [16] by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. Thus they have constantly been filling up the measure of their sins; but God’s wrath has overtaken them at last. Ὑμεῖς γὰρ μιμηταὶ ἐγενήθητε, ἀδελφοί, τῶν ἐκκλησιῶν τοῦ θεοῦ τῶν οὐσῶν ἐν τῇ Ἰουδαίᾳ ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ, ὅτι τὰ αὐτὰ ἐπάθετε καὶ ὑμεῖς ὑπὸ τῶν ἰδίων συμφυλετῶν καθὼς καὶ αὐτοὶ ὑπὸ τῶν Ἰουδαίων, [15] τῶν καὶ τὸν κύριον ἀποκτεινάντων Ἰησοῦν καὶ τοὺς προφήτας καὶ ἡμᾶς ἐκδιωξάντων καὶ θεῷ μὴ ἀρεσκόντων καὶ πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποις ἐναντίων,[16] κωλυόντων ἡμᾶς τοῖς ἔθνεσιν λαλῆσαι ἵνα σωθῶσιν, εἰς τὸ ἀναπληρῶσαι αὐτῶν τὰς ἁμαρτίας πάντοτε. ἔφθασεν δὲ ἐπ ̓ αὐτοὺς ἡ ὀργὴ εἰς τέλος. (1 Thess 2:14–16) This passage has generated considerable discussion with regard to two interrelated questions: first, is it Pauline? And second, does it have a concrete historical referent? In an article on “1 Thessalonians 2:14–16 and the Church in Jerusalem,” Markus Bockmuehl argues that both style and content point to Pauline authorship. 4 He then considers the evidence for Jewish persecution of Christ-confessors to which Paul might have been referring. Most obvious, he suggests, are the hostile measures against Jewish Christ-believers in ca AD 36 (the martyrdom of Stephen) and again under Agrippa I in 41/42 (Herod Agrippa I’s execution of James son of Zebedee), as described in Acts 7 and Acts 12 respectively. At this point Bockmuehl invokes the criterion of plausibility: “It would seem most reasonable to begin from the assumption that memories of both experiences are fresh in his mind.” 5 Nevertheless, chronology is a problem. Is it plausible that Paul would still be reacting to events that happened some 9 years before he wrote his letter? For Bockmuehl, the answer seems to be no. To fill the chronological gap, he looks to the sixth-century CE chronicler Malalas of Antioch, who mentions a Jewish persecution of the Jerusalem church during the procuratorship of Ventidius Cumanusa in the eighth year of Claudius’ reign ( 48/49 CE). Bockmuehl acknowledges that Malalas is neither impartial

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  great and unrecognized, they may turn to various compensations— drugs, alcohol, sex with as many partners as possible, shopping, a superior, mocking attitude, et cetera. Those with unsatisfied grandiosity will often become filled with manic energy—one moment telling everyone about the great screenplays they will write or the many women they will seduce, and the next moment falling into depression as reality intrudes. People still tend to idealize leaders and worship them, and you must see this as a form of grandiosity. By believing someone else will make everything great, followers can feel something of this greatness. Their minds can soar along with the rhetoric of the leader. They can feel superior to those who are not believers. On a more personal level, people will often idealize those they love, elevating them to god or goddess status and by extension feeling some of this power reflected back on them. In the world today, you will also notice the prevalence of negative forms of grandiosity. Many people feel the need to disguise their grandiose urges not only from others but also from themselves. They will frequently make a show of their humility—they are not interested in power or feeling important, or so they say. They are happy with their small lot in life. They do not want a lot of possessions, do not own a car, and disdain status. But you will notice they have a need to display this humility in a public manner. It is grandiose humility—their way to get attention and to feel morally superior. A variation on this is the grandiose victim —they have suffered a lot and been the victim numerous times. Although they may like to frame it as being simply unlucky and unfortunate, you will notice that they often have a tendency to fall for the worst types in intimate relationships, or put themselves in circumstances in which they are certain to fail and suffer. In essence, they are compelled to create the drama that will turn them into a victim. As it turns out, any relationship with them will have to revolve around their needs; they have suffered too much in the past to attend to your needs. They are the center of the universe. Feeling and expressing their misfortune gives them their sense of importance, of being superior in suffering. You can measure the levels of grandiosity in people in several simple ways. For instance, notice how people respond to criticism of them or their work. It’s normal for any of us to feel defensive and a bit upset when criticized. But some people become enraged and hysterical, because we have called into doubt their sense of greatness. You can be sure that such a person has high levels of grandiosity. Similarly, such types might conceal their rage behind a martyred, pained expression meant to make you feel guilty. The emphasis is not on the criticism itself and what they need to learn but on their sense of grievance.