Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Of course, I had not been tortured for my false beliefs by inquisitors or massacred like the victims of the Crusaders. But in my own small way, I had suffered from this intolerance. I remembered the scene with Mother Greta: No, the arguments for the historicity of the Resurrection are not true, Sister, but please don’t tell the others. “How can anyone believe all this stuff?” John or Nick would ask incredulously, and we would look at one another, wide-eyed in genuine astonishment. It did indeed seem incredible that in the late twentieth century people could still accept the idea that a personalized deity had brought the world into being and supervised human history, or that a young Jewish teacher who had died in an obscure province of the Roman Empire had been divine. And if you could give no credence to these doctrines—and I could not— you had lost your faith. That was the end of the matter, and truth demanded that you should say so honestly. I was convinced that I had not been alone in my doubts: there must be hundreds—thousands—of Christians who suppressed similar misgivings, stamped on their rebellious thoughts, and felt all the while a sinking loss of intellectual and personal integrity. These people must be crippling their minds as I had done by confining them within an untenable doctrinal system. Channel 4 had commissioned me to liberate them. I would show the absurdity of these dogmatic constraints. People could walk free and rediscover the joy of an unfettered mind, as I was doing right now. This was arrogant, of course, but I still felt slightly intoxicated by my newly recovered mental agility and I wanted others to feel this way too. I could not get over my luck in getting this commission; it was a privilege, and I wanted to spread the “gospel” that had, I thought, saved me. So I was not simply carried away by the flattery, the attention, and the expense-account lunches. I was a woman with a mission. Saint Paul seemed a great place to start. I was convinced that many if not all of the failings of Christianity could be traced back to this pugnacious apostle. The churches’ obsession with complex doctrine, their denigration of women and the body, their intolerance and authoritarian corruption could all be laid at his door. He had perverted the simple, loving message of Jesus, and the religion that came after him had never fully recovered.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I was a woman with a mission. Saint Paul seemed a great place to start. I was convinced that many if not all of the failings of Christianity could be traced back to this pugnacious apostle. The churches’ obsession with complex doctrine, their denigration of women and the body, their intolerance and authoritarian corruption could all be laid at his door. He had perverted the simple, loving message of Jesus, and the religion that came after him had never fully recovered. But as I started to read a little more deeply, I found that the role of Paul in early Christianity had been even more significant. I had stumbled unawares into the minefield of New Testament scholarship, whose findings astounded me. In the convent, I had been introduced to the rudiments of modern biblical criticism while working for my theology diploma, but this had been a very ladylike syllabus, which had excluded most of the really challenging material. Now, reading in my flat in the weeks before my departure for Israel, while June was arguing with Channel 4 about my contract, I made some startling discoveries. A disturbing number of eminent scholars agreed that Jesus had no intention of founding a new religion. He had preached only to his fellow Jews, and there was nothing strikingly original about his teaching, which was in line with other strands of first-century Judaism. Jesus certainly never claimed to be God, but preferred the title “Son of Man,” which emphasized his humanity. After the scandal of his crucifixion, his traumatized disciples had had visions of him risen from the tomb and concluded that he was the long-awaited Jewish Messiah, who would shortly return to inaugurate the kingdom of God on earth. But the early Christians still regarded themselves as forming an exclusively Jewish sect. It was Saint Paul, who had never known the historical Jesus, who had first marketed the faith for the non-Jewish world of the Roman Empire. But even Paul had not seen Jesus as divine in any simplistic way. When he called him “Son of God,” he used the phrase in its strictly Jewish sense: Jesus was an ordinary human being who had been given a special mission by God; as a result of his obedience and devotion, he had been elevated to a position of unique intimacy with God and given the title “Lord,” or kyrios. But (I now read) there is always a clear distinction in the New Testament between the kyrios Christos and God the Father. This was startling information, but once I had been introduced to these ideas, I read the gospels and epistles with new eyes. All kinds of anomalies and contradictions in the text, which were easily overlooked when you read it piecemeal or heard it recited in a liturgical setting, now made sense.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  And so quickly too!” I had thought she had looked bad the last time I saw her, but now it seemed astonishing that she was still alive; her face was already a death’shead. I said nothing, however, and if Rebecca noticed my own weight loss, she also kept a tactful silence. We stared at each other bleakly. That morning I had received a postcard, written in Rebecca’s characteristically spiky script. She had been moved from Sussex to the London convent, had been sent into Oxford Street on an errand, had collapsed and been brought to the intensive-care department of the West Middlesex Hospital. She was not yet quite out of danger. “How are you?” It seemed a stupid question. I sat beside the bed, trying not to flinch from the horror of her profile and the shallowness of her chest. Her skin now had a bluish pallor, and her eyes protruded even more starkly than before. “Much better. Really much better now.” That was difficult to believe, and I felt a sudden rush of pure rage. How could the community have sat back and watched her waste away like this, day after day? What on earth had they been about? Had they wanted to