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

  The exciting cause of this religious revolt is to be looked for in the worldliness and arrogance of the clergy, the formalism of the Church’s ritual, and the worldly ambitions of the papal policy. In their depositions before the Church inquisitors, the accused called attention to the pride, cupidity, and immorality of the priests. Tanchelm, Henry of Lausanne, and other leaders directed their invectives against the priests and bishops who sought power and ease rather than the good of the people. Underneath all this discontent was the spiritual hunger of the masses. The Bible was not an altogether forgotten book. The people remembered it. Popular preachers like Bernard of Thiron, Robert of Abrissel and Vitalis of Savigny quoted its precepts and relied upon its authority. There was a hankering after the Gospel which the Church did not set forth. The people wanted to get behind the clergy and the ritual of the sacraments to Christ himself, and, in doing so, a large body of the sectaries went to the extreme of abandoning the outward celebration of the sacraments, and withdrew themselves altogether from priestly offices. The aim of all the sects was moral and religious reformation. The Cathari, it is true, differed in a philosophical question and were Manichaeans, but it was not a question of philosophy they were concerned about. Their chief purpose was to get away from the worldly aims of the established church, and this explains their rapid diffusion in Lombardy and Southern France.944 A prominent charge made against the dissenters was that they put their own interpretations upon the Gospels and Epistles and employed these interpretations to establish their own systems and rebuke the Catholic hierarchy. Special honor was given by the Cathari to the Gospel of John, and the Waldensian movement started with an attempt to make known the Scriptures through the vulgar tongue. The humbler classes knew enough about clerical abuses from their own observation; but the complaints of the best men of the times were in the air, and these must also have reached their ears and increased the general restlessness. St. Bernard rebuked the clergy for ambition, pride, and lust. Grosseteste called clerics antichrists and devils. Walter von der Vogelweide, among the poets, spoke of priests as those — "Who make a traffic of each sacrament The mass’ holy sacrifice included." These men did not mean to condemn the priestly office, but it should occasion no surprise that the people made no distinction between the office and the priest who abused the office.

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

  In his readiness to support the ambitions of his nephew, Jerome Riario, the pope seemed willing to go to any length of violence. A conspiracy was directed against Lorenzo’s life, in which Jerome was the chief actor,—one of the most cold-blooded conspiracies of history. The pope was conversant with the plot and talked it over with its chief agent, Montesecco and, though he may not have consented to murder, which Jerome and the Pazzi had included in their plan, he fully approved of the plot to seize Lorenzo’s person and overthrow the republic.765 The terrible tragedy was enacted in the cathedral of Florence. When Montesecco, a captain of the papal mercenaries, hired to carry out the plot, shrank from committing sacrilege by shedding blood in the church of God, its execution was intrusted to two priests, Antonio Maffei da Volterra and Stefano of Bagnorea, the former a papal secretary. While the host was being elevated, Julian de’Medici, who was inside the choir, was struck with one dagger after another and fell dead. Lorenzo barely escaped. As he was entering the sanctuary, he was struck by Maffei and slightly wounded, and made a shield of his arm by winding his mantle around it, and escaped with friends to the sacristy, which was barred against the assassins. The bloody deed took place April 26, 1478. The city proved true to the family which had shed so much lustre upon it, and quick revenge was taken upon the agents of the conspiracy. Archbishop Salviati, his brother, Francesco de’ Pazzi and others were hung from the signoria windows.766 The two priests were executed after having their ears and noses cut off. Montesecco was beheaded. Among those who witnessed the scene in the cathedral was the young cardinal, Raphael, the pope’s grandnephew, and without having any previous knowledge of the plot. His face, it was said, turned to an ashen pallor, which in after years he never completely threw off. With intrepid resolution, Sixtus resented the death of his archbishop and the indignity done a cardinal in the imprisonment of Raphael as an accomplice. He hurled the interdict at the city, branding Lorenzo as the son of iniquity and the ward of perdition,—iniquitatis filius et perditionis alumnus,—and entered into an alliance with Naples against it. Louis XI. of France and Venice and other Italian states espoused the cause of Florence. Pushed to desperation, Lorenzo went to Naples and made such an impression on Ferrante that he changed his attitude and joined an alliance with Florence. The pope was checkmated. The seizure of Otranto on Italian soil by the Turks, in 1480, called attention away from the feud to the imminent danger threatening all Italy. In December of that year, Sixtus absolved Florence, and the legates of the city were received in front of St. Peter’s and touched with the rod in token of forgiveness.

