Anxiety

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 Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  For every ten paces of my journey that were illuminated by a pool of gas-light, there were a further twenty that were cast in gloom. The gloom lifted a little at Old Street itself, for here there were offices, and crowded bus stops and shops. As I walked towards the Hackney Road, however, it seemed only to deepen, and my surroundings to grow shabbier. The crossings at the Angel had been decent enough; here the roads were so clogged with manure that, every time a vehicle rumbled by, I was showered with filth. My fellow pedestrians, too - who, so far, had all been honest working-people, men and women in coats and hats as faded as my own - grew poorer. Their suits were not just dingy, but ragged. They had boots, but no stockings. The men wore scarves instead of collars, and caps rather than bowlers; the women wore shawls; the girls wore dirty aprons, or no apron at all. Everyone seemed to have some kind of burden - a basket, or a bundle, or a child upon their hip. The rain fell harder. I had been told by the tea-girl at the Angel to head for Columbia Market; now, a little way along the Hackney Road, I found myself suddenly on the edge of its great, shadowy courtyard. I shivered. The huge granite hall, its towers and tracery as elaborate as those on a gothic cathedral, was quite dark and still. A few rough-looking fellows with cigarettes and bottles slouched in its arches, blowing on their hands to keep the cold off. A sudden clamour in the clock tower made me start. Some complicated pealing of bells - as fussy and useless as the great abandoned market hall itself - was chiming out the hour: it was a quarter-past four. This was far too early to visit Florence’s house, if Florence herself was at work all day: so I stood for another hour in one of the arches of the market where the wind was not so cutting and the rain was not so hard. Only when the bells had rung half-past five did I step again into the courtyard, and look about me: I was now almost numb. There was a little girl nearby, carrying a great tray about her neck, filled with bundles of watercresses. I went up to her, and asked how far it was to Quilter Street; and then, because she looked so sad and cold and damp - and also because I had a confused idea that I must not turn up on Florence’s doorstep entirely empty-handed - I bought the biggest of her cress bouquets.

• From My People (2022)

  And though we moved back to the United States in 2012, we have traveled back from time to time, and South African friends visit us here in America and otherwise keep in touch. But in recent months the emails and Skype chats and talks with visiting friends have become intense and somber and worrying in a way that I haven’t previously experienced. Sooner or later, the conversation turns to disturbing reports of the direction of South African’s political culture, with accounts of ongoing corruption at the highest levels of the government of President Jacob Zuma. He is scheduled to remain in office until national elections in 2019, but is facing a revolt within his party. It is not of the same kind that drove his predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, prematurely from office. Mbeki was not accused of personal corruption; what put him in jeopardy was his alleged effort to undermine Zuma’s chances of succeeding him. When the time came, Mbeki resigned rather than waiting to be removed, in part to avoid a political crisis ahead of the 2009 general election. (In South Africa, the president is chosen by Parliament immediately after an election.) At the time, Zuma had already fought off charges of corruption to win the leadership of his party, the African National Congress, and of the country. But the stigma and stain of corruption never went away; instead, they grew as Zuma financed a lavish renovation of his kraal (or homestead) in his home base, Nkandla, in KwaZulu-Natal, with state money, and was subject to allegations of cronyism. Last week, South Africa’s public protector, an ombudsman with constitutional powers, issued what has become known as the “state-capture report.” It called for a full judicial inquiry into possible corruption and conflicts of interest involving Zuma, senior state officials, and members of the wealthy Gupta family. Reports indicate that the Guptas plan to defend themselves against the charges at the upcoming inquiry. Zuma has dismissed the report and seems ready to fight it in court. Ahmed Kathrada, a revered eighty-seven-year-old anti-apartheid activist who served time in prison with Mandela, wrote an open letter earlier this year about what he called “a crisis of confidence” in the leadership of the country. He called for Zuma to step down. A few months later, Jackson Mthembu, the chief whip of the ANC, who was once one of the staunchest supporters of his party—often coming down hard on journalists who questioned anything the ANC did—called on the entire ANC executive leadership, including himself, to step down. Mthembu was quoted in the City Press as saying, of his fellow leaders, that, in certain respects, “We are not only equal to the apartheid state, we are worse.” That may be an extreme statement, but it captures the frustration and disappointment of many in South Africa. And it reminded me of something F. W. de Klerk, the last apartheid-era president, told me when I interviewed him in Johannesburg shortly before Mandela and the ANC assumed power, in 1994.

