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 H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I was angry with the woman for tearing down the skylark and angry with this nice, innocent man who gave me no cause to be angry at all. I mumbled an unsatisfactory apology, told him that ‘things have been hard since my father died’, and ‘it isn’t your fault’ and ‘I’m sorry, and this is awful, but I really have to go’. I walked past the window as I crossed the street. The woman was back on her chair, smoothing a new sticker out against the glass: a giant arrow that pointed at nothing. I could not meet her eye. Then I started crashing my father’s car. I didn’t mean to: it just happened. I backed up against bollards, scraped wings against walls, heard the sound of metal squealing in agony over and over again, and I’d get out of the car and rub the new gouges dumbly with my fingers, as if somehow that might fix them, though they ran through the paint to the metal below. ‘Are you punishing your father’s car because he left you?’ asked a psychoanalytically-minded and fairly tactless friend. I thought about that. ‘No,’ I said, embarrassed because my answer was so much less interesting. ‘It’s that I don’t know what shape my car is any more.’ It was true. I couldn’t keep the dimensions of the car in my head. Or my own, for I kept having accidents. I cracked cups. I dropped plates. Fell over. Broke a toe on a door-jamb. I was as clumsy as I had been as a child. But when I was busy with Mabel I was never clumsy. The world with the hawk in it was insulated from harm, and in that world I was exactly aware of all the edges of my skin. Every night I slept and dreamed of creances, of lines and knots, of skeins of wool, skeins of geese flying south. And every afternoon I walked out onto the pitch with relief, because when the hawk was on my fist I knew who I was, and I was never angry with her, even if I wanted to sink to my knees and weep every time she tried to fly away. 15 For whom the bell ‘Bloody hell, she’s calm, Helen,’ Stuart says. ‘I can feel her heartbeat. She’s not bothered at all.’ His head is bowed low over the table, fingers spread wide over the closed wings of my hooded hawk. He holds her upon a kitchen cushion as firmly and as gently as if she were made of glass. ‘Good,’ I say, shifting her covert feathers carefully aside to reveal the base of her tail. Here, just before the long feathers join her body, the quills are hollow and translucent, and I’m about to glue and tie a bell the size and shape of an acorn onto the topmost pair. It doesn’t take long. I tug on it gently to check it is secured, then take the hawk back onto my fist.

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  What hasn’t worked about making a change in the past? 10. How should we plan to communicate about this current behavior moving forward? As you go through these questions, you’ll want to integrate the OARS tool. This stands for a set of skills that includes asking open-ended questions, affirming the person’s experience, offering reflective listening, and summarizing what has been shared. 117 This helps the person express where they currently stand as you engage in a nonjudgmental way. You’ll notice that all of these questions lean more into curiosity than accusation. When you come in with an open stance, the person has room to reflect. If you go in hot and make it about you, the conversation is likely not going to go how you want. No one likes to feel attacked. When the finger- wagging comes at us, it’s a common defense to lie, get angry, or dig our heels in even more. Even if someone says they’ll change, it’s unclear whether they want to improve to get you off their back or because they genuinely want to improve for themselves. If you can sit with your discomfort and not let your pain push the conversation forward, there’s room for the person’s real answers to bubble up. It’s a lot easier for someone to buy into change when they’ve come to the conclusion themselves. For the caretakers, you have to start by understanding where you are at in your own process as well. When Jessie took the time to sit with her own feelings, rather than just focus solely on Tony, she realized just how angry and sad she was. She lamented, “I hate that he did this to me. Even more, I hate that he did this to himself. I just want to rage at him.” “I can understand that. You were having such a great time together and then he made a different choice that derailed your plans. You were just so excited to enjoy college together.” I followed up, “But do you think raging at him would actually get you anywhere?” “A part of me wishes it would but if I’m being honest, I don’t think it would. I’m sure he’s struggling enough as it is. Getting shame from me wouldn’t change anything.” This is where Jessie and I practiced some role-plays to help her assess where Tony was at in the Stages of Change. She could integrate some of the motivational interview questions to see how much he wanted to shift his behaviors. Rather than judge his behavior, she tried to keep an open mind and let him explain for himself why he did the things that he did, as well as how he felt about what he did. When she eventually had a conversation with him using the techniques, she told me that it was enlightening.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Once the pitch is clear of temptation I call Mabel as usual. She flies to my fist perfectly, a whole thirty yards. But on the second and third flights she clouts the glove hard with both feet, skies up, tries to turn in mid-air, wobbles, stalls, then ends up on the ground a few feet away, panting, wings dropped, looking as if she is going to explode. All my laughter is gone. Now I know why austringers have, for centuries, been famed for cursing. I curse. It is my fault this is happening. I know it is. I hate myself. I try to keep calm. I fail. Damn, damn, damn. I’m hot, incredibly bothered, pushing hair from my eyes with rabbit-flesh-specked fingers, cursing to high heaven, and to top it all I see a man in white shirtsleeves and a black waistcoat striding towards Christina, his shadow dark before him. It is one of the college porters, and he is not happy. The set of his shoulders is unmistakable. They start talking. From this distance I can’t hear what’s being said, but she is waving one hand towards me, and I suppose she is explaining to him that I’m not a random trespasser, but a bona fide College Fellow, and what I am doing is not against the rules. From his demeanour I don’t think he believes her. They stop talking as I approach. He recognises me. I recognise him. ‘Hello!’ I say brightly, and explain what I am doing with a hawk on this hallowed ground. ‘Hmm,’ he says, eyeing Mabel with suspicion. ‘Are you going to catch students with it?’ ‘Only if they’re causing trouble.’ Then I whisper conspiratorially, ‘Let me have the names.’ It is the right answer. A shout of laughter. He is fascinated by the hawk, and wants to know more about it, but he is working and duty calls. ‘Excuse me,’ he says, and he sets his shoulders once again, narrows his eyes into the sun, and stalks off towards some poor tourists who’ve decided to have a picnic on the corner of the college rugby pitch.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Maybe it really was that simple for him. I imagined my father sitting at his desk in Nairobi, a big man in government, with clerks and secretaries bringing him papers to sign, a minister calling him for advice, a loving wife and children waiting at home, his own father’s village only a day’s drive away. The image made me vaguely angry, and I tried to set it aside, concentrating instead on the sound of salsa coming from an open window somewhere down the block. The same thoughts kept returning to me, though, as persistent as the beat of my heart. Where did I belong? My conversation with Regina that night after the rally might have triggered a change in me, left me warm with good intentions. But I was like a drunk coming out of a long, painful binge, and I had soon felt my newfound resolve slipping away, without object or direction. Two years from graduation, I had no idea what I was going to do with my life, or even where I would live. Hawaii lay behind me like a childhood dream; I could no longer imagine settling there. Whatever my father might say, I knew it was too late to ever truly claim Africa as my home. And if I had come to understand myself as a black American, and was understood as such, that understanding remained unanchored to place. What I needed was a community, I realized, a community that cut deeper than the common despair that black friends and I shared when reading the latest crime statistics, or the high fives I might exchange on a basketball court. A place where I could put down stakes and test my commitments. And so, when I heard about a transfer program that Occidental had arranged with Columbia University, I’d been quick to apply. I figured that if there weren’t any more black students at Columbia than there were at Oxy, I’d at least be in the heart of a true city, with black neighborhoods in close proximity. As it was, there wasn’t much in L.A. to hold me back. Most of my friends were graduating that year: Hasan off to work with his family in London, Regina on her way to Andalusia to study Spanish Gypsies.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  You have slaughtered with such fury as reaches to heaven. And now you propose to reduce these children of Judah and Jerusalem to being your serving men and women! And are you not all the while the ones who are guilty before Yahweh your God? Now listen to me—release the prisoners you have taken of your brothers, for the fierce anger of Yahweh hangs over you.147 The troops immediately released the captives and relinquished all their booty; specially appointed officials “saw to the relief of the prisoners. From the booty, they clothed all those of them who were naked; they gave them clothing and sandals, and provided them with food, drink and shelter. They mounted all those who were infirm on donkeys, and took them back to their kinsmen in Jericho.”148 These priests were probably monotheists; in Babylonia, paganism had lost its allure for the exiles. The prophet who had hailed Cyrus as the messiah also uttered the first fully monotheistic statement in the Bible: “Am I not Yahweh?” he makes the God of Israel demand repeatedly. “There is no other god beside me.”149 Yet the monotheism of these priests had not made them intolerant, bloodthirsty, or cruel; rather, the reverse is true. Other postexilic prophets were more aggressive. Inspired by Darius’s ideology, they looked forward to a “day of wonder” when Yahweh would rule the entire world and there would be no mercy for nations who resisted: “Their flesh will moulder while they are still standing on their feet; their eyes will rot in their sockets; their tongues will rot in their mouths.”150 They imagined Israel’s former enemies processing meekly each year to Jerusalem, the new Susa, bearing rich gifts and tribute.151 Others had fantasies of the Israelites who had been deported by Assyria being carried tenderly home,152 while their former oppressors prostrated themselves before them and kissed their feet.153 One prophet had a vision of Yahweh’s glory shining over Jerusalem, the center of a redeemed world and a haven of peace—yet a peace achieved only by ruthless repression.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Heat began in my back teeth, igniting the wick of my tongue. A light lanterned my mouth and I named it rage. I ringed my arms around my father’s waist and dangled from him, trying to weaponize the weight of my body. My brother tried to kick back at him, but his foot flung out and kicked the side-view mirror instead, freeing our faces from it. The mirror shattered, turning our faces multifaceted as diamonds, and before its shards hit the asphalt, I saw in it how small I was, how my arms barely circled the width of my father’s waist. From another angle, it might have looked like I was trying to dance with him, dip him back in my arms. I let go of his waist and stood, my spine hammered straight, welded to wound. Beneath my skirt, my tail tautened between my legs, tethering me to the ground. I walked up behind my father, low and crouched, my knees hinged with a strength that was