kill her? “I’m sorry,” I said, turning my gaze with relief from Rebecca to the tray of food in front of her. “I seem to have interrupted your lunch.” It was three o’clock in the afternoon—an odd time to be eating lunch, but obedient and docile as ever, Rebecca plunged her fork into a steaming, smelly mess of sausage, baked beans, and chips. She shook her head, swallowed a mouthful, and loaded her fork again. I blenched. “No, I’m being given something to eat every hour. They won’t let me out of here until I’ve reached at least ninety pounds, and I have a long way to go. I’m still not putting on weight,” she reflected calmly, “even though I’m eating all this, but at least I’m not losing any.” “Oh, let’s look on the bright side, by all means,” I said dryly as a nurse bustled into the room and deposited a fruit yogurt on the tray. “Are you getting any other help?” “Yes. I’m seeing a psychiatrist twice a week. He’s a Catholic. That should help.” Again we looked at each other. I recalled Mother Frances’s words: “You and Rebecca!” We both seemed bent on a destructive course. I watched Rebecca spoon up the pink, sugary yogurt, which her body refused to absorb. Like me, she seemed to be losing her hold on life, seemed unable to move forward into the future. We did not know how to live anymore. We had somehow lost the knack. “Have you seen him yet, the psychiatrist?” I recalled Mother Frances’s distaste for the very idea of such an expedient. But she had been wrong.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  Sellers of pornography have been known to perpetrate their fair share of fraud against their customers (though online auctions, general merchandise sales and many other mainstream businesses have far worse records). Some early trickery was both mundane and low-tech—for instance, offering a free trial membership that automatically converts to a paid membership, and then making it impossible to get to the page that allows the user to cancel. (One scam actually involved a line buried in the terms of service that said that when customers cancelled their account, they were actually triggering an upgrade to a more expensive membership.) Such scams were a short-term proposition, because when customers could not get a response from the website, they went to their credit card companies to complain. The credit companies repaid the customer, reclaimed the money from the porn company and charged the company a hefty fine. Once the chargebacks started soaring, the credit card company would sever its relationship with the webmaster, which meant the jig was up. This didn’t stop a few porn-site operators in the late 1990s from bilking customers out of tens of millions of dollars before they got shut down. Pagejacking was another trick used by unethical pornographers—it involved creating a duplicate of a real mainstream web page but modified with a bit of code that forwarded surfers to adult websites. These modified pages were then submitted to search engines that couldn’t tell the difference between a harmless page and its evil twin. When a user did a search for, say, sports sites, the engine would spit out links that would take the user straight through to a gateway to sex. People found themselves at websites they had not sought. The unwitting sports enthusiast did not even need to make a purchase in order for the porn scam to be profitable—the operators could sell the “exit traffic” of disgusted dupes to other sites, which meant that all you had to do was get people to the site, by hook or by crook, in order to make money. Not only was this annoying and offensive, it caused office workers to inadvertently violate their employers’ anti-porn policies, and landed unsuspecting kids face-to-monitor with nudity.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  So into the tiny studio I went, and was told to talk directly into one of the cameras. During the journey, I had hastily concocted a little argument. I remembered that some years ago, while I was still living in Oxford, I had dropped into Blackfriars one evening. The Dominicans had been celebrating the Mass together and had just reached the consecration, pointing toward the Eucharistic bread and saying in unison, “This is my body.” The words had suddenly struck me as horribly ironic. At the time, I weighed about ninety pounds; I was in my anorexic phase, and was doing my best to make my body disappear. I thought of Rebecca; I thought of the way our bodies had rebelled against the religious regime we had endured. Of all the great world religions, Christianity should value the body most. After all, it taught that God had in some sense taken a human body and used it to redeem the world; everything about the physical should have been sacred and sacramental. But that had not happened. Instead, the churches had found it almost impossible to integrate the sexual with the divine and had developed a Platonic aversion to the body—particularly the bodies of women. So that morning, in the hot little studio, I told that story. I also spoke of my anorexia and my epilepsy. I recalled my blackouts and the way I had been instructed by my superiors to subjugate my body to my will. I recalled the physical penances we had used to keep our bodies in line. And then I branched out and spoke of the failure of the churches to make creative use of their cult of the body of Christ. I remembered how Francis of Assisi had called his body Brother Ass, as though it were simply a stupid, sexually rampant beast of burden. I mentioned the women saints, such as Margaret Mary Alocoque, who had suffered from anorexia; Catherine of Siena had starved herself to death with the church’s approbation. I spoke of the barely concealed disgust felt by the Fathers of the church when they were forced to contemplate the female body; recalled that in the convent at Matins each Saturday, we had listened to readings from Saint Bernard or Saint Augustine, who had speculated about the virginity of the Mother of God in a way that even then had seemed prurient to me: How exactly had Mary remained a virgin after giving birth to Jesus? Did her hymen remain intact after the birth? I finally concluded my little talk by suggesting that a religion that found it impossible to accommodate the physical makeup of half the human race had a grave problem. I looked at the clock. My twenty minutes was up.