• From My People (2022)

  [W]e want to state clearly and unequivocally that we cannot tolerate, in a nation professing democracy and among people professing Christianity, the discriminatory conditions under which the Negro is living today in Atlanta, Georgia, supposedly one of the most progressive cities in the South.” In the early days, I waited for the students to pile in with their stories. In the early days, they would demonstrate for part of the day, then get arrested so as to establish a case that could be argued at a later date in court and hopefully lead to a decision that would overthrow separate and not equal. Within hours, they would then get bailed out and many would come straight to the Holman basement to tell their stories to Julian Bond, who was one of the writers of the Committee on Appeal document, as well as managing editor of the paper. He had been a student at Morehouse College but had put that on hold for the time being. I bided my time rambling around the basement, looking over textbooks belonging to Holman, who wrote under the pen name Vox. In time, I felt the need to get out of the basement and into the streets myself—not as a participant but as an observing servant of the people. And in a few years I traveled from the streets of Atlanta to streets up and down the East Coast, where there may not have been Jim Crow laws, but the pattern and practice of racial discrimination had the same effect on my people. So, along with my clothes, I packed my racial consciousness. And while some of my clothes wore out from time, my people and their stories kept my consciousness fresh and responsive to their ongoing challenges. For while their consciousness kept them focused on how far they had come in many instances, it also helped them (and me) keep their eyes on what continued and continues to be an elusive prize: equality and justice for all. At one point in 1967, following four summers of riots protesting inequality around the country, a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders was created by President Lyndon B. Johnson to address the cause of the disturbances. The commission ultimately concluded that the country was “moving toward two societies, one white and privileged, one Black and unequal.” It included in the blame the mostly white media. And while corrective steps were taken in all areas, including the media, all these years later, inequality persists, even in many well-funded and well-staffed and even prize-winning news organizations. The protests sparked by police killings of Black people over the last few years have caused another period of soul-searching, a moment to dig deeper, as clearly the racist demons of our past still haunt us.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  In those early days, I would occasionally glance at the pages she worked on; but whatever I saw, made me frown. ‘What does it mean, cooperative?’ I asked her once. It was not a word I had ever heard used at Felicity Place.And yet, there were moments at Quilter Street, when I found myself handing out cups of tea, rolling cigarettes, nursing babies while other people argued and laughed, when I thought I might as well still be in Diana’s drawing-room, dressed in a tunic. There, no one had ever asked me anything, because they never thought I might have had an opinion worth soliciting; but at least they had liked to look at me. At Florence’s house, no one looked at me at all - and what was worse, they all supposed I must be quite as good and energetic as themselves. I lived in a continual panic, therefore, that I would accidentally disenchant them - that someone would ask me my opinion on the SDF or the ILP, and my reply would make it clear that, not only had I confused the SDF with the WLF, the ILP with the WTUL, but I had absolutely no idea, and never had had, what the initials stood for anyway. When I shyly confessed one time, about six weeks after I moved in there, that I scarcely knew the difference between a Tory and a Liberal, they took it as a kind of clever joke. ‘You are so right, Miss Astley!’ a man had answered. ‘There is no difference at all, and if only everyone were as clear-sighted as yourself, our task would be an easier one.’ I smiled, and said no more. Then I collected the cups, and took Cyril into the kitchen with me; and while I waited for the kettle to boil I sang him an old song from the music hall, which made him kick his legs and gurgle.Then Florence appeared. ‘What a pretty song,’ she said absently. She was rubbing her eyes. ‘Ralph and I are going out - you won’t mind watching Cyril, will you? There is a family up the road - they are having the bailiffs in. I said we would go, in case the men get rough...’

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It was not a word I had ever heard used at Felicity Place. And yet, there were moments at Quilter Street, when I found myself handing out cups of tea, rolling cigarettes, nursing babies while other people argued and laughed, when I thought I might as well still be in Diana’s drawing-room, dressed in a tunic. There, no one had ever asked me anything, because they never thought I might have had an opinion worth soliciting; but at least they had liked to look at me. At Florence’s house, no one looked at me at all - and what was worse, they all supposed I must be quite as good and energetic as themselves. I lived in a continual panic, therefore, that I would accidentally disenchant them - that someone would ask me my opinion on the SDF or the ILP, and my reply would make it clear that, not only had I confused the SDF with the WLF, the ILP with the WTUL, but I had absolutely no idea, and never had had, what the initials stood for anyway. When I shyly confessed one time, about six weeks after I moved in there, that I scarcely knew the difference between a Tory and a Liberal, they took it as a kind of clever joke. ‘You are so right, Miss Astley!’ a man had answered. ‘There is no difference at all, and if only everyone were as clear-sighted as yourself, our task would be an easier one.’ I smiled, and said no more. Then I collected the cups, and took Cyril into the kitchen with me; and while I waited for the kettle to boil I sang him an old song from the music hall, which made him kick his legs and gurgle. Then Florence appeared. ‘What a pretty song,’ she said absently. She was rubbing her eyes. ‘Ralph and I are going out - you won’t mind watching Cyril, will you? There is a family up the road - they are having the bailiffs in. I said we would go, in case the men get rough...’ There was always something like this - always some neighbour in trouble, and needing money, or help, or a letter writing or a visit to the police; and it was always Ralph and Florence that they came to - I had not been with them a week before I saw Ralph leave his supper and run along the street in his shirt-sleeves, to give some word of comfort and a couple of coins to some man who had lost his job. I thought them mad to do it. We had been kind enough to our neighbours, back in Whitstable; but the kindness had had limits to it - Mother had never had time for feckless wives, or idlers, or drunkards. Florence and Ralph, however, helped everybody, even - or, it seemed to me, especially - those layabout fathers, those slatternly mothers, whom all the rest of Bethnal Green had taken against.