my mother’s: practiced at bending and rising, learning all the angles of prayer. My brother’s head lolled to the side as my father shook him again, spit whipping out of my brother’s mouth, sparkling in the air. Coiling his arms in, he retracted my brother to his chest, and I thought he was either going to hug him or throw him. I stood behind my father, standing in his shadow while my tail wrapped around his ankle, yanking so quick his leg buckled beneath him. He collapsed on one knee and cried out, the asphalt burning his kneecap bald, gravel gritting into it. My brother, let go, stumbled and leaned against the SUV, looking at my tail as if it might strangle his ankle too: It dangled slack between my legs again, sated. Wringing the sweat from its fur, I tucked it back into my underwear. I stepped back from my father’s kneeling body, his shadow truncated at the waist. He moaned a sound too low and gutted for even the car engines to comprehend, his lip metallic where he’d bitten it. He stood up halfway, cradling his skinned-open knee like a geode: Beneath the broken dullness of his skin, he was rubied with blood, pearled with tendon. Looking up at me through the black blades of his hair, he said my name, his mouth unstitched by it. It wasn’t the pain of his knee that kept him from following us: It was my face, my face that was my mother’s, my face that made the sun swivel around and witness it, my face backlit and blurred into the sky’s blue, resembling what couldn’t be touched.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Now that you are dead you can see why I never wanted you to live. See how much lighter you are now? barren of a body mother to nothing? You darkest of my daughters in skin in smoke. I burned you this ash is yours rebuild it into anything you want me to be. This letter is not apology . I am not writing for a response a bullet doesn’t ask to be given back. My second husband the soldier lives by the law of loss kill what you cannot carry marry what you cannot bury writing will wring lies from the white open a gate to our griefs. I have no need to grieve what I named . I’m here shitting my pants. The zhongyi says sphincter loose as a sleeve says it’s because of my age I suspect it’s your father the first man I married for his soldier’s pension for a future the color of tendon one night I woke to him between my legs tongue out weeding my pubic hair with his teeth balding me said he could see the lice on me the size of pearls stuffed me with what he plucked I birthed hairballs the size of your head rehearsed birth until you born drilling my body into wind You my littleplum I raised you braised in my blood let me begin the river is noodled with snakes the river is not to blame I once saw soldiers throw prisoners into the river the fish for weeks were shaped like boys they say the babies here born gilled bladed or hammerheaded evolution is the body becoming its best weapon. What feeds on your body without permission is a parasite children are no exception. The only cure is to survive what lives off you

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  It is difficult for us today to realize how strange this insistence on cultic exclusivity would have been in the seventh century BCE. Our reading of the Hebrew Bible has been influenced by two and a half thousand years of monotheistic teaching. But Josiah, of course, had never heard of the First Commandment—“Thou shalt not have strange gods before my presence”—which the reformers would place at the top of the Decalogue. It pointedly condemned Manasseh’s introduction of the effigies of “strange gods” into the temple where Yahweh’s “presence” (shechinah) was enthroned in the Holy of Holies. But pagan icons had been perfectly acceptable there since Solomon’s time. Despite the campaigns of such prophets as Elijah, who had urged the people to worship Yahweh alone, most of the population of the two kingdoms had never doubted the efficacy of such gods as Baal, Anat, or Asherah. The prophet Hosea’s oracles showed how popular the cult of Baal had been in the northern kingdom during the eighth century, and the reformers themselves knew that Israelites “offered sacrifice to Baal, to the sun, the moon, the constellations and the whole array of heaven.”105 There would be great resistance to monotheism. Thirty years after Josiah’s death, Israelites were still devotees of the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, and Yahweh’s temple was once again full of “the idols of the house of Israel.”106 For many it seemed unnatural and perverse to ignore such a divine resource. The reformers knew that they were asking Judeans to relinquish beloved and familiar sanctities and embark on a lonely, painful severance from the mythical and cultural consciousness of the Middle East. Josiah was completely convinced by the sefer torah and at once inaugurated a violent orgy of destruction, eradicating the cultic paraphernalia introduced by Manasseh, burning the effigies of Baal and Asherah, abolishing the rural shrines, pulling down the house of sacred male prostitutes and the Assyrian horses. In the old territories of the Kingdom of Israel, he was even more ruthless, not only demolishing the ancient temples of Yahweh in Bethel and Samaria but slaughtering the priests of the rural shrines and contaminating their altars.107 This fanatical aggression was a new and tragic development, which excoriated sacred symbols that had been central to both the temple cult and the piety of individual Israelites.108 A tradition often develops a violent strain in a symbiotic relationship with an aggressive imperialism; fearing annihilation by an external foe, people attack an “enemy within.” The reformers now regarded the Canaanite cults that Israelites had long enjoyed as “detestable” and “loathsome”; they insisted that any Israelite who participated in them must be hunted down mercilessly.109 “You must not give way to him, nor listen to him, you must show him no pity,” Moses had commanded; “You must not spare him, and you must not conceal his guilt. No, you must kill him.”110 An Israelite town guilty of this idolatry must be put under the “ban,” burned to the ground, and its inhabitants slaughtered.111

