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.

Page 420 of 501 · 20 per page

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Zane was a legal adult—eighteen when he downloaded the app. Other boys I met were not. Whether they were openly gay with limited options or closeted, Grindr had become their outlet—a safe distance from that neutered public expression of gay-best-friend sexuality—for exploring actual sex. Elliot, a high school junior at a private school in Baltimore, would tell his mom (who didn’t know he was gay) that he was going out with friends, then drive to meet a stranger for a quickie; his partners were generally in their twenties but occasionally decades older. Elliot claimed to be nineteen on the apps. It wasn’t what he wanted, he said, but seemed like his only option. “All of my straight friends have had relationships. I’d like a boyfriend, too, but this is what is presented to me.” Neither Elliot nor the other high school boys I talked with disclosed their activity to friends and certainly not to parents, so no one knew where they were or what they were doing. “I always get nervous,” Elliot admitted, “because I don’t know whose house I’m going to be in. How is he going to talk? How is he going to smell? What is his place going to look like? Am I going to die right now?” Recently, he had met a man at the Fairmont hotel in Washington, DC, a locale he considered riskier than someone’s house. I suggested that if things went wrong in a hotel at least someone might hear him scream; his partner would have had to put down a credit card for the room, too. At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, in a private home he could be chopped up into little pieces and buried in the backyard and no one would be the wiser. “You’re right,” he responded. “I never thought of that.” If Elliot had been a teenage girl using swipe apps to have sex with random older men, I would likely have felt compelled to report the behavior to an adult. So why, I asked him, was this any different? “I don’t think it is, really,” he admitted. “It’s not ideal.” The trouble is, there aren’t a lot of outlets for gay teens to form romantic attachments or explore sexuality in an age-appropriate way. Even if they are out, other boys around them may not be, limiting their possibilities. “If choosing between an inappropriate relationship and celibacy,” Dan Savage said, “a horny teen will pick ‘inappropriate’ every time. Straight teens have more options and more support. Providing no channel or outlet for gay teenagers, telling them that they have to be eunuchs or aren’t allowed to act on desire sets those kids up for disaster. It drives them onto Grindr, where good and decent guys will block them, leaving the shitty guys, or the twenty-four-year-olds who really do think you’re eighteen.”

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

  The Cockburns were great writers. Each one of them kept a diary, in which every evening they recorded the events of their day; it was, I could see, another form of meditation, or even an examination of conscience; it was a way of making sense of their lives. Sally had kept her diary since she was eight years old, and I used to marvel at the thick volumes, one for each year, lined up on her shelves. “I don’t know how anybody manages without a diary,” she used to say. “You should have kept one in the convent. I bet you would have got out sooner; you see things so much more clearly when you write them down.” Both Sally and her parents constantly urged me to write about my years in the convent. “After all, it’s over ten years since you left,” Sally argued. “You’ll forget it all, and that would be such a pity.” In fact, I had been thinking along these lines myself. I was growing uneasy about the way these years were being trivialized, reduced to a series of funny stories to tell at dinner parties. It had been a crucial period and I needed to find out what it had really meant to me. I used to look thoughtfully at Sally’s diaries, which had clearly been a means of creative self-appraisal and discovery. Maybe I should try something similar. My mother agreed. She had recently given me a typewriter, which had been thrown out of her office. “But you can only have it on one condition,” she said. “Use it to write your story!” As it happened, I even had a literary agent lined up. Charlotte had invited me to a dinner party in her flat to meet June, who had edited an anthology of short stories to which Charlotte had contributed. June had become professionally alert as soon as she heard that I had been a nun. “You should write about that,” she said immediately. “That could be a terrific book!” “You could call it I Was a Teenage Nun!” her husband, Greg, quipped caustically. June looked at him reflectively. “Actually, that’s not bad . . .” She was just about to leave publishing and set up her own literary agency. “Remember,” she said at the end of the evening, “if ever you decide to write that book, let me know.” Things were moving a little too fast for me. The only major piece of writing I had attempted was my ill-fated thesis, and the kind of book that June had in mind was something very different. It would mean that I would have to reveal myself at my most vulnerable. It would be like stripping naked before hundreds of strangers. And writing books was something that other people did—people like Charlotte. The whole process seemed daunting. How would I know what incidents to select?