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

  He advised the emperor to order every university in Germany to establish chairs of Hebrew for ten years.1072 Pfefferkorn, whom Reuchlin had called a "buffalo or an ass," replied in a violent attack, the Handmirror—Handspiegel wider und gegen die Juden — 1511. Both parties appeared before the emperor, and Reuchlin replied in the Spectacles—Augenspiegel,—which in its turn was answered by his antagonist in the Burning Glass—Brandspiegel. The sale of the Spectacles was forbidden in Frankfurt. Reuchlin followed in a Defense against all Calumniators, 1513, and after the manner of the age cudgelled them with such epithets as goats, biting dogs, raving wolves, foxes, hogs, sows, horses, asses and children of the devil.1073 An appeal he made to Frederick the Wise called forth words of support from Carlstadt and Luther. The future Reformer spoke of Reuchlin as a most innocent and learned man, and condemned the inquisitorial zeal of the Cologne theologians who "might have found worse occasions of offence on all the streets of Jerusalem than in the extraneous Jewish question." The theological faculty of Cologne, which consisted mostly of Dominicans, denounced 43 sentences taken from Reuchlin as heretical, 1514. The Paris university followed suit. Cited before the tribunal of the Inquisition by Hoogstraten, Reuchlin appealed to the pope. Hoogstraten had the satisfaction of seeing the Augenspiegel publicly burnt at Cologne, Feb. 10, 1514. The young bishop of Spires, whom Leo X. appointed to adjudicate the case, cleared Reuchlin and condemned Hoogstraten to silence and the payment of the costs, amounting to 111 gulden, April 24, 1514.1074 But the indomitable inquisitor took another appeal, and Leo appointed Cardinal Grimani and then a commission of 24 to settle the dispute. All the members of the commission but Sylvester Prierias favored Reuchlin, who was now supported by the court of Maximilian, by the German "poets" as a body and by Ulrich von Hutten, but opposed by the Dominican order. When a favorable decision was about to be rendered, Leo interposed, June 23, 1520, and condemned Reuchlin’s book, the Spectacles, as a work friendly to the Jews, and obligated the author to pay the costs of trial and thereafter to keep silence. The monks had won and Pfefferkorn, with papal authority on his side, could celebrate his triumph over scholarship and toleration in a special tract, 1521. With the Reformation, which in the meantime had broken out at Wittenberg, the great Hebrew scholar showed no sympathy. He even turned away from Melanchthon and cancelled the bequest of his library, which he had made in his favor, and gave it to his native town, Pforzheim. He prevented, however, Dr. Eck, during his brief sojourn at Ingolstadt, from burning Luther’s writings. His controversy with Pfefferkorn had shown how strong in Germany the spirit of obscurantism was, but it had also called forth a large number of pamphlets and letters in favor of Reuchlin.

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

  In November, 1166, Frederick crossed the Alps a fourth time, with a strong army, marched to Rome, captured the Leonine city, put Pascal III. in possession of St. Peter’s, and was crowned again, with Beatrice, Aug. 1, 1167. Alexander defended the city on the other side of the Tiber, but soon withdrew to Benevento. The emperor, victorious over armies, found a more formidable enemy in the Roman fever, which made fearful ravages among his bishops, noblemen, and soldiers. He lost in a few weeks his bravest knights and two thousand men by the plague. He broke up his camp in great haste, and marched to Pavia (September, 1167).137 He found all Lombardy in league against him, and recrossed the Alps for safety, alone and almost a fugitive, but with unbroken spirit and a determination to return. The second anti-pope died, Sept. 20, 1168, and with him the power of the schism collapsed. Calixtus III. was elected his successor, but he was a mere shadow, 1168–1178.138 Barbarossa undertook a fifth campaign to Italy in 1174. He destroyed Susa, and, descending through Piedmont, besieged the new city of Alessandria, which was named in honor of Alexander III., and strongly fortified. Here he found determined resistance. His forces were weakened by a severe winter. He was forsaken by his strongest ally, the Saxon duke, Henry the Lion. He fought a pitched battle against the Lombards, near Legnano, May 29, 1176. He rushed, as usual, into the thickest of the fight, but was defeated after terrible slaughter, and lost his shield, banner, cross, lance, and coffers of silver and gold. He retired with the remnant of his army to Pavia. He was left without a single ally, and threatened in Germany by the dangerous rivalry of Henry the Lion. He now took serious steps towards a reconciliation with Alexander, the spiritual head of his enemies. The emperor sent Archbishop Christian of Mainz (his chancellor, ablest general, and diplomat), Archbishop Wichmann of Magdeburg, Bishop Conrad of Worms, and Protonotary Wortwin to Anagni, with full powers to treat with the pope (October, 1176). Alexander received the commissioners with marked respect, and in private conferences, lasting over a fortnight, he arranged with them the preliminary terms of peace, which were to be ratified at Venice during a personal interview between him and the emperor. The pope, provided with a safe-conduct by the emperor, left Anagni on Christmas, 1176, in company with his cardinals and the two commissioners of the kingdom of Sicily, Archbishop Romuald of Salerno and Count Roger of Andria, and arrived at Venice, March 24, 1177. The emperor tarried at Chioggia, near Venice, till July 23. The peace negotiations between the pope and the imperial commissioners began in May and lasted till July. They were conducted on the basis of the previous negotiations in Anagni. § 30. The Peace of Venice. 1177.

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

  The path of anti-Semitism was early struck by Church and Christian state. The mediaeval legislation followed closely the precedent of earlier enactments.913 The synod of Elvira, 306, forbade Christians to eat with Jews and intermarry with them. Theodosius II., 439, excluded them from holding public office. The civil edicts, offering the alternative of baptism or death, were inaugurated by King Sisibut of Spain. When princes, as in Lyons, protected Jewish merchants, prelates violently protested, as did Agobard, archbishop of Lyons, apostle as he was in some particulars of modern enlightenment.914 Among the enactments of this period are the following: The Jews were forbidden to employ Christian nurses, servants, or laborers, to publicly sell meat, to work on Sundays or feast days, to employ Christian physicians,915 or to practise usury, and were commanded to make a money payment to the priest at Easter, and to wear a distinguishing patch or other object on their garments. On the other hand, Christians were forbidden to attend Jewish funerals and marriages, and were punished for borrowing from Jews. None of the regulations was so humiliating as the one requiring the Jew to wear a distinguishing costume or a distinguishing patch upon his garments. This patch was ordered placed on the chest, or on both chest and back, so that the wearer might be distinguished from afar, as of old the leper was known by his cry "unclean," and that Christians might be prevented from ignorantly having carnal connection with the despised people. At the instance of Stephen Langton the synod of Oxford, 1222, prescribed a woollen patch, and Edward I., 1275, ordered the yellow patch worn by all over seven. Louis IX. ordered that the color of the patch should be red or saffron, the king of England that it should be yellow. Its size and shape were matters of minute enactment. The Fourth Lateran gave the weight of its great authority to this regulation about dress, and decreed that it should be enforced everywhere. Dr. Graetz pronounces this law the culminating blow in the humiliation of his kinsmen. He declares that Innocent III. brought more misery upon the Jews than all their enemies had done before, and charges him with being the first pope who turned the inhuman severity of the Church against them.916 The position Innocent took was that God intended the Jews to be kept, like Cain, the murderer, to wander about on the earth designed by their guilt for slavery till the time should come in the last days for their conversion.917