• From Philosophy and Religion in the West (1999)

  5. Augustine argues that this choice is inequitable but not unjust: since all are sinners, the punishment of those not chosen is deserved (and thus just) while the grace given to the chosen is undeserved (and thus merciful but not unjust). 6. Since grace cannot be earned (all are undeserving) we cannot know why God gives grace and salvation to some and not to others. 7. Thus arises the key pastoral problem concerning predestination: “what assurance have I that I am among the chosen?” C. Diverse Responses to the Problem of Predestination 1. Luther thinks the sacrament of Baptism is sufficient to assure you that you are among God’s people—but that it does not guarantee you will ultimately be saved, because it is always possible you may abandon the faith before you die. 2. In this Luther and Catholicism both follow Augustine, who argued that those who are predestined to be saved receive in addition to the grace of faith, the grace of perseverance in faith—but because we have a whole life ahead of us still, we cannot be sure we have this grace. 3. Calvin’s major innovation in the doctrine of predestination is his teaching that we can know we are among the chosen (the “elect”). 4. For Dutch Calvinism, the elect gain assurance of their election by seeing its fruits in their life: sincere faith, works of love, etc. 5. For English and American Puritans, assurance is gained through a conversion experience. 6. Hence Puritanism becomes an especially deep form of Protestant inwardness, dependent on inner experience rather than outward signs. 7. Here lies another innovation of Calvinism, which becomes the root of American revivalism: that it is through conversion, not baptism, that one is regenerated or “born again” into the life of Christ. IV. Philosophical Developments in Protestantism A. As the concern with justification and salvation takes center stage, the themes of Christian Platonist spirituality recede. ©1999 The Teaching Company. 85 B. In Protestantism, the alliance between theology and philosophy is downplayed or repudiated, and new accounts of the knowledge of God emerge to replace the Augustinian notion of a beatific intellectual vision: first that of belief in the Word, then that of inner experience. C. An abiding problem: the characteristically Biblical understanding of God as a person who chooses becomes prominent, but begins to look like bad news: if grace is divine favor, then is a gracious God playing favorites? Essential Reading: Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian” in Martin Luther: Selections, pp. 42–85. Supplemental Reading: Calvin, Institutes, 3:21–22 (on predestination) and 4:14 (on the sacraments). Luther, “The Sacrament of Penance” in Luther’s Works, vol. 35, pp. 9–22.

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

  It is significant that, even though the Catholic monarchs remained the pope’s obedient servants, they insisted that it remain separate from the papal inquisition. Ferdinand may have hoped thereby to mitigate the cruelty of his own inquisition and almost certainly never intended it to be a permanent institution. 20 The Spanish Inquisition did not target Christian heretics but focused on Jews who had converted to Christianity and were believed to have lapsed. In Muslim Spain, Jews had never been subjected to the persecution that was now habitual in the rest of Europe, 21 but as the Crusading armies of the Reconquista advanced down the peninsula in the late fourteenth century, Jews in Aragon and Castile had been dragged to the baptismal font; others had tried to save themselves by voluntary conversion, and some of these conversos (“converts”) became extremely successful in Christian society and inspired considerable resentment. There were riots, and converso property was seized, the violence caused by financial and social jealousy as much as by religious allegiance. 22 The monarchs were not personally anti-Semitic but simply wanted to pacify their kingdom, which had been shaken by civil war and now faced the Ottoman threat. Yet the Inquisition was a deeply flawed attempt to achieve stability. As often happens when a nation is menaced by an external power, there were paranoid fears of enemies within, in this case of a “fifth column” of lapsed conversos working secretly to undermine the kingdom’s security. The Spanish Inquisition has become a byword for excessive “religious” intolerance, but its violence was caused less by theological than by political considerations. Such interference with the religious practice of their subjects was entirely new in Spain, where confessional uniformity had never been a possibility. After centuries of Christians, Jews, and Muslims “living together” (convivencia), the monarchs’ initiative met with strong opposition. Yet while there was no public appetite for targeting observant Jews, there was considerable anxiety about the so-called lapsed “secret Jews,” known as New Christians. When the Inquisitors arrived in a district, “apostates” were promised a pardon if they confessed voluntarily, and “Old Christians” were ordered to report neighbors who refused to eat pork or work on Saturday, the emphasis always on practice and social custom rather than “belief.” Many conversos who were loyal Catholics felt it wise to seize the opportunity of amnesty while the going was good, and this flood of “confessions” convinced both the Inquisitors and the public that the society of clandestine “Judaizers” really existed. 23 Seeking out dissidents in this way would not infrequently become a feature of modern states, secular as well as religious, in times of national crisis. After the conquest of 1492, the monarchs inherited Granada’s large Jewish community.