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

  “Yes.” In fact, this interested me. I had dropped into the Junior Common Room one evening and joined a group who were watching an adaptation of a D. H. Lawrence short story on the television. It had been about a young woman in flight from her sexuality. The play had ended with the disturbing shot of the rich old man she eventually married, who was rather like my visitant. As I explained this connection, I saw Dr. Piet brighten and scribble something on the pad in front of him. My heart sank. You didn’t have to be a genius to see how he would interpret this information. And sure enough: “Did you find yourself relating to the heroine in that play?” he asked. “Did you feel that she was like you?” As a matter of fact, I did not. She had been very flighty, beautiful, uneducated, had lots of money and not enough to fill her day. No, not very much like me. But then, what did I know? I probably was in flight from my sexuality, though as no man ever displayed the slightest interest in me, I did not see what I could do about this. Dr. Piet smiled rather smugly when I said this, as though he knew better. Perhaps he did. In the interests of my own recovery, I ought to give him the benefit of the doubt. “I’m interested that it is only the old man’s head that you see.” I raised my eyebrows. “Well, your life seems to revolve around the intellect. You seem fixated on heads and brains,” Dr. Piet continued. “You never see any of the other parts of his body.” I reflected, wryly, that perhaps I ought to be thankful for small mercies. If Dr. Piet meant what I thought he meant, these visions could be a lot worse. “I think we’re going to look at your relations with your parents,” Dr. Piet continued, leaning back in his chair and looking at me in a pleased kind of way, as though I were a promising child who had come out with all the right answers. “You see, these panic attacks seem to me to relate to your early childhood. To some shock or deprivation that occurred while you were growing up. They are rather classic images.” Again, the nod of professional pleasure. “And then, of course, we have to find out why you went into a convent in the first place. That’s hardly a normal decision for a teenage girl. Until we get to the root of that—find out what had gone so wrong in your life that you decided to leave the world— and,” he added pointedly, “to leave your family” —he paused significantly—“we cannot really get to the root of your problem.”

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Emmett has thought about joining one of the handful of historically black frats at the university but isn’t sure the time he’d need to put in as a pledge or what he described as “a more intense hazing process” would be worth the effort. None of those frats have houses on the row, either, which is fairly typical for black Greek institutions—they tend to be underfunded—nor do they have the equivalent hookup scene. African American students are, in general, less likely to drink to excess than whites and more likely to endorse gender equality, negating two essential preconditions for casual campus sex. Additionally, while members of both black and white fraternities objectify female classmates, a comparative study found that they diverged when it came to values regarding dating and intimacy: black Greeks were more likely to say companionship, sharing, and love were the main benefits of a serious relationship; white Greeks cited regular sex and being able to skip the condom. The black men also believed that “respecting women on campus” meant “[treating] a woman the way I would want to be treated” (though some health educators would say that is still the wrong standard—you should treat someone the way they want to be treated); the white guys said such things as “We won’t take advantage of them if they’re wasted,” or “I’ll never ask if she needs a ride home after we hook up. I’ll let her bring it up or let her spend the night.” The contrast was not solely a function of race; the researchers believed their findings might have been different had they also interviewed men at a historically black institution. They concluded that the small size, insularity, and visibility of the black community on a predominantly white campus had contributed, at least in part, to the sense of personal accountability that was largely absent for white men: black Greeks were more conscious of their position as leaders and role models, and that extended to better treatment of women. Emmett had hooked up with a few girls this semester, again almost all of them white. “But I’ve stayed in pretty safe situations,” he said. “The only real out-of-the-blue approaches I’ve had at parties were drunk white women who I guess are extremely horny for some reason, and I’m like, ‘No, this is not okay. Maybe you can hook up with a white guy, but if you’re intoxicated, I’m not going to.’”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  My new shoes looked quaint and girlish, like a principal boy’s in a pantomime. The trousers were shorter, their line rather spoiled. The jacket flared a little, above and below the waist, quite as if I had hips and a bosom - but it felt tighter than before, and not a half as comfortable. My face, of course, I could not see: I had to turn and squint into a picture over the hearth, and saw it reflected there - all eyes and lips - over the red nose and whiskers of ‘Rackity Jack’.I looked at the others. Mrs Dendy and the Professor smiled, Kitty did not look at all nervous, now. Walter was flushed, and seemed awed by his own handiwork. He folded his arms.‘Perfect,’ he said. After that - clad not exactly as a boy but, rather confusingly, as the boy I would have been, had I been more of a girl - my entry into the profession was rather rapid. The very next day Walter sent my costume to a seamstress, and had it properly re-sewn; within a week he had borrowed a hall and a band from a manager who owed him a favour, and had Kitty and I, in our matching suits, practising upon the stage. It was not at all like singing in Mrs Dendy’s parlour. The strangers, the dark and empty hall, disconcerted me; I was stiff and awkward, quite unable to master the few simple strolling steps that Kitty and Walter tried patiently to teach me. At last Walter handed me a cane, and said I should just stand and lean upon it, and let Kitty dance; and that was better, and I grew easier, and the song began to sound funny again. When we had finished and were practising our bows, some of the men in the orchestra clapped us.Kitty sat and took a cup of tea, then; but Walter led me off to a seat in the stalls, away from the others, and looked grave.‘Nan,’ he began, ‘I told you when all this started that I would not press you, and I meant it; I would give up the business altogether before I forced a girl upon the stage against her will. There are fellows who do that sort of thing, you know, fellows who think of nothing but their own pockets. But I am not one of them; and besides, you are my friend. But -’ he took a breath. ‘We have come this far, the three of us; and you are good - I promise you, you are good.’‘With work, perhaps,’ I said doubtfully.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Think for a moment of how a “proclamation” like this works. Those of us who live in modern democracies are used to the idea of a new government taking office, with a new president or prime minister. We are used to hearing about this on the radio or TV. When this happens, almost all of us simply accept that this is how things now are. We believe in democracy. Even if we didn’t vote for the eventual winner, we shrug our shoulders and recognize that the majority disagreed with us this time around. Whatever happens, it’s unlikely to mean that all the old laws and all the old customs will be swept away, or that the new leader will invent a whole lot of new ones and expect us all to come into line. Some policies will shift this way or that, to be sure. But a new leader, a new government, won’t transform our lives from top to bottom. But imagine what it would be like if you’d lived for years and years under the vicious and repressive rule of a foreign tyrant. You have no system in place to change things. No elections are held, or if they are, they’re rigged from start to finish. And imagine that this takes place in a world without radio, TV, or printed media. The only way you hear about things is by rumor (often very effective, and sometimes remarkably accurate) or by some kind of public proclamation—perhaps as it finally filters down to your town, far away from the center of power. Proclamations would be used too to announce a change of ruler, but the continuation of the system. The old emperor dies, but the power brokers around him will take care that, before the bad news of his death is released, the good news of his successor is firmly in place. Then the heralds are sent off to provinces, cities, and towns across the whole empire, with a message that carries weight, authority, and a sense that this isn’t a new idea you might like to think about, but a new fact that you’d better get used to. “Good news—we have a new emperor!” So when Jesus was in his late teens, and the old emperor Augustus finally died after his four decades as master of the Western world, we can imagine Jesus, perhaps in the newly rebuilt city of Sepphoris, not far from Nazareth, being in the market square when the herald came in to read the proclamation. “Good news—Tiberius Caesar is emperor!”