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

  The complications in Southern France were one of the chief questions brought before the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215. Raymund was present and demanded back his lands, inasmuch as he had submitted to the Church; but by an overwhelming majority, the synod voted against him and Montfort was confirmed in the possession of his conquests.1112 When Raymund’s son made a personal appeal to Innocent for his father, the pope bade him "love God above all things and serve Him faithfully, and not stretch forth his hand against others’ territory" and gave him the cold promise that his complaints against Montfort would be heard at a future council.1113 The further progress of the Albigensian campaigns requires only brief notice here, for they were converted into a war of territorial plunder. In 1218, Montfort fell dead under the walls of Toulouse, his head crushed by a stone. In the reign of Honorius, whose supreme concern was a crusade in the East, the sectaries reasserted themselves, and Raymund regained most of his territory. But the pope was relentless, and again the sentence of excommunication was launched against the house of Toulouse. In 1226, Louis VIII. took the cross, supported by the French parliament as well as by the Church. Thus the final chapter in the crusades was begun, a war of the king of France for the possession of Toulouse. Louis died a few months later. Arnold of Citeaux, for nearly twenty years their energetic and iron-hearted promoter, had preceded him to the grave. Louis IX. took up the plans of his royal predecessor, and in 1229 the hostilities were brought to a close by Raymund’s accepting the conditions proposed by the papal legate. Raymund renounced two-thirds of his paternal lands in favor of France. The other third was to go at his death to his daughter who subsequently married Louis IX.’s brother, and, in case there was no issue to the marriage, it was to pass to the French crown, and so it did at the death of Jeanne, the last heir of the house of Toulouse. Thus the domain of France was extended to the Pyrenees. Further measures of repression were directed against the remnants of the Albigensian heresy, for Raymund VII. had promised to cleanse the land of it. The machinery of the Inquisition was put into full action as it was perfected by the great inquisitorial council of Toulouse, 1229. The University of Toulouse received papal sanction, and one of its chief objects was announced to be "to bring the Catholic faith in those regions into a flourishing state."1114 In 1244, the stronghold of Montségur was taken, the last refuge of the Albigenses. Two hundred of the Perfect were burned.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “Fairly”, I said, “but why do you take all the room?” and I jostled him aside: he immediately pushed me hard and I slapped his face as I had promised. The elder boys held him back or the fight would have taken place then and there: “will you fight?” he barked at me and I replied, “as much as you like, bully!” It was arranged that the fight should take place on the next afternoon, which happened to be a Wednesday and half-holiday. From three to six would give us time enough. That evening Stackpole asked me to his room and told me he would get the Doctor to stop the fight if I wished; I assured him it had to be and I preferred to have it settled. “I’m afraid he’s too old and strong for you”, said Stackpole: I only smiled. Next day the ring was made at the top of the playing field behind the haystack so that we could not be seen from the school. All the Sixth and nearly all the school stood behind Jones; but Stackpole, while ostensibly strolling about, was always close to me. I felt very grateful to him: I don’t know why; but his presence took away from my loneliness. At first the fight was almost like a boxing-match. Jones shot out his left hand, my head slipped it and I countered with my right in his face: a moment later he rushed me but I ducked and side-stepped and hit him hard on the chin. I could feel the astonishment of the school in the dead silence: “Good, good!” cried Stackpole behind me: “that’s the way.” And indeed it was the “way” of the fight in every round except one. We had been hard at it for some eight or ten minutes when I felt Jones getting weaker or losing his breath: at once I went in attacking with all my might; when suddenly, as luck would have it, I caught a right swing just under the left ear and was knocked clean off my feet: he could hit hard enough, that was clear. As I went into the middle of the ring for the next round Jones jeered at me: “You got that, didn’t ye, Pat!” “Yes”, I replied, “but I’ll beat you black and blue for it” and the fight went on. I had made up my mind, lying on the ground, to strike only at his face. He was short and strong and my body-blows didn’t seem to make any impression on him; but if I could blacken all his face, the masters and especially the Doctor would understand what had happened.