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Less important, but still noteworthy and peculiar, is the apologetic work of the Gallic presbyter, Salvianus, on providence and the government of the world.127 It was composed about the middle of the fifth century (440–455) in answer at once to the charge that Christianity occasioned all the misfortunes of the times, and to the doubts concerning divine providence, which were spreading among Christians themselves. The blame of the divine judgments he places, however, not upon the heathens, but upon the Christianity of the day, and, in forcible and lively, but turgid and extravagant style, draws an extremely unfavorable picture of the moral condition of the Christians, especially in Gaul, Spain, Italy, and Africa. His apology for Christianity, or rather for the Christian faith in the divine government of the world, was also a polemic against the degenerate Christians. It was certainly unsuited to convert heathens, but well fitted to awaken the church to more dangerous enemies within, and stimulate her to that moral self-reform, which puts the crown upon victory over outward foes. "The church," says this Jeremiah of his time, "which ought everywhere to propitiate God, what does she, but provoke him to anger?128 How many may one meet, even in the church, who are not still drunkards, or debauchees, or adulterers, or fornicators, or robbers, or murderers, or the like, or all these at once, without end? It is even a sort of holiness among Christian people, to be less vicious." From the public worship of God, he continues, and almost during it, they pass to deeds of shame. Scarce a rich man, but would commit murder and fornication. We have lost the whole power of Christianity, and offend God the more, that we sin as Christians. We are worse than the barbarians and heathen. If the Saxon is wild, the Frank faithless, the Goth inhuman, the Alanian drunken, the Hun licentious, they are by reason of their ignorance far less punishable than we, who, knowing the commandments of God, commit all these crimes. He compares the Christians especially of Rome with the Arian Goths and Vandals, to the disparagement of the Romans, who add to the gross sins of nature the refined vices of civilization, passion for theatres, debauchery, and unnatural lewdness. Therefore has the just God given them into the hands of the barbarians and exposed them to the ravages of the migrating hordes. This horrible picture of the Christendom of the fifth century is undoubtedly in many respects an exaggeration of ascetic and monastic zeal. Yet it is in general not untrue; it presents the dark side of the picture, and enables us to understand more fully on moral and psychological grounds the final dissolution of the western empire of Rome. CHAPTER III.ALLIANCE OF CHURCH AND STATE AND ITS INFLUENCE ON PUBLIC MORALS AND RELIGION.SOURCES.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I read the last letter aloud in my yard. Ben sat in front of me with her legs forked open in the soil, her hand petting the 口. Reading aloud to the holes, I mispronounced all the silences, rewrote them with my own prayer. She’s getting ready to bury him, Ben said. She’s baiting us. My tail curled in on itself, fit in my hand like a stone. I wanted a window. I wanted to see something shatter because of me. I said I wasn’t going to let her bury anything. The bone in my tail was wincing down to a wick, preparing for me to light it. Its marrow was memory. When my mother came home from the foot spa that night, I said I was volunteering to be her weapon. She softened the knots of her hands in a bowl of hot water, said she was tired. But I said it anyway: Ama is going to hurt Agong. She turned away from the window, her face wiped of light. The sink behind her was full, the water silver with knives. You think I don’t know? she said, and I knew she was mocking me, her voice stretched out of shape over the words. Everything in my mouth sounded already wrong, gone sour. I looked down at the bruised tile floor, at her shadow grazing on mine, eating it whole. I know about the river, I said, looking up. I think it’s time to dam her. My mother’s knees must have come unscrewed: She knelt down, her back against the wall, her hands snagging in her hair when she tried to shift it out of her face. I moved forward through the dim of the kitchen, tugged down on her left ear like she always did for me when I was having a bad dream. When she jerked her head away from me, I told her she didn’t have to be afraid of Ama. While I untangled the hair from around her fingers, I imagined loosing my tail like an arrow, shortcutting it through Ama’s body, her ribs making a fist around her heart. Do you remember that story I told you? my mother said. I asked her which one, and she told me about the women who hanged themselves with their own hair when the mountains were mowed over. Once, we lived inside the ground. The sun swung like a bucket of our blood. When I asked her why they hanged themselves, she said the only way to own your body is to die inside it. I said that wasn’t true anymore. She stood up and tugged her own ear, checking to see if we were dream-speaking. Steaming her hands over the bowl of water, she said, You’re not listening. The steam opened her fists like flowers. The story about the women, she said, was a story about choice. How we had one. How we chose to be dead in our own bodies than alive without our language.