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 462 of 501 · 20 per page

• 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.

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  One wall of Marta Meana’s cramped university office was covered with postcard-sized reproductions, portraits from past centuries. All were of women. The faces of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and Portrait of a Young Woman floated on their dark backgrounds, their skin luminous, their eyes turned toward something or someone behind them. Below them, as a joke, Meana handed me a picture of two control panels. One symbolized the workings of male desire; the other, female. One had only a simple on-off switch; the other had countless knobs. “Trying to figure out what women want,” she said, “is a real dilemma.” It was a dilemma she was trying to address—as a scientist, as a couples counselor, and as the president of the Society for Sex Therapy and Research, the most prominent organization in its clinical field—in different ways than Chivers. And it was a dilemma that Isabel, a lawyer at a nonprofit, was attempting to solve for herself as she debated whether she should stay with her boyfriend of eighteen months, Eric, and marry him if he proposed, which she sensed he would. The issue was that despite his good looks, his intelligence, his kindness, and his skill in bed, she rarely wanted to make love with him. Isabel, who was not one of Meana’s patients but was one of the women I spent my time learning from, recounted a scene from the evening of last year’s Valentine’s Day. In her small Manhattan apartment, Eric had run her a bath, strewn it with salts, surrounded it with candles, and considerately left her to lie alone in it. When she stepped out of the bathroom, she found her bedroom lit with more candles. And on her bed was a deluge of rose petals arranged in the shape of a heart. Through a fair amount of conscious effort, she managed to be seduced by this gift: while Eric took her place in the bathroom and showered, she lay back on the bed, brushed the petals across her lips, and dropped some onto her shoulders and breasts. When he emerged from the shower, she did feel pleasure as he went down on her, slid his broad shoulders up her body, and slid inside her. But the pleasure was precarious. And on many other nights what she felt was merely patience or something worse than that.

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

  And, she adds, it means leaders must ask essential questions. “Most people will respond to a genuine and direct question. If you ask me what I think, it’s mighty awkward not to open my mouth.” Method 5: Assume Positive IntentTeam leaders can also teach their people that when debating or facing a tough issue with others in the group, it’s important to assume everyone brings positive intentions and wants to do what’s right for the organization as a whole—and they are just coming at things from a different perspective. In short, it’s okay to question someone’s facts or ideas, but not their motives. We’ll write about a Republican in Chapter 8 , to be fair, but we thought a terrific example of this idea was shared by Democrat Joe Biden in his 2018 eulogy of Republican John McCain. Biden began his talk with these words: “I’m a Democrat, and I loved John McCain. . . . I always thought of John as a brother, [and] we had a hell of a lot of family fights.” Biden noted that when he and McCain were junior senators, it was considered appropriate to challenge the opposition’s judgment but never to challenge their intentions. That, he said, eventually changed and partisanship emerged as the rule of the day. “All we do today is attack the oppositions of both parties—their motives—not the substance of their argument. The last day John was on the Senate floor he was fighting to restore what you call regular order, to treat one another again like we used to . . . [when we would watch] Teddy Kennedy and James O. Eastland fight like hell on civil rights and then go have lunch together, down in the Senate dining room.” Method 6: Have a PlanBefore their teams set out to tackle a challenge, we recommend leaders coach the conflict-averse to plan and then rehearse what they may say, again with a focus on using the facts they have assembled, e.g., you might help an employee express herself as such: “I’ve had to pull late nights for a week straight to hit the deadline because you haven’t gotten your share of research in on time.” Here, presenting the concern clearly, along with facts about the amount of work being done, lays a good base for a conversation about values and a solution rather than the problem itself. Another part of planning is planning to follow up, even if things seem to go well in a first conversation. After all, those involved may have additional thoughts, or they may replay the conversation in their minds and change their point of view, or they may confer with others and come to second-guess the outcome. What we all thought was a positive resolution can begin to deteriorate without follow-up.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  of a total Christian society had taken shape: the faith not only had answers, but definitive and compulsory answers, to questions on almost every aspect of human behaviour and arrangements. A pagan society embracing Christianity was accepting a completely new way of life. Moreover, in large parts of central Europe and the Balkans, such societies were offered the choice between two increasingly different brands of Christian practice, each attended by different cultural and geopolitical consequences. Fortunately, we have a unique glimpse of the dilemma, as it appeared to a barbarian monarch, thanks to the survival of two documents. In the 850s, the emergent state of Bulgaria, which feared both Carolingian and Byzantine imperialism, had seemed set on a pro-Frankish course, and in the early 860s it looked as though its king, Boris I, would accept Christianity from Frankish hands. In 864 a powerful military and naval demonstration by the Byzantines led him to change his mind; and he became an Orthodox Christian in 865. Orthodox clergy moved into his territories in huge numbers, and this rapid introduction of new customs provoked a revolt of the Old Bulgar aristocracy, which Boris put down with some savagery. In consequence, Boris wrote to the Patriarch of Constantinople, Photus, asking for an autonomous Church – that is, a patriarchate equivalent to the five which already existed. Photus’s reply, which survives, was long but unsatisfactory; and in 866, Boris made a move to Rome, sending the Pope a letter asking for replies to a hundred and six questions. The Pope, Nicholas I, was delighted, despatched two bishops, and answered all the queries. His reply, which we possess, is one of the most fascinating documents of the entire Dark Ages. Boris did not raise any theological issues. He was concerned with behaviour, not belief. His questions reflect the tensions created in Bulgarian society by the reception of Christianity, and in particular by the rigorous ritualism of the Orthodox Greeks. Were the Byzantines right to forbid the Bulgars to take baths on Wednesdays and Fridays? To take communion without wearing their belts? To eat the meat of animals killed by eunuchs? Was it true that no layman could conduct public prayers for rain, or make a sign of the cross over a table before a meal? And that lay-folk must stand in church with arms folded over their breast? (‘No, no, no,’ said the Pope.) Were the Greek clergy right to refuse to accept the repentance of some of the pagan rebels? (‘Of course not,’ said the Pope.) On the question of Byzantine ecclesiastical claims, the Pope denied that Constantinople was the second in rank of the patriarchates; it was