• From The Art of Memoir

  (I’d been told I needed a hundred pages and an outline), I started knowing where the words went. Plus an obvious order rose up— mostly chronological, with one flash forward at the outset. It didn’t happen in one instant. But over a period of a few days I went through a profound psychological shift. The images in my head suddenly had words representing them on the page. And accompanying the words was a state of consciousness. It almost felt like I’d walked into some inner room where my lived experiences could pass through and come out as language. If the voice worked as a living contract with the reader, it also strangely bound me to candor. To make stuff up would somehow have broken the spell the voice cast over me. Even fake names slid some glass down between me and the past. I had to do the whole book with real names and descriptions and do global find/replace afterward. Odd, that. Whatever the source of the voice—self-hypnosis, psychological peace, the ghost of Papa Hem saying Write one true sentence, or the Lord God on high—its arrival changed the whole game. I honestly don’t know if a shift in mind predated the voice or vice versa. But suddenly I felt the wagon I’d been pulling like a trudging ox was a vehicle with an engine, moving down the road. Pages started piling up. And two and a half years later I had a full draft of what went into print—so close they set type by it.

• From My People (2022)

  I had asked him how it was going to feel being out of power. He responded, almost jocularly, that his ruling party would likely not be out of power long, since a liberation movement had never successfully run a country. (I didn’t bother to bring up our American Revolution, among other examples, not least because his reference was clearly to countries in Africa.) As the unfolding political crisis grows, universities around the country have been engulfed with protests over proposed national tuition hikes. The University of the Witwatersrand, situated a few blocks from where I used to live in Johannesburg—I enjoyed walking my dog around its sprawling grounds—has been shut down, as violence has spread on the campus. In recent days, someone set a fire in the library; a shelf of books burned before it could be put out. Thirteen students have been suspended in the past four weeks, some arrested, others intimidated by a force of police officers brought onto the campus. As exam time approached and the protests continued, arrangements were made to extend the exam period for two weeks. At least one group of students took their finals in their professor’s living room. That professor, as it happens, is a friend of mine, and generally a big South Africa booster. When I wrote to ask him about the developments at Wits, as the university is known, and elsewhere, he responded, “South Africa these days is not for the fainthearted.” When I asked another friend, a doctor and loyal ANC member, for his take on what on earth was going on in the country we both loved, he quickly replied, “We must continue to believe that we live in a constitutional democracy.” But the responses I got from other friends included questions about what seems to them like our challenges to our own constitutional democracy. I had just done a conversation for PBS NewsHour on the N-word, arising out of how it was recently used by a white man against an African American reporter, and it resonated in South Africa, which has its own N-word that starts with a K . My South African friends also wrote in disbelief of threats of revolt and possible violence in the United States if one party fails to win the presidency. The country that so inspired them during their struggle has them, as it has a lot of us here, deeply worried. The issue is not only the damaging optics of this campaign season but the impact those optics will have within our country, as well as in countries like South Africa, where our beacon light, albeit imperfect, nevertheless has helped to light their often treacherous path to inclusive democracy. As a South African journalist colleague wrote to me on Tuesday morning, “Just writing to wish you all the best with elections. We are watching with bated breath hoping that America will vote wisely.

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

  4, to be a reproof of her premature haste.777 In the same way Tertullian, Origen, Basil the Great, and even Chrysostom, with all their high estimate of the mother of our Lord, ascribe to her on one or two occasions (John ii. 3; Matt. xiii. 47) maternal vanity, also doubt and anxiety, and make this the sword (Luke ii. 35) which, under the cross, passed through her soul.778 In addition to this typological antithesis of Mary and Eve, the rise of monasticism supplied the development of Mariology a further motive in the enhanced estimate of virginity, without which no true holiness could be conceived. Hence the virginity of Mary, which is unquestioned for the part of her life before the birth of Christ, came to be extended to her whole life, and her marriage with the aged Joseph to be regarded as a mere protectorate, and, therefore, only a nominal marriage. The passage, Matt. i. 25, which, according to its obvious literal meaning (the e{w" and prwtovtoko" 779), seems to favor the opposite view, was overlooked or otherwise explained; and the brothers of Jesus,780 who appear fourteen or fifteen times in the gospel history and always in close connection with His mother, were regarded not as sons of Mary subsequently born, but either as sons of Joseph by a former marriage (the view of Epiphanius), or, agreeably to the wider Hebrew use of the term ;aj cousins of Jesus (Jerome).781 It was felt—and this feeling is shared by many devout Protestants—to be irreconcilable with her dignity and the dignity of Christ, that ordinary children should afterward proceed from the same womb out of which the Saviour of the world was born. The name perpetua virgo, ajei; parqevno", was thenceforth a peculiar and inalienable predicate of Mary. After the fourth century it was taken not merely in a moral sense, but in the physical also, as meaning that Mary conceived and produced the Lord clauso utero.782 This, of course, required the supposition of a miracle, like the passage of the risen Jesus through the closed doors. Mary, therefore, in the Catholic view, stands entirely alone in the history of the world in this respect, as in others: that she was a married virgin, a wife never touched by her husband.783 Epiphanius, in his seventy-eighth Heresy, combats the advocates of the opposite view in Arabia toward the end of the fourth century (367), as heretics under the title of Antidikomarianites, opposers of the dignity of Mary, i.e., of her perpetual virginity. But, on the other hand, he condemns, in the seventy- ninth Heresy, the contemporaneous sect of the Collyridians in Arabia, a set of fanatical women, who, as priestesses, rendered divine worship to Mary, and, perhaps in imitation of the worship of Ceres, offered little cakes (kollurivde") to her; he claims adoration for God and Christ alone.