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I’m dying, he said, performing a wound in his side, and instead of offering my bare calf, I ran from the kitchen and into the living room, left him to paddle around in his own pretend blood. Between my buttocks, my tail burned like a fuse, heat clawing up to the root, a pain pinned to my lower back. I bent forward, hunching until my palms were pressed to the hardwood and I was on all fours, my tail flicking between my legs. I could hear my father in the kitchen behind me, standing with his back to me, and I got to my feet, watched the back of his neck where his veins were alive as snakes. My mother once told me that snakes were the severed fingers of a god who lived on the moon, a god who snipped off her own fingers and littered them on earth as self-punishment for trying to steal the sun. Every snake, I thought, must be roaming for blood, seeking the hand it was severed from. When I looked at my father, my tail unfurled like a whip and patrolled the air, licking my legs forward. It butted between my knees and sang and begged: Fasten my maw to his neck, unspool his veins with my teeth. Bury his hands in the yard for pickpocketing my mother from me. Instead, I considered how best to cook my knees and cure him. His blood may have been made of snakes, but saving him was still my story. When he turned around and saw me kneading my knees, crouching low enough to tongue my shadow off the floor, he smiled and asked if I was praying. Tired-lines gathered in a stanza above his eyebrows. Sweat sheening his skin like an oil spill. In the back of his mouth, his molars were silver-capped, cupping the light inside them, and I looked away. Remembered how he once untangled my kite-string when it got noosed around a tree: He told me that cutting the line wouldn’t save the kite. It would only flee me. So he climbed the tree instead, unsnagging the string from the bark until I could finally tug it back, easing the kite out of the sky’s fist. Running to the bathroom, I sat on the toilet and let my tail dangle into the bowl, its ache receding as the water stroked it. In the mirror above the sink, a shadow striped my face into halves, and my tail curled around my thigh like a hand, choking me above the knee. It wouldn’t release my leg until I promised to let it hunt for me, hurt for me.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  § 27. Restriction of Religious Freedom, and Beginnings of Persecution of Heretics. Sam. Eliot: History of Liberty. Boston, 1858, 4 vols. Early Christians, vols. i. and ii. The most important facts are scattered through the sections of the larger church histories on the heresies, the doctrinal controversies, and church discipline. An inevitable consequence of the union of church and state was restriction of religious freedom in faith and worship, and the civil punishment of departure from the doctrine and discipline of the established church. The church, dominant and recognized by the state, gained indeed external freedom and authority, but in a measure at the expense of inward liberty and self-control. She came, as we have seen in the previous section, under the patronage and supervision of the head of the Christian state, especially in the Byzantine empire. In the first three centuries, the church, with all her external lowliness and oppression, enjoyed the greater liberty within, in the development of her doctrines and institutions, by reason of her entire separation from the state. But the freedom of error and division was now still more restricted. In the ante-Nicene age, heresy and schism were as much hated and abhorred indeed, as afterward, yet were met only in a moral way, by word and writing, and were punished with excommunication from the rights of the church. Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and even Lactantius were the first advocates of the principle of freedom of conscience, and maintained, against the heathen, that religion was essentially a matter of free will, and could be promoted only by instruction and persuasion not by outward force.241 All they say against the persecution of Christians by the heathen applies in full to the persecution of heretics by the church. After the Nicene age all departures from the reigning state-church faith were not only abhorred and excommunicated as religious errors, but were treated also as crimes against the Christian state, and hence were punished with civil penalties; at first with deposition, banishment, confiscation, and, after Theodosius, even with death.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  That’s supposed to be funny because our society thinks that women having unwanted sex is just one of the “inconveniences of marriage.” For centuries, the marriage vow has functioned as an irrevocable, blanket sexual consent—by women, for men. So why aren’t we talking about how one in ten women will be raped by their husbands? Another 13 percent of women say they’ve had sex because they were “bullied or humiliated” into it by their current husbands. About a third of married women have complied with their husbands’ demands for sex because it was expected after he spent money on her, even though the sexual act was unwanted. The majority of married women report that they experience coercion to have sex from their current husband. Marriage remains the site of the most widespread rape and sexual exploitation in our society.44 Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Whore? In a sense, women and femmes are all forced to be sexual laborers—to please men and masculine people with our bodies. But we are never allowed to admit that this giving of pleasure is real work and that sometimes it is forced work. We are certainly never allowed to take control of this work and negotiate to receive something in exchange for it. Because asking for money makes a woman or femme a whore. And—surprise!—our culture tells us this is the very worst thing we can be. Whores are degraded! Unlovable! Rape-able! Better off dead! We use the term “whore” to refer to the feminine sin of demanding too much. “Attention whore,” “fame whore,” “money whore”: a whore commits the sin of wanting—whether it’s money, sex, or attention. Instead, women and femmes are supposed to treat sexual pleasure like good wives doing the housework: do it for straight men, mostly at home, invisibly, with a smile and, of course, for free. Make him happy. Don’t ask for too much. Wouldn’t want to see women and femmes actually get something in return, would we? Much of our culture’s fear about selling sex is exaggerated and misunderstood. This is because the imaginary sex industry is used as a mirror of our larger problems with sex and with work. Tell me what you fear about sex work, and I’ll tell you what makes you anxious about your own sex life—and your own working life. The stories we tell about sex work are about our culture’s hidden realities—that, even in the “safety” of love and marriage, sex can be a lot of work; sometimes we don’t have much choice about it; nonconsensual domination and violence are common (including among queers); sex is still tied to economic survival and class mobility for many people (especially women); and under capitalism, all of us “sell our bodies” in one way or another.45 Selling Our Bodies