• From How the Bible Actually Works (2019)

  Judaism, and it won’t be solved here. We have the Old Testament uncomfortably assuming that other gods exist, and then when we turn to the time of the New Testament, it’s as if we’re looking in on another world entirely—which we are. We do see some movement, though, in a few Old Testament stories. For example, in one section of the book of Isaiah, written in the wake of the exile, we read: I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god (44:6). For this prophet, idols are frauds, inanimate objects made by ironsmiths and carpenters, useless lumps of wood suited only for cooking food or keeping warm (44:12–20). * Jeremiah, another prophet of the exile, uses similar language about idols (10:1–18). In the entertaining story in 1 Kings 18:20–40, the prophet Elijah * teases and mocks the priests of the Canaanite god Baal when their god does not show up for a divine duel with Yahweh. At one point Elijah even suggests that perhaps Baal needed to use the restroom, which is to say he isn’t a god at all. I’m not kidding. He has wandered away in verse 27 is a euphemism for going potty. We are not yet in the world of full-blown monotheism, though we are moving in that direction, and the experience of exile seems to have played some role in this shift in thinking. If I stood on a table covered in syrup with my hair on fire, I still couldn’t draw enough attention to the importance of the Babylonian exile for the Israelites’ reimagining of God in the centuries that followed. Living on Babylonian soil was a new “here and now” that had to be addressed. Seeing their capital city and Temple razed and being deported to a foreign land were more than an inconvenience. With no land, no king, and no Temple and surrounded by the religious practices of their captors, Israelites surely thought God had finally abandoned them. This raised all sorts of questions in people’s minds, namely, “Was all this trust in Yahweh worth it?” “Does this God want anything to do with us or has he turned his back forever?” “Is this even the true God?” The harsh realities of changing times and nothing less than an unraveling social-religious fabric raised new questions that their ancestors never dreamed of —or if they did, those questions would now take on a practical urgency like never before. Modes of thinking from a more sheltered past were not adequate for dealing with this catastrophe. The Israelites had to adapt to a different world. One of those adaptations, a fundamental one, has been staring us in the face all along.