• From Bold Move

  She made a mistake, I chewed her out, and the poor woman looked like she was going to cry. I don’t want to be a bully, but it pisses me off when people turn in crap work, because I rely on them to do their job so I can do mine. It’s not my job to babysit my employees. I bust my ass all day and the last thing I need is more work on my plate.” I asked him how often something like this happens, and the answer seemed to surprise him: “Pretty much every week.” Then he added, “I can’t help it. When someone messes up, I have to handle it, you know? That’s my job.” “And what would happen if you didn’t march down to whichever co-worker’s cubicle and tell it like it is?” “What, like not say anything? That’s not an option. I think I would just explode with anger. I just have to do something to deal with it right away!” I understood what he meant. Every time Oliver noticed an employee’s mistake, his brain would perceive “danger,” and that false alarm would create intense discomfort—like going from zero to a million on the anxiety scale—so Oliver had to do something to calm down. And what he did was yell, be assertive, tell it like it is. As he engaged with his co-worker, the anger would come down momentarily, but what was the price tag? In Oliver’s case, he had been warned by HR several times, and it was getting to the point where his career was at risk. Oliver’s behavior was similar to how many people avoid intense feelings of frustration and irritation. Studies regarding work environments suggest that nearly half of workers who experience anger-inducing situations will express their anger.13 In particular, individuals who are exposed to high-stress jobs, such as doctors or military personnel, often tend to be quite reactive. During the COVID-19 pandemic, health care personnel reported experiencing elevated anxiety and increased anger.14 Elevated states of stress also contributed to unhelpful expressions of said anger.15 Remember, reacting is a biologically driven response to threat (or anything that causes intense emotions that we want to bring down quickly), but that doesn’t mean reacting can’t cause problems for us. Now, don’t get me wrong: blowing off a little steam now and then can be alright—like calling a close friend to vent about a particularly bad day, or doing an especially grueling workout to burn off excess energy.

• From Bold Move

  I asked her to elaborate. She paused for a moment, as if she were about to betray her family. “Okay, for instance, even trivial things like the TV shows I watch have to be Chinese. My parents don’t want me watching American TV, so I’m only allowed to watch shows that are in Mandarin. I want to be able to watch the same shows as my friends, but it’s not allowed at home, and even though it might seem small, it makes me feel like an outsider at school.” “What happens at school?” I asked. “When I’m on campus, I wear makeup, change my hair, whatever. I just act and appear as I want to. It’s like I can be more American, or at least, more American to whatever degree I choose. But then my parents started getting on my case about it and made me ‘tone it down,’ which was incredibly frustrating.” From here, she switched into Mandarin without realizing it and detailed an entire argument between herself and her parents. For the next five minutes, I sat patiently waiting, not understanding a single word. (I launch into Portuguese when I’m upset, I could relate.) Eventually, Stephanie looked up at me and realized that I had no clue what she was saying and we both laughed. But I told her I got the gist of it all. Some things go beyond language, and one of those things is the way our families can occasionally drive us insane, no matter how much we love them. “It sounds like you’re finding yourself stuck between two distinct cultural values, and you don’t fully fit into either of them. As a consequence, your schoolwork and happiness are suffering.” “Exactly! I feel like there’s no good answer to this. If I choose one, I sacrifice my happiness, and if I choose the other, I turn my back on my heritage.” Living and working in an international college town like Boston, I’ve seen many patients like Stephanie, whose cultural values from back home (wherever home may be) collide with the new cultural values they’re experiencing in the US, and this tension creates quite a few interpersonal challenges. In fact, the research community, never shy about making up new words, has a term for this: acculturative stress .8 How families respond to the acculturation process has a direct impact on the level of stress experienced. One study (of Asian American college students, as a matter of coincidence) found that acculturative family conflict is directly related to increased stress.9 Cultural values colliding is something I know well. When I first came to the US, I wanted more than anything to be an American (you’ll recall my horror when my colleague told me I “looked so Latina”).

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I was shaken when I put down the phone, and angry. How many times had I been told that nuns were never shocked, any more than Jesus had been? You can say anything to a nun; nothing about human nature surprises them. That was the theory, but it was not true, of course. It is probably not the case with anyone; and now, almost thirty years later, I cannot say that I blame that superior. I probably frightened her half to death. She would have remembered me as a timid little novice, unable to say “boo” to a goose, and here I was apparently deranged and dangerously suicidal. It was indeed a mad idea to imagine that I could go back to the convent to convalesce, and the fact that I had thought it feasible showed how confused I really was, despite my studied calm. But at the time the rejection seemed a slap in the face. And that too was salutary. It made me realize that I could not keep looking back to the past; I had to move on. I repeated my new mantra: “We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind.” It was not so easy to be positive, however, when, a few hours later, I found myself sitting on a lumpy sofa waiting to be checked into a ward in the Littlemore Hospital, watching another patient making her slow, crablike progress down the corridor. Her limbs splayed in all directions, so that she looked disjointed. On her face was an expression of exaggerated terror as she took each painful step forward. While both her hands and feet made contact with the wall, she was all right, but each time she inched forward, she broke her sole link with concrete reality.