• From The Historical Jesus (Great Courses) (2000)

  VI. It is clear that Jesus face widespread rejection among the Jewish people to whom he preached and had numerous controversies with other Jewish teachers of his day. A. It was not these legal disputes with the Pharisees that ultimately led to Jesus’ execution. The Pharisees were not the power players in Jesus’ day; they had no political clout, civil authority, or legislative jurisdiction. They were a group of highly respected and seriously religious Jews, but they were not influential, at that time, in political affairs. Their disputes with Jesus could not have led to his crucifixion. B. The religious authorities responsible for Jesus’ arrest and trial were the Sadducees and high priests in the Temple of Jerusalem. 1. When Jesus left the familiar rural environs of his childhood and took his apocalyptic message of the coming judgment of God to the 34 ©2000 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership capital city of Jerusalem, he aroused the opposition of those who were powerful enough to silence him. 2. Once he offended them by proclaiming that they too would face God’s coming wrath, his own days became numbered. Essential Reading: Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet, chap. 1 1 . Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. II. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus, chap. 14. Suggested Reading: Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, chaps. 9-10. Questions to Consider: 1. How do you think we can explain the persistent report that Jesus was widely rejected by those who knew him, including his own family? How could they not realize who he was? 2. Think of the most heated arguments that you’ve gotten into. Are they with people who are close with you or with people you scarcely know? In light of your experience, what do you make of Jesus’ heated disagreements with the Pharisees? Is it possible that they were at such odds precisely because they knew each other well and agreed on some of the most basic issues? ©2000 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 35 Lecture Twenty The Last Days of Jesus

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

  Between March and May 1525, peasant communities in southern and central Germany had resisted the centralizing policies of the princes that deprived them of traditional rights, and by hardheaded bargaining, many villages had managed to wrest concessions from them without resorting to violence. But in Thuringia, in central Germany, lawless peasant bands roamed the countryside, looting and burning convents, churches, and monasteries. 39 In his first pamphlet on the Peasants’ War, Luther had tried to be even-handed and had castigated the “cheating” and “robbing” of the aristocracy. But in his view the peasants had committed the unpardonable sin of mixing religion and politics. Suffering, he maintained, was their lot; they must obey the gospel, turn the other cheek, and accept the loss of their lives and property. They had had the temerity to argue that Christ had made all men free—an opinion that clearly chimed with New Testament teachings but cut no ice with Luther. He insisted that “a worldly kingdom cannot exist without an inequality of persons, some being free, some imprisoned, some lords, some subjects.” 40 Luther encouraged the princes to use every possible means to suppress the peasant agitators : Let everyone who can, smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisoned, hurtful or devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one must kill a mad dog: if you do not strike him, he will strike you and a whole land with you. 41 The rebels, he concluded, were in thrall to the devil, and killing them was an act of mercy, because it would rescue them from this satanic bondage. Because this rebellion threatened the entire social structure, the state suppressed it savagely: as many as a hundred thousand peasants may have died. The crisis was an ominous sign of the instability of early modern states at a time when traditional ideas were being widely questioned. The reformers had called for reliance on scripture alone but would find that the Bible could be a dangerous weapon if it got into the wrong hands. Once people began reading their Bibles for themselves, they soon saw glaring discrepancies between Jesus’s teachings and current ecclesiastical and political practice. The Anabaptists (“Re-baptizers”) were especially disruptive because their literal reading of the gospel led them to condemn such institutions as the Holy Roman Empire, the city council, and the trade guild. 42 When some Dutch Anabaptists managed to seize control of Münster in northwestern Germany in 1534, instituting polygamy and banning private property, Catholics and Protestants—for once in firm agreement—saw this as a political threat that could easily be emulated by other towns.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Again and again Jones swung, first with right hand and then with his left, hoping to knock me down again; but my training had been too varied and complete and the knock-down blow had taught me the necessary caution: I ducked his swings, or side-stepped them and hit him right and left in the face till suddenly his nose began to bleed and Stackpole cried out behind me in huge excitement: “that’s the way, that’s the way; keep on peppering him!” As I turned to smile at him, I found that a lot of the fags, former chums of mine, had come round to my corner and now were all smiling encouragement at me and bold exhortations to “give it him hard.” I then realized for the first time that I had only to keep on and be careful and the victory would be mine. A cold, hard exultation took the place of nervous excitement in me, and when I struck, I tried to cut with my knuckles as Raleigh had once shown me. The bleeding of Jones’s nose took some time to stop and as soon as he came into the middle of the ring, I started it again with another right-hander. After this round, his seconds and backers kept him so long in his corner that at length, on Stackpole’s whispered advice, I went over and said to him: “Either fight or give in: I’m catching cold.” He came out at once and rushed at me full of fight, but his face was all one bruise and his left eye nearly closed. Every chance I got, I struck at the right eye till it was in an even worse case. It is strange to me since that I never once felt pity for him and offered to stop: the truth is, he had bullied me so relentlessly and continually, had wounded my pride so often in public that even at the end I was filled with cold rage against him. I noticed everything: I saw that a couple of the Sixth went away towards the schoolhouse and afterwards returned with Shaddy, the second master. As they came round the haystack, Jones came out into the ring; he struck savagely right and left as I came within striking distance, but I slipped in outside his weaker left and hit him as hard as I could, first right, then left on the chin and down he went on his back. At once there was a squeal of applause from the little fellows in my corner and I saw that Stackpole had joined Shaddy near Jones’s corner. Suddenly Shaddy came right up to the ringside and spoke, to my astonishment, with a certain dignity:

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  When his boss asks the guy in the video why he hasn’t sent over a certain report, the robot guy says it’s because the boss didn’t tell him to send the report, simply to print out the report. Robot Man says he always finishes his work on time, and he will never be late, but he will never finish early. He does exactly what he is told, no more and no less. “I couldn’t stand that guy,” I explained to Deb. “I think it was just something about his face, just the way he looked. He’s got that mustache, you know?” Deb looks at me. “And why is a guy like that working here, in a start-up? Why is he here? Who hired him? If I had to work with that guy, I’d want to smack him.” Nobody laughs. They all just sit there. “Well,” Deb says, in a patronizing voice, “I can hear your frustration. I think we all can agree that it can be hard to work with people who are different from us. I think what you’re trying to say is that you might have a hard time interacting with that person.” “Definitely,” I say. She smiles. “And you would probably have to come up with a strategy for how to deal with him, right?” “I suppose. But really I’d just want to strangle the guy.” If this were a room full of journalists, people would now be joining in, talking about various ways to kill the guy without getting caught. Could you make it look like an accident? Could you lure him onto the roof by telling him the boss says he has to go there right away, and then push him off? Could you invite him to lunch, and arrange to have him hit by a car while crossing the street? In a room full of journalists someone would already be doing an impersonation of the Robot Man. We’d also make fun of the smarmy host, who is a bit like Tom Bergeron, host of Hollywood Squares, America’s Funniest Home Videos, and Dancing with the Stars, only cheesier, which is remarkable because Tom Bergeron is already the gold standard of cheesiness, and yet here is this total amateur, this complete unknown, blowing Bergeron away. Maybe the host of this training video should have his own game show. Maybe you could have a game show based on DISC, and pit the four personality types against each other. Put them into a cage and make it a fight to the death: Four drones go into the box, but only one comes out! Who will survive?

• From The Historical Jesus (Great Courses) (2000)

  4. It’s hard to see how the Temple could function without some system like this. Our early accounts, though, indicate that Jesus entered the Temple, drove out those who were selling sacrificial animals, and overturned the tables of the moneychangers. C. It is difficult to know, historically, what Jesus actually did when he entered the Temple and what he meant by it. Most scholars recognize that some aspects of the accounts appear to be exaggerated. This is particularly true of Mark’s claim that Jesus completely shut down the operation of the Temple. 1. Again, the Temple complex was immense, and armed guards would have been present to prevent any major disturbances. 2. Moreover, if Jesus had created a problem in the Temple, it’s nearly impossible to explain why he wasn’t arrested on the spot and taken out of the way before he could stir up the crowds. 3. For these reasons, it looks as if Mark’s account represents an exaggeration of Jesus’ actions. Exaggerations aside, we’re almost certain that Jesus did something that caused a disturbance in the Temple. The event is multiply attested in independent sources and the event coincides with Jesus’ predictions that the Temple would soon be destroyed. D. For this reason, a good number of scholars — beginning in the 1 970s with E. P. Sanders — have begun to recognize that Jesus’ actions in the Temple were meant as a symbolic expression of his proclamation. 1. Jesus sometimes engaged in symbolic acts that illustrated his apocalyptic message (for example, by associating with tax collectors and sinners to illustrate his message that the kingdom was for the outcast and lowly). 2. In view of Jesus’ message of the coming destruction of the Son of Man, perhaps it is best to see his action in the Temple as a kind of prophetic gesture, an enacted parable, in which he demonstrated on a small scale what was soon to happen in a big way on the Day of Judgment. The Temple was going to be destroyed. ©2000 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 39 E. It is hard to know, though, what exactly Jesus found to be offensive about the Temple, i.e., whether he found the priests operating it to be corrupt or had some other problem with it. 1 . The words quoted in the accounts may not go back to Jesus himself, because the charges of corruption in the Temple may represent later Christianization of the tradition. 2 . On the other hand, we do have accounts of other Jews both before Jesus (e.g., Jeremiah 7) and in his own day (e.g., the Essenes) who believed that the Temple system had become corrupt. 3 . As a country fellow from rural Galilee, who preached against wealth and power, the sheer opulence of the place may have made Jesus’ blood boil on principle.

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

  95 The Iraqi cleric Sheikh Muhammad Bashir complained that if the Americans had brought freedom to the country, it was not for the Iraqis: It is the freedom of occupying soldiers in doing what they like.… No one can ask them what they are doing, because they are protected by their freedom.… No one can punish them, whether in our country or in their country. They expressed the freedom of rape, the freedom of nudity, and the freedom of humiliation. 9 6 The overwhelming 2004 U.S. assault on Fallujah, the iconic “city of mosques,” has been called the Arab 9/11: hundreds of civilians were killed and 200,000 made homeless. By the following year 24,000 civilians had been killed in Iraq and 70,000 injured. 97 Instead of bringing peace to the region, the occupation inspired an insurgency of Iraqis and mujahidin from Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Jordan, who responded to this foreign invasion with the heretofore unusual technique of suicide bombing, eventually breaking the long-standing record of the Tamil Tigers. 98 As to global terrorism, the situation has become only more dangerous than it was before the Iraq War. 99 Following the assassination of Bin Laden in 2011, al-Qaeda still thrives. Its strength was always more conceptual than organizational—global revolutionary fervor combining an intense political militancy with dubious claims to divine sanction. Its branch affiliates, including the one founded in Iraq (as of this writing increasingly active there and also in the Syrian civil war) as well as those in Somalia and Yemen, continue to promote a restoration of the caliphate as the ultimate objective of their interventions in local politics. Elsewhere, in the absence of any tightly organized cadre, there are thousands of freelance aspirants to terrorism worldwide—radicalized in Internet chat rooms, self-trained, poorly educated, and lacking any clear practical objective. Such was the case with Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebolawe, two British-born converts to Islam, who murdered the British soldier Lee Rigby in 2013 in southeastern London, claiming to avenge the deaths of Muslim innocents by British troops. Like Muhammad Bouyeri, who assassinated the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in 2004, and the Madrid train bombers, who killed 191 people in the same year, they were not directly linked to al-Qaeda.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  Harry squirmed in his seat, rattled. He called for a moment by raising his hand, then took a drink of water. “Your mother and I are separated,” he blurted. “What? When?” “As of today. She’s staying with your sister for two weeks. I have to get out of the house while she’s away.” Cody sat back, shoulders slumping. “But... why?” Then his eyes flickered with knowing, and became angry. “Wait. Don’t tell me why. I already know. You’re un-fucking-believable, Dad.” “That’s what they say.” “That’s what who says? Who would say that? The clothes at the Laundromat? Are you dating a trophy pair of silk panties now?” As Harry moved to point an irate finger at his son, he inadvertently knocked over a glass of water. The cool liquid seeped into the green tablecloth, conjuring images of bikini beauties washing cars, or young lovers fucking in the surf, or ... a wet, green tablecloth. Harry’s patience and control suddenly met an abrupt and bitter end. Leaping from the booth, he ripped the cloth from the table, then sprinted toward the bathroom, leaving befuddled patrons, staff, * and son in his panting wake. Once inside the stall, he had trouble getting his pants down. Despite the easy access the elastic offered, his raging erection had become a nuisance, an uncooperative child, thickly hindering the lowering of his britches. Not to be outdone by his manhood, Harry tore the sides of his pants to free himself, then laughed maniacally as the garment pooled around his ankles. 1? “My cock!” he exclaimed. “My whore Harry cradled the tablecloth like a dancing partner and, as he bent deeply in a convoluted dip of reverence and passion, the sheer joy of this union, as well as the rush of myriad broken mores, fired his cock with girth and life. Even his speech became antiquated, a cry to older times, a cry to the ageless libertine within, a cry of gluttonous whimsy. “T shall now fuck thee, my luscious, whorish damsel!” Then a cautious knock met the door of the stall, followed by an equally guarded voice. “Dad? You need to come out. We need to leave. If you don’t, they’re going to call the police.” _ “But lo!” boomed Harry. “A true test of my will and resolve! I shall not be denied!” “Um, Dad? You will be denied, or you will leave in handcuffs. The manager is here with me, and she’s not happy.” 492 Mel Bosworth