• From Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

  It is an old, old defense of the weak against the strong. The question of deception is not academic, but profoundly ethical and spiritual, going to the very heart of all human relations. For it raises the issue of honesty, integrity, and the consequences thereof over against duplicity and deception and the attendant consequences. Does the fact that a particular course of action jeopardizes a man’s life relieve him of the necessity for following that course of action? Are there circumstances under which the ethical question is irrelevant, beside the point? If so, where does one draw the line? Is there a fine distinction between literal honesty and honesty in spirit and intent? Or is truthtelling largely a matter of timing? Are there times when to tell the truth is to be false to the truth that is in you? These questions and many related ones will not be downed. For the disinherited they have to do with the very heart of survival. It may be argued that a man who places so high a price upon physical existence and survival that he is willing to perjure his own soul has a false, or at least an inadequate, sense of values. “What shall a man give in exchange for his own soul?” Jesus asks. The physical existence of a man makes of him the custodian, the keeper, of the fragment of life which is his. He lives constantly under the necessity to have life fulfill itself. Should he take chances, even in behalf of the values of a kind other than those which have to do with his physical survival? With reference to the question of deception the disinherited are faced with three basic alternatives. The first alternative is to accept the apparent fact that, one’s situation being what it is, there is no sensible choice offered. The individual is disadvantaged because he is not a member of the “party in power,” the dominant, controlling group. His word has no value anyway. In any contest he is defeated before he starts. He cannot meet his opponent on equal terms, because there is no basis of equality that exists between the weak and the strong. The only thing that counts is victory—or any level on which victory can be achieved. There can be no question of honesty in dealing with each other, for there is no sense of community. Such a mood takes for granted a facile insincerity. The fact is, in any great struggle between groups in which the major control of the situation is on one side, the ethical question tends to become merely academic. The advantaged group assumes that they are going to be fooled, if it is possible; there is no expectation of honesty and sincerity. They know that every conceivable device will be used to render ineffective the advantage which they have inherited in their position as the strong.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  As coauthor of the Bouchon and French Laundry cookbooks, and as a respected writer on the subject of chefs, he was uniquely placed to help me. He'd been to Vegas before. He knew the histories of the personalities and operations I was interested in—and his reputation and deceptively innocent aw-shucks manner and preppy good looks might, I hoped, make me (a vicious interloper if ever there was one) more welcome in town. My plan had been to get him liquored up, then piggyback on the research he'd spent many months if not years assembling. If nothing else, I knew he could get me a good table at Bouchon. But he'd turned on me. And not without reason. In the past few days, in the interests of television entertainment, I'd induced him to wear the same loud, electric-blue Hawaiian shirt every day. I'd repeatedly shot (and badly bruised) him during a ferocious game of indoor paintball; fed him beer and liquor from sunup to late night; then, when he was vulnerable, remorselessly interrogated him about Vegas culinary history. I'd watched him lose terrible sums at blackjack—all this while being regularly force-fed gargantuan, two-time-a-day tasting menus as the cameras rolled and I jotted down his every comment. Now, we'd been driving back and forth for hours in the scorching desert sun—so the television crew could get that perfect Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas "homage" shot—and it wasn't going well. He had to drive. I was in much worse shape than he, my head pounding from the previous night's mile-high frozen margaritas, my heart racing with terror in my chest. What had I been thinking? Six days to research, cover, write, rewrite, edit, and deliver an article for a respectable major publication—while simultaneously making an hour-long episode of a show that would (and did) require every variety of bestial, excessive behavior. Even now, there was a Sammy Davis Jr. impersonator waiting for me in the Neon Boneyard, an accordion convention to attend, and more food—always more food, more meals to eat—before I was due, on the last day, to jump out of an airplane at two miles over the desert with the Flying Elvi skydiving team. "Pull yourself together, Ruhlman," I howled over the blaring radio. "Pouring beer on yourself is good. Helps avoid sunstroke. And having an open receptacle in the car is, I'm pretty sure, illegal—even in this state. Now snap out of it. And drive us to Bouchon!" Las Vegas: a bright, hopeful land of opportunity for chefs—or the elephant graveyard for cynical cooks-turned-restuarateur / entrepreneurs? A well-deserved final score for celebrity chefs, after a lifetime of toil; a last cash-out before knees fail entirely and brains cook—or just a soulless extension of The Brand? Was it possible to serve truly good food; maintain one's standards, one's integrity; do good works in Vegas's mammoth, air-conditioned Xanadus, this neon-lit theme park, these Terrordomes of twenty-four-hour beeping, bleeping, and jangling slots?

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  The “normal science” that developed in the early church regularly subsumed Mark, and stories like ours, to the emergent structure of the developing apostolic tradition and the canon as a development of that apostolic tradition. Specifical y, Mark was subsumed to Matthew, which became what we might call the imperial power of the gospel world. As such, our text has been made to disappear through readings of Mark by Matthew, as well as by Luke and Paul, a disappearance that was enshrined in patristic commentators. The process of the eventual canonical shaping of all material within the canonical sequence starting with Matthew, compounded by the development of post-Constantinian “Christendom,” meant that eventual y the apocalyptic message of Mark would become anathema and his message would become canonical y domesticated. One can see the process at work regarding our passage from the time of the patristic authors and how the same lines of interpretation are reiterated in a more sophisticated and historical way in the historical-critical interpreters. Natural y, this same domestication occurred in many Protestant and evangelical interpreters who sought to relate our text especial y to other texts and to make it congenial to providing lessons on living the Christian life. 108 A striking exception to this domestication is found in Calvin and interpreters like Collinges who used our passage to underscore the chaotic violence that the church would experience at the hands of her enemies. But with few exceptions, 109 once the church is beyond a period that, because of the violence 107 For a presentation of Matthew’s understanding of the slave-based life-style that he proposes, see L. Gregory Bloomquist, “An Important Stoic Influence in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount: The Significance of Single-Mindedness,” Theoforum 46.1 (2015): 165–83. 108 This catechetical and homiletical goal is clearly in mind in Kuruvil a’s concluding comments regarding the young man in the garden and the young man in the tomb (“Naked Runaway,” 545): Who, then, is the naked runaway? He is Every Disciple, shameful y feeble and fallible. And the enrobed reporter? That one, too, is Every Disciple, gloriously restored by the grace of God, through Jesus Christ! 109 Perhaps were one to survey medieval or modern apocalyptic communities, the Markan message of 14:51–52 might be more clearly enunciated. But even if that were so, it would still be the case that these communities themselves, somewhat like the passage of Mark 14:51–52 itself, would in fact be “eccentric” to what Christianity became in an emergent post-Nicene structure that was shaped by a canonical biblical understanding. 178 178 Paul and Matthew among Jews and Gentiles and chaos, might appear to be a harbinger of the final judgment, the church and her interpreters—even Calvin’s followers—turn their attention away from the chaos and violence that Mark adumbrates.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I needed to find out more about White to write this book. So I spent a week in the Harry Ransom Center, the Texas archive where T. H. White’s papers and journals are kept. Reading about muddy English winters while sitting in an air-conditioned library was a very strange experience; outside, vultures soared on tilted wings through ninety-degree heat and grackles hopped on the burning sidewalks. I turned pages, sifted through manuscripts, read through the books he had owned, returned home with stacks of notes and thoughts. But they did not seem enough. There was something else to be done. So one hot July day I drove across England to Stowe. It’s still a school, but its grounds are open to the public. I parked my car in the National Trust car park, paid my entrance fee, clutched a map, and walked up the long lane to the gate. ‘Turn left for the best views,’ the man at the sentry box said. I turned right out of sheer contrariness and set off on my quest, the vast Palladian palace bright on the horizon, everything under metallic sunlight that made the lime-leaves black and the lakewater a deep, painful blue. Water lilies glowed on it in thick constellations. Ink-black shadows underpinned the parkland trees. Swifts pushed through air so thick they hardly beat their wings against the breeze. These were the grounds of the school where White had taught, landscape gardens that had drawn tourists for hundreds of years. After an hour of walking past temples with fluted columns and painted doors, cupolas, obelisks, porticoes and follies, I started to freak out. Nothing made any sense. Greek Temples, Roman Temples, Saxon gods on runic plinths starred with orange lichen. A vast Gothic Temple in rouged ironstone. Palladian bridges, tufa grottoes and Doric arches. Nothing here seemed solid or understandable but the trees. The buildings littered the landscape as if they had been dropped by some crazed time machine, and all of them, I realised, were there to teach me a lesson. This was a landscape of aristocratic moral certainty, designed and built to lecture visitors of the dangers of modern vice and the ways of ancient virtue. It might have been the sun, it might have been incipient heatstroke, but I started to hate it. Here is the temple of British Worthies. Look at them all. Ugh. I turned round and began to walk back to the car. I was feeling extremely sorry for White. This was a very beautiful place, and a marvellous lesson in the exercise of power, but I would have felt unreal here, yes; I would have fled from it too. And I did. I fled from the school grounds. I got back in my car and drove, and parked, and then walked to the place where I had to go.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Augustine, the ideologist of the official church, presented Revelation in his City of God as a mere spiritual allegory; the millenium had already begun with Christ and had been realized in the shape of the Church itself. But this did not end the argument, as he had hoped. Christians continued to believe in the millenium, the coming of Antichrist, cosmic battles, giant dragons, total upheavals of society – and endless series of signs which would presage these events. For better or for worse, the notion of the apocalypse was part of the canon, linked to bedrock articles of Christian belief it was too late to suppress. Moreover, the eschatological corpus was gradually added to by various sibylline texts: they had no canonical status but they were popular, and much used by preachers, writers and theologians. All stressed the coming battle between Christ and Antichrist. The idea could be reinterpreted to fit almost any political situation, and identified with kings and emperors, even popes, whether good or bad. All the signs could be made to fit. This tradition confronted the official Church with an almost insoluble problem. If it played things quietly, the millenarians would demand reform. But if the Church tried to initiate reform, as under Gregory VII, this also was calculated to stir up the latent millenarian forces. The tradition of lay preaching had never been completely buried; laymen responded joyfully to efforts to improve the priesthood and tried to take the movement into their own hands. Much of the heterodox effervescence of the twelfth century was the indirect result of the Gregorian campaign. There were areas in the lower Rhineland, for instance, where forms of unorthodox revivalism coexisted with the official Church more or less throughout the Middle Ages. It is a mistake to believe everyone had his or her place in society. On the contrary: between the orderly guilds of the towns and the feudal hierarchy of the countryside there was an immense chaos teeming with the displaced, the dispossessed, the chronic sick or crippled, beggars, lepers, runaway serfs. Perhaps a third of the population did not fit into official categories, but formed the raw materials of huge crowds which formed and dispersed mysteriously and rapidly. Runaway monks or priests who had fallen out with the Church existed in plenty to provide leadership and half-knowledge. Once such a mob was on the march it was difficult to stop. In 1251, for instance, in response to the failure of the Fourth Crusade, a renegade Hungarian monk called Jakob preached an anti-clerical crusade and taught that the murderer of a priest gained merit. He gathered an army of thousands and rampaged through northern French towns. He was able to occupy places like Paris, Orleans and Amiens virtually

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

  You busy yourself and are anxious about many things, but only one thing is needful; Mary has chosen that one necessary thing which no one shall take from her. The one thing needful for life is food for the soul. And Jesus said to them all: He who wishes to follow me, let him put aside his own will and be ready to endure all hardships and sufferings of the flesh throughout his life; only then can he follow me. He who wishes to take heed for his bodily life will destroy his true life, but he who obeys the will of the Father, even though he may destroy his bodily life, will save his true life. And what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world but destroys or harms his true life? And he said: Beware of riches, for your life does not depend on possessing more than others. There was once a rich man who had a large harvest. And he thought to himself, I will rebuild my barns and put up larger ones and gather all my wealth into them, and I will say to my soul: There, my soul, you have all you desire; rest, eat, drink, and live for your pleasure. But God said to him: Foolish man, tonight your soul will be taken and all that you have stored up will go to others. So it is with everyone who provides for his bodily life and does not live in God. And Jesus said to them: You tell me that Pilate slew the Galileans. Were those Galileans any worse than others, that this happened to them? Not at all. We are all such, and we also shall all perish unless we find salvation from death. Or were those eighteen men who were crushed by a falling tower, worse than all the other people of Jerusalem? Not at all. If we do not save ourselves from death, today or tomorrow we too shall perish. If we have not yet perished as they did, we must think of our position thus: A man had an apple-tree in his garden and he came and looked at the tree and saw there was no fruit on it. And he said to the gardener: This is the third year I have been here and found that apple tree always barren. It must be cut down, for it only takes up space uselessly. But the gardener said: Let us wait awhile, master. I will dig round it, manure it, and we will see next summer. Perhaps it will bear fruit, but if not, then cut it down. So we, too, while we live in the flesh and do not bear fruit of the life of the spirit, are barren apple trees. Only by someone's mercy are we left for another year.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  “day of the Lord” comes not just with the proleptic chaos, confusion, and violence we find here, but ful y when the Son of Man comes in judgment, who will stand firm in the midst of the smoke and flames? Certainly, “watch” (Mark 13:37), he tel s the three on the Mount, but in watching “understand” (Mark 13:14) that no one is prepared for the fire of tribulation that is coming. Will anyone? 106 Given Matthew’s extended resurrection appearances, including most significantly the so-called Great Commission of Matt 28:16–20, it is possible that Mark’s apocalyptic rhetoric clashed with Matthew’s wisdom rhetoric, which was grounded in a longer-term 103 Further study would reveal in fact some lexical parallels between our passage and Mark 13, as was noted by Farrer, A Study in St. Mark, 141. 104 This insight drawn from SRI accords with Gnilka’s interpretation that the narrative of 14:51–52 fits an apocalyptic motif in which chaos is present. See Joachim Gnilka, Das Evangelium nach Markus, 3rd ed. (EKK; Zurich: Benziger, 1989), 2.271. 105 This suggestion raises the question of how accurately the νεανίσκος in the tomb has been understood and depicted in Christian proclamation and art. Collins, Mark, 795 may be right to connect the seating of the νεανίσκος in the tomb on the right in relation to the earlier mention of “the Lord” seated at the right hand of God (12:35–37), but if so it is important to note that the “enthronement” language of 12:35–37 clearly does not portend a seating in glory but rather a seating in judgment until a time of perhaps glory or peace wil begin. 106 The formulation ‘When the Son of Man returns will he find faith?’ is explicitly found in the “parable of the unjust judge” in Luke 18:8, which suggests that Luke, and possibly Matthew, do pick up on the cautionary note for would-be followers of Jesus. 17 Mark 14:51–52 177 slave-based Christian lifestyle to be lived out however long, an end-time expectation extended into the future.107 True, Matthew may not have understood Mark’s implicit fulfillment and the apocalyptic expectation that ground Mark 14:51–52; however, if he did, it seems likely that he had reasons for ignoring the passage, perhaps in order not to present end-time expectation couched in fear but rather in his intentional singleminded, Christic lifestyle. Emergent Structure: How Mark 14:51–52 Creates New Possibilities of Meaning It is not surprising that the history of interpretation of the gospels, Mark in particular, and this passage even more particularly, has failed regularly to underscore the dramatic implications unveiled by a socio-rhetorical interpretation approach to the material.

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

  There’s actually quite a lot that team leaders can do to encourage inclusion; for instance, looking carefully for anyone on the team who may seem to be left out (all the more important when some or all of a team works remotely), which person is regularly cut off during group discussions, who is regularly chatting with whom, and who doesn’t seem to be interacting with anyone. By watching, a manager can gain awareness and insight. But regular one-on-ones are probably the best way to understand what’s really going on: asking about people’s interactions with others on the team and if they are having challenges with any specific personalities. At FYidoctors, doctors and team leaders follow what they call a Ten-Ten Commitment in their optometry clinics, labs, and home office departments. “For the first ten minutes of each day, leaders walk around and ask their team members how they are doing with a friendly hello and no other agenda but a welcome to the day,” said president Darcy Verhun. “It’s incumbent on the leaders to do this to demonstrate visible leadership and caring. It’s ten minutes at the start of the day, and another ten minutes at the end of the day to see how everyone’s day has gone. I’m amazed at the power of a simple check-in.” Verhun added, “These check-ins are not so that the team can hear the leader’s story, but so the leaders can hear their team members’ stories and connect. We have received such positive feedback from the team on this leadership commitment and have found it reduces anxiety.” But even if managers pick up on exclusion, they still need specific approaches to help their people move from feeling isolated to connected and accepted. We are not necessarily suggesting dragging everyone out for karaoke or starting a potluck Friday, but a few ideas that can help immediately include: Ensure that all team members can contribute in meetings and have their voices heard in a calm, organized manner.Buddy new hires up with more seasoned employees who they might form a connection with (friendly seasoned employees, that is).Spend time in every meeting recognizing the contributions of individuals as well as those of the group as a whole.Go out of the way to make remote workers feel fully accepted—e.g., even though some people may be working in the office, now and then ask everyone to join meetings via electronic means. Also bring remote people into the workplace on a regular basis. What follows are a few more methods used by leaders we’ve interviewed and worked with to enhance inclusion and strengthen bonds in their teams to great effect.

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

  If you come out leading with the facts, the predictive part of the mind that induces anxiety has nothing to work with. Or, if you try to solve a problem without a clear discussion of the issue and how that affects your team values, e.g., “Sam, what are we going to do about Landex?” then you may never learn the real reasons for his actions. Method 2: Don’t Delay “Although deferring a difficult conversation can result in temporary relief, things simmer, problems get worse, and projects get off track or fail,” says Amy Jen Su, managing partner of Paravis Partners, a leadership development firm. When managers display what candor looks like themselves—addressing problems immediately, and with care, empathy, and directness—the message spreads throughout a team that this is appropriate behavior. In addition, as a leader works with conflict-averse employees, she may have the employee consider what would boost confidence in dealing with the conflict immediately versus putting it off. Does the employee need support during the meeting, or to role-play what might be said? Has the employee considered what business objectives are at risk by not confronting the issue in a timely manner? Method 3: Stick to FactsLeaders should teach employees to provide evidence around issues of concern when a conflict ensues. “By naming names, identifying events, describing situations, and illustrating behaviors, the leader seeks to get down to basics,” write Drs. Tim Porter-O’Grady and Kathy Malloch, authors of Quantum Leadership . A goal of conflict resolution is to ensure that all the tangible issues are laid on the table in clear enough terms that all the players can see them plainly. When the facts are fully presented, it’s remarkable how quickly many conflicts can be resolved. With that said, ensure your people have accurate and relevant sources to glean facts from. Also help them understand how you want them to research the issue they will discuss and debate, including what you consider a credible source (e.g., internal reports, industry journals) and what is not (e.g., Wikipedia, social media). Method 4: Use Your WordsAmy Edmondson of Harvard Business School told us managers must teach their people to have the courage to “use their words” to convey what they see, think, worry about, and need help with. She said, “Many leaders fail to recognize the implications of silence in moments when people could have spoken up. The surprise is how often the use of words is stymied by interpersonal anxiety.” That doesn’t mean meetings must get bogged down in endless clarification and discussions. Psychologically safe meetings don’t have to take longer. What it does mean is managers must show vulnerability and admit they don’t have all the answers. Otherwise people are sizing up the situation: “If I get the sense that you don’t think you’re a fallible human being, like the rest of us, I’m sure as heck not going to stick my neck out.”

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

  Funny that research also shows some 65 percent of today’s workers feel shortchanged when it comes to receiving individualized feedback from their bosses. To offer constructive feedback, we steer leaders away from the commonly recommended “sandwich” approach of offering a negative between two positives. In these cases, the constructive suggestions can get suffocated under a pillow full of praise, or employees may focus only on the negatives. No, the best constructive feedback includes specific ideas for improvement, instead of generalities, along with meaningful praise in the right measure. One of our coaching clients admitted he had never been good at giving feedback but was game to try again. One of his first attempts was with an employee who had been missing some deadlines. He recounted to us a private conversation with her. He said, “I’ve noticed some changes in the way you are working and your results over the past few weeks. I know how focused and driven you normally are, so I wanted to see if there was anything at all you are having trouble with that I could help with.” That was terrific, we told him. He got to the point and acknowledged the issue openly without hedging, but he also let her know how valued her work was to the team. He also offered to work together with her to fix the problem. The employee admitted to some personal struggles outside the job, and the manager was able to empathize. After listening, he offered her a couple of afternoons off to address the challenges, and together they worked on prioritizing her assignments for the coming weeks. They kept meeting weekly, and soon after she delivered a project ahead of time. We encouraged him to publicly reward that achievement, and he did in his next staff meeting. He said how proud she’d been to share with the team how she’d pulled off the win. When we ask leaders why they aren’t living up to their employees’ expectations in giving clear feedback, they often tell us that it is not only uncomfortable but time-consuming. “No one wants to hear what they are doing wrong,” they say. We understand. We had an employee in our corporate days who we tried to coach to collaborate better with his peers, but the fellow didn’t believe he had a problem. He was a friend of the CEO, so we had to tread lightly. In our next coaching session, we gave him specifics about the kind of behaviors we were expecting, and we offered facts about when he hadn’t lived up to expectations with actual things said about him by peers around the company (with their permission). The employee was still skeptical. Why hadn’t these colleagues told him themselves?

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  In this chapter I propose to set forth this aspect of the situation. It is not the highest line of appeal, but it well deserves consideration, not only by those whose professional interests are bound up with the Church, but by all who believe that the Church propagates and perpetuates the religious life, and that its vitality is of importance to the higher life of humanity. The Church and its real estate The Church is a large landowner. As soon as it gets beyond its first itinerant stage, it needs a permanent foothold on the land. Every enlargement of church work, every mission or parish-house, requires land. If land is cheap, church expansion is easy. If land prices are artificially high, expansion is checked. Land speculation, which checks and strangles every other business, hampers the Church too. The retarding influence of land prices is felt most in the founding of missions and young churches. It is a frost that nips the young shoots. A young church enterprise is usually feeble in its finances. If it has to pay a prohibitive price for a mere location, that may cripple it or frustrate it altogether. Now, land prices are highest where population is densest. Consequently it is harder to plant new churches in large cities than in small. A hundred working people in a small town might easily unite in buying a lot for $1000. The same hundred persons, if living in New York, might have to pay $10,000 for a lot of half the size. But the denser the population, the more unwholesome are the moral influences and the greater is the need of religious work. Thus land prices act as an automatic brake on church extension, and this brake presses the harder, the steeper the uphill grade is which the Church has to climb. This is one simple explanation of the fact so often lamented, that the Church does not keep pace with the population in large cities. A certain church in New York fifty years ago planted a number of missions in the growing suburbs of that day by holding cottage meetings in the homes of its members and renting vacant stores in which it organized Sunday-schools. Several of these missions developed into vigorous churches. Forty years later the same church desired to resume its early missionary career, but its members now lived in tenement houses, and the cheapest store in sight cost $600 a year. It was numerically and financially stronger than in its early days, but rent had increased faster than the ability of the church, and high rent quenched its missionary impulse. The pioneer work which formerly rested on the spontaneous zeal of plain people becomes dependent on the assistance of wealthy individuals or city mission organizations.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Ahmed also points out that in Egypt, Islamic dress is not a return to the past. There was nothing traditional about the clothes that many women preferred in the 1970s and 1980s. It was a new fashion, resembling Western styles (apart from the long sleeves and skirts) rather than the garb worn by their grandmothers. Indeed, it could be seen as a “halfway house” and as the uniform of transition to modern society. More and more women than ever before had started to receive a higher education during these years. A large number of the women who opted for Islamic dress in the universities were among the first members of their family to have advanced beyond basic literacy; they often came from a rural background. Their dress was, therefore, a “modern” version of the clothes worn by the women in their family. When they encountered the alarming modernity of the big city—its cosmopolitanism, aggressive consumerism, inequalities, violence, and overcrowding—they could easily have been overcome. Their dress proclaimed their upward mobility, but it also provided some continuity with what they had worn before. An Islamic identity and the community that went with it enabled them to make what could have been a traumatic rite of passage more easily and peacefully. We have seen that in the past, religion has helped people to cross over from a conventional to a more modern lifestyle and ideology. Islamic dress, for both men and women, could be another of these stratagems.45 All transitions are painful, however. The Islamic jamaat on the campuses during the late 1970s was a youth movement which helped young men and women to articulate their frustration and confusion. It often spilled over into violence. The jamaat were the least aggressive of the Egyptian Islamic movements during the 1970S, but some of the more militant leaders would resort to strong-arm tactics on occasion to get control of the campus. The American Arabist Patrick Gaffney made a study of the Jamaah al-Islamiyyah at the new University of Minya in Upper Egypt, where the student body was still undeveloped and the small Islamic cadre had few rivals. They began by establishing special places as Islamic zones: a bulletin board, a section of the cafeteria, or the shady spots on lawns. By 1977, by dint of bullying to deter rivals, the Islamists had gained control of the student union. They made a mosque in the shared grounds of the Colleges of Art and Education, where students had to congregate between classes. The Islamists took the place over, spreading prayer mats, amplifying the prayers over a loudspeaker, and bearded youths occupied the area at all times, studying the Koran.46

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

  For to him who understands my teaching there will be no meaning in 'father', or 'mother', or 'wife', or 'children', or 'property'. Then the learned Orthodox gathered at Jerusalem and went to Jesus who was in a village near by. A crowd of people had thronged into the house where he was and stood around it. The Orthodox began to speak to the people, telling them not to listen to the teaching of Jesus. They said that he was possessed of a devil, and that if men lived by his commandments there would be still more evil in the world than now. They said that he drove out evil by evil means. Jesus called them to him and said: You say that I drive out evil by evil. But no power destroys itself If it destroyed itself it would cease to exist. You try to drive out evil by threats, executions, and murders, but evil still exists precisely because it cannot fight against itself. I do not drive out evil by evil as you try to. I drive out evil by calling on men to fulfill the will of the Father's spirit which gives life to all men. Five commandments express the will of that spirit, which gives happiness and life. And they therefore destroy evil. That is a proof that they are true. If men were not sons of one spirit it would not be possible to overcome evil, just as it is not possible to enter a strong man's house and rob it. To rob his house it is necessary first to bind the strong man. And men are bound by their unity in the spirit of life. And so I say to you that all mistakes of men and every false opinion shall escape punishment, but false interpretations of the holy spirit, which gives life to all, will not be forgiven. If anyone speaks ill of a man it may not be counted against him, but if anyone speaks against the holy spirit in man, that cannot pass without harm to him. Abuse me as much as you like, but do not decry the commandments of' life I have disclosed to you. It cannot pass harmlessly for a man if he calls what is good- evil. Man must be at one with the spirit of life. He who is not at one with it is against it. Man must serve the spirit of life and goodness in all men, and not in himself alone. Either you believe life and happiness to be good for the whole world, and should then love life and happiness for all men, or you believe life and happiness to be evil, and should then not love them even for yourself. Either you consider a tree good and its fruit good, or else you consider the tree bad and its fruit bad. For a tree is valued by its fruit.

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

  Whether we’re feeling social judgment online or in the real world, we find ourselves doing one of two things: avoiding or enduring. Unlike most psychological jargon, both these terms mean exactly what you think. Avoidance is the equivalent of sticking our fingers in our ears and singsonging, “I can’t heeeeear you!” Avoidance can be a lot of work—faking an illness means remembering to have a lingering cough the next day, walking the long but less crowded way around wastes time, and showing up to a meeting at the moment it begins so you don’t have to make small talk takes exhausting precision. Avoidance can be overt: not showing up at the party, letting our calls go to voicemail. But avoidance can be covert, too—we may not even realize we’re doing it. Not making eye contact is the classic. Or we may go to the party but spend most of our time petting the host’s cat or checking text messages on the balcony before sneaking home to watch Netflix and eat a bowl of cereal. But while avoidance offers immediate relief, it’s almost always followed by a bitter aftertaste of guilt, shame, disappointment, or frustration. [image file=image_rsrc2GA.jpg] Enduring, however, is white-knuckling it through an office team-building event, presentation, or wedding reception. God help the well-meaning bridesmaid who tries to pull us onto the dance floor—we would rather stab her with a dessert fork than have to YMCA. Those of us who endure usually get home with jangled nerves, a mysterious stomachache, and sore cheek muscles from continuous smiling. Or we get drunk, but more on that later. Most of us have felt this way for a long time. For 75 percent of people who experience social anxiety, this long, awkward trip all started somewhere between the ages of eight and fifteen, allowing us many future decades to scroll through our phone rather than make conversation. For many of us, it’s as much a part of us as our brown eyes or curly hair. It’s what we remember from Day One. * * * By now, you may have noticed that I say “we.” In academia there’s a saying: “research is me-search.” Many scientists choose their field because their subject matter rings true to them and their lives. The grit researcher bounces back after any setback. The trauma expert survived a life-threatening experience. The ADHD researcher works surrounded by teetering stacks of paper. For me, it is telling that I work at Boston University’s storied Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders, or CARD. If anxiety were a religion, CARD would be the mother church and I would be a lifelong congregant.

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

  We value calculated risk taking.” Yet during uncertainty, too many people freeze and can’t decide on a course to take, worried they’ll be held accountable for a wrong call. Sewitch adds that leadership’s role is to first tell the truth so their people have all the available information (here’s what we know and what we don’t), and then to encourage and guide their tribe members to move. Leaders also set the example since people believe the behaviors they observe, not the words they hear, from their leaders. “It’s important to let people know where you are seeing improvement because they may not recognize it themselves. Then celebrate those wins. Finally, don’t punish people for making intelligent errors, or what we call learning moments.” Explaining this concept of the “learning moment,” WD-40 Company CEO Garry Ridge told us, “A learning moment is the positive or negative outcome of any decision, action, or event that is freely shared with all in order to advance the collective knowledge of our tribe.” He added, “It can be a period of frustration, a burst of inspiration, a breakthrough of collaboration in which people stumble upon a problem, unearth an opportunity, or fail at an initiative, and then communicate what they’ve learned without fear of reprisal. “We don’t expect perfection. Pursuit of perfection does not produce great results. It just stops people from taking action or risks. We expect people to be curious, to experiment, and to get comfortable with uncertainty of outcomes.” Ridge went on to explain his own epiphany about learning moments: “When I get introduced at events, our company’s reputation often precedes me. The emcee might say nice things about me, and then I say, ‘Let me tell you the truth. I’m the chairman and CEO of WD-40 Company. I’m consciously incompetent about a lot of things. I’m probably wrong and roughly right at most things.’” It’s clear that humility is a prerequisite in creating an organization that is not afraid to act, to learn, and to evolve. Method 6: Offer Constructive FeedbackThis is an adage that everyone commits to but few leaders practice. Offering constructive feedback builds on the process of one-on-one performance and development conversations but is so important that it merits its own method in reducing anxiety. The most effective leaders we’ve met are not afraid to deliver fair, tough coaching. And yet according to Forbes , nine out of ten managers say they avoid giving constructive feedback to their employees for fear of them reacting badly.