• From My People (2022)

  Thurow, since 1970 there is “little evidence” of any advance in the relative earnings of black males and the same is true of black females since 1971. Although black women are not far from parity with white women, according to Dr. Thurow, not only have white women lost ground but black women have also made virtually no progress in the higher-income, or top 5 percent jobs. “Whatever the feminist movement has done,” he said, “it hasn’t got anybody high-income jobs.” As for black families, he continued, from 1947 to 1952, black family incomes rose from 51 percent to 57 percent of white family earnings at the peak of the Korean War, declined to 51 percent with the recession of 1957–58, rose to 64 percent under the pressures of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, and then once again started to fall, reaching 60 percent in 1973. At the same time, however, among one of the two other ethnic groups—there are only three ethnic groups with incomes below the average—blacks, American Indians, and persons of Spanish heritage, according to Dr. Thurow—between 1969 and 1973, Spanish heritage families—particularly Cubans, Central and South Americans—have gone from a position of inferiority relative to both black and white families to a position of economic superiority relative to black families. A “substantial fraction” of that improvement, according to Dr. Thurow, comes from falling relative unemployment rates for male Spanish-heritage workers, along with an increase in the participation rate of Spanish-heritage females—a rate faster than that of black females. Rejecting the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as the mechanism for major changes in the distribution of earnings, Dr. Thurow urged “an all-out effort” by minority groups and others interested in such problems to push for a comprehensive job or real “right to work” program, one that is permanent and open ended. Irma Vidal Santaella, chairman of the Appeals Board of the New York State Division of Human Rights, argued against Dr. Thurow’s conclusions about the gains of Puerto Ricans, whose unemployment rates, particularly in New York City, she said, had soared to 22 to 23 percent as a result of the curtailment of poverty programs. In addition, the group of about two hundred people were advised by lawyers among the panelists not to discount law and litigation as forces for social change. That issue, along with a forecast for the future of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, will be among the concluding topics of the two-day session. Fighting Racism in SchoolsThe New York Times NOVEMBER 27, 2019 To the Editor: Re “Finding the Tools to Spot, and Fight, Intolerance in Schools” (news article, Nov. 24): Having examined this disturbing phenomenon in my PBS NewsHour series looking at solutions to racism, let me hasten to say that intolerance is a worrisome development that is germinating in the underbelly of our democracy.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  To keep him from sleepwalking, we knot three seatbelts around his limbs at night. Ba’s breath humidifies the whole car, and in the morning we wake with our windows steamed, our bodies hammocked in heat. Jie drives in a spine shape, swerving between lanes, uncontained. We pass Texas and unzip its border with New Mexico, which looks like the same state but thirstier, the cacti more nipplelike, asking for our mouths around them. The desert floor breeds rows of button cacti, and I’m tempted to wander out one night and undress them of their spines. Jie leans her head while she drives, half of her face frying against the window, the left half browning more than the right. I tell her she looks like two women splitting one mouth. Go deep-throat a cactus, she says. Go back to sleep. I dream it: my throat perforated with needle-holes, my throat turning into a sprinkler every time I try to drink. Jie and I buy corn dogs and packaged pies at convenience stores, where the clerks look at us like we’re a species of upright armadillo, yellow and armored. They watch through the window as Jie pumps gas, sometimes asking where we’re going, sometimes asking where we’re from. We say Taiwan even though we’ve never called it that, and the cashier grins big as a window: We see his missing teeth, we smell what he eats. He says he bombed Taiwan back during the war. Says it looked pretty from the air, a severed green finger floating in the sea. Jie tells him that Taiwan’s silhouette looks more like a finger flipping you off, then runs out of the store with a stolen lighter up her sleeve. The packaged fruit pies dye our spit different colors, and when Ba sleeps at night with his mouth ajar, I can see his tongue glowing blue-raspberry. We stop at a seafood restaurant somewhere left of Texas, though the closest sea is the one we dream. There’s a live fish tank two feet from our table, and when the waiter hears us speak his dialect he bags us a fish for the road even though we’ve got no fire to cook it. Finally, we fry it on the hood of our car, the sun seething through flesh. The fish tastes metallic, too much memory of the sea in its bones. On our maps, we pencil the line from Arkansas to LA: It’s straight all the way across, no excuse to get lost. Still, we get lost. In Arizona, we drive in circles around the same three cities until Ma lets us stop at a motel to ask directions.