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Young men dodged the draft, shirking their duty to protect American interests in the face of global communism. Antiwar protesters shunned authority, advising their generation to make love, not war. Sporting long hair and flowered shirts, the young men and women of this generation seemed nearly indistinguishable, at least according to conservative critics. The failure of American soldiers to defeat a ragtag enemy testified to serious problems of American manhood, and no group felt this crisis more keenly than American evangelicals.38 For evangelicals, the problem of American manhood was at its heart a religious one, properly addressed within the Christian family. Fundamentalist megachurch pastor Jack Hyles made this case in his 1972 book How to Rear Children . The son of a distant, alcoholic father, Hyles had grown up in Texas, served in the 82nd Airborne Division in the Second World War, and later turned to ministry. In 1959, the “skinny, charismatic Bible thumper with a Southern-fried drawl and a couple of cheap suits” showed up in Hammond, Indiana, and took charge of its First Baptist Church. He quickly built the church into one of the largest Independent Fundamental Baptist churches in the nation, boasting an attendance of over 20,000 and housing “the world’s largest Sunday School.”39 Hyles’s book included a section on “How to Make a Man Out of a Boy.” Boys needed to be taught to be winners: “This is how we get our General MacArthurs. This is how Billy Sundays are made.” Teaching boys how to be good losers left you with a generation of young men who didn’t want to fight for their country and were instead “willing to let the strongest nation on earth bow down in shame before a little nation like North Vietnam.” It was up to Christian parents to rear a new generation of men, and to this end they should make boys “play with boys and with boys’ toys and games,” with “guns, cars, baseballs, basketballs, and footballs.” Boys who engaged in “feminine activities,” he warned, often ended up as “homosexuals.” A boy must be taught to fight, to “be rugged enough” to defend his home and those he loved. Hyles bought his own son a pair of boxing gloves when he was five, an air rifle at thirteen, and a .22 at fifteen. When a neighbor boy insulted Hyles’s daughter, he encouraged his son to “let him have it” and walked away as his son beat the boy bloody. Such violence was sanctified: “God pity this weak-kneed generation which stands for nothing, fights for nothing, and dies for nothing.”40 Hyles prefigured a style of militant masculinity that other evangelical pastors would perfect. Known for angry outbursts and a nasty temper, Hyles had “a penchant for ironfisted control” over his growing religious empire.

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

  The Epic of Gilgamesh, set toward the mid-third millennium, when Sumer was militarizing, presents martial violence as the hallmark of civilization. 34 When the people beg the gods for help, Anu attempts to alleviate their suffering by giving Gilgamesh someone of his own size to fight with and siphon off some of his excessive aggression. So the Mother Goddess creates Enkidu, primeval man. He is huge, hairy, and has prodigious strength but is a gentle, kindly soul, wandering happily with the herbivores and protecting them from predators. But to fulfill Anu’s plan, Enkidu has to make the transition from peaceable barbarian to aggressive civilized man. The priestess Shamhat is given the task of educating him, and under her tutelage, Enkidu learns to reason, understand speech, and eat human food; his hair is cut, sweet oil is rubbed into his skin, and finally “he turned into a man. He put on a garment, became like a warrior. ” 35 Civilized man was essentially a man of war, full of testosterone. When Shamhat mentions Gilgamesh’s military prowess, Enkidu becomes pale with anger. “Take me to Gilgamesh!” he cries, pounding his chest. “I will shout in his face: I am the mightiest! I am the man who can make the world tremble! I am supreme!” 36 No sooner do these two alpha males set eyes on each other than they begin wrestling, careening through the streets of Uruk, thrashing limbs entwined in a near-erotic embrace, until finally, satiated, they “kissed each other and formed a friendship.” 37 By this period, the Mesopotamian aristocracy had begun to supplement its income with warfare, so in the very next episode Gilgamesh announces that he is about to lead a military expedition of fifty men to the Cedar Forest, guarded by the fearsome dragon Humbaba, to bring this precious wood back to Sumer. It was probably by such acquisition raids that the Mesopotamian cities came to dominate the northern highlands, which were rich in the luxury goods favored by the aristocracy. 38 Merchants had long been dispatched to Afghanistan, the Indus Valley, and Turkey to bring back timber, rare and base metals, and precious and semiprecious stones. 39 But for an aristocrat like Gilgamesh, the only noble way to acquire these scarce resources was by force. In all future agrarian states, aristocrats would be distinguished from the rest of the population by their ability to live without working.