• From Bold Move

  This anger over not knowing how to articulate his frustration caused difficult emotions to bubble up, like a child who can’t yet speak full sentences. Not knowing what else to do, Oliver avoided his bubbling emotions by reacting and yelling. Stressful Situations Don’t Always Lead to AngerNow, not everyone will use anger as a way to avoid strong emotions or stressful situations. Some of us react in a milder way, when our discomfort climbs to orange instead of red. Interestingly, research has shown that we are more likely to react when the threat feels up close and personal (say, a careless driver almost hitting you or your family at a crosswalk) and we wind up holding on to the memory of that threat.22 So the next time we walk across the street with our family, we’re on red alert. Even if reacting isn’t your go-to flavor, there may be “momma bear” moments in your life when something threatens something or someone who is close to you, and you react to avoid harm. There is more than meets the eye when it comes to reactive avoidance. Many other factors can influence our desire to fight back. Two of those reasons are worth covering here: the need to belong and attachment. The Need to BelongWe all have an evolutionary need to belong to a group or “tribe”23 —be it at work, at school, on a team, or through social media—but some of us feel this need a lot more strongly than others. Group membership gives us safety,24 a sense of meaning,25 and even the ability to self-regulate.26 Exclusion from groups is a real threat to our well-being. Individuals who are left out of a group suffer from poor time management, work turnover, an elevated heart rate, and less self-control around things like stress eating.27 So when we feel as though we no longer belong, our fight, flight, or freeze response kicks in and goes a long way toward explaining why many people in our modern era can sometimes twist themselves into knots to remain in good standing with their group. Because our need to belong is as strongly biologically wired as is our fight, flight, and freeze response, when it is threatened, we often feel like we have to do something, and sometimes that something is reactive avoidance. And I have to confess, I am the queen of that sort of thing. By this stage in my life, I am well aware that I am especially afraid of not belonging due to my childhood fear of not being enough. When I feel as though I might not belong or am somehow “less than,” I feel threatened, and I act quickly.

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

  25 As a boy, Joseph—Jacob’s favorite son—had dreams of agrarian tyranny that he foolishly described to his brothers: “We were binding sheaves in the countryside, and my sheaf, it seemed, stood upright; then I saw your sheaves gather round and bow to my sheaf.” 26 The brothers were so incensed that they stuttered in fury: “Would you be king, yes, king over us?” 27 Such fantasies of monarchy violated everything the family stood for, and Jacob took the boy to task: “Are all of us, then, myself, your mother and your brothers to come and bow to the ground before you?” 28 But he continued to indulge Joseph, until, driven beyond endurance, his brothers had him sold into slavery in Egypt, telling their father he had been killed by a wild beast. Yet after a traumatic beginning, Joseph, a natural agrarian, cheerfully abandoned the pastoral ethos and assimilated to aristocratic life with spectacular success. He got a job in Pharaoh’s court, took an Egyptian wife, and even called his first son Manasseh—“He-Who-Makes-Me-Forget,” meaning “God has made-me-forget ... my entire father’s house.” 29 As vizier of Egypt, Joseph saved the country from starvation: warned by a dream of impending agricultural blight, he commandeered the harvest for seven years, sending fixed rations to the cities and storing the surplus, so that when the famine struck, Egypt had grain to spare. 30 But Joseph had also turned Egypt into a house of bondage, because all the hard-pressed Egyptians who had been forced to sell their estates to Pharaoh in return for grain were reduced to serfdom. 31 Joseph saved the lives of his family when hunger forced them to seek refuge in Egypt, but they too would lose their freedom since Pharaoh would forbid them to leave. 32 Readers of the Pentateuch are often confused by the patriarchs’ ethics. None of them are particularly admirable characters: Abraham sold his wife to Pharaoh to save his own skin; Joseph was arrogant and self-centered; and Jacob was shockingly indifferent to the rape of his daughter Dinah. But these are not morality tales. If we read them as political philosophy, things become clearer. Doomed to marginality, Israel would always be vulnerable to more powerful states. Ordered to leave civilization yet unable to survive without it, the patriarchs were in an impossible position. Yet despite his flaws, Abraham still compares favorably with the rulers in this story, who appropriate their subjects’ wives, steal their wells, and rape their daughters with impunity.

• From Philosophy and Religion in the West (1999)