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

  At the same time he prepared a written petition to the Council, which was received on the 24th of August. He demanded his release from the criminal charge for several reasons, which ought to have had considerable weight: that it was unknown in the Christian Church before the time of Constantine to try cases of heresy before a civil tribunal; that he had not offended against the laws either in Geneva or elsewhere; that he was not seditious nor turbulent; that his books treated of abstruse questions, and were addressed to the learned; that he had not spoken of these subjects to anybody but Oecolampadius, Bucer, and Capito; that he had ever refuted the Anabaptists, who rebelled against the magistrates and wished to have all things in common. In case he was not released, he demanded the aid of an advocate acquainted with the laws and customs of the country. Certainly a very reasonable request.1180 The attorney-general prepared a second indictment in refutation of the arguments of Servetus, who had studied law at Toulouse. He showed that the first Christian emperors claimed for themselves the cognizance and trial of heresies, and that their laws and constitutions condemned antitrinitarian heretics and blasphemers to death. He charged him with falsehood in declaring that he had written against the Anabaptists, and that he had not communicated his doctrine to any person during the last thirty years. The counsel asked for was refused because it was forbidden by the criminal statutes (1543), and because there was "not one jot of apparent innocence which requires an attorney." The very thing to be proved! A new examination followed which elicited some points of interest. Servetus stated his belief that the Reformation would progress much further than Luther and Calvin intended, and that new things were always first rejected, but afterwards received. To the absurd charge of making use of the Koran, he replied that he had quoted it for the glory of Christ, that the Koran abounds in what is good, and that even in a wicked book one may find some good things.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  The silence, the tension in the theater during the scene communicates itself through the house—from me to them, from them to me—and at the end of the night’s performance, when they clap and call me back for curtain call after curtain call, I feel it’s not only the actress they’re applauding, but me, Caroline, the woman, too. Acting often tends to split you off from yourself, and you don’t know who you are. But in this role, the audience’s applause—their approval—somehow reunites the actress in me with the private self in me. Now when I make love privately, I sometimes think, Oh, what’s the use… it’s all so dull and unstimulating. And there’s this feeling of anxiety. It’s as if I’m not sure I’m doing it well, you see, no matter what the man says. Before this play, I didn’t need fantasies. Or that’s what I would have told you six months ago. I realize now that somewhere in the back of my mind I’d always had someone watching while I made love: me. This split between the me who is in the act, actually making love, and the me who is watching, this split is healed by the audience taking over the role of watcher and applauding me for my efforts. I can’t tell you the feeling of satisfaction it gives me. I remember the first time we did the love scene before an audience. The rehearsals had naturally been private, and I had been able to be professionally cool and clinical about it. But on opening night I was very nervous and apprehensive, I imagine because I was afraid that they would think I was not very good, or wouldn’t give me their approval by becoming excited themselves… that they would just think the scene odd, and me very strange for being in it. But when they applauded… Now I need an audience; without it, there’s just no excitement. So even if I’m with the man I’m in love with, somehow in my mind I twist his face around so that it’s the face of the actor I’m in the play with. The funny thing is, I don’t even like the actor. Maybe that makes it even more exciting for me, I don’t know. I haven’t really figured this out. But I think it’s because behind him, behind his back is the audience, and they’re applauding him for making love to me and applauding me for responding to him in such a loving way. And as my own excitement mounts and mounts, the applause gets louder and louder… [Taped interview]