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

  Liberation priests were dubbed “ communists” and, like Iranian clerics, were imprisoned, tortured, and executed because they made it clear that the economic order imposed on the “Third World” by the colonial West was inherently violent: For centuries, Latin America has been a region of violence. We are talking of the violence that a privileged minority has been using, since the colonial period, to exploit the vast majority of the people. We are talking of the violence of hunger, of helplessness, of underdevelopment … of illegal but existing slavery, of social, intellectual, and economic discrimination. 82 They insisted that because the world was now so economically interdependent, a North American individual was able to live a comfortable life only because other people, living perhaps in a Brazilian slum, were impoverished; they could purchase goods cheaply because others had been exploited in their production. 83 In the United States too, religion acquired a revolutionary edge and for the first time in the twentieth century opposed the policies of the American government. While presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were careful to keep religion out of politics, liberal Catholics, Protestants, and Jews campaigned in the name of their faith against the structural and military violence of the United States. Like Iranian Shii Muslims, they took to the streets to protest the Vietnam War and joined Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement against racial discrimination at home. In 1962 the National Council of Churches asked Kennedy to commit the nation to “an all-out effort to abolish [poverty], both at home and abroad.” 84 Khomeini, often thought in the West to be a rabble-rouser, was not advocating violence. The crowds who protested on the streets were unarmed, and their deaths laid bare the ruthless ferocity of the shah’s secular regime. The assassination of Martin Luther King, who had insisted that a nonviolent response to injury was “an absolute necessity for our survival … the key to the solution of the problems of our world,” 85 also revealed the latent violence of American society. King would have agreed with Khomeini’s demand for global justice. He had lamented Kennedy’s disastrous colonial misadventure in the Bay of Pigs (1961), and even though Johnson had given African Americans more than any previous president, he refused to support his war in Vietnam. But in the late 1970s, when the Iranian revolution broke out, the mood in the West had changed.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  I hold my hands in front of me, these fingers, the things they’ve done. They cannot guess at the person standing next to them. I glance up at the old white granny with the funny white gloves. Her brittle bones. Once alone, an easy kill. Old blood is like old wine. But what would her grandchildren say? “Tf the bank has got a hold of you, and it’s got your house, and it’s got your car and it — it has broken your heart, the Lord wants to heal you. If your boyfriend or your husband has left you, or your wife has left you, the Lord wants to heal you. If-if-if-if you had some drugs in the past, and-and-and you’re burning up for drugs, but you say to yourself ‘this is not God’ and your heart is broken and you’re alone, somebody help me, God wants to heal your broken heart. ‘I may tell all my bones’ the Bible says right here, ‘I may tell all my bones, they look and they stare at me, they part my garments among them and cast lots—’ ” “Shut up!” I murmur at him. “Stupid bastard! With your fucking fake language! You don’t know anything about the Devil. Not like me! I’ll bite your dick off in pieces and play with your guts!” Ruby looks at me shocked, no one else seems to have heard. A gob of pink foam drops from my lips to the floor. I give her a look and she moves away from me. “ “Be thou not far from me’ — hallelujah! —- ‘Oh, Lord, Oh my strength, haste thee to help me— ” “Shut up! Pll fucking kill you!” I yell again, this time for real. “Ill cut your dick off and fuck your skull with it!” Eddie has been standing next to me with his hands in the air as though being arrested, weeping his little heart out and going babababa. But he stops and looks at me shocked. “What do you think you’re looking at, you big nigger bastard? Are you looking at my tits? Do you want to fuck me?”’ I yell at him, holding out my breasts. “You buck nigger bastard? Is that it? I’m the devil! ’'m the demon! I can tear your throat out and not give a fucking damn about any of you! I’m the devil!” He’s staring at me, but no one seems to notice yet. I fling my hands up over my ears. “Stop!” I am turning in circles now with my arms over my head. “Go away!” “ “Deliver my soul O Lord, ” says the preacher man, “ ‘deliver my soul from the sword— ” “Get away from me! I'll hurt you. I’ve killed so many people. More than everybody! I want blood! So much blood! So many people!” “ “— and my darling from the power of the dog. Save me from the lion’s mouth— ” The Lady and the Unicorn 509