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But before we can even get going, we have to face a problem that is peculiarly our own. Behind the three historical puzzles ( Jesus’s world, Jesus’s God, and Jesus’s behavior—acting as if he was in charge) are additional difficulties that, like the elements of a perfect storm, have come together to pose severe challenges for anyone trying to address the questions about Jesus, let alone to do so simply. I Chapter 3 The Perfect Storm T WAS LATE OCTOBER 1991. The crew of the fishing boat Andrea Gail, out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, had taken the vessel five hundred miles out into the Atlantic. A cold front moving along the Canadian border sent a strong disturbance through New England, while at the same time a large high- pressure system was building over the maritime provinces of southeastern Canada. This intensified the incoming low-pressure system, producing what locals called the “Halloween Nor’easter.” As Robert Case, a meteorologist, put it, “These circumstances alone could have created a strong storm, but then, like throwing gasoline on a fire, a dying Hurricane Grace delivered immeasurable tropical energy to create the perfect storm.” 3 The hurricane, sweeping in from the Atlantic, completed the picture. The forces of nature converged on the helpless Andrea Gail from the west, the north, and the southeast. Ferocious winds and huge waves reduced the boat to matchwood. Only light debris was ever found. There had, of course, been earlier “perfect storms,” but this was the one made famous by the book and movie of that title. Those of us who study and write about Jesus find ourselves at the mercy of our own perfect storm. The very mention of Jesus raises all kinds of winds and cyclones today. Listen to the buildup of the western wind. “How do we know those things really happened? Isn’t it the sort of legend people always tell about remarkable characters? Hasn’t modern science and history shown we can’t believe that kind of tale? And anyway, weren’t the books about Jesus written a long time later, by people who wanted to make him out to be someone extra special, so that they could boost their own religious beliefs or even establish some kind of power for themselves? Isn’t it time we got rid of these old superstitions once and for all?” But as that storm whistles in from the west, watch the skies darken to the north, as other voices clamor for our attention. “Of course Jesus did it! The Bible is the word of God, and we have to believe it! Anyway, he was the Son of God, so he could do that kind of stuff. Miracles were his stock-in-trade. We have to stand up for the truth of the gospels against the blasts of modern skepticism.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  And his followers really believed it had happened. Talking about someone new being in charge was dangerous talk in Jesus’s day, and it’s dangerous talk still. Someone behaving as if they possess some kind of authority is an obvious threat to established rulers and other power brokers. Perhaps that’s why, particularly in the last two or three hundred years, this side of Jesus hasn’t been explored too much. Our culture has become used to thinking of Jesus as a “religious” figure rather than a “political” one. We have seen those two categories as watertight compartments, to be kept strictly separate. But it wasn’t like that for Jesus and others of his time. What would happen if we took the risk of going back into his world, into his vision of God, and asking, “Suppose it really is true?” What would it look like, in other words, if Jesus not only was in charge then, but is in charge today as well? A ridiculous idea, you might say. It’s blindingly obvious that Jesus isn’t in charge in our world. Murder, misery, and mayhem still continue, as they always have. Even Jesus’s own so-called followers contribute their fair share. (As I write this, a “Christian” mob is vowing to take violent revenge on adherents of another religion who have bombed a packed church.) What could we possibly mean by saying, “Jesus is in charge”? Well, we’ll come to that later. But before we can even get going, we have to face a problem that is peculiarly our own. Behind the three historical puzzles ( Jesus’s world, Jesus’s God, and Jesus’s behavior—acting as if he was in charge) are additional difficulties that, like the elements of a perfect storm, have come together to pose severe challenges for anyone trying to address the questions about Jesus, let alone to do so simply. Part Two Part Three Further Reading I T WOULD BE possible to compile a bibliography for the present book that would be almost as long as a chapter. An annotated bibliography could easily be as long as the book itself. Instead, I content myself here with noting some recent books that I regard as supplementing (and quite often challenging) the work I set out in Jesus and the Victory of God (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996) and The Challenge of Jesus (London: SPCK; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2000). They remain basic for my own account of Jesus, standing firmly on the foundations laid (not least in regard to Second Temple Judaism) in The New Testament and the People of God (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992). For the resurrection, one may cite The Resurrection of the Son of God (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003). A team of scholars has engaged with my work in the recent symposium Jesus, Paul and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N. T.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Chris is old enough to remember the groundswell of horror that, in the 1960s, recognized racism for what it was, in the United States and South Africa in particular, and worked to eliminate it. (It took longer in South Africa, but the movements were clearly related.) Such movements may or may not have been initiated or led by Christians; some were, some weren’t. That’s not the point: God isn’t confined to the church. Chris is now inclined to see a similar God-given groundswell of opinion in the feminist movement and the green agenda. For Chris, God is at work in the world, and our task is to see what he’s doing and to join in, to do it with him. That is how the kingship of Jesus is to be worked out in the world today. Davie pours cold water on Chris’s hot-headed enthusiasm. Chris is simply repeating what Hitler’s tame theologians said in the 1930s: “God has raised up the German nation to transform the world; the church must get in line and lend its support to what God is already doing.” That, Davie recalls, is partly why Karl Barth uttered his famous “No!” There are many times when the church needs to recognize quite other “forces” at work in the great movements of ideas and beliefs, forces that worship the idols of money, military power, blood and soil, and not least the supposed “life force” of sex itself. All these, Davie insists, drag the church down into a form of pantheism, where God and the world are simply confused with one another, and dark, deathly forces within the world are given a cheerful would-be Christian whitewashing. Instead of that, Davie proposes, what we need is a fresh word from God, a word from outside, a fresh summons to worship Jesus and so to be fortified in our stand against all human power systems and idolatries. The church must not collude with the world! Jesus is driving the car, not merely steering a toboggan carried downhill by its own weight. And sometimes the car has to go in the opposite direction to the rest of the traffic. This isn’t dualism, Davie insists. This is how Jesus is claiming what is rightfully his own in the first place, but has been under enemy rule. This is what it looks like for Jesus to be king today. Andy, of course, listens to this discussion and thinks it’s a waste of time. Billy, naturally, thinks it’s a category mistake, since, though Jesus does care about the way the world is at the moment, the only way he’s going to fix it is by coming back once and for all. Chris, meanwhile, is uncomfortably aware of leaving open the question of which of the movements of history we claim as the work of God. Communism or capitalism? Rationalism or Romanticism? Modernism or postmodernism?