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

  In the following year, no less a figure than King George V’s personal physician, Bernard Lord Dawson, President of the Royal College of Physicians, bluntly warned the Anglican Church Congress in Birmingham that ‘birth control is here to stay’. His exalted status was probably only one factor in the Church leadership listening to him: what may be the key to the bishops’ growing change of stance was the fact that Dawson’s informed opinions were part of a conversation among former public schoolboys who moved in the same social world. [9] As a result, a great change in attitudes appeared in 1930, when the Lambeth Conference acknowledged in cautious Anglican-speak that there would be occasions when ‘a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood’, and ‘a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence’ would justify contraception in the light of Christian principles. The decision to use contraceptives should thus be up to the consciences of individual couples. More importantly, a majority among the bishops no longer considered birth control sinful by its nature. Some even argued that there was no real moral difference between sexual abstinence and artificial contraception, since both set out deliberately to prevent conception. [10] All through this discussion, eugenics remained significant; it was the chosen emphasis of the Church’s self-appointed expert on birth control, Theodore Woods, the Bishop of Winchester, who noted the alarming decline in birth rate among the middle and upper classes and considered that the lesser orders needed encouraging to limit their families so that the British population would be rebalanced towards the leaders of society and Empire. That argument swayed many doubters, though other speakers did say more about individual morality, and also equity for women. [11] The Anglican Communion had by whatever route become the first major Church grouping in the world to accept contraception as legitimate. The triumph of contraception in Anglicanism was sealed at the Lambeth Conference of 1958, where over three hundred bishops from forty-six countries unanimously decided that family planning was a ‘right and important factor in Christian family life’ – and it seems that where Anglicans lead, the world follows: in 2012 the United Nations declared access to family planning a universal human right. [12] Opposition to this momentous step had been still loud in the Lambeth debates in 1930. Anglo-Catholics were split, the final direction of the Conference being set from among their ranks by the moral theologian and later Bishop of Oxford Kenneth Kirk, while others in opposition echoed nineteenth-century Roman Catholic moral theology, chief among them being the veteran Anglo-Catholic leader and monk, Bishop Charles Gore of Oxford. Gore was an exceptionally clear-sighted theologian, austerely ready to call a spade a spade.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Then the shark-holding guy (who was wearing pink rubber gloves of the type grandmas use to wash dishes) asked Daddy if his girls wanted to see the hammerhead, and Daddy said sure. I’d never seen a shark up close before, and what struck me was how chinless it was, its mouth drawn low down where its neck should have been. This gave it a deep, snaggle-toothed frown and kept it from looking very smart. Plus its whole body was one big muscle. It couldn’t have weighed more than fifteen or twenty pounds, but the guy was having to fight to hold it, yelling over to Bucky to hurry. The shark, meanwhile, was thrashing from side to side in the air. Finally, Daddy helped the man pin the thing on the sand with his foot so Lecia and I could feel how rough its skin was. I rubbed it the wrong way (exactly, Daddy pointed out to me, as he had told me not to do) and it chafed the skin off my fingers like sandpaper. In the black-and-white picture from Bucky’s Polaroid camera, Lecia is looking solemnly at the shark, which is blurred into a kind of swinging bludgeon in the fellow’s gloved hands, and Daddy is grinning a little bit too hard, and I am studying my bloody fingers like they’re some code I’m about to crack. What was on my mind was Mother vanishing up those steps to drink, taking herself Away. There’s no picture of that worry, of course. I can only guess it from the crease in my forehead. Farther down the beach, we hit a kelp bed full of dead men-of-war, which was what Daddy had wanted us to see. There were more of these tangled up in the brown ribbons of kelp than I’d ever seen in one place before. The storm had blown them in, and Daddy wanted us to look out for them. If you’ve never seen a man-of-war, it’s something right out of science fiction. The head’s a translucent globe about the size of a softball and full of air, so it floats on top of the water, clear in places, but full of sunset-type colors in others—royal blue and red-violet, the colors bleeding into each other. A bunch of men-of-war bobbing on a wave looks at a slant like water flowers—lily or lotus, even. The colors are that strong. You can poke the head with a finger and feel it give like a bubble-gum bubble. But the tentacles dangling down under the surface hold serious poison. They’re fuchsia and grow yards long. They sway around where you can’t see them just looking for a leg to wrap onto, or so Daddy told us that afternoon. We knew jellyfish better. They had short hard tentacles that stayed in one place. We’d both been stung by jellyfish, and it was about like a honeybee sting.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Indeed, my exhaustion and my situation had beaten me down to the point of preferring death to the ordeal of keeping it at bay. We were then preparing to enter Dauphine, of a sudden six horsemen, galloping at top speed behind our coach, overtook it and, with drawn cutlasses, forced our driver to halt. Thirty feet off the highway was a cottage to which these cavaliers, whom we soon identified as constables, ordered the driver to lead the carriage; when we were alongside it, we were told to get out, and all three of us entered the peasant's dwelling. With an effrontery unthinkable in a woman soiled with unnumbered crimes, Dubois who found herself arrested, archly demanded of these officers whether she were known to them, and with what right they comported themselves thus with a woman of her rank. "We have not the honor of your acquaintance, Madame," replied the officer in charge of the squadron; "but we are certain you have in your carriage the wretch who yesterday set fire to the principal hotel in Villefranche"; then, eyeing me closely: "she answers the description, Madame, we are not in error - ; have the kindness to surrender her to us and to inform us how a person as respectable as you appear to be could have such a woman in your keeping." "Why, 'tis very readily accounted for," replied Dubois with yet greater insolence, "and, I declare, I'll neither hide her from you nor take her side in the matter if 'tis certain she is guilty of the horrible crime you speak of. I too was staying at that hotel in Villefranche, I left in the midst of all the commotion and as I am getting into my coach, this girl runs up, begs my compassion, says she has just lost everything in the fire, and implores me to take her with me to Lyon where she hopes to be able to find a place. Far less attentive to my reason than to my heart's promptings, I acquiesced, consented to fetch her along; once in the carriage she offered herself as my servant; once again imprudence led me to agree to everything and I have been taking her to Dauphine where I have my properties and family: 'tis a lesson, assuredly, I presently recognize with utmost clarity all of pity's shortcomings; I shall not again be guilty of them. There she is, gentlemen, there she is; God forbid that I should be interested in such a monster, I abandon her to the law's severest penalties, and, I beseech you, take every step to prevent it from being known that I committed the unfortunate mistake of lending an instant's credence to a single word she uttered."