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Or someone found him? What time?” “I don’t know the details, Yale.” “How is this happening today?” He was asking the wrong questions. Watching Julian’s production of Hamlet, he’d been struck by Laertes’ response to Ophelia’s death. “O, where?” he’d said when he heard the news. But yes, look, it was right: The details were what you grabbed for. “Fiona’s organized it.” Of course; that was part of the whole power of attorney thing, dealing with the body. Charlie said, “It’ll be odd if we aren’t there together.” “Will it.” “I just mean we shouldn’t burden Fiona with this right now. You can sit beside me. It won’t kill you.” Yale had never hit anyone in his life, not really hit, but he wanted to right then. He wanted to grab all the gay weeklies from around the country that Charlie hung on those pretentious racks behind his desk and crumple them, one by one, in his face. But Charlie looked so tired. Blue moons under his eyes. Yale said, even though he knew it was ridiculous, “Where did you even have this testing done?” “Yale. It’s positive. I was exposed, and it’s positive. One plus one is two. I’m dead.” He flung out the last word like a hand grenade. And if Charlie had broken down right then, if his face had crumpled—Yale might have softened, gone around to him, held him in his arms even as he stared out the window conflicted. But Charlie’s face didn’t change. Yale had come here planning to yell, and the fact that he wasn’t yelling was concession enough. Charlie said, “Would you please just sit near me at the bloody church so we don’t have to explain this to everyone?” The thing was, Yale wasn’t ready to explain it either. “I’ll need a suit. Fuck. Is Teresa in the apartment?” “I can call and send her on an errand.” “Yes, please do.” “It’s at the Unitarian place. You’ve got, what, two hours?” This was the same church where they’d held services for Asher’s friend Brian. A gay-friendly church right off Broadway, and thus—recently—Funeral Central. Yale said, “I don’t even understand. I don’t get—” And he stopped talking, wiped his face with his sleeve. Charlie said, “I’m sorry you’re so torn up about Terrence.” “Okay, Charlie.” Instead of screaming, he walked out of the office. He closed the door, really believing that Charlie would call him back, chase him down. Had this truly been their first and only conversation since Yale had called him, jubilant, from Wisconsin? He’d talked to Charlie so many times in his head that it didn’t seem right. And how had he left without making Charlie apologize, beg forgiveness, explain? He got angrier as he walked. He’d felt deflated in the office, but the cold air, the sun, every step away from Charlie, filled him again with indignation. Charlie had not, for an instant, expressed concern for Yale, for his health.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The victory of the council of Nicaea over the views of the majority of the bishops was a victory only in appearance. It had, to be sure, erected a mighty fortress, in which the defenders of the essential deity of Christ might ever take refuge from the assaults of heresy; and in this view it was of the utmost importance, and secured the final triumph of the truth. But some of the bishops had subscribed the homoousion with reluctance, or from regard to the emperor, or at best with the reservation of a broad interpretation; and with a change of circumstances they would readily turn in opposition. The controversy now for the first time fairly broke loose, and Arianism entered the stage of its political development and power. An intermediate period of great excitement ensued, during which council was held against council, creed was set forth against creed, and anathema against anathema was hurled. The pagan Ammianus Marcellinus says of the councils under Constantius: "The highways were covered with galloping bishops;" and even Athanasius rebuked the restless flutter of the clergy, who journeyed the empire over to find the true faith, and provoked the ridicule and contempt of the unbelieving world. In intolerance and violence the Arians exceeded the orthodox, and contested elections of bishops not rarely came to bloody encounters. The interference of imperial politics only poured oil on the flame, and embarrassed the natural course of the theological development. The personal history of Athanasius was interwoven with the doctrinal controversy; he threw himself wholly into the cause which he advocated. The question whether his deposition was legitimate or not, was almost identical with the question whether the Nicene Creed should prevail. Eusebius of Nicomedia and Theognis of Nicaea threw all their influence against the adherents of the homoousion. Constantine himself was turned by Eusebius of Caesarea, who stood between Athanasius and Arius, by his sister Constantia and her father confessor, and by a vague confession of Arius, to think more favorably of Arius, and to recall him from exile. Nevertheless he afterwards, as before, thought himself in accordance with the orthodox view and the Nicene creed. The real gist of the controversy he had never understood. Athanasius, who after the death of Alexander in April, 328,1333 became bishop of Alexandria and head of the Nicene party, refused to reinstate the heretic in his former position, and was condemned and deposed for false accusations by two Arian councils, one at Tyre under the presidency of the historian Eusebius, the other at Constantinople in the year 335 (or 336), and banished by the emperor to Treves in Gaul in 336, as a disturber of the peace of the church.