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  That has happened again and again. I believe that this kind of easy-going anachronism is almost as corrosive to genuine Christian faith as skepticism itself. This tropical storm—the challenge of writing history about Jesus—would be threatening enough even without the cultural pressures of the western wind (modernist skepticism) and the high-pressure system to the north (would-be “Christian” conservatism). Or, if you like, angry voices from the left, angry voices from the right, and a major historical puzzle sweeping in on us with full force. If, trying to make things simple, we fail to recognize this multilayered complexity, we will simply repeat the age-old mistake of imagining Jesus in our own image or at least placing him, by implication, in our own culture. And part of the whole point of the Christian message is that what happened back then, what happened to Jesus, what happened through him, was a one-time, never-to-be-repeated piece of history. Hence the perfect storm of present-day discussion. I have on my desk as I write two brand-new books about Jesus, one written by the pope himself and another by a well-known English skeptic. Both are learned, sophisticated, engaging. They cannot both be true. Behind me are twenty shelves of books about Jesus and the gospels written over the last two hundred years. They cannot all be true either. What are we to do? Faced with this massive storm brewing, some earnestly advise us to stay in the harbor. It’s too dangerous out there just now; let’s just tell the story the way we learned it, let’s rely on the great tradition of the church, let’s be faithful to our scriptures. This amounts, of course, to a sophisticated version of the northern high-pressure system: take shelter from the western wind, pretend the hurricane isn’t happening, and just let the northern wind blow wherever it wants. To do anything else, such voices say, is to capitulate to the forces of skepticism and cynicism, to collude with post-Enlightenment reductionist notions of “history.” Not so. The western wind of modernist skepticism and the eastern hurricane of historical puzzle are not the same thing. There were historians before the Enlightenment; please God, there will be historians after postmodernity. History studies what actually happened (and when, and where, and how) and particularly why people did what they did. These are good questions. We should be grateful to the whole post-Enlightenment movement we loosely call “modernism” for reminding us that they matter, even as we should firmly decline the same movement’s unwarranted restriction of the kinds of answers it is prepared to accept. Part of our difficulty here—this has been another serious problem I’ve faced in writing this book—is that the world of first-century Palestinian Judaism was complex and (to us) often highly confusing.

