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 Open (2009)

  PART OF THE PROBLEM with my game in 1989 is my racket. I’ve always used a Prince, but Nick has convinced me to sign with a new company, Donnay. Why? Because Nick’s got money troubles, and for delivering me to Donnay he gets a lucrative contract for himself. Nick, I tell him—I love my Prince. You could play with a broomstick, he says. It wouldn’t matter. Now, with the Donnay, I feel as if I am playing with a broomstick. I feel as if I’m playing left-handed, as if I’ve suffered a brain injury. Everything is slightly off. The ball doesn’t listen to me. The ball doesn’t do what I say. I’m in New York, hanging out with J.P. It’s well after midnight. We’re sitting in a seedy deli with garish fluorescent lights and loud countermen arguing in several Eastern European languages. We’re each having a cup of coffee and I’m holding my head in my hands, telling J.P. over and over: When I hit the ball with this new racket, I don’t know where it’s going. You’ll find a solution, J.P. says. How? What? I don’t know. But you will. This is a momentary crisis, Andre. One of many. As sure as we’re sitting here, there will be others. Bigger, smaller, and everything in between. Treat this crisis as practice for the next crisis. And then the crisis is resolved during a practice. Days later, I’m in Florida, hitting at the Bollettieri Academy and someone hands me a new Prince. I hit three balls, just three, and it’s something like a religious experience. Every ball goes like a laser to the spot where I want it to go. The court opens before me like Xanadu. I don’t care about any deals, I tell Nick. I can’t sacrifice my life to a deal. I’ll handle it, he says. He doctors a Prince racket, stencils it to look like a Donnay, and I cruise to several easy victories at Indian Wells. I lose in the quarters, but I don’t care, because I have my racket back, my game back. The next day, three Donnay execs descend on Indian Wells. This is unacceptable, they say. It’s clear to everyone that you’re playing with a doctored Prince. You’re going to ruin us. You’re going to be liable for the destruction of our company. Your racket is going to be liable for the destruction of me.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  It is not as delightful to be a god on a small scale as outsiders think. Or the children of the rich man may be debilitated by the atmosphere of wealth and be more interested in orchids or art curios than in the Church their father and mother loved so well. Or they may follow the drift of their social set toward the ritualistic churches, which offer more æsthetic satisfaction and bring to this country some of the social prestige and antique grandeur which they have in older countries. In any of these contingencies the revenues of an entire denomination, which have been adjusted to these important contributions, may be upset and its missionary policies at home and abroad may suffer calamitous retrenchment. If wealth is in few hands, there is the pleasant possibility of very large and swift benefactions, but there is also a constant danger of instability. The safest income is from the moderately wealthy. There is more to say, but this will suffice to show that the financial welfare of the churches is bound up with the economic health of society, and that its perils increase as wealth accumulates in few hands and the social extremes draw farther apart. Moreover, the finances of the Church have always affected its constitution and inner life in the subtlest ways. The bishops probably rose to power in the early Church first of all by controlling the purse-strings of the churches. One cause for the rise of the papacy was the large wealth early controlled by the bishop of Rome. The history of the Church in the Middle Ages and its struggles with the secular powers were largely due to the fact that the Church was a great landowner and fought for its income. The corruptions of the papacy and its financial extortions, which alienated the Northern nations and prepared them for the schism of the Reformation, were due in part to the economic changes of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The financial necessities of the Church even created new sacramental observances, and indirectly the doctrines based on them. In the Reformation financial interests played a decisive part throughout. The democratic polity of the various congregational bodies, which is most in harmony with the genius of American life, grew up in homogeneous bodies of plain people. It works best where social equality is greatest. Its essence is imperilled as soon as equality departs. Financial changes are apt to involve far more than any one foresees at the time. When financial control shifts, other elements and functions of church life are sure to shift with it. The Church surely has an interest at stake in the distribution of social wealth.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Throughout twenty years of working with clients and research participants, I’ve witnessed the effects of this rising tide of perfectionism. I see them in my client Gus, who came to me looking to optimize his performance at work. A tall, mustachioed product designer at a cookware company, Gus either went all out or got stuck. “I have two gears,” he liked to say, “overdrive and park.” His approach was all or nothing, but because it took so much time and energy to reach his “all” standards, he frequently felt stuck at “nothing.” He worked long hours but was embarrassed to tell me that many of them were spent in procrastination. When he did manage to be productive, he found himself focusing on inconsequential tasks he had already mastered rather than novel, high-profile projects where he had to make decisions or figure things out on the fly. Despite receiving two promotions, he said, “I always have this scene in my head of my boss calling me, telling me she found a mistake I missed, and then firing me, saying she always suspected I couldn’t cut it.” Gus’s all-or-nothing mentality carried over to other parts of his life. An avid distance runner, my eyes widened when he described his last run: “I wore a heart monitor, tracked my metrics on my phone, and uploaded everything to two apps when I got home, one of which is for my coach.” He loved running, but lately, he admitted, slogging through his training regimen felt like a chore. We’ll get to know Gus better in chapter 7, when we talk about what to focus on besides performance. I also see the effects of perfectionism on Francesca, a fortysomething stay-at-home-parent who came to me thinking she was depressed, lazy, and unmotivated. She was depressed for sure, but it was from setting such unrealistic standards for herself. She expected her house to look like a magazine design spread even though twin kindergarteners lived there, expected herself to get into the best shape of her life, expected herself to make everyone around her happy, and make it all look easy. No wonder she would end up eating M&M’s on the couch while watching daytime talk shows. What she saw as laziness was actually feeling completely overwhelmed. “But other people do it, so why can’t I?” she would ask when I questioned her expectations. She compared herself: “I have friends who work full-time and get dinner on the table and coach their kids’ soccer team and have beautiful houses. I should be able to do that, too.” Sometimes when she uttered her expectations out loud, she realized they sounded wildly unreasonable. “I have this idea that I need to have the body I had at twenty,” she said. “I know that sounds insane, but internally, I feel like if I did it before, I should be able to do it again.”

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Postponement to the Lord’s coming. Hostility to the Empire and its civilization. The limitations of primitive Christianity and their perpetuation. The other-worldliness of Christianity. The ascetic tendency. Monasticism. Sacramentalism. The dogmatic interest. The churchliness of Christianity. Subservience to the State. The disappearance of church democracy. The lack of scientific comprehension of social development. Results of the discussion. The passing of these causes in modern life. Conclusion CHAPTER V T he P resent C risis A prelude. The industrial revolution. The land and the people. Work and wages. The morale of the workers. The physical decline of the people. The wedge of inequality. The crumbling of political democracy. The tainting of the moral atmosphere. The undermining of the family. The fall or the rise of Christian civilization CHAPTER VI T he S take O f T he C hurch I n T he S ocial M ovement The purpose of this chapter. The Church and its real estate. The Church and its income. The volunteer workers of the Church. The supply and spirit of the ministry. The Church and poverty. The Church and its human material. The hostile ethics of commercialism. Christian civilization and foreign missions. The Church and the working class. The forward call to the Church CHAPTER VII What to D o “No thoroughfare.” Social repentance and faith. Social evangelization. The pulpit and the social question. The Christian conception of life and property. The creation of customs and institutions. Stewardship and ownership. Solidarity and communism. The upward movement of the working class. Summary of the argument. The new apostolate ----------------------- INTRODUCTION Western civilization is passing through a social revolution unparalleled in history for scope and power. Its coming was inevitable. The religious, political, and intellectual revolutions of the past five centuries, which together created the modern world, necessarily had to culminate in an economic and social revolution such as is now upon us. By universal consent, this social crisis is the overshadowing problem of our generation. The industrial and commercial life of the advanced nations are in the throes of it. In politics all issues and methods are undergoing upheaval and re-alignment as the social movement advances. In the world of thought all the young and serious minds are absorbed in the solution of the social problems. Even literature and art point like compass-needles to this magnetic pole of all our thought. The social revolution has been slow in reaching our country. We have been exempt, not because we had solved the problems, but because we had not yet confronted them. We have now arrived, and all the characteristic conditions of American life will henceforth combine to make the social struggle here more intense than anywhere else. The vastness and the free sweep of our concentrated wealth on the one side, the independence, intelligence, moral vigor, and political power of the common people on the other side, promise a long-drawn grapple of contesting forces which may well make the heart of every American patriot sink within him.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  Identify what you’re feeling: name it. Are your heart palpitations an indicator of fear? (They come on in a flash and have a beginning, middle, and end.) Or is it more like anxiety, worry, or rumination about something that may or may not happen? This next suggestion might sound silly, but it always helps me. Once you’ve identified the emotion, connect with it. “Hey, anxiety . . . Hey, sadness . . . you’re OK.” Greeting and soothing our emotions reminds us that our feelings are friends, not enemies. Validate what you’re feeling: Remember, feelings aren’t good or bad; they’re information. They help us know how to respond in different situations. Your feelings have a right to take up space. There’s nothing wrong with them or with you. They deserve to be seen without having to be fixed, justified, or controlled. They’re OK, and so are you. Soothe your inner critic: Sometimes it’s hard to selfsoothe when our inner critics shit all over our brains like demon-possessed parrots. You want to feel better, but your negative thoughts make it impossible. Inner critics are destructive for a reason: they’re trying to protect us. For example, my inner critic says BS like this: If you don’t look or act a certain way, you won’t be loved. You’ll be left. I don’t want you to experience that, so I’m going to shut you down or shame you back in line to avoid rejection. What a sweetie pie, right? As much as we want to avoid them, inner critics need our love, because they’re in a lot of pain. A question for you to ponder as you soothe your critic: What if the opposite of what you’re feeling about yourself were true? Think about it for a second. It’s certainly possible, isn’t it? Just as bad stuff can happen, so too can good stuff. Here’s another question that can help your brain get on a better track: What would your best friend say about this? I doubt she’d be as douchey as you (and I) can be to ourselves—because she’s your best frickin’ friend. And my personal favorite: What does love see? Love doesn’t think you’re worthless, incapable, unintelligent, weak, and all the other awful things you may believe when you’re out of sorts. Love sees you for who you truly are, a valuable and wonderful person. When self-attacking thoughts take hold, lean on love. My go-to way of working through these questions is by journaling. There’s just something about writing this stuff out that gives me perspective. The goal here is to give your inner critic kinder thoughts to ponder so you can take care of your feelings.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  You know how it works. Social anxiety can jump out in an instant, like a bogeyman in a Halloween haunted house. In just a few seconds, it’s all systems go. You’re hit with the urge to leave, to dart the long way around to avoid being spotted, or to pull out your phone so you don’t have to make eye contact. And avoidance works—sort of. When we avoid, the anxiety magically dissipates, leaving us with not only a sense of relief but also the unfortunate confirmation that whatever we just avoided—small talk with your kid’s classmate’s mom, a break room discussion of last night’s game with your co-workers, or a conversation on a park bench with a 1940s cutie—was really and truly a danger. What’s more, avoidance leaves us with the nagging feeling that we couldn’t have handled it anyway. [image file=image_rsrc2GD.jpg] By contrast, take a look at what happens in the second graph. This is what happens when we hang in there—when we’re brave for the few seconds it takes to join the group at the party, raise our hand in class, or for young Albert to sit down on the bench. The anxiety shoots up, but then, when we stick with it, after we reach the summit of the mountain it’s all downhill from there. What goes up must come down. When we go over the summit instead of avoiding, we learn a very different lesson. Rather than reinforcing the idea that the girl on the bench is a threat to be avoided, we learn she’s polite, even if she already has a boyfriend. We learn that while we’re uncomfortable, sitting there doesn’t kill us—we can handle this, even if what we blurt out isn’t exactly smooth and witty. Of course, the anxiety goes down more slowly than if we ducked out, but the trip down that long, slow slide teaches us exactly what Brandon Stanton and Albert Ellis figured out: one, we are much safer than our imaginations would have us believe, and two, we can handle it. [image file=image_rsrc2GE.jpg] [image file=image_rsrc2GF.jpg] Now let’s zero in on the hardest part—the tippy-top of that peak. This is where Jim hid behind a bush. This is when Aisha faked her phone call. This is where I may or may not have crossed the street to avoid well-meaning but aggressive nonprofit sidewalk fundraisers with their clipboards and smiles, even if it meant forgoing the taco salad I’d been craving. I’ll never tell. That peak might be high, but it’s actually a skinny little thing. To climb the peak and go over the top doesn’t actually take that long—maybe ten seconds to a minute. So commit to being brave for one minute. Once you do that, it’s all downhill from there. As we stay with it, it gets easier. Plus we get a taco salad.

• From Between Us

  Inside-out emotions may be healthy when emotions are understood as MINE, but not so much when they are OURS. In an elegant study, psychologists Iris Mauss and Emily Butler made European American and Asian Americans undergraduate students angry in the lab. On average, Asian American students put a higher value on emotional control than their European American counterparts, agreeing more that “It is wrong for people to always display how they feel.” In contrast, European American students put a lower value on emotional control, and agreed more than their Asian American peers that “It is better for people to let out pent up emotions.” Generally, students who valued (high) emotional control behaved less angry during the experiment (as perceived by judges who were blind to the hypotheses of the study). Turning that same finding around, it can be said that the individuals showing most anger were the ones to endorse the Freudian notion that it is better to let out pent-up emotions. Most of these were European American. Even more interestingly, Mauss and Butler tracked anger experience and cardiac output during the same experiment. Low cardiac output is often a sign that the individual has difficulty coping with the situation (the situation is a “threat”); high cardiac output can mean that the individual feels well equipped to cope with the situation and that the situation feels under control (the situation is a “challenge”). Judging by cardiac output measures, anger affected the cultural groups in the study differently. European Americans who showed little anger had stronger anger feelings and felt more “threat” than European Americans who did show anger. In contrast, Asian Americans who showed little anger felt less angry and better equipped to cope than Asian Americans who did show anger. These findings suggest that emotional control, while effortful, allowed Asian American individuals to achieve the emotional state that they were aiming for. Moreover, the outward-in adjustment felt under control. Outside-in emotions do not always move away from strong to weaker emotions. Norms, other people’s needs and expectations, or relationship concerns may call for expression rather than suppression: either for an emotion that was not there in the first place, or for amplification of an existing emotion. Among the Ifaluk, who live on a small Micronesian island in the southwest Pacific, another person’s needs call for fago, the readiness to care for others. Fago can be translated as a mix of compassion, love, and sadness. A sister who feels fago for her brother comes to his aid. When Tamalekar, an Ifaluk man, was shamed by his ten-year-old son who had thrown rocks at a man who lived on the island and suffered from psychosis, this elicited fago in Tamalekar’s sisters. The sisters “hurried to his house with gifts and cloth to be given, by way of apology, to the family of the ‘crazy’ man.”

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  One group does better than the other. If you had to guess, which would you say drop out more often: Taskers or Optimizers? McGrath told us, “The people who drop out are overwhelmingly Optimizers. They focus on the big picture; and they don’t rest because they are always thinking about the next thing they have to do. The secret of success for the Taskers is they take this monolithic thing and break it into chunks. It’s task, rest. Task, rest.” As the saying goes, you don’t try to eat an elephant all at once; you have to divide it into easily digestible parts. This chunking tactic is also used by athletes. “You’ll see many ultramarathoners and triathletes doing this. They focus on the next immediate objective—the next point on the horizon—and prevent their minds from passing to the entire race,” writes Charles Chu in his newsletter the Open Circle . The point for leaders: Many of our employees are feeling overloaded with crushing amounts of work to accomplish, and it’s leading to unprecedented levels of stress and anxiety. A first tactic any manager can try is to help team members break down their work into optimal chunks. Of course, this is only one of a number of methods of helping lessen the mental weight of workloads. In this chapter, we’ll explore those tactics and how they may be best implemented to reduce anxiety levels and build resilience in team members. But first, it’s important to address a few widespread misconceptions about overload. They Just Can’t Keep Up (and Other Common Myths)Most common of the myths of overload: Many managers believe it is an individual failure, thinking, Oh, he just can’t keep up. Consider that in the US alone, research in 2019 from global staffing firm Robert Half showed 91 percent of employees felt at least somewhat burned out at that moment, defined as mentally and physically exhausted from work. That’s a clear indication that the problem is more macro than micro. Some managers argue it is a lack of resiliency that’s at the core of this issue. Yet some of the most resilient of all workers experience burnout in high numbers. Take the case of health-care professionals. As Adam Grant of the Wharton School reported in the New York Times , “More than half of doctors and a third of nurses regularly feel burned out,” and that was before the COVID-19 crisis. As their dedication to their work during the outbreak admirably demonstrated, battling through long days in hellish conditions, these are among the most resilient people on the planet. Adrienne Boissy, MD, chief experience officer at the renowned Cleveland Clinic, makes the point forcefully. “I held three jobs in college, completed a residency for four years, and this was followed by two years of fellowship.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  Aerial view of the remains of the Herodian stronghold of Masada, near the Dead Sea, Israel. Ben Sira on Women The practical instruction, found mainly but not exclusively in the first half of the book, deals with matters familiar from ancient wisdom instructions: honor of parents, friendship, treatment of children and slaves, and so on. The most controversial part of this instruction is Ben Sira’s view of women. The sage extols the virtues of the good wife in Sir 26:1-4, 13-18, in a manner similar to Proverbs 31. Admittedly, her virtues are assessed from the husband’s point of view. She is praised for silence and modesty. There is no mention of substantial business activity on the part of the wife, such as we find in Proverbs 31. A more significant difference from Proverbs, however, is that Ben Sira sets this praise in contrast to a discourse on the wickedness of women (Sir 25:13-26; 26:6-12, 19- 27). One might, perhaps, compare the portrayal of the “strange woman” in Proverbs 7, but Ben Sira is speaking of wives and daughters, not strangers or prostitutes, and his rhetoric is much more extreme. “Any iniquity,” he declares, “is small compared to a woman’s iniquity” (25:19). In 42:14 he goes further: “Better is the wickedness of a man than a woman who does good; it is a woman who brings shame and disgrace.” Much of Ben Sira’s negative comment on women arises from a fear of being put to shame. In 42:9-14 he explains his feelings about daughters: “A daughter is a secret anxiety to her father, and worry over her robs him of sleep; when she is young, for fear she may not marry, or if married, for fear she may be rejected; while a virgin, for fear she may be seduced and become pregnant in her father’s house; or having a husband, for fear she may go astray.” In 22:3 he declares bluntly, “The birth of a daughter is a loss.” Such sentiments were not unknown in ancient Judaism (or elsewhere in the ancient world). According to the Babylonian Talmud: “Without both male and female children the world could not exist, but blessed is he whose children are male and woe to him whose

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  A final major theme in Luke’s Acts is Roman reaction to Paul. Every Roman or Romanizing authority that Paul encounters declares him formally and explicitly to be innocent. In the theater in Ephesus, the town clerk declared that Paul’s companions were “neither temple robbers nor blasphemers of our goddess” Diana and so “he dismissed the assembly” (19:37, 41). Claudius Lysias, the tribune at Jerusalem, wrote to the governor, Felix, at Caesarea that Paul “was accused concerning questions of their [ Jewish] law, but was charged with nothing deserving death or imprisonment” (23:29). Two years later, the new governor, Festus, told Paul’s case to the Jewish king Agrippa II and his sister Bernice and commented that “they did not charge him with any of the crimes that I was expecting” and “that he had done nothing deserving death” (25:18, 25). After Paul’s speech, all three agree, “This man is doing nothing to deserve death or imprisonment” (26:31). Finally, Luke ends not with Paul’s trial or execution, but with this sentence: “He lived there two whole years at his own expense and welcomed all who came to him, proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance” (28:30–31). There you have it, concludes Luke with a Roman audience in mind; we Christians are completely innocent. All troubles come from pagan greed or Jewish jealousy. And the first Jewish war against Rome in 66–70 C.E. should not be held against Christians. To allow Christianity “without hindrance” should be Roman policy. Jesus, Paul, and Christianity are encased by Luke in apologetic garments. It was quite possible, however, as the Roman authorities knew full well, to be an ideological danger without ever being a violent threat. As we have just seen, Roman officials repeatedly declare Paul innocent of any crime against Rome, but Paul can only be repeatedly declared innocent by being repeatedly accused before those same officials. In other words, Luke both reveals and conceals, admits and denies, that there were constant troubles between Paul and Rome. Take, then, as example and summary, the case of Paul before the proconsul Gallio at Corinth in Acts 18:12–17, which, whether literal fact or metaphorical fiction, is the perfect example of Luke’s defense of Christianity in general and of Paul in particular. Look, therefore, at that judicial b [image file=image_rsrc2XV.jpg] ma, or tribunal, in Corinth and see it as the symbolic heart of Lukan rapprochement between Christ and Caesar, between the Christian church and the Roman Empire.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The fraternal societies, which offer insurance and mutual help in sickness and death, have increased immensely among the wage-earners, while the Church confessedly has lost ground among them. Is this due merely to religious indifference and unbelief, or to poverty coupled with self-respect? I am not in a position to prove this, but I offer it as a working hypothesis to explain in part the alienation of the working classes from the churches. Certainly the churches are deeply affected by the economic pressure resting on the wage-workers. Engel’s Law deserves serious consideration from the point of view of church finances. I have never come across any discussion of it nor any indication that it is understood in its bearings on church life. If the people become poor, they cannot afford to share in a self-supporting church. The unequal distribution of wealth thus tends to strip the churches of their poorer clientage. The same inequality of wealth threatens the churches in other ways on the side of the strong who profit by it. If a church is composed of many wage-workers with a few well-to-do families, the contributions of these few will be of inordinate importance in the financial affairs of the church. The departure of a single family may mean that the church can no longer pay the minister’s salary nor support itself. Such a condition will almost inevitably breed an unwholesome deference at some points and an unwholesome jealousy at others. It would be strange, too, if those who are the financial stays of the church did not have the feeling that their wishes ought to be decisive about the coming and going of the minister and other matters deeply affecting the spiritual life. But the preference of wealthy men and their wives may select a pastor who is more of a courtier than a saint. The fundamental evil in the union of Church and State is that worldly men with their interests and points of view dominate the life of the Church which ought to be guided by moral and Christian interests. The point of contact between the Church and the State was frequently the local nobleman, who had the right of “patronage” and could “present the living” to some candidate of his own selection. It was this which caused the Disruption of the Church of Scotland in 1843. Church and State are separate with us, but the essence of the evil may creep in once more as soon as the mass of church members are financially weak and a few persons hold the financial existence of the church in their hands. Church democracy and voluntaryism presuppose approximate financial equality. The danger just described has been averted usually by the fact that in the larger cities, where there is more than one church of a denomination, the wealthier families do not remain in the poorer churches, but gravitate toward churches composed in the main of their own class.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Thus, Laney, Williams, and others imposed a respectability requirement on those women who would become educators of public opinion, in part because the work required an intrinsic placing of the Black female body on display for white public consumption. Certainly, the class policing that anchors respectability discourse remains persistent and troubling; and I suspect it is the reason that many of these women have been given short shrift in existing conversations about Black intellectual thought. Most work has focused on respectability as a marker of problematic class hierarchies among turn-of-the-twentieth-century African Americans. Many middle-class Black women expressed acute anxiety about how the practices of poor Black women would make them look bad. But I want to suggest that we move beyond focusing only on the ways that respectability discourses attempted to instantiate class hierarchies.29 I am not offering social conditions as an apologetic for elite Black women’s problematic class politics. Rather, I argue throughout this book that respectability discourse also constituted one of the earliest theorizations of gender within newly emancipated Black communities. The post-Reconstruction push to style Black people as respectable men and women indexes a community’s attempt to understand and articulate what it meant to be a man or a woman. As Hortense Spillers has suggested, the Middle Passage and chattel slavery stripped all but the most crude gender identifications from the Black body. To the extent, Spillers reminds us, that the “New-world, diasporic plight [of Black people] marked a theft of the body. … [W]e lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific.”30 “The materialized scene of unprotected female flesh—of female flesh ‘ungendered’” created an indeterminate social terrain for the articulation of Black gender identity.31 Although I think much of the violation and violence that shaped Black life during enslavement was predicated on a denial of access to gender norms—which is to say that much of the treatment was gender-specific (e.g., denying Black women the protections of womanhood) or, at the very least, specific to the biological sex of the person—Spillers’s larger observation is instructive, namely that enslavement was predicated on a dialectical doing and undoing of gender that frequently rendered the Black body a space of indeterminate gender terrain.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Learning to see love’s ripple effects can be a lifeline. The signs of love, which for your ancestors were perhaps among the most enticing objects in the landscape, can be so subtle by modern standards that you can miss them completely. If you rush through your morning routine, for instance, inhale breakfast and brush your teeth while driving to work, plow through your in-box and mushrooming to-do list, run to meeting after meeting right up to the end of your workday, race through the grocery store, fix a quick dinner for your kids, send them off to bed, only to collapse in your own bed to fret about the marathon day you face tomorrow, how do you find the time or the energy to kindle those fragile states of positivity resonance? Thinking Nearly sixty years ago, a decade before the counterculture of the 1960s erupted throughout the United States and beyond, Aldous Huxley famously described his first experience with psychedelic drugs, in his controversial 1954 book, The Doors of Perception. The book’s title cast back to the metaphorical language of English poet and printmaker William Blake’s 1790 book, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and inspired the name of the 1960s American rock band the Doors. Blake wrote: If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern. Building on Blake’s metaphor, Huxley likened the human brain to a reducing valve. It functions to limit your awareness to only those perceptions, ideas, and memories that might be useful for your survival at any given moment, eliminating all else. Although narrowed awareness prevents you from becoming overwhelmed by a flood of images and impressions, to some extent, it can become an overlearned habit, a self-limiting cavern. By comparing—through the use of language—your own reduced experiences of the world to the reduced experiences of others, you can become convinced that your limited awareness represents the reality of the world. Huxley writes: Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of bypass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary bypasses may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate “spiritual exercises,” or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Huxley’s hypothesis that the doors of perception can temporarily swing open wider than usual—even seemingly spontaneously—is now confirmed by brain imaging experiments. Importantly, however, you don’t need drugs, hypnosis, or lofty spiritual experiences to open those doors. Sometimes all it takes is a little positivity.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  But it was extremely difficult to think about God or even to work up any enthusiasm for contemplation. Anselm was acutely aware of the torpor that made prayer so difficult. In the opening verses of the Proslogion, which takes the form of a highly wrought poem, he laments his sense of alienation from the divine. The image of God within him was so obscured by his imperfections that, try as he would, he could not perform the task for which he had been created. He must, therefore, shake off this mental sloth, using his intellect, reason, imagination, and emotion to stir up and excite his mind; his newfound rational powers in particular were a God-given tool for rousing and kindling the spirit. But he had no illusions about human reason, which he knew was incapable of understanding the unknowable God. “Lord, I am not trying to make my way to your height,” he prayed, “for my understanding is in no way equal to that.”6 He simply wanted to grasp a little of your truth, to which my heart is already loyal and which it loves [quem credit et amat cor meum]. For I do not seek to understand in order that I may have faith [intellegere ut credam], but I commit myself in order that I may understand [credo ut intellgam]; and what is more, I am certain that unless I so commit myself I shall not understand.7 Anselm is still using the verb credere in its original sense: it is an affair of the “heart,” the center of the human being, rather than a purely notional act and, as for Augustine, inseparable from love. Because the word “belief” has changed its meaning since Anselm’s day, it is misleading to translate, as is often done, credo ut intellgam as: “I believe in order that I may understand.” This gives the impression that before one can have any comprehension of the loyalty and trust of faith, one must first force one’s mind to accept blindly a host of incomprehensible doctrines. Anselm is saying something quite different: religious truth made no sense without practically expressed commitment. Perhaps a better translation is “I involve myself in order that I may understand.” Anselm was trying to shake off his lethargy in prayer by engaging all his faculties, and was certain that “unless I so involve myself, I shall not understand.” So to spark his reader’s interest, he invites him to consider what has been called the “ontological proof” for the existence of God.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  You do not practice what you know, not because you doubt, but because you are diverted from the true life by false cares and excuse yourself from it. This is like what you do: A master prepared a dinner and sent to invite guests, but they began to decline. One said: I have bought some land and must go to see it. Another said: I have bought some oxen and must try them. A third said: I have married and must give a wedding feast. And the servants came and told the master that no one would come. Then the master sent his servants to call in the poor, and they did not refuse but came. And when they had come there was still room to spare, so the master sent to call in others, saying: Go and persuade everyone you meet to come to my dinner, that there may be still more guests. But those who refused because they were busy missed the dinner. All men know that the fulfillment of the will of the Father gives life, but they do not accept his invitation because they are drawn away by the guile of riches. He who gives up false transitory riches for true life in accord with the Father's will, acts as a clever steward did. There was a steward to a rich master. This steward saw that his master would soon dismiss him and he would be left without food or shelter. And he thought to himself. This is what I will do. I will secretly give away some of my master's goods to the peasants and reduce their debts, and then if my master sends me away the peasants will remember my kindness and will help me. And he did so. He called the peasants who were in debt to his master, and re-wrote their quittances. For him who owed a hundred he made it fifty; instead of sixty he put down twenty, and for the others in the same way. When the master heard of this he said to himself: My steward has acted cleverly, for he saw he would have been left with nothing. He has caused me loss, but he has acted cleverly for himself. For in the bodily life we all understand what is advantageous, but in regard to the life of the spirit we do not wish to understand. We should give away the transitory and false riches of this life in order to I obtain the life of the spirit. If we grudge such trifles as riches for the life of the spirit, we shall not receive it. If we do not give up the false life our true life will not be given us. It is not possible to serve two masters at once-God and riches: the will of the Father and your own will. You must serve either the one or the other. The Orthodox heard this, and as they loved wealth they ridiculed him.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  A third disadvantage is that, owing to the infirmity of our judgement and the perturbing force of imagination, there is some admixture of error in most of the investigations of human reason. This would be a reason to many for continuing to doubt even of the most accurate demonstrations, not perceiving the force of the demonstration, and seeing the divers judgements of divers persons who have the name of being wise men. Besides, in the midst of much demonstrated truth there is sometimes an element of error, not demonstrated but asserted on the strength of some plausible and sophistic reasoning that is taken for a demonstration. And therefore it was necessary for the real truth concerning divine things to be presented to men with fixed certainty by way of faith. Wholesome therefore is the arrangement of divine clemency, whereby things even that reason can investigate are commanded to be held on faith, so that all might easily be partakers of the knowledge of God, and that without doubt and error. Hence it is said: Now ye walk not as the Gentiles walk in the vanity of their own notions, having the understanding darkened (Eph. iv, 17, 18); and, I will make all thy sons taught of the Lord (Isa. liv, 1, 5). CHAPTER V THAT IT IS AN ADVANTAGE FOR THINGS THAT CANNOT HE SEARCHED OUT BY REASON TO BE PROPOSED AS TENETS OF FAITHSOME may possibly think that points which reason is unable to investigate ought not to be proposed to man to believe, since Divine Wisdom provides for every being according to the measure of its nature; and therefore we must show the necessity of things even that transcend reason being proposed by God to man for his belief. 1. One proof is this. No one strives with any earnestness of desire after anything, unless it be known to him beforehand. Since, then, as will be traced out in the following pages (B. III, Chap.CXLVIII), Divine Providence directs men to a higher good than human frailty can experience in the present life, the mental faculties ought to be evoked and led onward to something higher than our reason can attain at present, learning thereby to desire something and earnestly to tend to something that transcends the entire state of the present life. And such is the special function of the Christian religion, which stands alone in its promise of spiritual and eternal goods, whereas the Old Law, carrying temporal promises, proposed few tenets that transcended the enquiry of human reason.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The hunters feel profoundly uneasy about slaughtering the beasts, who are their friends and patrons, and to assuage this anxiety, they surround the hunt with taboos and prohibitions. They say that long ago the animals made a covenant with humankind and now a god known as the Animal Master regularly sends flocks from the lower world to be killed on the hunting plains, because the hunters promised to perform the rites that will give them posthumous life. Hunters often abstain from sex before an expedition, hunt in a state of ritual purity, and feel a deep empathy with their prey. In the Kalahari Desert, where wood is scarce, the Bushmen have to rely on light weapons that can only graze the skin, so they anoint their arrows with a lethal poison that kills the animal very slowly. A tribesman has to remain with his victim, crying when it cries and participating symbolically in its death throes. Other tribes identify with their prey by donning animal costumes. After stripping the meat from the bones, some reconstruct their kill by laying out its skeleton and pelt; others bury these inedible remains, symbolically restoring the beast to the netherworld from which it came.12 The hunters of the Palaeolithic age may have had a similar worldview. Some of the myths and rites they devised appear to have survived in the traditions of later, literate cultures. Animal sacrifice, for example, the central rite of nearly every religious system in antiquity, preserved prehistoric hunting ceremonies and continued to honor a beast that gave its life for the sake of humankind.13 One of the functions of ritual is to evoke an anxiety in such a way that the community is forced to confront and control it. From the very beginning, it seems, religious life was rooted in acknowledgment of the tragic fact that life depends upon the destruction of other creatures.

• From A History of God (1993)

  11 Does God Have a Future?1. Peter Berger, A Rumour of Angels (London, 1970), p. 58.2. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 152.3. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Belief and History (Charlottesville, 1985), p. 10.4. Thomas J.J. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (London, 1966), p. 136.5. Paul Van Buren, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (London, 1963), p. 138.6. Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Indianapolis, 1966), passim.7. Paul Tillich, Theology and Culture (New York and Oxford, 1964), p. 129.8. Alfred North Whitehead, “Suffering and Being,” in Adventures of Ideas (Harmondsworth, 1942), pp. 191–92.9. Process and Reality (Cambridge, 1929), p. 497.10. Ali Shariati, Hajj, trans. Laleh Bakhtiar (Teheran, 1988), p. 46.11. Ibid., p. 48.12. Martin Buber, “Gottesfinsternis, Betrachtungen zur Beziehung zwischen Religion und Philosophie,” quoted in Hans Kung, Does God Exist? An Answer for Today, trans. Edward Quinn, (London, 1978), p. 508.13. Quoted in Raphael Mergui and Philippa Simmonot, Israel’s Ayatollahs; Meir Kahane and the Far Right in Israel (London, 1987), p. 43.14. Personal responsibility is also important in Christianity, of course, but Judaism and Islam have stressed it by their lack of a mediating priesthood, a perspective that was recovered by the Protestant Reformers.15. Philipp Frank, Einstein: His Life and Times (New York, 1947), pp. 189–90.Suggestions for Further ReadingGeneralBaillie, John, The Sense of the Presence of God (London, 1962). Berger, Peter, A Rumour of Angels (London, 1970).(ed.) The Other Side of God, A Polarity in World Religions (New York, 1981). An illuminating series of essays on the conflict between an interior and an external God of ultimate reality. Bowker, John, The Religious Imagination and the Sense of God (Oxford, 1978). Problems of Suffering in Religions of the World (Cambridge, 1970). Two erudite yet highly readable books on world religions. Campbell, Joseph, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, 1949).(with Bill Moyers) The Power of Myth (New York, 1988). The text of the popular television series on mythology in traditional society and the major religions. Cupitt, Don, Taking Leave of God (London, 1980). A challenging and passionate plea for a “Christian Buddhism”—a spirituality without an external, realistic God. Eliade, Mircea. One of the major experts on comparative spirituality: essential reading. The Myth of the Eternal Return or Cosmos and History (trans. Willard J. Trask, Princeton, 1954). The Sacred and the Profane (trans. Willard J. Trask, New York, 1959).The Quest; History and Meaning in Religion (trans. Willard J. Trask, Chicago,1969). James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York and Harmondsworth, 1982). A classic work which is still relevant and stimulating. Katz, Steven T. (ed.), Mysticism and Religious Traditions (Oxford), 1983. Useful essays on the relationship between dogma and mysticism in the world religions. Louth, Andrew, Discerning the Mystery, An Essay on the Nature of Theology (Oxford, 1983). Highly recommended; a slim volume that goes to the heart of the matter.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  All this is very helpful when the shit is actually hitting the fan and a real tiger is chasing you. Not so helpful in tiger-free zones like bumper-to-bumper traffic, dinner with your mother-in-law, and a stressful company meeting. Unfortunately, in today’s world, our amygdalae can easily get stuck in fight, flight, or freeze mode because they have a hard time differentiating between a real tiger and a figurative one. (And there is a difference, no matter how feral your in-laws may seem.) To make matters even more complicated, when the information coming in through your senses is unfamiliar, your brain desperately looks for data to assess the risk. But because none exists—you’ve never lived through a global pandemic or a war—your brain doesn’t know what to do, so it throws more gasoline onto the fire, making you more anxious, out of control, and cut off from reason. That’s because your brain relies on clues from the past to predict outcomes in the future. When it doesn’t have enough data, it ruminates (worries and catastrophizes—on steroids). For me, worrying is like scratching an itchy bug bite. The more I scratch, the itchier it gets. The more I worry, the more worried I become—about everything. Nothing helps. Not even those X marks you dig into your skin where the bite is. Did I leave the stove on? The house is burning down, and the dogs are dead. Did I leave the windows open? The living room is flooded, and the dogs are dead. Did I lock the doors? There’s an axe murderer waiting for me—and the dogs are dead. SEE, I TOLD YOU SO!But what about when our worst-case scenarios and negative fantasies come true because bad shit does happen? It can inadvertently reinforce our need to stay hypervigilant. See, I told you so! There was a fatal accident. Your child did die. Your partner did leave. Your best friend did lose her life to suicide. Your dad did die of cancer. Maybe if you had done more or said more, you could have helped or stopped it. In your mind you didn’t do enough, so you ruthlessly beat yourself up for “failing.” While this may be hard for you to take in, no matter how bad it was or what happened, punishing yourself in perpetuity is pointless. It does no one any good, especially you. Even if you could have done something different, that doesn’t guarantee that there would have been a different outcome. More overanalyzing or disaster dress rehearsals won’t protect you or the ones you love from everything. We can’t know the future. We’re all doing the best we can with the tools we have at the time—and that includes you. Sure, it’s easy to look back and think, I shoulda, woulda, coulda done more. But it’s a waste of time, and it won’t change things.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Ellis was an extremely shy child. Despite the prominence and unguarded eccentricities of his adulthood, as a kid he refused to take part in classroom plays and “sweated and sizzled with anxiety” whenever he had to recite a poem or accept an award. So at nineteen, Ellis assigned himself a project—some structure. He decided to talk to as many women as possible. Every day, he took himself to what is now called the New York Botanical Garden. In a 2004 interview with National Public Radio, at the age of ninety, he recalled his project as if it were yesterday: “Whenever I saw a woman sitting on a park bench alone, I’d sit on the same bench and give myself one minute to talk to her. If I die, I die. Fuck it.”1 Over the course of a month, Ellis talked to over 130 women. He was brave for the short time it took to approach, sit down, and say hello. And what happened? Ellis said, “I saw philosophically, cognitively, that nothing happened. Nobody cut my balls off. I had a hundred pleasant conversations.” Nothing happened. This is the ideal outcome: nothing. Nothing our imaginations can conjure. Nothing our Inner Critic can predict. Even rejection, once experienced, is seldom as bad as we imagine. Another thing Ellis discovered is that repetition is key. Like Brandon Stanton’s experience, the first approaches were the hardest. But every time Ellis approached another woman, it got a little easier. With every approach, he was a little less anxious. What’s more, he recovered more quickly—the sweating and sizzling didn’t last as long. Indeed, as your confidence catches up, as you choose your structure and play your roles, here’s what you’ve been waiting for: your anxiety will also ebb away. But don’t take it from me. Take it from none other than Albert Ellis. THE ONLY THREE GRAPHS IN THIS BOOK Since a picture is worth a thousand words, let’s bring in some visuals to see what was happening to the young Albert Ellis. Take a look at the first graph. The x-axis is time ticking along. The y-axis is anxiety, anchored by the official scientific terms of “chillin’” at the bottom and “freaking out” at the top.