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  be lost on other monarchs; some modern historians have termed this system in early medieval Europe ‘resource polygyny’. [70] In Irish society both before and after its adoption of Christianity, marital strategies more obviously tipped into polygyny, though the early legal texts do not in any case seem as preoccupied as those elsewhere by what constituted a legal marriage. [71] Nevertheless, the Irish recognized clear gradations of marital status, so an institution equivalent to concubinage was widespread: alongside marriage to a principal wife (cétmuinter), a prominent man might sustain relationships with an adaltrach (spouse), or maybe more than one, who would benefit from his financial support and protection, while he could enjoy the same potential genealogical benefits as in Merovingian practice. [72] Similar systems can be recognized in pre-Christian Viking-age Scandinavia, though here concubinage was linked to slavery, which became such a feature of Scandinavian raids right across Europe, and it was coupled with a much more flexible attitude to inheritance than elsewhere, including children from casual liaisons. [73] The Scandinavian conversion to Christianity was piecemeal and late – a process gradually extending from the ninth century – and most of the literature that describes these arrangements, both sagas and lawcodes, postdates official Christian arrival. Nevertheless, it shows that polygyny effectively survived. Looking northward from the German coast, the eleventh-century clerical chronicler Adam of Bremen observed that in contemporary Sweden men had several women each, and that all their children were treated as legitimate. [74] Twelfth-century Norwegian laws drafted under the influence of the Church prohibit plural marriages, a sure indication that they were still common at the time. It is significant that the lawcode also lays down differential fines to be paid to the local bishop for keeping a slave woman or concubine, or for having plural wives: the latter fine was twice the former. [75] The further out the territory in a society that had adopted Christian faith, the later was the survival of a discrepancy between official Christian views on marriage, divorce and clerical celibacy and the actual practice: in the case of Iceland, it was right into the thirteenth century, regardless of the personal esteem in which Icelanders held those among their bishops who were attempting reform. [76] For Churchmen at the end of the Carolingian age, amid many initiatives of reform, there was therefore much to ponder and deplore. One can savour the frustration and anger of Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, writing around 1074 to the most prominent Irish king of his day, Toirdelbach Úa Briain of Munster. He raged against various disgraceful and improper practices in Ireland, including Irish customs around marriage, divorce and concubinage contrary to canon law; around the same time he also badgered Guthric, subordinate king to Toirdelbach in Dublin, on that theme. It would have been frustrating to Lanfranc that he had little power to interfere across the water on an island where Christians might cheerfully turn to the Old Testament, as alert polygynists have always been able to do. As an eighth-century Irish lawcode commented, ‘there is a dispute in Irish law as to which is more proper, whether many sexual unions or a single one: for the chosen people of God [that is, the Israelites] lived in a plurality of unions, so that it is not easier to condemn it than to praise it.’ [77] It would take both time and thought to persuade the rulers of western Europe to conform to what the Church hierarchy wanted – indeed, first the Church had to decide exactly what it did want. Lanfranc was a voice from a new world, which from the eleventh century onwards built on what we have surveyed, but which also represented a new and unprecedented formation of a Christian society. From the previous five or six centuries, the new programme inherited campaigns to impose Benedictine standards on monastic life, to move even non-monastic clergy away from marriage and towards celibacy, and to persuade the laity that their marriages should reflect the form of monogamy that the Church had set as the sole standard in marital partnership. None of these campaigns remained anywhere near completion in 1000, but the developing parochial structure and the growing practice of individual penance provided a framework in which they could continue. Additionally, Western Christians had meditated on a new place for Mary in the Christian dispensation and had come to a new understanding of what they were doing when they came to the Eucharist. Around these existing elements, eleventh-century Latin Churchmen promoted what can only be described as a revolution in sexuality. Part Four TWO WESTERN REVOLUTIONS

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Indeed so: Theodore’s penitential provisions for his English flock, carefully setting out circumstances in which second marriages were allowable, contrast starkly with any other contemporary or future Western regulations. It is significant that, despite Theodore’s golden long-term reputation in Anglo-Saxon memory and the lasting effect of many of his legal provisions, his views on marriage were thrust aside in the general hardening of Western Latin attitudes against divorce. [20] The contrast between traditions on marriage stemming respectively from Augustine and Basil underlines the fact that, otherwise, our marital journey from Jovinian via Ambrose and Jerome on to Augustine has been our first sexual adventure experienced almost exclusively within Latin Western Christianity. Augustine, so crucial in shaping the life and thought of the West, himself spoke little Greek and was not greatly aware of what his distinguished Greek theological contemporaries were saying. Even his knowledge of ancient Greek philosophy, the ocean in which Greek theologians unselfconsciously swam, was mostly at one remove, through the writings of ‘Neo-Platonist’ philosophers of the second and third centuries CE. That did not stop Augustine praising Plato and commenting in his mammoth discussion of God’s purposes in The City of God that Platonists were esteemed among Christians ‘above the rest of the philosophers’. Perhaps surprisingly, it was his Platonism that opened another gulf between West and East. [21] Augustine’s affirmation of Plato was part of his classically Platonic description of God: utterly transcendent, perfect and remote from contact with his human creation, despite the puzzling biblical contrary that we are created in God’s image. That view of God alone might have propelled Augustine towards his proposition that God’s perfection could never be swayed into changing the divine purpose for every individual human, which therefore encompassed not merely salvation but eternal damnation: a ‘double’ predestination, therefore. Yet, in the latter half of Augustine’s career, theological conflicts further propelled him into peculiarly pitiless versions of that thought, just as Jovinian’s bold statements on baptism had weaponized Jerome’s attitude to sex. The result was a distinctively Western insistence on predestination as a framework for human destiny, coupled with a connection between sex and sin which was peculiarly North African in origin, and which Eastern theology did not make. As in the case of Jovinian, the cockpit of conflict was in Rome. Jerome’s abrupt and enforced leave-taking of the city in 385 (above, Chapter 8) left opportunities for other aspiring spiritual consultants to the Roman aristocracy, notably the British monk Pelagius. Pelagius’s campaign to instil a strenuous genuine devotional practice in his wealthy clientele led to a theology emphasizing individual human responsibility in striving for salvation. This is what provoked Augustine’s fury, especially because Pelagius had rashly taken his name in vain, criticizing a prayer in Confessions: ‘you command me to be continent.