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

  “This is Karen, Jacob. She’s going to come and live here and help to look after you. Won’t that be nice?” Her tone turned the question into a plea. Jacob stared at me with hostility. “Hello, Jacob.” Even I could hear the anxiety in my voice. Jacob turned away in apparent disdain, and walked to the far end of the room. His gait was the only thing that indicated that there might be something wrong. He shuffled rather clumsily, his long arms swinging at his side, as though they didn’t quite belong to his body. “Go away!” he roared suddenly, and flung himself face downward on the floor. Jenifer crossed the room and knelt beside him. “Karen’s such a nice girl. She’s going to sleep in the room next to your playroom. When she brings her luggage over from college, you could help her unpack.” I tried—I feared unsuccessfully—to look delighted at the prospect. From the next room, the serene strains of a Mozart piano concerto filled the air. “Be quiet!” Jacob ordered. “Or I shall become very, very angry.” Jenifer gave up and returned to the sofa. “Herbert!” she shouted. “Come and meet Karen.” The Mozart stopped abruptly, there was another confusion of footsteps, and the door of the drawing room was flung open after much fumbling with the handle, and crashed against the wooden arm of one of the chairs. Herbert Hart, former Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford, but now retired, made his way toward me with an absent but charming smile, uncombed hair, a clever Jewish face, and clothes somewhat haphazardly put together. As he stumbled erratically across the room, missing the coffee table more by accident than design, I realized that Jacob’s deportment was not the result of his disability but was hereditary. “How do you do?” He was, I noticed, a shy person. “How very nice to have you with us.” “This is Karen Armstrong.” Jenifer started to make the introductions. “Karen, this is my husband, Herbert—” “The Royal Arms!” The words were spoken with emphasis. We all turned, puzzled, to Jacob beside the French doors. “The Royal Arms!” he intoned again, still lying facedown on the floor. We looked at one another, and Herbert shrugged elaborately as he hurled himself perilously into a chair. “A pub, I suppose,” he muttered. “I don’t think I’ve taken him to one called the Royal Arms. He probably saw the sign during our drive. Jacob, tell Mummy and . . . er . . . Karen where we went this afternoon.” “The Royal Arms!” Jacob scrambled into a sitting position and beamed happily at us. We smiled back, grateful but mystified. “No, we didn’t go to the Royal Arms, darling.” Herbert’s rather husky voice was patient. “We went to—can you remember?”

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

  “Yes, we did, actually,” I said. Geoffrey’s head snapped to attention, his eyes startled. “You’re not serious, are you?” I nodded. “Good God.” He gazed, lost for words for a moment, at the ceiling. “We always thought that was a silly fantasy—one of the absurd stories that people tell about nuns. I had no idea that they actually did it.” “You’ve had a sheltered life, Geoffrey.” I stood up and started putting on my coat. “If you’re not careful, I’ll tell you the whole story one day.” “I’m not sure that I could take it.” Geoffrey was smiling but I could sense his real distaste. “I suppose that’s women for you,” he said reflectively as we walked down the cloister. “We always said in the army that they were no good at community life. They seem to get bogged down in petty rules and regulations—can’t see the wood for the trees.” Perhaps, I thought as I headed back to college. But I also knew enough about the church to know that it was men who had made the rules in the first place. I had mixed feelings as the train thrust its way through the lush Sussex countryside. In one sense, I was going home, going back to the convent where I had spent the first three years of my religious life. I had received a letter from Sister Rebecca, asking me if I could come to see her. This in itself was surprising. Visitors were generally discouraged and I could scarcely be considered a suitable companion for Rebecca. Things had obviously changed during the fourteen months that I had been away. But I had some misgivings about my own reactions. I had no idea how it would feel to be in a convent atmosphere once more.

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

  “Karen, my dear, how very nice to see you.” I looked up from my breakfast, which I was enjoying in the elegant parlor. How odd it was to be waited on in this way, as I had so often waited on visitors, bringing in coffee, toast, and eggs, while a few hundred yards away the community were eating cornflakes, bread, and margarine. There were some advantages to secular life, I reflected, helping myself to more marmalade but hastily suppressing my involuntary smile of enjoyment when Mother Frances came into the room. She looked somewhat less imposing in her new habit, but she had recently been promoted to become one of the provincial councillors. “But I’m interrupting your breakfast.” Mother Frances gestured toward the hot buttered toast. “Not at all, Reverend Mother.” Instantly I became the young nun again, unable to swallow a single mouthful while my former superior stood waiting to speak to me. “Well, you’re looking very well,” she went on, settling herself in one of the oak carvers at the head of the table. “Are you well?” “Not really, Reverend Mother.” I knew that I was supposed to say that everything was fine, but I suddenly pictured Rebecca’s stricken face. “I’m finding it very hard—almost impossible—to adapt. And it seems to be making me ill.” I briefly gave her the headlines: the fainting, the panic attacks, and the psychiatrist. “Oh really, Sister—Karen, I mean.” She corrected herself, laughing lightly but without amusement. “I really had hoped that you would grow out of all that nonsense! It’s high time, surely. You must be twenty-five? Twenty-six?” “Twenty-five,” I replied, though I couldn’t really see what my age had to do with it. “Well, there you are, then. Far too old for these childish displays.” “But how do I adjust?” Perhaps she should understand the problem so that she could advise other nuns who were thinking of leaving. “I trained to become a nun for five solid years. You know what it was like. You call it ‘formation’ now, I believe, and that’s what it is. It’s a training that shapes you at a very deep level. And I just can’t stop being a nun. I need a new training—one that is equally intensive—to turn me into a secular. Undoing habits and attitudes which are now engrained. I don’t know how to do this. You and Mother Walter made me a nun, but how do I reverse that? I don’t have anybody to help me deprogram myself, and I don’t think I can do it alone.” “Still as dramatic as ever, I see.” Mother Frances sounded bored, as she often did when, I suspected, she felt on uncertain ground. “It’s bound to be difficult at first. Of course it is.” She smiled brightly, and in an effort, perhaps, to avoid my eye, she started to brush away the crumbs scattered on the gleaming tabletop. “But I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.”