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Since the image of the black ooze was deeply etched in her mind, not to be dislodged by reason or rhetoric, I used the metaphor to guide my therapy. To dissolve it I needed not the therapeutic word but the therapeutic act. Hence, I tried to stay close to her in her rage, to face down her anger—as Jack had done. I had to engage her, wrestle with her fury, refuse to let her push me away. Her anger took many shapes—she was forever setting tests and traps for me. One particularly treacherous trap provided an auspicious opportunity for the therapeutic act. After several months of severe agitation and discouragement, she arrived one day at my office inexplicably calm and content. “It’s wonderful to see you so tranquil,” I remarked. “What’s happened?” “I just made a landmark decision,” she said. “I’ve jettisoned all expectations for personal happiness or self-fulfillment. No more yearning for love, for sex, for companionship, for artistic creation. From now on I’m going to devote myself entirely to fulfilling my job description—being a mother and a surgeon.” All this she said with an air of great composure and well-being. During the previous few weeks I had become greatly concerned about the intensity and relentlessness of her despair and wondered how much more she could endure. So despite the odd abruptness of her change, I was so grateful that she had found some way, any way, to diminish her pain that I chose not to inquire further into its source. Instead I took it as a blessed event—not unlike the peace achieved by many Buddhists who, through meditative practice, alleviate suffering by systematically detaching themselves from all personal cravings. To be honest, I did not expect Irene’s transformation to endure, but I hoped that even a temporary respite from her relentless pain might initiate a more positive cycle in her life. If a state of calm permitted her to stop tormenting herself, to make adaptive decisions, to develop new friends, perhaps even to meet a suitable man, then I believed it made little difference how she initially achieved that state of mind: she could simply pull up the ladder and ascend to the next level. The next day, however, she phoned in a fury: “Do you realize what you’ve done? What kind of therapist are you? Your caring for me! All pretense! Pretense! The truth is, you’re willing to sit back and calmly watch me renounce everything vital in my life—all love, joy, excitement—everything! No, no, it’s more than just sitting back; you’re willing to be an accomplice to my self-murder!” Once again she threatened to leave therapy, but I finally persuaded her to return for the next hour. Over the next couple of days I ruminated about the sequence of events.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Double Cross This, maybe, was the worst part: the whole world was out to kill you both. Your bodies have always been abject. You were dropped from the boat of the world, climbed onto a piece of driftwood together, and after a perfunctory period of pleasure and safety, she tried to drown you. And so you aren’t just mad, or heartbroken: you grieve from the betrayal. Dream House as Unreliable Narrator When I was a child, my parents—and then, learning from their example, my siblings—loved to refer to me as “melodramatic,” or, worse, a “drama queen.” Both expressions confused and then rankled me. I felt things deeply, and often the profound unfairness of the world triggered a furious, poetic response from me, but while that was cute when I was a toddler, neither thing—feeling, responding to feeling—aged well. Ferocity did not become me. Later, retelling stories about this dynamic to my wife, my therapist, the occasional friend, filled me with incandescent rage. “Why do we teach girls that their perspectives are inherently untrustworthy?” I would yell. I want to reclaim these words—after all, melodrama comes from melos , which means “music,” “honey”; a drama queen is, nonetheless, a queen—but they are still hot to the touch. This is what I keep returning to: how people decide who is or is not an unreliable narrator. And after that decision has been made, what do we do with people who attempt to construct their own vision of justice?