  Outline I. Socrates’ Questions A. Plato’s Early (“Socratic”) Dialogues 1. Plato’s earliest writings are dialogues—like miniature plays— whose main character is Socrates, Plato’s teacher and hero. 2. Though fictional, the dialogues give us a sense of Socrates as a person and a philosopher. 3. Each dialogue focuses on a quest to define some key term in the good life, such as “piety,” “justice” or “temperance.” 4. Since Socrates claims to have no wisdom, it is always Socrates’ interlocutor who volunteers an answer to the question, and then Socrates asks him questions about it. 5. These Socratic dialogues always end in perplexity, without finding a satisfactory answer. 6. In fact what people learn by talking with Socrates is not “the right answer” but rather their own ignorance. 7. Of course not all of Socrates’ interlocutors appreciate discovering their own ignorance, so Socrates ends up making many people angry, and they get him put to death on a charge of impiety. ©1999 The Teaching Company. 8 B. Socrates and Euthyphro 1. The Euthyphro is a Socratic dialogue focusing on the question: “What is piety?” 2. Euthyphro, Socrates’ interlocutor, is a self-righteous windbag who thinks he knows everything about piety. 3. Euthyphro has hauled his father into court, hoping to get him executed. 4. Shocked, Socrates suggests (with veiled irony) that surely Euthyphro surely wouldn’t dare to do this unless he was very sure it was pious. 5. Upon receiving Euthyphro’s assurance that he knows everything about piety, Socrates asks him to enlighten him by defining it for him—and the fun begins. 6. After offering a string of unsuccessful definitions, none of which stands up under Socrates’ critical questions, Euthyphro ends up completely flustered yet still trying to pretend he knows it all. 7. Euthyphro’s unwillingness to admit his own ignorance is a moral as well as intellectual failing, as it means he is not willing to reconsider the impiety of trying to get his own father killed. 8. Ever since, philosophy has stood as a perennial challenge for religious people to be self-critical and intellectually humble. C. The “Euthyphro Problem” 1. One of Euthyphro’s definitions of piety is “what the gods love.” 2. The problem with this definition is that the Greek gods often disagreed about what sort of actions they loved. 3. After Socrates points this out, Euthyphro accepts a modified version of the definition proposed by Socrates: a pious act is one that all the gods love. 4. The problem here is that (as Euthyphro and Socrates agree) the gods love pious acts because those acts are pious—not the other way around. 5. Hence there must be some form or essence of piety that causes the gods to love pious acts—so the acts are not pious just because the gods love them. ©1999 The Teaching Company. 9

• From Wild (2012)

  “I wouldn’t say that,” I stammered. “Being a hobo and being a hiker are two entirely different things.” I looped my wrist into the pink strap of my ski pole and scraped the dirt with the tip, making a line that went nowhere. “I’m not a hiker in the way you might think of a hiker,” I explained. “I’m more like an expert hiker. I hike fifteen to twenty miles a day, day after day, up and down mountains, far away from roads or people or anything, often going days without seeing another person. Maybe you should do a story on that instead.” He glanced up at me from his notebook, his hair blowing extravagantly across his pale face. He seemed like so many people I knew. I wondered if I seemed that way to him. “I hardly ever meet hobo women,” he half whispered, as if confiding a secret, “so this is fucking cool.” “I’m not a hobo!” I insisted more vehemently this time. “Hobo women are hard to find,” he persisted. I told him that this was because women were too oppressed to be hobos. That most likely all the women who wanted to be hobos were holed up in some house with a gaggle of children to raise. Children who’d been fathered by hobo men who’d hit the road. “Oh, I see,” he said. “You’re a feminist, then.” “Yes,” I said. It felt good to agree on something. “My favorite,” he said, and wrote in his notebook without saying his favorite what. “But none of this matters!” I exclaimed. “Because I myself am not a hobo. This is totally legit, you know. What I’m doing. I’m not the only one hiking the PCT. People do this. Have you ever heard of the Appalachian Trail? It’s like that. Only out west.” I stood watching him write what seemed like more words than I’d spoken. “I’d like to get a picture of you,” Jimmy Carter said. He reached into his car and pulled out a camera. “That’s a cool shirt, by the way. I love Bob Marley. And I like your bracelet too. A lot of hobos are Nam vets, you know.” I looked down at William J. Crockett’s name on my wrist. “Smile,” he said, and snapped a shot. He told me to look for his piece on me in the fall issue of the Hobo Times, as if I were a regular reader. “Articles have been excerpted in Harper’s,” he added. “Harper’s?” I asked, dumbfounded. “Yeah, it’s this magazine that—” “I know what Harper’s is,” I interrupted sharply. “And I don’t want to be in Harper’s. Or rather, I really want to be in Harper’s, but not because I’m a hobo.” “I thought you weren’t a hobo,” he said, and turned to open the trunk of his car. “Well, I’m not, so it would be a really bad idea to be in Harper’s, which means you probably shouldn’t even write the article because—”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I hated the high-handed way that the Christian authorities had behaved over the centuries, haranguing the faithful on their sexual lives, telling them what to believe and what kind of contraception they could use. I was appalled by their attitude toward women. I was incensed by the way they claimed a monopoly of truth and had persecuted others for not submitting to the theological niceties that they endorsed. A cursory glance at Christian history with its crusades, inquisitions, persecutions, and bloody wars of religion was surely proof enough that on the whole faith had done more harm than good. This was what certainty did for you! For years I had kept these thoughts to myself. But now I could name my anger, give it a definite form and shape. This was liberating and healing, like lancing a boil. I was chiefly angry about the churches’ obsession with intellectual conformity. Of course, I had not been tortured for my false beliefs by inquisitors or massacred like the victims of the Crusaders. But in my own small way, I had suffered from this intolerance. I remembered the scene with Mother Greta: No, the arguments for the historicity of the Resurrection are not true, Sister, but please don’t tell the others. “How can anyone believe all this stuff?” John or Nick would ask incredulously, and we would look at one another, wide-eyed in genuine astonishment. It did indeed seem incredible that in the late twentieth century people could still accept the idea that a personalized deity had brought the world into being and supervised human history, or that a young Jewish teacher who had died in an obscure province of the Roman Empire had been divine. And if you could give no credence to these doctrines—and I could not— you had lost your faith. That was the end of the matter, and truth demanded that you should say so honestly. I was convinced that I had not been alone in my doubts: there must be hundreds—thousands—of Christians who suppressed similar misgivings, stamped on their rebellious thoughts, and felt all the while a sinking loss of intellectual and personal integrity. These people must be crippling their minds as I had done by confining them within an untenable doctrinal system. Channel 4 had commissioned me to liberate them. I would show the absurdity of these dogmatic constraints. People could walk free and rediscover the joy of an unfettered mind, as I was doing right now. This was arrogant, of course, but I still felt slightly intoxicated by my newly recovered mental agility and I wanted others to feel this way too. I could not get over my luck in getting this commission; it was a privilege, and I wanted to spread the “gospel” that had, I thought, saved me. So I was not simply carried away by the flattery, the attention, and the expense-account lunches.