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  For some college men, treating a sexual partner—especially one who was not suitably hot or selective—with roughness or disinterest and then bragging about it the next day became a form of image management, a preemptive strike against potential ridicule, the loss of social currency. So, when boys assured me that their friends, their frat brothers, their classmates would never assault a girl (it was always those other boys), that could feel like a very low bar: having sex that is technically “legal” is hardly the same as sex that is ethical, mutual, reciprocal, or kind. “Casual sex can be great,” a sophomore at a Los Angeles college told me. “But you can forget to treat the other person as a human being.” Boys felt less strongly than girls that the game was rigged against them; still, few felt the competitive, detached nature of hookup culture fully served them. They struggled not only with unexpected feelings of connection and vulnerability, but with other emotions: inadequacy, anxiety, insecurity, confusion, disappointment, embarrassment—none of which, as guys, they felt permission to express. That was especially true in high school, where hookup culture, while less studied (academics tend to focus on college students), truly begins. Ws and Ls Nate, a high school junior from the Bay Area, recalled sinking deeper into the couch, trying to look chill, like he was such an insider that he didn’t need to prove it by standing around with the other kids gathered in Nicole’s living room. The party was slowly filling up with students from his high school: first the sophomores, then, later, other juniors and a few seniors. The table next to him was crowded with handles of liquor, beer bottles, and a fruit-flavored malt drink called Great America that was packaged like moonshine, in mason jars. Kids were drinking shots and moking. Some were Juuling. “People at my school like to get fucked up, because they have so much pressure on them,” he told me. “So at parties they just want to fucking destroy their bodies and feel like they have no inhibitions. There is a lot of getting drunk and there’s a lot of ‘fun’ I don’t completely understand.” Nate described himself as in the middle of his school’s social scene: friends with the “popular” kids, but also with the “lower” kids. “But the hierarchy really centers around who has access to the parties,” he explained. “And I do get invited to all the parties.” Nate didn’t drink much himself, and he never got high: he wasn’t morally opposed to it; he just didn’t like the feeling of being out of control. So he usually ended up as designated driver, or taking care of the guy who was puking on the sidewalk, or “protecting” a female friend from some wasted, creepy guy’s advances, slinging an arm around her shoulder as if making a claim.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Sameer phoned his roommate, who begrudgingly cleared out—they had a rule against bringing girls home after two a.m., but Sameer pleaded, “Come on, just this once, man!”—taking his bedding with him. When they got to his dorm, Anwen removed the shorts she’d worn to the party, leaving on her leggings and tank top. She popped her contact lenses into a shot glass filled with water (never a good idea). Then she went to the bathroom. Sitting in a stall, she racked her brain for any friends she had in common with Sameer, anyone whose number might be in his contacts. What are you doing? she thought. What are you doing? Maybe she could sleep in the dorm’s common room. “But I knew he’d say that was silly: there was a bed in his room, blankets.” Her mind reeled. It was so late. She was so tired. She just wanted to sleep. Looking back now, Anwen wishes she had thought to go to campus security. She wishes she had followed the two boys back to her dorm. She wishes her friends hadn’t abandoned her. She wishes the fraternity brother who locked her stuff in his room had told her that he was leaving. She wishes she lived in an era where people still memorized their friends’ phone numbers. “So many things,” she told me. “So many things.” But none of that is what happened. Chance and choice colluded: people don’t always make the decisions that seem patently obvious in hindsight. When she returned to Sameer’s room, he had queued up Bon Iver’s “Skinny Love,” which Anwen had said was one of her favorite songs. He began kissing her against the closed door, scooped her onto his bed, then climbed up after her. He knew her sexual experience was limited; his was, too, but the girls he’d been with before “liked it rough,” or at least appeared to, so he began rubbing Anwen between the legs, hard. It hurt. “Oh, fuck,” he said, “it would feel so good to fuck you.” “Remember, I don’t want to have sex,” she replied. “It’s okay, I don’t have a condom,” Sameer said again. A few minutes later he told her, “Take off your shirt”—more an order than a request. She had pulled her top halfway off when he grabbed a breast and squeezed. A wave of revulsion hit her, and she jerked away, blurting, “No!” “It’s okay,” he said. “That can come later.” Sameer figured he’d try again when Anwen was more comfortable: he attributed her hesitation to nerves and inexperience. He imagined he would be “the nice guy,” a “teacher” who would help her along without judgment. He took her hand, guided it to the crotch of his sweatpants, and began to rub, then he pulled out his penis. “You should play with it,” he said. “It doesn’t bite.”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I felt my eyes, that had been so wide and dazzled, grow small again in the gloom of the coach, and I began to feel, not thrilled, but rather nervous. I wondered what kind of lodgings he had found for us, and what kind of lady Mrs Dendy would be. I hoped that neither would be very grand.I need not have worried. Once we had left the West End and crossed the river, the streets grew greyer and quite dull. The houses and the people here were smart, but rather uniform, as if all crafted by the same unimaginative hand: there was none of that strange glamour, that lovely, queer variety of Leicester Square. Soon, too, the streets ceased even to be smart, and became a little shabby; each corner that we passed, each public house, each row of shops and houses, seemed dingier than the one before. Beside me, Kitty and Mr Bliss had fallen into conversation; their talk was all of theatres and contracts, costumes and songs. I kept my face pressed to the window, wondering when we should ever leave behind these dreary districts and reach Greasepaint Avenue, our home.At last, when we had turned into a street of tall, flat-roofed houses, each with a line of blistered railings before it and a set of sooty blinds and curtains at its windows, Mr Bliss broke off his talk to peer outside and say that we were almost there. I had to look away from his kind and smiling face, then, to hide my disappointment. I knew that my first, excited vision of Brixton - that row of golden make-up sticks, our house with the carmine-coloured roof - was a foolish one; but this street looked so very grey and mean. It was no different really, I suppose, from the ordinary roads that I had left behind in Whitstable; it was only strange - but therefore slightly sinister.As we stepped from the carriage I glanced at Kitty to see if she, too, felt any stirrings of dismay. But her colour was as high, and her eyes as damp and shining, as before; she only gazed at the house to which our chaperon now led us, and gave a little, tight-lipped smile of satisfaction.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But I decided to answer the simple question by putting together, layer upon layer, in as simple a fashion as I could, what I thought might help someone who really wanted to find the way to Jesus, to Jesus as he really was, and so to find the way through Jesus both to God himself and to a life in which “following Jesus” would make sense. The book then falls, more or less, into three parts. Part One consists of the first five chapters, in which I try to explain what the key questions are, why they matter, and why we today find them difficult to answer. Then, in the central part of the book, Part Two (Chapters 6–14), I try, as simply as I can, to say what I think Jesus’s public career was all about, what he was trying to accomplish, and how he went about it. At this point, to be honest, the material is so rich and dense that I have found myself, like a gardening expert given half an hour to guide a visitor around the Chelsea Flower Show, both spoiled for choice as to what to talk about and anxious about maintaining some shape and direction to the conducted tour. I found it necessary, here and there, to indulge in the cinematic technique of “flashbacks,” and indeed “flash-forwards,” taking readers away from Jesus for a moment to remark on other leaders or would-be leaders in Jewish movements of the period. (I didn’t want to put those up front, or readers might have become tired, and might have despaired of ever arriving at Jesus himself. By placing them where I have, I trust they illuminate Jesus rather than distract attention from him.) In this section I ask readers to try various thought experiments. This is absolutely necessary, because first-century Jews thought very differently from the way we do now—and, indeed, from the ways in which other first-century people such as the Greeks and the Romans thought. We have to make a real effort to see things from a first-century Jewish point of view, if we are to understand what Jesus was all about. All this brings us, in the end, to Jesus’s death, resurrection, and ascension and the meaning of those events. Throughout the whole book, as will quickly become apparent, I have done my best to explore the meaning of the phrase Jesus used as the great slogan for his whole project, the “kingdom of God.”

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

  The bus came to a stop in the church parking lot, and Will walked to the front of the bus. He thanked everybody for coming and urged them to stay involved. “It’s a long road we’re traveling,” he said, “but tonight showed me what we can do when we put our minds to it. That good feeling you got right now, we got to keep it going till we got this neighborhood back on its feet.” A few people smiled and offered an amen. But as I stepped off the bus, I heard a woman behind me whispering to her friend, “I don’t need to hear about the neighborhood, girl. Where these jobs they talking about?” The day after the rally, Marty decided it was time for me to do some real work, and he handed me a long list of people to interview. Find out their self-interest, he said. That’s why people become involved in organizing—because they think they’ll get something out of it. Once I found an issue enough people cared about, I could take them into action. With enough actions, I could start to build power. Issues, action, power, self-interest. I liked these concepts. They bespoke a certain hardheadedness, a worldly lack of sentiment; politics, not religion. For the next three weeks, I worked day and night, setting up and conducting my interviews. It was harder than I’d expected. There was the internal resistance I felt whenever I picked up the phone to set up the interviews, as images of Gramps’s insurance sales calls crept into my mind: the impatience that waited at the other end of the line, the empty feeling of messages left unreturned. Most of my appointments were in the evening, home visits, and the people were tired after a full day’s work. Sometimes I would arrive only to find that the person had forgotten our appointment, and I’d have to remind him or her of who I was as I was eyed suspiciously from behind a half-opened door. Still, these were minor difficulties. Once they were overcome, I found that people didn’t mind a chance to air their opinions about a do-nothing alderman or the neighbor who refused to mow his lawn. The more interviews I did, the more I began to hear certain recurring themes. I learned, for example, that most of the people in the area had been raised farther north or on Chicago’s West Side, in the cramped black enclaves that restrictive covenants had created for most of the city’s history. The people I talked to had some fond memories of that self-contained world, but they also remembered the absence of heat and light and space to breathe—that, and the sight of their parents grinding out life in physical labor.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  How drunk had Yale been? What had happened, exactly, and on what bed and when? He’d been careful about himself, protecting Roman. They hadn’t been careful the other way. Because Roman was a virgin. Because Roman was a virgin. Yale said, “Tell me.” “He’s not that hot, chill out. I met him last year at my friend Michael’s lecture at the Cultural Center. He’s got this whole tortured artist thing going on, like he just suddenly has to leave the room and be alone.” “Oh.” Yale relaxed. “I thought you met him at a bathhouse or something.” “God, Yale, I go other places. I mean—” he laughed, leaned close “—I ploughed him like a fresh spring field, but we definitely met at the Cultural Center.” Yale let Teddy step ahead of him in line. The park was more sound than color now, more vibration than reality. If he opened his eyes, he’d be in bed next to Charlie, and it would be last summer. He told Teddy he’d be back and he stepped toward Roman’s group, which was still quite far away. He needed to see that it wasn’t Roman. The mayor was still talking, and the air still smelled like hot dogs, and yes, it was Roman standing there looking bored, just like his bored and beautiful friends. Yale might have run home and hidden under his blankets, but instead he made his way past a pack of leatherdykes, past the guy with the bird, and straight to Roman. Roman tried to angle his body away, a teenager who didn’t want his friends knowing that this embarrassing person was his dad. Yale said, “May I have a word?” One of the boys in black hooted; the other said, “Who is she?” Roman opened his mouth as if he wanted to make an excuse not to talk, but then he wiped his brow with the back of his arm and stepped away with Yale. Yale didn’t care if Teddy looked over and saw them together. He was far beyond caring. He said, “We’ll make this really quick. Did you misrepresent yourself?” “I’m sorry?” “I should have been—I should have asked you more questions. I should have made you take some kind of written exam. Is this what you do? You go around doing the confused Mormon act? Like, role-playing?” Roman said, “What are you talking about?” His friends were watching, snickering. They were too far away to hear. “I’m a Mormon. That wasn’t a lie.” “But you’re a Mormon who sleeps with a lot of men. Who’s been doing this for a long time.” “Well, no. Not a lot. I mean, I used to. I was trying to be monogamous.” For a second Yale thought Roman meant monogamy with him, that their hazy midnight assignations were meant to be some kind of steady relationship, but that made no sense. And Roman kept talking. “Or, like, I had been, and then he was—like, he felt kind of suffocated, I guess.

• From The Art of Memoir

  feet wet. You’ll work up to it. Let’s face it: you dread this scene as the rich dread tax time, as demons dread Jesus. It’s a haunter. You’re going to write it now. Don’t get me wrong: your goal is not to finish these pages. The opposite. This draft will land in a folder you keep. I want you to suffer through sitting in a room for some hours with your worst memories. But you’ll start with a centering exercise in an attempt to get underneath your normal ego and into some deeper place, more receptive to the truth. Meditation as a technique to loosen creative powers fills boatloads of books. There are millions of techniques: counting your breaths one to ten, following your breath, a mantra, visualization, studying a passage of sacred writing. In getting tough-guy undergrads to meditate, I found the story of Zen basketball master Phil Jackson’s Sacred Hoops useful. Students who’d otherwise refuse to close their eyes and get woo-woo in class went along behind Jackson’s example. Phil writes about playing as a young man from a warrior’s ego— all rage for dominance. But in the NBA, as he reaches the far edge of his natural physical talent, he chooses to cultivate a mental edge. Through Zen meditation, Jackson starts to notice how much noise is in his head during a game, including anger (“That #$%^& Chamberlain. Next time he’s dead meat.”) and self-blame (“Phil, a sixth-grader could’ve made that shot!”). The litany was endless. However the simple act of becoming mindful in the frenzied parade of thoughts, paradoxically, began to quiet my mind down. . . . Yogi Berra once said about baseball: “How can you think and hit at the same time?” The same is true with basketball, except everything’s happening much faster. The same is true of writing. To tap in to your deepest talent, you need to seek out a calm, restful state of mind where your head isn’t defending your delicate ego and your heart can bloom open a little. For me, my mind is constantly checking where I am in line— comparing myself to others, or even to a former self, racing, fretting, conniving to get ahead. But underneath that is another self that quietly notices all that. A friend called to say she was going crazy