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.

Page 260 of 447 · 20 per page

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

  280 The History of Christianity II õ Filipino Catholic leaders like the radical bishop Julio Labayen adapted the Latin American idea of base communities. These were self-reliant worship communities of peasants and poor workers who often lived many miles from the nearest parish church. This strategy drew on the spirit of Vatican II: the call to empower laypeople to play a more active role in worship and Catholic community. õ In the Filipino context, under the oppressive Marcos regime with communists using the ideas of Mao Zedong to compete for the hearts of peasants and workers, Catholic progressives used these base communities to cultivate a generation of lay Catholic leaders. They would push for political reform while encouraging their followers to reject atheistic communism. õ But there were also Catholic leaders who embraced Maoist ideas a little too fondly, and that gave Marcos’s allies the ammunition they needed to accuse the bishops of being communist dupes and train the sights of the military on the church. During the years when Marcos ruled through martial law, from 1972 to 1981, the regime arrested church workers, shut down Catholic radio stations, deported missionaries, and murdered some lay Catholic activists. õ Marcos’s security and intelligence staff were pretty confident that they could keep the Catholic would-be reformers in check. But gradually, the regime became alarmed at the way Catholic base communities were becoming a lasting political network for the opposition. After 1982, Marcos stepped up arrests of Catholic workers. õ All this time, the Filipino middle class—who were mostly Catholic— were getting angrier and angrier at the greed, corruption, and brutality of Marcos and his cronies. His wife, Imelda, became world-famous for her collection of hundreds of pairs of designer shoes. õ The last straw came when Marcos’s henchmen murdered the main leader of the reform movement, a former senator named Benigno Aquino, as he was getting off a plane at the Manila airport. The middle class revolted and joined the radicals in mass demonstrations known as the People Power Revolution.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  To distract her from her loneliness, Mary befriended a beautiful young woman named Isabel Robinson who needed help—she had given birth to an illegitimate child and her father would certainly disown her if he discovered the truth. For weeks Mary conspired to help her, planning to send Isabel to Paris to live with a “man” who would act as the father—the man in this case being a woman known as Miss Dods, a notorious lesbian who loved to dress as a man and could easily pass for one. Mary delighted in furthering this plot, but before accompanying Isabel to Paris, one afternoon she received the shock of her life: Isabel confided to her in complete detail the stories that Jane had been telling her for months about Mary—that Shelley had never really loved his wife; that he had admired her but had had no feelings for her; that she was not the woman he had needed or wanted; that Jane was in fact the great love of his life. Jane had even hinted to Isabel that Mary had made him so unhappy that he had secretly wanted to die the day he left on his fatal sailing venture, and that Mary was somehow responsible for his death. Mary could hardly believe this, but Isabel had no reason to make up such a story. And as she thought about it more deeply, suddenly things began to make sense—the sudden coldness of Hogg, Leigh Hunt, and others who must have heard these stories; the looks Jane occasionally threw at Mary when she was the center of attention in a group; that look on her face when she threw Mary out of her house; the vehemence with which she wanted Mary to stay away from London and give up her child, which meant giving up their inheritance. All these years she had been not a friend but a competitor, and now it seemed clear that it was not Mary’s husband who had pursued Jane but Jane who had actively seduced him with her poses, her coquettish looks, her guitar, her put-on soft manner. She was false to the core. It was, after the death of Mary’s husband, the harshest blow of all. Not only did Jane believe these monstrous stories, but she had made others believe them. Mary knew how well her husband had loved her over so many years, and after so many shared experiences. To spread the story that she had somehow caused his death was beyond hurtful; it was like a knife being plunged into an old wound. She wrote in her journal: “My friend has proved false & treacherous. Have I not been a fool?” After several months of brooding over this, Mary finally confronted her. Jane burst into tears, creating a scene.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Nevertheless, the French people held great hopes for the Estates General, and Louis had been extremely reluctant to call for it. Only a month before the convening of the Estates General, riots in Paris had broken out over the price of bread, and royal troops had shot into the crowds, killing dozens. Danton had witnessed the bloodshed and he felt a turning point in the mood of the people, particularly the lower classes, and in himself. He shared their desperation and anger; they could no longer be placated with the usual rhetoric. He began to address the angry crowds on street corners, attracting followers and making a name for himself. To a friend who was surprised at this new direction in his life, he responded that it was like seeing a strong tide in the river, jumping in, and letting it carry him where it might. — As he prepared for the convening of the Estates General, King Louis could barely contain his resentment and anger. In the years since he had become king, various finance ministers had warned him of an impending crisis if France did not reform its tax system. He had understood this and had tried to initiate reforms, but the nobility and clergy, fearing where this might lead, had become so hostile to such ideas that the king had been forced to back down. And now, with the state’s coffers nearly empty, the nobility and the Third Estate were holding him hostage, making him convene the Estates General and putting him in the position of begging for funds from his people. The Estates General was not a traditional part of French government; it was an anomaly, a challenge to the divine right of the king, a recipe for anarchy. Who knew what was best for France—his subjects, with their million different opinions? The nobility, with their own narrow interests and hunger to grab more power? No, only the king could navigate the nation through this crisis. He had to regain the upper hand over these rowdy children. The king decided upon a plan: he would impress upon them all the majesty of the monarchy and its absolute necessity as the supreme power in France. To do so, he would hold the Estates General at Versailles, something his advisers warned him not to do, considering Versailles’s closeness to Paris and all its agitators.