• From Wild (2012)

  I packed my few things, wrote a note to Joe and taped it to the bathroom mirror, and called Paul. When he pulled up to the corner, I got into his car. I sat in the passenger seat as we drove across the country, feeling my real life present but unattainable. Paul and I fought and cried and shook the car with our rage. We were monstrous in our cruelty and then we talked kindly afterward, shocked at each other and ourselves. We decided that we would get divorced and then that we would not. I hated him and I loved him. With him I felt trapped, branded, held, and beloved. Like a daughter. “I didn’t ask you to come and get me,” I yelled in the course of one of our arguments. “You came for your own reasons. Just so you could be the big hero.” “Maybe,” he said. “Why’d you come all this way to get me?” I asked, panting with sorrow. “Because,” he said, gripping the steering wheel, staring out the windshield into the starry night. “Just because.” I saw Joe several weeks later, when he came to visit me in Minneapolis. We weren’t a couple anymore, but we immediately started back up with our old ways—getting high every day for the week he was there, having sex a couple of times. But when he left, I was done. With him and with heroin. I hadn’t given it another thought until I was sitting with Aimee in Sioux Falls and I noticed the bizarre being-poked-by-sharp-edges-of-uncrushed-tortilla-chips feeling in my gut. We left the Mexican restaurant and went to a vast supermarket in search of a pregnancy test. As we walked through the brightly lit store, I silently reasoned with myself that I probably wasn’t pregnant. I’d dodged that bullet so many times—fretted and worried uselessly, imagining pregnancy symptoms so convincing that I was stunned when my period arrived. But now I was twenty-six and wizened by sex; I wasn’t going to fall for another scare. Back at the motel I shut the bathroom door behind me and peed onto the test stick while Aimee sat on the bed outside. Within moments, two dark blue lines appeared on the test’s tiny pane. “I’m pregnant,” I said when I came out, tears filling my eyes. Aimee and I reclined on the bed talking about it for an hour, though there was nothing much to say. That I would get an abortion was a fact so apparent it seemed silly to discuss anything else.