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  5.GUILT AND FANTASY, OR, “WHY THE FIG LEAF?”WOMEN’S GUILTDo women dress for men or women? I’ve always wondered why that eternally provocative question is put in terms of approval—as if the heart of the matter, the answer, were indeed a question of approval by either sex. But the question is never satisfactorily answered because it is incorrectly posed. It’s disapproval, the fear of it, that motivates most women, and with disapproval it doesn’t matter where it comes from. It’s no different with sexual fantasy; the question is not for whom do women select their sexual imagery, but out of fear of whose disapproval do they suppress it? And the answer’s the same as above. Nor is the parallel especially contrived between what a woman chooses to put on her body and what sexual imagery it is that goes into her head. In the marvelous climactic scene of an early Bette Davis film, Jezebel, when she appears at the traditionally all-white-dress cotillion in a flaming red torch of a dress, whose hearts stop (along with the music) in shocked disapproval and anxiety at what she’s dared to wear? Absolutely everyone’s, both men and women. Everyone, that is, except handsome gambler George Brent, who suddenly sees that his own private fantasy of a woman is also Bette’s. And ours in the audience, too, of course. For an instant there, we share the fantasy of being the most daringly beautiful woman at the ball, who, rather than being rejected for her daring, is chosen because of it by the manliest man, the Hero. Then the lights go up; we sigh and go home to reality, where we would no more think of actually buying a dress like that than we would think of responding to the next “George Brent” who comes along. Not because a red sheath doesn’t suit us; there’s an equivalent on the market for what that dress does, for every woman, just as there’s an equivalent George Brent somewhere who could do for every woman what George did for Bette. But we don’t dress “out of character” (and in to fantasy) for the same reason we don’t act unpredictably; it would arouse too much anxiety. Anxiety in other women, in our men, and in ourselves.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  And the rare calm in her voice those times must have set Lecia fretting about the specter of Mother offing herself. We never spoke that worry out loud. But if Mother lingered too long and too quiet in the bath, Lecia might take up a post outside the locked door, her head cocked, listening with an intensity that always put me in mind of my cousin’s hunting dog at a stand of quail. Lecia seemed to hold her breath those times, listening with her whole self for the slightest scuttle to suggest something alive. If I went scampering down the hall humming to myself and ignorant of her worry, she’d wheel my way and press her finger hard against her lips to shush me, her face twisted into a mask of anger. Speaking a word like “suicide” aloud was unthinkable. We didn’t dare give it breath for fear of invoking it. In fact, we’d become superstitious enough to stop playing with the Ouija board. After the spirit of Grandma started spelling out how she was broadcasting to us from H-E-L-L, Lecia stamped on the planchette till it splintered. I pitched the board into the field of nettles behind our house. We both started any meal off by tossing salt over our shoulders, even times we hadn’t spilled any in the first place. And walking to school, we skipped every sidewalk crack. I kept the fingers of my left hand crossed all the time, while on my right-hand fingers I counted anything at all—steps to the refrigerator, seconds on the clock, words in a sentence—to keep my head occupied. The counting felt like something to hang on to, as if finding the right numbers might somehow crack the code on whatever system ran the slippery universe we were moving through. Mother’s misery was also sneaking up inside me somehow. One night after Hector passed out, she found me lying wide-eyed in bed next to the lump of quilts that was Lecia. She sat down on the mattress edge and read to me by the hall light from The Myth of Sisyphus , her bible at the time, by Albert Camus, whose name she taught me to pronounce right, so nobody at any future cocktail party would ever tease me for a hick. Sisyphus had it way worse than all of us, it seemed to me, being doomed to sweat and grunt pushing a boulder up a mountain all day and night without rest. The punch line was that once he got to the top of the mountain, the rock just rolled back down. So he had to push it up again, over and over. This happened forever, Mother said, closing the book. With my head lying deep in the trench of my pillow, I was still waiting for some moral, or happy ending, a reward for all that work.

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

  11 And not all shared the same concerns: some were strictly secular survivalists who were simply fleeing the threat of nuclear catastrophe. 12 Yet there is a religious patina to some of these extremist groups, who use the language of faith to express fears, anxieties, and enthusiasms that are widespread, though not openly expressed, in the mainstream. The reach of the message can be dramatic. Christian Identity’s brand of ideology would inspire Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. McVeigh was a self-professed agnostic, however. Like several Identity leaders, he had served in the U.S. Army and had a pathological attraction to violence. During the 1991 Gulf War he had helped massacre a group of trapped Iraqi soldiers and taken photographs of their corpses for his personal collection. He was not officially a member of Christian Identity but read its newsletter, had telephone conversations with its officers, and had visited its compound on the Oklahoma- Arkansas border. 13 How, then, can we try to understand terrorism as a particular species of violence? Like religion, “terrorism” is notoriously difficult to define. There are so many competing and contradictory formulations that, according to one scholar, the word is now “shrouded in terminological confusion.” 14 Part of the problem is that it is such an emotive word, one of the most powerful terms of abuse in the English language, and the most censorious way of characterizing any violent act. 15 As such, it is never used of anything we do ourselves, except perhaps in some abjectly penitential confession. Connoting more than it denotes, the word stubbornly refuses to reveal much, especially when both sides in a conflict hurl the same charge at each other with equal passion. Its effect is to accuse an opponent much more than to clarify the nature of the underlying conflict. 16 One attempt at definition describes the phenomenon as “the deliberate use of violence, or threat of its use, against innocent people, with the aim of intimidating them specifically or others into a course of action they would not otherwise take.” Yet this could also be said of some forms of conventional warfare. 17 Indeed, there is a general scholarly agreement that some of the largest-scale acts of terrorizing violence against civilians have been carried out by states rather than by independent groups or individuals. 18 In the national wars of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of civilians were firebombed, napalmed, or vaporized. During the Second World War, Allied scientists carefully calculated the mix of explosives and wind patterns to create devastating firestorms in densely populated residential areas in German and Japanese cities precisely to create terror in the population. 19 There is, however, at least one point on which everybody is in agreement: terrorism is fundamentally and inherently political, even when other motives—religious, economic, or social—are involved. 20 Terrorism is always about “power—acquiring it or keeping it.”