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Everything had to flow through Hughes himself. He had to be consulted on the smallest decision. Frustrated by all of his interference in their work, several top-notch engineers had already quit. Hughes saw the problem and hired a general manager to help with the Hercules project and straighten the company out, but the general manager quit after two months. Hughes had promised him carte blanche in restructuring the company, but only several days into the job he began vetoing his decisions and undermining his authority. By the late summer of 1943, $6 million of the $9 million set aside for the production of the first Hercules plane had already been spent, but the plane was nowhere near completion. Those in the Defense Department who had endorsed Hughes for the job began to panic. The photo-reconnaissance order was a critical one for the war effort. Did the internal chaos and delays with the Hercules bode problems with the more important reconnaissance order? Had Hughes duped them with his charm and his publicity campaign? By early 1944, the order for the reconnaissance planes had fallen hopelessly behind schedule. The military now insisted he hire a new general manager to salvage something from the order. Fortunately one of the best men for the job was available at the time: Charles Perelle, the “boy wonder” of aircraft production. Perelle did not want the job. He knew, like everyone in the business, of the chaos within Hughes Aircraft. Now Hughes himself, feeling desperate, went on a charm offensive. He insisted he had realized the error of his ways. He needed Perelle’s expertise. He was not what Perelle had expected—he was completely humble and made it seem as if he were the victim of unscrupulous executives within the company. He knew all the technical details of producing a plane, which impressed Perelle. He promised to give Perelle the authority he needed. Against his better judgment, Perelle took the job. After only a few weeks, however, Perelle regretted his decision. The planes were further behind schedule than he had been led to believe. Everything he saw reeked of a lack of professionalism, down to the shoddy drawings of the planes. He went to work, cutting wasteful spending and streamlining departments, but nobody respected his authority. Everybody knew who really ran the company, as Hughes kept undermining Perelle’s reforms. As the order fell further behind and the pressure mounted, Hughes disappeared from the scene, apparently having a nervous breakdown. By the end of the war, not a single reconnaissance plane had been produced, and the air force canceled the contract. Perelle himself, broken by the experience, quit his job in December of that year. Hughes, trying to salvage something from the war years, could point to the completion of one of the flying boats, later known as the Spruce Goose. It was a marvel, he claimed, a brilliant piece of engineering on a massive scale.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  He concludes that she has deceived him or has changed. Such a betrayal makes him angry. This male projection generally stems from a particular type of relationship with the mother—she adores her son and showers him with attention. Perhaps this is to compensate for never quite getting what she wants from her husband. She fills the boy with confidence; he becomes addicted to her attention and craves her warm, enveloping presence, which is what she wants. When he grows up, he is often quite ambitious, always trying to live up to the expectations of his mother. He pushes himself hard. He chooses a certain type of woman to pursue and then subtly positions her to play the mother role—to comfort, adore, and pump up his ego. In many instances, the woman will come to understand how he has manipulated her into this role, and she will resent it. She will stop being so soothing and reverential. He will blame her for changing, but in fact he is the one projecting qualities that were never exactly there and trying to make her conform to his expectations. The ensuing breakup will be very painful for the man, because he has invested energy from his earliest years and will feel this as abandonment from the mother figure. Even if he is successful in getting the woman to play the role, he himself will feel resentment at his dependency on her, the same dependency and ambivalence he had toward his mother. He may sabotage the relationship or withdraw. His anima has a sharp, recriminating edge, always ready to complain and blame. The man in this case must see the pattern of these relationships in his life. What this should signal to him is that he needs to develop from within more of the mothering qualities that he projects onto women. He must see the nature of his ambition as stemming from his desire to please his mother and live up to her expectations. He tends to drive himself too hard. He must learn to comfort and soothe himself, to withdraw from time to time and be satisfied with his accomplishments. He needs to be able to care for himself. This will drastically improve his relationships. He will give more, instead of waiting to be adored and taken care of. He will relate to women as they are, and in the end they will perhaps feel unconsciously impelled to provide more of the comfort he needs, without being pushed into this. The Original Man/Woman A common experience for us humans is that at a certain point in life —often near the age of forty—we go through what is known as a midlife crisis. Our work has become mechanical and soulless. Our intimate relationships have lost their excitement and spirit. We crave change, and we look for it through a new career or relationship, some new experiences, even some danger.

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

  14 The History of Christianity II in order to worship Christ and learn his teachings. By contrast, the reformers wanted the Bible to be printed and widely distributed in the local languages of Christian communities. õ Protestants disagreed about how to solve these problems. We can map their points of disagreement on a spectrum that runs roughly from the conservatives, who wanted to keep many structures and doctrines of Catholicism intact, to the radical, who wanted to throw almost everything away and start over. MARTIN LUTHER õ The Protestant spectrum begins with Martin Luther, a German monk on the conservative side. Cloistered away in an austere monastery, he found himself frustrated; the more he tried to live by God’s law, the more he just thought about his own failings. He couldn’t stop thinking about what a sinner he was. This paradox of his holy outer life and his inner selfishness drove him nearly mad. õ He was also horrified by the corruption and greed he saw in the church, like the sale of indulgences to pay off local bishops’ debts and to fund the rebuilding of a new St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Indulgences gave Catholics partial remission of punishment in Purgatory, a place of purification between heaven and hell where the soul goes after death to be purged of the lingering effects of sins committed on earth. õ In October of 1517 Luther’s anger moved him to scribble down 95 complaints about the church—the 95 Theses . Tradition says that he nailed these theses to the Wittenberg church door, but this is probably a myth. It is certain, though, that he sent his theses to his archbishop. This set in motion a series of events that would have an extraordinary impact on Western history and faith. 15Lecture 2—Luther and the Dawn of Protestantism õ The 95 Theses criticized abuses of indulgences, but this was a fairly conservative document. Luther did not call for abolishing indulgences altogether, and while he revised the doctrine of Purgatory, he still allowed for the idea of a transition place between death and heaven where people could to atone for sins in life.

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

  in order to worship Christ and learn his teachings. By contrast, the reformers wanted the Bible to be printed and widely distributed in the local languages of Christian communities. õ Protestants disagreed about how to solve these problems. We can map their points of disagreement on a spectrum that runs roughly from the conservatives, who wanted to keep many structures and doctrines of Catholicism intact, to the radical, who wanted to throw almost everything away and start over. MARTIN LUTHER õ The Protestant spectrum begins with Martin Luther, a German monk on the conservative side. Cloistered away in an austere monastery, he found himself frustrated; the more he tried to live by God’s law, the more he just thought about his own failings. He couldn’t stop thinking about what a sinner he was. This paradox of his holy outer life and his inner selfishness drove him nearly mad. õ He was also horrified by the corruption and greed he saw in the church, like the sale of indulgences to pay off local bishops’ debts and to fund the rebuilding of a new St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Indulgences gave Catholics partial remission of punishment in Purgatory, a place of purification between heaven and hell where the soul goes after death to be purged of the lingering effects of sins committed on earth. õ In October of 1517 Luther’s anger moved him to scribble down 95 complaints about the church—the 95 Theses. Tradition says that he nailed these theses to the Wittenberg church door, but this is probably a myth. It is certain, though, that he sent his theses to his archbishop. This set in motion a series of events that would have an extraordinary impact on Western history and faith. 14 The History of Christianity II õ The 95 Theses criticized abuses of indulgences, but this was a fairly conservative document. Luther did not call for abolishing indulgences altogether, and while he revised the doctrine of Purgatory, he still allowed for the idea of a transition place between death and heaven where people could to atone for sins in life. Lecture 2—Luther and the Dawn of Protestantism 15

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  In certain moments, however, we find it hard to accept these limits. We cannot advance in our careers or make a lot of money as quickly as we would like. We cannot get people to work with us to the degree that we want them to, so we feel frustrated. Or perhaps an old wound from childhood is suddenly reopened. If we anticipate that a partner could be ending the relationship, and we have a great fear of being abandoned stemming from parental coldness, we could easily overreact and try to control him or her, using all of our manipulative powers and turning quite aggressive. (Feelings of love often turn to hostility and aggression in people, because it is in love that we feel most dependent, vulnerable, and helpless.) In these cases, our hunger for more money, power, love, or attention overwhelms any patience we might have had. We might then be tempted to go outside the guardrails, to seek power and control in a way that violates tacit codes and even laws. But for most of us, when we cross the line, we feel uncomfortable and perhaps remorseful. We scurry back to within the guardrails, to our normal ways of trying for power and control. Such aggressive acts can occur at moments in our lives, but they do not become a pattern. This is not the case, however, with more chronically aggressive types. The sense of helplessness or frustration that we may feel upon occasion plagues them more deeply and more often. They feel chronically insecure and fragile and must cover this with an inordinate amount of power and control. Their need for power is too immediate and strong for them to accept the limits, and overrides any sense of compunction or social responsibility. It is possible that there is a genetic component to this. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, who specialized in the study of infants, noticed that some babies were decidedly more anxious and greedier than others. From their very first days, they would suckle on the mother’s breast as if they were attacking it and wanting to suck it dry. They needed more coddling and attention than others. Their crying and tantrums were almost impossible to stop. They felt a higher degree of helplessness that verged on continual hysteria. Such babies were in the minority, but she noticed them often enough. She speculated that those who are chronically aggressive could be adult versions of the greedy baby. They are simply born with a greater need to control everything around them. They brood more over feelings of hurt or envy—“Why should other people have more than me?”

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  business; she would work harder than all of them; she would reduce expenditures for the court, sacrificing her own income in the process; and all activity was to be directed toward lifting England out of the hole it had fallen into. She showed early on her superior knowledge of the finances of the country and the tough side of herself in any negotiation. Upon occasion, she would flash her anger if a minister seemed to be furthering a personal agenda, and such outbursts could be quite intimidating. Mostly, though, she was warm and empathetic, attuned to the various moods of these men. Soon they wanted to please her and win her approval. To not work hard or smart enough could mean isolation and some coldness, and unconsciously they wanted to avoid this. They respected the fact that she lived up to her own high standards. In this way, she slowly placed these ministers into the same position that she had found herself in: needing to gain her trust and respect through their actions. Now, instead of a cabal of conspiring, selfish ministers, the queen had a team working to further her agenda, and the results soon spoke for themselves. By these methods, Elizabeth acquired the credibility she needed, but she made one major mistake—her handling of Mary, Queen of Scots. Elizabeth had become somewhat entitled herself, feeling in this case that she knew better than her ministers and that her personal qualms about executing a fellow queen trumped everything else. She paid a price for this policy, as she felt the people’s respect for her draining away, and it pained her. Her sense of the greater good was what guided her, but in this case the greater good would be served by having Mary executed. She was violating her own principles. It took some time, but she realized her mistake. She tasked the head of her secret service to lure Mary into her most far-reaching conspiracy to get rid of Elizabeth. Now with solid evidence of Mary’s complicity, Elizabeth could take the dreaded step. In the end, going against her own feelings for the sake of the country, in essence admitting her mistake, gained her even more trust from the English. It was the kind of response to public opinion that almost no rulers of the time were capable of. When it came to her foreign rivals, particularly Philip II, Elizabeth was not naive and understood the situation: Nothing she had done had earned her any respect or respite from their endless conspiracies to get rid of her. They disrespected her as an unmarried queen and as a woman who seemed to fear conflict and warfare. She largely ignored all of this and kept to her mission of securing England’s finances. But when the invasion of England seemed imminent, she knew it was time to finally prove herself as the great strategist that she was. She would play on Philip’s underestimating of her craftiness and her toughness as a leader.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  The point of this strategy is to make you feel bad in a way that gets under your skin and causes you to think of the insinuation for days. They want to strike blows at your self-esteem. Most often they are operating out of envy. The best counter is to show that their insinuations have no effect on you. You remain calm. You “agree” with their faint praise, and perhaps you return it in kind. They want to get a rise out of you, and you will not give them this pleasure. Hinting that you might see through them will perhaps infect them with their own doubts, a lesson worth delivering. The Blame-Shifter Strategy: With certain people, you feel irritated and upset by something they have done. Perhaps you have felt used by them, or they’ve been insensitive or ignored your pleas to stop behavior that is unpleasant. Even before you express your annoyance, they seem to have picked up your mood, and you can detect some sulking on their part. And when you do confront them, they grow silent, wearing a hurt or disappointed look. It is not the silence of someone with remorse. They may respond with a “Fine. Whatever. If that’s how you feel.” Any apologies on their part are said in a way (through tone of voice or facial expressions) that subtly conveys some disbelief that they have done anything wrong. If they are really clever, in response they might conjure up something you’ve said or done in the past, which you’ve forgotten but which still rankles them, as if you are not so innocent. It doesn’t sound like something you’ve said or done, but you can’t be sure. Perhaps they will say something in their defense that pushes your buttons, and as you get angry, they can now accuse you of being hostile, aggressive, and unfair. Whatever their type of response, you are left with the feeling that perhaps you were wrong all along. Maybe you overreacted or were paranoid. You might even slightly doubt your sanity—you know you felt upset, but maybe you can’t trust your own feelings. Now you are the one to feel guilty, as if you were to blame for the tension. Better to reassess yourself and not repeat this unpleasant experience, you tell yourself. As an adjunct to this strategy, passive aggressors are often quite nice and polite to other people, only playing their games on you, since you are the one they want to control. If you try to confide in people your confusion and anger, you get no sympathy, and the blame shifting has double the effect. This strategy is a way of covering up all kinds of unpleasant behavior, of deflecting any kind of criticism, and of making people skittish about ever calling them on what they are doing.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  I saw all the blocks in our city you were too busy at work to know about, blocks where things happend. Things even Trevor, having lived all his life on this side of the river, the white side, the one I was now riding on, never saw. I saw the lights on Asylum Ave., where there used to be an asylum (that was actually a school for the deaf) that caught fire and killed half a ward back in 18-something and to this day no one knows what caused it. But I know it as the street where my friend Sid lived with his family after they came over from India in ’95. How his mom, a schoolteacher back in New Delhi, went door-to-door, hobbling on her bloated diabetic feet selling hunting knives for Cutco to make ninety-seven dollars a week—cash. There were the Canino brothers, whose father was in jail for what seemed like two lifetimes for going seventy on a sixty-five in front of a state trooper on 91. That and the twenty bags of heroin and the Glock under his passenger seat. Still, still. There was Marin, who took the bus forty-five minutes each way to work at the Sears in Farmington, who always had gold around her neck and ears, whose high heels clacked like the slowest, most deliberate applause when she walked to the corner store for cigarettes and Hot Cheetos, her Adam’s apple jutting out, a middle finger to the men who called her faggot, called her homomaphedite. Who’d say, holding their daughter’s or son’s hand, “I’m gonna kill you, bitch, I’m gonna cut you, AIDS gonna take you out. Don’t sleep tonight, don’t sleep tonight, don’t sleep tonight. Don’t sleep.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

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

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

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

• From In the Dream House (2019)

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

• From In the Dream House (2019)

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

• From In the Dream House (2019)

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

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

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