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

  It was a glaring inconsistency that those who had just shaken off the yoke of popery as an intolerable burden, should subject their conscience and intellect to a human creed; in other words, substitute for the old Roman popery a modern Protestant popery. Of course, they sincerely believed that they had the infallible Word of God on their side; but they could not claim infallibility in its interpretation. The same inconsistency and intolerance was repeated a hundred years later on a much larger scale in the "Solemn League and Covenant" of the Scotch Presbyterians and English Puritans against popery and prelacy, and sanctioned in 1643 by the Westminster Assembly of Divines which vainly attempted to prescribe a creed, a Church polity, and a directory of worship for three nations. But in those days neither Protestants nor Catholics had any proper conception of religious toleration, much less of religious liberty, as an inalienable right of man. "The power of the magistrates ends where that of conscience begins." God alone is the Lord of conscience. The Calvinistic churches of modem times still require subscription to the Westminster standards, but only from the officers, and only in a qualified sense, as to substance of doctrine; while the members are admitted simply on profession of faith in Christ as their Lord and Saviour.485 § 84. Expulsion of the Reformers. 1538. Calvin’s correspondence from 1537 to 1538, in Op. vol. X., Pt. II. 137 sqq. Herminjard, vols. IV. and V.—Annal. Calv., Op. XXI., fol. 215–235. Henry, I. ch. IX.—Dyer, 78sqq.—Stähelin, I. 151 sqq.—Kampschulte, I. 296–319. Merle D’Aubigné, bk. XI. chs. XI.–XIV. (vol. VI. 469 sqq.). C. A. Cornelius: Die Verbannung Calvins aus Genf. i. J. 1538. München, 1886. The submission of the people of Geneva to such a severe system of discipline was only temporary. Many had never sworn to the Confession, notwithstanding the threat of punishment, and among them were the most influential citizens of the republic;486 others declared that they had been compelled to perjure themselves. The impossibility of enforcing the law brought the Council into contempt. Ami Porral, the leader of the clerical party in the Council, was charged with arbitrary conduct and disregard of the rights of the people. The Patriots and Libertines who had hailed the Reformation in the interest of political independence from the yoke of Savoy and of the bishop, had no idea of becoming slaves of Farel, and were jealous of the influence of foreigners. An intrigue to annex Geneva to the kingdom of France increased the suspicion. The Patriots organized themselves as a political party and labored to overthrow the clerical régime. They were aided in part by Bern, which was opposed to the tenet of excommunication and to the radicalism of the Reformers.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Instead, the churches had found it almost impossible to integrate the sexual with the divine and had developed a Platonic aversion to the body—particularly the bodies of women. So that morning, in the hot little studio, I told that story. I also spoke of my anorexia and my epilepsy. I recalled my blackouts and the way I had been instructed by my superiors to subjugate my body to my will. I recalled the physical penances we had used to keep our bodies in line. And then I branched out and spoke of the failure of the churches to make creative use of their cult of the body of Christ. I remembered how Francis of Assisi had called his body Brother Ass, as though it were simply a stupid, sexually rampant beast of burden. I mentioned the women saints, such as Margaret Mary Alocoque, who had suffered from anorexia; Catherine of Siena had starved herself to death with the church’s approbation. I spoke of the barely concealed disgust felt by the Fathers of the church when they were forced to contemplate the female body; recalled that in the convent at Matins each Saturday, we had listened to readings from Saint Bernard or Saint Augustine, who had speculated about the virginity of the Mother of God in a way that even then had seemed prurient to me: How exactly had Mary remained a virgin after giving birth to Jesus? Did her hymen remain intact after the birth? I finally concluded my little talk by suggesting that a religion that found it impossible to accommodate the physical makeup of half the human race had a grave problem. I looked at the clock. My twenty minutes was up. It was a clever piece, and I use that word advisedly. There was truth and insight there, but it was not profound. It was also very angry. As I spoke, I realized that I still had a lot of scores to settle with the church. When I had finished, the cameraman raised himself slowly into an upright position and gazed at me. “Phew!” he breathed, wiping his brow. When I went out into the control room, I found the rest of the crew staring at me dumbstruck, even the cool Nick. “Wow!” he said. And then he grinned. “You,” he told me, “are embarrassingly good!” Apparently nobody else had been able to do this. Without a TelePrompTer, most of the contributors had dried up after a few minutes. “And what you said was terrific ,” Nick continued. “We’ll call it The Body of Christ. John is going to love it!” John apparently was the commissioning editor for religion at Channel 4. “But surely, if he’s religious, he won’t like this?” I asked. “No, no! You don’t understand.” Nick beamed at me. “John loathes religion! He’ll really go for this.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  It transpired that I was to be the chief weapon in John’s antireligious arsenal. “You’re so bright, darling,” he repeatedly exclaimed. “God—you’re clever!” he would breathe ecstatically, after I had uttered what seemed to me a perfectly commonplace remark. Constantly he and Nick would congratulate me on having escaped from the clutches of the church. Like the tabloid newspapers, they treated me as a heroine, who had, with great resourcefulness, escaped from deadly peril. “How did you come to be the person you are?” Nick once wrote to me on a postcard. I was amused and flattered. After all the years of failure, of being told that I was simply not up to the rigorous demands of a university career and being treated like a tiresome child at Dulwich, this adulation was delightful. Of course, I could see that it was over the top, but I wouldn’t have been human if I hadn’t enjoyed it. And it was all such fun. This was the eighties, and John was constantly sweeping me off for delicious, bibulous lunches and dinners, where we all discoursed wittily on, among other things, the absurdity of the religious enterprise. And the more I gave voice to the distaste that I still felt for the church and its claims, the more repelled I became. There was also something cathartic in this iconoclasm. For years I had kept quiet about my frustration with religion, and even though writing Through the Narrow Gate had redeemed certain aspects of the convent years, there was still a residue of anger. I hated the high-handed way that the Christian authorities had behaved over the centuries, haranguing the faithful on their sexual lives, telling them what to believe and what kind of contraception they could use. I was appalled by their attitude toward women. I was incensed by the way they claimed a monopoly of truth and had persecuted others for not submitting to the theological niceties that they endorsed. A cursory glance at Christian history with its crusades, inquisitions, persecutions, and bloody wars of religion was surely proof enough that on the whole faith had done more harm than good. This was what certainty did for you! For years I had kept these thoughts to myself. But now I could name my anger, give it a definite form and shape. This was liberating and healing, like lancing a boil. I was chiefly angry about the churches’ obsession with intellectual conformity. Of course, I had not been tortured for my false beliefs by inquisitors or massacred like the victims of the Crusaders. But in my own small way, I had suffered from this intolerance. I remembered the scene with Mother Greta: No, the arguments for the historicity of the Resurrection are not true, Sister, but please don’t tell the others.