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Away with him, this teacher of Nestorius!" His friends replied with equal violence: "They forced us [at the robber-council] by blows to subscribe; away with the Manichaeans, the enemies of Flavian, the enemies of the faith! Away with the murderer Dioscurus? Who does not know his wicked deeds? The Egyptian bishops cried again: Away with the Jew, the adversary of God, and call him not bishop!" To which the oriental bishops answered: "Away with the rioters, away with the murderers! The orthodox man belongs to the council!" At last the imperial commissioners interfered, and put an end to what they justly called an unworthy and useless uproar.637 In all these outbreaks of human passion, however, we must not forget that the Lord was sitting in the ship of the church, directing her safely through the billows and storms. The Spirit of truth, who was not to depart from her, always triumphed over error at last, and even glorified himself through the weaknesses of his instruments. Upon this unmistakable guidance from above, only set out by the contrast of human imperfections, our reverence for the councils must be based. Soli Deo gloria; or, in the language of Chrysostom: Dovxa tw'/ qew'/ pavntwn e{neken! § 66. List of the Ecumenical Councils of the Ancient Church, We only add, by way of a general view, a list of all the ecumenical councils of the Graeco-Roman church, with a brief account of their character and work. 1. The Concilium Nicaenum I., A.D. 325; held at Nicaea in Bithynia, a lively commercial town near the imperial residence of Nicomedia, and easily accessible by land and sea. It consisted of three hundred and eighteen bishops,638 besides a large number of priests, deacons, and acolytes, mostly from the East, and was called by Constantine the Great, for the settlement of the Arian controversy. Having become, by decisive victories in 323, master of the whole Roman empire, he desired to complete the restoration of unity and peace with the help of the dignitaries of the church. The result of this council was the establishment (by anticipation) of the doctrine of the true divinity of Christ, the identity of essence between the Son and the Father. The fundamental importance of this dogma, the number, learning, piety and wisdom of the bishops, many of whom still bore the marks of the Diocletian persecution, the personal presence of the first Christian emperor, of Eusebius, "the father of church history," and of Athanasius, "the father of orthodoxy" (though at that time only archdeacon), as well as the remarkable character of this epoch, combined in giving to this first general synod a peculiar weight and authority. It is styled emphatically "the great and holy council," holds the highest place among all the councils, especially with the Greeks,639 and still lives in the Nicene Creed, which is second in authority only to the ever venerable Apostles’ Creed.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Addressing the clergy, he devotes nearly a hundred pages of his Truth of Scripture to an elaboration of this principle. Not even the most trifling sin is permissible as a means of averting a greater evil, either for oneself or one’s neighbor. Under no circumstances does a good intention justify a falsehood. The pope himself has no right to tolerate or practice misrepresentation to advance a good cause. To accomplish a good end, the priest dare not even make a false appeal to fear. All lying is of itself sin, and no dispensation can change its character.594 The friars called forth the Reformer’s keenest thrusts, and these increased in sharpness as he neared the end of his life. Quotations, bearing on their vices, would fill a large volume. Entire treatises against their heresies and practices issued from his pen. They were slavish agents of the pope’s will; they spread false views of the eucharist; they made merchandise of indulgences and letters of fraternity which pretended to give the purchasers a share in their own good deeds here and at the final accounting. Their lips were full of lies and their hands of blood. They entered houses and led women astray; they lived in

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Charlie said, “I think I’ve figured out why I did it.” “Oh, do tell.” Yale held the box in front of him, a barrier. “This might not make sense, but I think I did it because I was tired of being scared.” “You were terrified of a disease, so you went out and got it?” “No. No. I was scared of you leaving me, of you cheating on me with someone younger and better looking and smarter. I know it’s fucked up, but somewhere in my mind it was like, if I did the worst thing I could think of, then every time I saw you flirt with someone else I’d almost hope you would go for it, so it would even the score.” “You thought this all through.” “Not at the time, no. I was blotto, Yale. And Julian had these poppers he’d stolen from Richard’s house.” “Poppers last all of ten seconds.” “That’s not what I meant, I mean what we did in bed, I wouldn’t have—” “Jesus, Charlie.” “I wouldn’t have let him.” “I think your little self-analysis is way off. I think you were absolutely trying to get sick.” Yale was yelling, and he didn’t care. “Why is the question, but that’s for you to figure out. Maybe you hate yourself. Maybe you hate me. Maybe you want the attention. There’s no good reason, is there? When you know the risks. You’re not naive. You’re the fucking condom czar of Chicago.” Charlie was shaking his head. Charlie never seemed to cry actual tears, but his eyes would turn pink and puffy. He hadn’t come far into the room, was standing near the doorway as if he might run out. He said, “We used a rubber. We did. We were in Nico’s apartment at first, when things, you know—and we were in the bathroom, and it was dark, and before we left I asked Julian if he had a rubber, and he said, ‘I bet there’s one here somewhere.’ And he groped around the medicine cabinet, and he put a couple in his pocket. And then we went back to his place. But later, before I left, I saw the wrapper, and it was lambskin.” “Holy fuck, Charlie. It was probably old too.” “Probably.” “I don’t even believe you. Really. You used a rubber, but it was dark, and oops, it was lambskin? Why would Nico even have lambskin? For what? To prevent pregnancy? You can come up with a better story. How many times did he fuck you really? I was willing to believe you. I was almost ready to believe you. And you come up with lambskin.” “It was one time.” “Just one great postfuneral fuck. Why not make it two? He’s out there right now. Have at it.” “Yale.” “Teddy fucks half the city and gets nothing, but the one time you mess up, with a rubber, you magically get sick. You should go on the talk show circuit.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  These invasions of the province of the secular power brought him into quarrel and continual contest with Orestes, the imperial governor of Alexandria. He summoned five hundred monks from the Nitrian mountains for his guard, who publicly insulted the governor. One of them, by the name of Ammon, wounded him with a stone, and was thereupon killed by Orestes. But Cyril caused the monk to be buried in state in a church as a holy martyr to religion, and surnamed him Thaumasios, the Admirable; yet he found himself compelled by the universal disgust of cultivated people to let this act be gradually forgotten. Cyril is also frequently charged with the instigation of the murder of the renowned Hypatia, a friend of Orestes. But in this cruel tragedy he probably had only the indirect part of exciting the passions of the Christian populace which led to it, and of giving them the sanction of his high office.2033 From his uncle he had learned a strong aversion to Chrysostom, and at the notorious Synodus ad Quercum near Chalcedon, A.D. 403, he voted for his deposition. He therefore obstinately resisted the patriarchs of Constantinople and Antioch, when, shortly after the death of Chrysostom, they felt constrained to repeal his unjust condemnation; and he was not even ashamed to compare that holy man to the traitor Judas. Yet he afterwards yielded, at least in appearance, to the urgent remonstrances of Isidore of Pelusium and others, and admitted the name of Chrysostom into the diptychs2034 of his church (419), and so brought the Roman see again into communication with Alexandria. From the year 428 to his death in 444 his life was interwoven with the Christological controversies. He was the most zealous and the most influential champion of the anti-Nestorian orthodoxy at the third ecumenical council, and scrupled at no measures to annihilate his antagonist. Besides the weapons of theological learning and acumen, he allowed himself also the use of wilful misrepresentation, artifice, violence, instigation of people and monks at Constantinople, and repeated bribery of imperial officers, even of the emperor’s sister Pulcheria. By his bribes he loaded the church property at Alexandria with debt, though he left considerable wealth even to his kindred, and adjured his successor, the worthless Dioscurus, with the most solemn religious ceremonies, not to disturb his heirs.2035 His subsequent exertions for the restoration of peace cannot wipe these stains from his character; for he was forced to those exertions by the power of the opposition. His successor Dioscurus, however (after 444), made him somewhat respectable by inheriting all his passions without his theological ability, and by setting them in motion for the destruction of the peace.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  He might have defended his doctrine even more effectually if he had restrained his wrath and followed the brotherly advice of Bullinger, and even Farel, who exhorted him not to imitate the violence of his opponent, to confine himself to the thing, and to spare the person. But he wrote to Farel (August, 1557): "With regard to Westphal and the rest it was difficult for me to control my temper and to follow your advice. You call those ’brethren’ who, if that name be offered to them by us, do not only reject, but execrate it. And how ridiculous should we appear in bandying the name of brother with those who look upon us as the worst of heretics."965 § 133. Calvin and the Augsburg Confession. Melanchthon’s Position in the Second Eucharistic Controversy. Comp. Henry, III. 335–339 and Beilage, pp. 102–110; the works on the Augsburg Confession, and the biographies of Melanchthon. During the progress of this controversy both parties frequently appealed to the Augsburg Confession and to Melanchthon. They were both right and both wrong; for there are two editions of the Confession, representing the earlier and the later theories of its author on the Lord’s Supper. The original Augsburg Confession of 1530, in the tenth article, teaches Luther’s doctrine of the real presence so clearly and strongly that even the Roman opponents did not object to it.966 But from the time of the Wittenberg Concordia in 1536, or even earlier,967 Melanchthon began to change his view on the real presence as well as his view on predestination and free-will; in the former he approached Calvin, in the latter he departed from him. He embodied the former change in the Altered Confession of 1540, without official authority, yet in good faith, as the author of the document, and in the conviction that he represented public sentiment, since Luther himself had moderated his opposition to the Swiss by assenting to the Wittenberg Concordia.968 The altered edition was made the basis of negotiations with the Romanists at the Colloquies of Worms and Ratisbon in 1541, and at the later Colloquies in 1546 and 1557. It was printed (with the title and preface of the Invariata) in the first collection of the symbolical books of the Lutheran Church (Corpus Doctrinae Philippicum) in 1559; it was expressly approved by the Lutheran princes at the Convention of Naumburg in 1561, after Melanchthon’s death, as an improved modification and authentic interpretation of the Confession, and was adhered to by the Melanchthonians and the Reformed even after the adoption of the Book of Concord (1580). The text in the two editions is as follows:— Ed. 1530. "De Coena Domini docent, quod corpus et sanguis Christi vere adsint [the German text adds: unter der Gestalt des Brots und Weins], et distribuantur vescentibus in Coena Domini, et improbant secus docentes." [In the German text: "Derhalben wird auch die Gegenlehre verworfen."] Ed. 1540.