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  The boss who used his power to manipulate or hurt you. The estranged friends who tried to ruin your reputation. The business partner who stole from you. The family member who abused you when you were a child. This prayer may be the most difficult prayer in this chapter. It also may be the truest test of how well we are learning to live like Christ. After all, He lived this. On the cross, dying in agony, His only words regarding those who had hurt Him were a prayer: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). Jesus is asking us to take forgiveness all the way to the extreme of actively seeking the good of those who have hurt us. At this point you’re probably saying, “That’s not fair!” No, it’s not. That’s the point. God doesn’t treat us fairly, or we’d all be dead. His treatment of us isn’t based on our actions but on His character. That’s what He is calling us to do as well. Easy? No. Fun? Not really. But it is one of the most liberating things you will ever do. We looked at the topic of forgiveness earlier, when we talked about bitter prayers and other ineffective ways of praying. Please don’t misunderstand me—I don’t believe that forgiving your enemies means pretending they are your friends or ignoring the harm they have done. It doesn’t mean burying your trauma or silencing your voice. That is toxic forgiveness, and it doesn’t do anybody any good. But you can turn your enemies over to God. That’s what Jesus did: He recognized that the ultimate judge was God. He didn’t have to carry the burden of judging them or punishing them. Paul encourages the Roman believers not to get even with their enemies because the Bible says, “‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord” (Romans 12:19). Since God will handle the revenge part, Paul continues, “‘If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:20–21). Can you think of anyone who might qualify as an enemy? When you think of them, what emotions come to mind? Are you willing to bring those emotions, and the memories, to God? It can help to pray some of the prayers earlier in this chapter (and even aspects of the Lord’s Prayer) first. Our human way of thinking prefers revenge, not mercy, for those who have hurt us. It might take some time talking with God and listening to His perspective before you can honestly pray for those who have hurt you. But when you do, it is freeing. Prayer is supernatural. Praying as Jesus did—that God would forgive and bless your enemies—can unleash healing and joy and peace in you.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Where Nick found religion faintly upsetting, John hated it with the passion of a zealot. This, I was told, was one of the reasons why Jeremy Isaacs, the controller of Channel 4, had put him in charge of religion. This new channel had a remit to be different from the other three. There was to be no “God slot,” no Songs of Praise, no edifying discussions for the devout. “I want to open up religion and discuss it as critically as any other subject,” John was fond of saying. And he did, conducting his mandate as an antireligious crusade. “They’re all bonkers, darling!” he would exclaim incredulously when yet another pious broadcaster came to talk to him about the possibility of a commission. He had also decided to put on a highly provocative series called Jesus: The Evidence, designed to explode the Christian myth once and for all. Indeed, as he gleefully explained, the director actually intended to blow up a statue of Jesus at the very beginning of the first program. “Blast it to smithereens!” John predicted exultantly. “That’ll show the bastards!” It transpired that I was to be the chief weapon in John’s antireligious arsenal. “You’re so bright, darling,” he repeatedly exclaimed. “God—you’re clever!” he would breathe ecstatically, after I had uttered what seemed to me a perfectly commonplace remark. Constantly he and Nick would congratulate me on having escaped from the clutches of the church. Like the tabloid newspapers, they treated me as a heroine, who had, with great resourcefulness, escaped from deadly peril. “How did you come to be the person you are?” Nick once wrote to me on a postcard. I was amused and flattered. After all the years of failure, of being told that I was simply not up to the rigorous demands of a university career and being treated like a tiresome child at Dulwich, this adulation was delightful. Of course, I could see that it was over the top, but I wouldn’t have been human if I hadn’t enjoyed it. And it was all such fun. This was the eighties, and John was constantly sweeping me off for delicious, bibulous lunches and dinners, where we all discoursed wittily on, among other things, the absurdity of the religious enterprise. And the more I gave voice to the distaste that I still felt for the church and its claims, the more repelled I became. There was also something cathartic in this iconoclasm. For years I had kept quiet about my frustration with religion, and even though writing Through the Narrow Gate had redeemed certain aspects of the convent years, there was still a residue of anger.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  ^The Helvetic Confession, II, Chapter 8: “We understand original sin to be the native corruption of man which has passed from our first parents to us; through which, being sunk in de- praved desires, averse to good, inclined to every evil, full of every wickedness, of contempt and hatred of God, we are unable to do or even to think any good whatever.” THE FALL OF MAN 43 fathers have made to the sin and misery of mankind. The social gospel would rather reserve some blame for them, for their vices have afflicted us with syphilis, their graft and their wars have loaded us with public debts, and their piety has perpetuated despotic churches and un- believable creeds. One of the greatest tasks in religious education reserved for the social gospel is to spread in society a sense of the solidarity of successive genera- tions and a sense of responsibility for those who are to come after us and whom we are now outfitting with the fundamental conditions of existence. This is one of the sincerest and most durable means of spiritual re- straint. It is hard to see how the thought of Adam and Eve can very directly influence young men and women who are to be the ancestors of new generations. In so far as the doctrine of the fall has made all later actions of negligible importance by contrast, it blocks the way for an important advance in the consciousness of sin. The traditional doctrine of the fall has taught us to regard evil as a kind of unvarying racial endowment, which is active in every new’^ life and which can be over- come only by the grace ofifered in the Gospel and min- istered by the Church. It would strengthen the appeal of the social gospel if evil could be regarded instead as a variable factor in the life of humanity, which it is our duty to diminish for every young life and for every new generation. These, it seems to me, are the points at which the social gospel impinges on the doctrine of the fall of man. Of course evolutionary thought has radically changed the conceptions about the origin of the race for those 44 A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL