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 465 of 501 · 20 per page

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

  As a result, an air of anxiety hangs over New Testament references to widows. The Acts of the Apostles indeed backdates trouble even to before the time of Paul’s ministry, when the surviving disciples of Jesus had to sort out accusations of preferential treatment between Greek- and Hebrew/Aramaic-speaking widows in the assembly in Jerusalem (Acts 6.1–7). After the Pastoral Epistles’ detailed regulations for their behaviour and the scope of their activities within the Church, Churches developed formal associations for eligible widows, mostly centred on confining them as much as possible to private life. The most restrictive view comes from a Syrian order for the running of a Church community, probably of third-century date, the Didascalia Apostolorum (‘Teaching of the Apostles’). In general, the Didascalia seeks to remove Christian laypeople from civic life, but it is particularly ingeniously eloquent about widows staying home: ‘let a widow know that she is the altar of God’, it says, adding unctuously that ‘the altar of God indeed never wanders or runs about anywhere, but is fixed in one place.’[17] In view of such a narrowing of options for senior women, it is rather charming to find that the earliest known epitaph anywhere for any member of the Christian Church’s hierarchy, predating anything for bishops, priests or deacons, is for a formally enrolled widow from the second-century Church in Rome: Flavia Arcas, ‘the sweetest of mothers’ according to her daughter Flavia Theophila, who financed the inscription.[18] Moreover, it has to be said that a formal place for widows, and a warm and open welcome for the financial patronage that wealthy widows might offer a Church community, were a good deal more than the rabbis were offering women in the synagogue. Judaism also continued its relentless emphasis on marriage, whereas Christianity in the second century was on the verge of opening another possible choice for Christian women in developing institutional celibate communities, a matter which we will visit in Chapter 7.[19]

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

  The eventual death blow to itinerant prophecy was a renewed surge of prophetic activity in mid-second-century Asia Minor, calling itself indeed ‘The New Prophecy’. It is otherwise known as Montanism, after its early leader Montanus, who proclaimed new revelations of the Holy Spirit and stirred up mass enthusiasm for his message in his native Phrygia. That was a direct challenge to the guardians of the Spirit in local communities, the bishops, but it was made more pointed by the fact that Montanus’ leading companions in authority were female prophets, Prisca and Maximilla, prominent in a ministry by now barely acceptable in the mainstream Church. Phrygian bishops could draw on Catholic contacts across the Mediterranean, and already it was an asset for them and a blow to their opponents to secure a condemnation of Montanism from one of the leaders of the large Church in Rome, Eleutherius. A further gathering of bishops reinforced the condemnation, but the fervent rhetoric of renewal in Montanism appealed more widely through the Mediterranean world beyond Asia Minor; it gained the allegiance of Tertullian, the constitutionally emphatic North African theologian whom we shall meet again. An obstinate Montanist remnant survived in their home territory of Phrygia for at least another four centuries, guarding the charisma that Montanus and his companions had conferred on their stronghold of Pepouza.[41] Along with the Montanists departed for the time being a Christian enthusiasm for prophecy and prophetic performance. Characteristically it has re-emerged in Christian tradition whenever Christians want to challenge existing power structures – as has a linked possibility, inadvisably dismissed as remote by one Victorian Church historian: ‘If Montanism had triumphed, Christian doctrine would have been developed, not under the superintendence of the church teachers most esteemed for wisdom, but usually of wild and excitable women.’[42] Amid stirrings of great change in Western Christianity some seven decades later, Monsignor Ronald Knox could still opine in his polemical but learned and entertaining study of Christian ‘enthusiasm’ that ‘[f]rom the Montanist movement onwards, the history of enthusiasm is largely a history of female emancipation, and it is not a reassuring one.’[43]

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

  Such comments seem risible now, but there is a serious historical point to them in looking at the directions taken by the developing Christian Church during the second century. This was the age of the impressively competent and generally sane Antonine emperors. It witnessed a growing moral seriousness among the Graeco-Roman elite, exemplified by their fascinated disapproval of supposed sexual excesses among Roman rulers in the previous century; we may follow their prurience in Suetonius’ lurid and still entertaining second-century account of the Twelve Caesars from Julius Caesar to Domitian.[44] So little did most outsiders know about this obscure, small-scale and often deliberately secretive religious organization that it was easy for them to project prurient sexual fantasies on to what they did know about unconventional Christian behaviour. What did the Eucharist signify, with its talk of eating flesh and drinking blood? Cannibalism? What happened in ceremonies of Baptism, when adults went nude into water? Was there incest involved?[45] In this almost Victorian atmosphere, with public suspicion of obscure groupings like Christians easily turning to indignant fantasies about their licentiousness, when Christians defended their devotional practice and common life in literary ‘apologies’, many found it tempting to stress sexual renunciation, a theme of austerity that would appeal to many strands of Graeco-Roman philosophy. It was equally natural, though a little contradictory, to emphasize respectability and conformity to the norms of a society based on a male construction of family, and to make attack a form of defence by criticizing the immorality and promiscuity of Graeco-Roman society. Yet such defence was never a simple task, because even as the Church constructed its notion of Christian marriage, the enterprise was complicated by the obstinate persistence of other thoughts in its tangled inheritance from the past, in which both celibacy and a new place for women contended with the demands of family. It is to those complexities that we now turn. 7Virgins, Celibates, Ascetics (c.100–c.300)The writer of the Pastoral Epistles had told the women of his Church that their salvation came from childbearing. During the second century CE, Christianity experienced a powerful reaction against this thought, as both women and men sought salvation by a flight not just from general sexual activity, but even from Christian marriage: this was the beginning of the Christian monastic life. Increasingly, theological commentators were unmarried clerics even if they were not monks, and they praised marriage’s virtues with a certain condescension, or worse. Indeed, over the next thousand years, from the second to the twelfth century, Christians wrote a very great deal more about celibacy than marriage. The two themes have stayed uncomfortably entwined right down to the present day, and so we must scrutinize developments in the second century with some care.

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

  Lay Marriage or Clerical Celibacy: The Gregorian ChoiceThe most original element in the Gregorian scheme for society was unique in Christian history, and has never been attempted by any other branch of the Christian Church before or since: to make the two major orders of clerical ministry (priests and bishops) entirely celibate. Consequently, this was an effort to identify together (or confuse) two separate Christian vocations, one to celibate life and the other to priesthood. It was a formidable task, since, outside monasteries, the vast majority of clergy in eleventh-century Europe were still married men with families, and indeed themselves likely to be the sons of clergy. The growth of the parish system was fanning them out across the continent, often alone in charge of a rural community, contrasting for instance with the community life of an Anglo-Saxon minster church. In the past, the general understanding had been that married clergy would go on living with their wives after they progressed from minor orders to become a priest, even though they now abstained from sex; in a minster the convention could be quietly policed by colleagueship. That was not so easy in rural isolation, in a village where the neighbours would take for granted marriage of whatever status. The centralizing Church bureaucracy was determined to change all this.[26] There was more than one level of ecclesiastical anxiety at work in the Gregorian move to ban clerical marriage. One practical motive was to defend clerical property: clerical marriage and the ties of paternal love expected of any family might disperse land and goods given to the Church. Reformers of monasteries in the Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian Churches had shown the same concern, tidying up tangles of family and monastic property that had resulted in much appropriation by the secular aristocracy (above, Chapter 11). Neurosis on this matter explains the extraordinary level of hostility to clerical children among the eleventh-century reformers. The Synod of Pavia convened by Pope Benedict VIII in 1022 started a long effort by the Church authorities to have these unfortunates declared as serfs belonging to the Church, which among other consequences meant that they could not be ordained. The programme took a crazy though logical step in the order of the Synod of Bourges in 1031 to ban clerical children from getting married at all. Although that particular proposal went nowhere, all this was an obvious hit at the ancient institution of clerical dynasties, and it was allied to a general prohibition on illegitimate men becoming priests that lasted in Roman Catholic canon law until the twentieth century; part of a general stigmatization of illegitimacy in Western Christianity that has rarely been equalled in intensity in any other culture.[27]

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

  The silences continued. In the East, the energetic legislation of the Synod In Trullo in Constantinople in 691–92 dealt with various matters around marriage, but a wedding ceremony in church was not one of them.[26] There is also a significant omission in a text that is roughly contemporary with those early Western sacramentaries in the late fifth or sixth century. This is the anonymous collection of Syrian theological and mystical treatises and letters whose author is only known under a pseudonym, masquerading as the first-century convert of Paul mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, Dionysios (Dionysius) the Areopagite. Even though this Corpus Dionysiacum may have been written by a non-Chalcedonian ascetic, it became influential on theology and Church practice throughout both Eastern and Western Christianity for many centuries, right up to and beyond the sixteenth-century Reformation.[27] The Corpus discusses as sacraments Baptism, Eucharist, Ordination, entry to the monastic life and funerals, with descriptions of the liturgy attached to them – but not marriage. The omission of marriage from among the sacraments continued as a silence in the theological commentary of such greatly respected Eastern Christian authorities as John of Damascus in the eighth century. It is the same a century later with the writings of a monk from the Stoudios monastery in Constantinople who hence is known as Theodore the Stoudite, a major reformer of Byzantine monastic life.[28] Lurking behind this general reluctance in such a wide variety of commentators was that quiet anxiety about the nature of marriage that we have now traced through so many Christian centuries: should something so universally practised by humankind, and so inextricably involved with the physicality of sex (plus the raucous fun of the marriage celebrations on the day), enter the sacred mysteries of God? Nevertheless, the Church of Byzantium moved on, to comply with a drastic change in imperial law not long after Theodore the Stoudite had repeated much of the text of Pseudo-Dionysios. Sometime around 900 a new law (Novella) of the Emperor Leo VI (reigned 886–912) laid down that, for free citizens (slaves hardly mattered), the only form of union recognized would be one blessed by a priest – anything else would be ‘illegitimate concubinage’.[29]

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

  While the Western Empire decayed through the fifth century, there was no certain future for Catholic Christianity and for the Bishop of Rome. The Western Church’s strength had lain in the episcopal system that, as much as in the East, was based on imperial towns and cities, so the Catholic Church’s character was urban and in many areas of the disintegrating Empire largely a religion of the social elite. The two provinces of Britannia were an extreme example, for archaeology suggests a late Roman minority Christian culture based on towns (three of them named as sending bishops to the Council of Western bishops at Arles in 314) and on the country villas of prosperous landowners.[1] Gaul and the Mediterranean basin had experienced greater growth in rural Christian practice, especially encouraged by the charisma and continuing golden memory of the fourth-century Martin of Tours, but demography and politics still suggested another possible future for the West: a different variety of Christianity, identified with the Germanic peoples who had been drifting westward across the Roman frontiers since the third century, prompted in turn by population movements to their east in Asia. Their arrival became unstoppable as the legions retreated or disbanded. During the fifth century a whole series of Germanic kingdoms emerged in place of imperial power, and, although most were Christian, theirs was an Arian Christianity, rejecting the conclusions dictated by Constantine I at Nicaea.[2] The now largely overlooked hero of Arian triumph in converting Germanic peoples to Christianity is Bishop Ulfila. He pioneered the missionary strategy later adopted by Patriarch Photios in creating a Christian literature and script for a vernacular language. Coming from an Eastern Christian family but raised across the northern imperial frontier, he devised a Bible text in the Gothic language, complete with a new alphabet to convey its particular sounds. Ulfila was consecrated bishop at a time in the 330s when Arian styles of belief championed by the skilful politician Eusebios, Bishop of Nicomedia (now İzmit in Turkey), had become dominant at the Roman imperial Court. When Arianism was ousted from imperial Christianity by ‘Catholics’ such as Bishop Ambrose of Milan, the Germanic peoples moving into the Empire continued proudly to wear their version of Christian faith as a badge of cultural identity over against Romans. Right up to the end of the sixth century, the Germanic successor-kingdoms to the Western Empire, from Spain to the Alps and the Adriatic, were primarily Arian in leadership. Gaul, the modern region of France, proved the crucial exception. Clovis, King of the Franks from 481, certainly dallied with Arian Christianity, and members of his family opted for Arianism.[3] Nevertheless, Clovis married a Catholic wife, and, besides that incentive, his beliefs were focused by his military victories, like the Emperor Constantine before him. Clovis attributed his success in battle to the charismatic saint of the West who had been first a soldier like himself and then a wonder-working (and Catholic) bishop, Martin of Tours.

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  In any case, note how Christianity’s official prayer begins with “Our Father [Householder]” before it gets to “Your Kingdom.”) I turn now to Where Now and What Next for this present chapter. I have argued in this chapter that the Christian Bible presents us with a God of nonviolent distributive justice but also one of violent retributive justice. It also proclaims Jesus the Christ as both the Christ of the nonviolent Sermon on the Mount and the Christ of the violent book of Revelation. But humans are made in “the image and likeness” of God (Gen. 1:26a, 27), and Christians are called to be “joint heirs” with Christ (Rom. 8:17) for the care and preservation of creation (Gen. 1:28; Rom. 8:19). How, then, are we to act against injustice and violence—nonviolently or violently? This is the essential question behind my title How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian. Do we choose and follow one or the other option since both are presented as the character of the biblical God? But if one Christian chooses God as nonviolent, another may—with equal validity—choose God as violent. Is the answer to my titular “How?” simply, “It’s your choice”? Or, alternatively, should we mix a transcendental cocktail of so many parts violence and so many parts nonviolence depending on personal taste or according to denominational tradition? It is my task in the next chapter to suggest another and different option for How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian. Furthermore, and even more importantly, my proposed solution will not come externally from me but internally from the Christian Bible itself. It comes from proposing a Christian theology of the Christian Bible by imagining the Bible as a whole—as a completed volume, as an organized unity, and as an integrated totality. Even though scholars may see the Bible as a collection of diverse works from authors with diverse backgrounds, theologies, and purposes, the church must deal with the Bible as a whole, as revelation, as guidance for our lives today. I plan to read that Christian Bible as if nobody ever told me about two discrete sections called an Old Testament and a New Testament. I will think about it as if our copies lacked any such divisions and we could read straight through, book after book, from Genesis to Revelation. In Chapter 2 I explore the question “What does the Christian Bible reveal about its own imagination of God’s character when we read it through as a complete unit and as an integrated whole?” Is there more there than a simple parallel bipolarity of violence and nonviolence? CHAPTER 2CenteringTHE MEANING IN THE MIDDLE ?[I]t is with civilization that human “savagery” becomes an agonizing part of the human condition. As civilization dawns, the ground of human existence turns an unearthly shade of red. ANDREW BARD SCHMOOKLER , The Parable of the Tribes DOES THE END OF a book determine the meaning of the story?

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

  I think it’s really important, however, to say that I still have my moments. I get intimidated by authority figures and starstruck by people I admire—I end up acting deferential or reticent, but I’m working on it. I’m still not genuinely comfortable public speaking, but I can fake it—I need to take a page from your Year of Speaking Dangerously. And I’m working on not beating myself up as much—I have to go back to the tenets of the Embrace chapter again and again and remember to speak kindly to myself. The Inner Critic is so stubborn and slippery! But all in all, even if I get anxious in the moment or beat myself up afterward, the anxiety and self-criticism don’t control me like they used to. Even when it happens, it’s much more properly proportioned than it used to be. In the book, you listed publishing How to Be Yourself, which contained your own story, as the most difficult item on your Challenge List. One year later, what have you learned? I’ve learned there was absolutely nothing to be afraid of! Beforehand, I worried that people would read the book and look at me differently—that revealing a struggle would make people draw back as if I were contagious. But the exact opposite happened. I can’t tell you how many people have confided in me that they struggle with social anxiety as well, from close friends to complete strangers. I was worried it would repel people, but instead it brought them closer. I find it so paradoxical and wondrous that the very thing that made me keep the world at arm’s length has now helped me embrace it. Notes Please note that some of the links referenced throughout this work are no longer active. Prologue 1. I’ve rendered these scales unofficial by editing some items to avoid repetition and have updated others with the language and technology of our time. 2. Common pushback to “be yourself” is “But what if your true self is an asshole?” I maintain that assholery is driven by fear and insecurity. When the fear goes away, so does the jerkitude. 3. Why? Time is on our side. Social anxiety declines steadily with age. We can’t avoid everything and everyone. As people grow older, they naturally worry less about what other people think. But why wait for time to take its course when we can help it along?3. Your Brain on Social Anxiety 1. How to Be Yourself is solidly rooted in cognitive-behavioral principles. Cognitive-behavioral theory is based on the idea that how you think and how you act affect how you feel, so by changing our thinking patterns and trying out new behaviors we’ll feel differently—less anxious, more willing—in situations that previously gave us the heebie-jeebies. 2. Since you asked, they are the dorsomedial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex—affectionately known as the DMPFC and DLPFC.8. No False Fronts in This Town: Play a Role to Build Your True Self

• From Quiet (2012)

  The speech was a success (so much so that he would be invited to make it every year). But the next invitation the college extended horrified him: to join the top brass for lunch. Little had to deliver another lecture that afternoon, and he knew that making small talk for an hour and a half would wipe him out. He needed to recharge for his afternoon performance. Thinking quickly, he announced that he had a passion for ship design and asked his hosts if he might instead take the opportunity of his visit to admire the boats passing by on the Richelieu River. He then spent his lunch hour strolling up and down the river pathway with an appreciative expression on his face. For years Little returned to lecture at the college, and for years, at lunchtime, he walked the banks of the Richelieu River indulging his imaginary hobby—until the day the college moved its campus to a landlocked location. Stripped of his cover story, Professor Little resorted to the only escape hatch he could find—the men’s room. After each lecture, he would race to the restroom and hide inside a stall. One time, a military man spotted Little’s shoes under the door and began a hearty conversation, so Little took to keeping his feet propped up on the bathroom walls, where they would be hidden from view. (Taking shelter in bathrooms is a surprisingly common phenomenon, as you probably know if you’re an introvert. “After a talk, I’m in bathroom stall number nine,” Little once told Peter Gzowski, one of Canada’s most eminent talk-show hosts. “After a show, I’m in stall number eight,” replied Gzowski, not missing a beat.) You might wonder how a strong introvert like Professor Little manages to speak in public so effectively. The answer, he says, is simple, and it has to do with a new field of psychology that he created almost singlehandedly, called Free Trait Theory. Little believes that fixed traits and free traits coexist. According to Free Trait Theory, we are born and culturally endowed with certain personality traits—introversion, for example—but we can and do act out of character in the service of “core personal projects.” In other words, introverts are capable of acting like extroverts for the sake of work they consider important, people they love, or anything they value highly. Free Trait Theory explains why an introvert might throw his extroverted wife a surprise party or join the PTA at his daughter’s school.

• From Quiet (2012)

  He’s been giving Friday-night dinners since he was a senior in college, and they’ve become a highlight of his week and a treasured piece of his identity. Emily has come to dread these weekly events. A hardworking staff attorney for an art museum and a very private person, the last thing she wants to do when she gets home from work is entertain. Her idea of a perfect start to the weekend is a quiet evening at the movies, just her and Greg. It seems an irreconcilable difference: Greg wants fifty-two dinner parties a year, Emily wants zero. Greg says that Emily should make more of an effort. He accuses her of being antisocial. “I am social,” she says. “I love you, I love my family, I love my close friends. I just don’t love dinner parties. People don’t really relate at those parties—they just socialize . You’re lucky because I devote all my energy to you. You spread yours around to everyone.” But Emily soon backs off, partly because she hates fighting, but also because she doubts herself. Maybe I am antisocial , she thinks. Maybe there is something wrong with me . Whenever she and Greg argue about this, she’s flooded with childhood memories: how school was tougher for her than for her emotionally hardier younger sister; how she seemed to worry more than other people did about social issues, like how to say no when someone asked her to get together after school and she preferred to stay home. Emily had plenty of friends—she’s always had a talent for friendship—but she never traveled in packs. Emily has suggested a compromise: What if Greg gives his dinner parties whenever she’s out of town visiting her sister? But Greg doesn’t want to host dinners by himself. He loves Emily and wants to be with her, and so does everyone else, once they get to know her. So why does Emily withdraw? This question, for Greg, is more than mere pique. Being alone for him is a kind of Kryptonite; it makes him feel weak. He had looked forward to a married life of shared adventures. He’d imagined being part of a couple at the center of things. And he’d never admitted it to himself, but for him being married meant never having to be by himself. But now Emily is saying that he should socialize without her. He feels as if she’s backing out of a fundamental part of their marriage contract. And he believes that something is indeed wrong with his wife. Is something wrong with me? It’s not surprising that Emily asks herself this question, or that Greg aims this charge at her. Probably the most common—and damaging—misunderstanding about personality type is that introverts are antisocial and extroverts are pro-social. But as we’ve seen, neither formulation is correct; introverts and extroverts are differently social.

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also pre destined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren. And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified .... Who shall bring any charge against God's elect? Schweitzer viewed the predestination of the elect as a main aspect of Paul's thought, regarding individuals as having only the right of refusal. 12 Bultmann, on the other hand, paid scant attention to predestination, empha sizing the necessity of individual decision. 13 Although the individual's ability to decide and commit himself to a way or a Lord seems to us to exclude predestinarian statements, we should recall that the two generally go together in Judaism. Just as the Q!.imran covenanters are called both the elect and those who choose God, so Paul has· no difficulty in thinking of those who accept the gospel as being the elect of God (cf. also I Thess. 10 On the question of the coherence and uniformity of Paul's future expectation, see above, section 1 n. ~ and the beginning of section 3 below. 1 See further the end of section 4 below. 12 Schweitzer, Mysticism, pp. 101-18, esp. p. n7; 128-30; above, section 1 n. 15. 13 See Theology l, pp. 228f., 232, 240, 256, 270 (all to the effect that man's choice or decision determines everything), 329f. (predestination cannot be understood literally, since that would destroy the character of faith as decision and obedience). 3] Pauline soterio/ogy 447

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

  Real Leadership Rosabeth Moss Kanter, professor at Harvard Business School, said, “It takes courage to speak up against complacency and injustice while others remain silent. But that’s what leadership is.” The sad truth is we expect people who are underrepresented to speak up for themselves about injustices. Often, colleagues and managers don’t believe them. Worse, they get combative. As leaders, we don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about how to address the microaggressions that happen every day in our workplaces that affect marginalized people deeply. As a definition, microaggressions are biases that reveal themselves in often subtle ways and leave people feeling uncomfortable or insulted. They may range from the offensive—a Black man notices a lone White woman flinch when he steps into the elevator, or a woman tries to speak up in a meeting but can’t get a word in with her male colleagues—to the bizarre—a gay man is told that he must love a certain musician, or a person in a wheelchair is jokily told to “slow down, speed racer.” We had a young friend explain that during her time as a teaching assistant at a local university, her professor would introduce her to the class with comments such as “I want you all to enjoy the lecture, so here’s a pretty face.” She knew it wasn’t meant to be harmful, but the comments ratcheted up her anxiety considerably and made her unsure of her abilities. She was, in fact, a qualified researcher and lecturer, but the professor’s comments framed her first as a thing to ogle. Instead, think of how engaged our friend would have been if the professor had bookended her lecture time with glowing comments about her research and educational accomplishments. This kind of death-by-a-thousand-cuts behavior is brushed off too frequently with those on the receiving end being termed “overly sensitive.” Yet research shows that microaggressions can take a real psychological toll on the mental health of recipients, may lead to anger and depression, and can lower work productivity and problem-solving abilities. One study at Marquette University provided strong evidence that microaggressions lead not only to elevated levels of depression and trauma, but thoughts of suicide in those affected. What follows are a few methods offered to us by powerful voices in marginalized communities and their allies to help those who feel on the outside become valued and included in any team. Method 1: Listen Up“If someone is brave and courageous enough to share their unique experience and perspective with you, honor it. Amplify it. Create space for it in your team meetings, in your business, and in your brand,” said HubSpot’s Burke. This means listening to those experiences.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  Maybe she’s got a lot of money, Mary Kay said. So, I checked, using some internet sites that I discovered in my investigative reporting training. Nope. She wasn’t rich. In fact, debt collectors were after her for failing to pay her bills. Maybe she thinks Holmer has a lot of dough, I said. Well, then, said Mary Kay, the wedding will also be a surprise party . Nervous about this prospective wife who seemed to be as lousy at financial management as Holmer, I asked him to consider getting a prenuptial agreement or set up a trust to protect Jake if anything should happen. He blew me off. Don’t be ridiculous, he said. Patty and I called Holmer’s cousin Joe, hoping he’d take up our cause. Our request seemed reasonable to us. Can’t Holmer just set a little something aside so Jake could afford to stay in the area, a world he’s always known and where he feels most comfortable? I’m not touching that with a ten-foot pole, and neither should you, Joe said. You girls leave your father alone. And then he hung up. Jake got out of the hospital a few days before the wedding, just in time to be fitted for the white dinner jacket he would wear to serve as Holmer’s best man. The next week, while Holmer and his new wife were circling the Arc de Triomphe, Jake began moving his stuff back down to the basement. 14 Building Character [image file=Image00020.jpg] Inspired by my brother Jake, I spent a year investigating these stories about abysmal housing in Milwaukee for people with serious mental illness. (Photo credit: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) Holmer and his wife didn’t technically kick Jake out of the house. But by 2005, their bills were piling up, and it was looking likely that they would have to sell their three-story condominium and move to a one-bedroom apartment. There would be no room for Jake in the new place. This would be trickier than it seemed. Jake, now fifty, had been unemployed for a few years and was increasingly limited by his depression and anxiety. For more than two decades, Jake worked as a clerk at a neighborhood hardware store—for a man who understood that Jake needed flexible hours to accommodate his lack of energy—but the hardware store had gone out of business, a victim of the big-box industry, and Jake’s income was down to his disability check. Even if he could find a place nearby that he could afford on his $540 a month in disability pay, he would have a hard time being on his own. Jake had even more trouble thinking straight. Shopping, cooking, even finding the energy to shower sometimes overwhelmed him. He was nervous about the idea of living alone. These last five years had been quite a ride for Holmer and his wife. She quit her job shortly after their wedding, announcing that she and her new husband would be traveling the world.

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  Furthermore, before Aslan the lion/Christ kills the White Witch, Peter, oldest of the four children who are the human participants in this apocalyptic battle, kills the Wolf-Monster. Afterward, Aslan/Christ reminds him: “You have forgotten to clean your sword . . . whatever happens, never forget to wipe your sword” (chapter 12). Once again, I have to recall a different admonition to another sword-yielding Peter: “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matt. 26:52). Both the Narnia series and the Left Behind series go beyond Revelation by having humans—children in the former case and adults in the latter—participate fully in the divine violence of apocalyptic cleansing. Both of those series generated questions and objections from my lecture audiences when I spoke of Jesus’s nonviolent resistance to Rome’s control of his first-century Jewish homeland. If I wanted to speak, as I did, about the historical Jesus, my audiences asked, as they should, about Revelation and its divine violence now at least fictionally supported by human violence. Clearly, and whether I liked it or not, I had to widen my focus from Gospel to Apocalypse, from historical Jesus to apocalyptic Jesus, and so across the entire New Testament from start to finish. But that focus could not and did not stop there; it had to extend to the entire Christian Bible and discuss the very character of the biblical God. The Vision of a Bipolar GodIN THOSE CHURCH LECTURES on Jesus I proposed that his attitude of nonviolent resistance to violence was programmatically based on his vision of a nonviolent God. In other words, Jesus’s message proclaimed the nonviolent Kingdom of a nonviolent God. That came, by the way, from the Sermon on the Mount where the divine model for “loving enemies” is a God who “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” Our earthly nonviolent resistance to violence makes us appropriate “children” of that heavenly Father who acts in similar fashion (Matt. 5:43–48 and Luke 6:27–36). But, whatever about Jesus in Temple or Apocalypse, it was concerning the character of the biblical God that questions, objections, and contradictions mounted exponentially. Was not the biblical God every bit as bipolar regarding violence and nonviolence as was that biblical Jesus? Sometimes it was argued that the God of the Old Testament was a God of vengeance and punishment while the God of the New Testament was a God of forgiveness and mercy. That was how, it was suggested to me, to solve my problem with the twin aspects of God’s biblical character. Despite that stereotype’s Christian anti-Judaism, the suggestion got little traction in my church audiences. Because, of course, we had usually discussed Revelation by then, and my questioners knew that it imagined a terminal and cosmic violence greater than anything in the Old Testament.

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

  How to take it to the next level? To jargonize it, we use disclosure, which simply means sharing what we think, do, and feel with others. This seems easy enough, but it’s not intuitive. Folks susceptible to social anxiety don’t often talk about themselves. We’re polite and pleasant, but others often get the impression we’re distant, formal, or otherwise keep the world at arm’s length. Disclosure got a lot of press when the “36 Questions to Fall in Love” phenomenon made the rounds of the interweb. Much has been made about this list of questions, with online articles like, “I Asked a Stranger These 36 Questions to See If We’d Fall in Love. And We Did,” and an essay in the New York Times titled “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This.” It sounded like a silver bullet for the lovelorn. But the real story is actually quite clinical, which makes it that much more amazing. More than twenty years ago, in 1997, psychologists Arthur and Elaine Aron, and a handful of colleagues from around the country published a paper with an innocuously dry title: “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings.” The procedure consisted of turning strangers into intimates in the laboratory by having them ask each other three sets of twelve questions. Each set became more probing and personal as they advanced. Set One included questions like, “For what in your life do you feel most grateful?” and, “Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?” Set Two goes a bit deeper: “Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?” and, “How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people’s?” Set Three ups the ante again, with questions like, “Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things that you might not say to someone you’ve just met,” and, “Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how he or she might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.” But the protocol wasn’t meant to make people fall in love; instead, the thirty-six questions were simply meant to induce closeness and intimacy in a laboratory setting without the messiness of relationships that occur naturally in the wilds of humankind. The questions were meant to eliminate experimental variability, not induce wedding bells, though the study team got an inkling of the power of the thirty-six questions when two subjects who had met during the study pilot ended up getting married.

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

  In an organization, part of what we, as leaders, need to create is an environment where our differences are celebrated. That’s what makes work interesting, exciting—the different approaches, ideas, and backgrounds.” As we spoke with individuals in marginalized communities, a few things they wanted managers to understand about addressing bias included: 1) Don’t try to convince a person from a marginalized group of all the things that have gone wrong in your life to better relate to their issues (you were poor, your parents died, you have a learning disorder, etc.); this is not a competition. 2) Don’t ante up by saying that your daughter is gay or that you have lots of Black friends. 3) Be compassionate but don’t be “shocked” by racism or other forms of bias; if you are, you have been actively ignoring what’s been happening because it did not affect you directly. 4) Don’t preach about your “wokeness” to the issue; show it (we’ll get to how in a minute). Says Katie Burke, chief people officer for HubSpot, “Allyship is a verb, and it starts with a combination of self-awareness and empathy. You have to adopt a mindset where you’re constantly learning, growing, and improving how you stand up and show up for others. It’s a lifelong commitment to building relationships based on trust, consistency, and accountability with marginalized individuals or groups.” It’s our responsibility as leaders to ensure those who are in need of support aren’t left feeling like they’re alone, added Terry Jackson, PhD, an executive coach and CEO of the Jackson Consulting Group. “Every day, your employees deal with social issues. Those issues will impact productivity and the level of engagement within your organization. If you’re an emotionally intelligent leader, you understand what is going on in the community that’s impacting your vulnerable employees. If you are not embracing those issues, discussing them and trying to solve them, you’re going to end up on the wrong side of history because we are at the tipping point where everybody is willing to engage around what is right for humanity.” Fundamentally, to do what Jackson suggests, leaders must start by believing people when they say they are hurt by racism, sexism, or other forms of discrimination. The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, for instance, didn’t spring up out of nowhere. They exposed a nerve that has long been ignored in America, that we are a nation still divided by inequality. As leaders who care about our people—their lives and emotional experiences—we need to be there for each other. After all, being the “only” in any group can be lonely and isolating, especially when no one speaks up for you, when no one believes the challenges you face every day. “As more and more companies attempt to build more diverse and inclusive workforces, one of the dynamics that fundamentally needs to shift is who speaks up on matters of belonging,” said Burke of HubSpot. Who is that? The leader.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  She kept threatening to get it tattooed on her ankle when she turned eighteen. Daisy turned back to Mychal, and I to my thoughts. The stomach grumbling had grown, if anything, louder. I felt like I might vomit. For someone who actively dislikes bodily fluids, I throw up quite a lot. “Holmesy, you okay?” Daisy asked. I nodded. Sometimes I wondered why she liked me, or at least tolerated me. Why any of them did. Even I found myself annoying. I could feel sweat sprouting from my forehead, and once I begin to sweat, it’s impossible to stop. I’ll keep sweating for hours, and not just my face or my armpits. My neck sweats. My boobs sweat. My calves sweat. Maybe I did have a fever. Beneath the table, I slid the old Band-Aid into my pocket and, without looking, pulled out a new one, unwrapped it, and then glanced down to apply it to my finger. All the while, I was breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, in the manner advised by Dr. Karen Singh, exhaling at a pace “that would make a candle flicker but not go out. Imagine that candle, Aza, flickering from your breath but still there, always there.” So I tried that, but the thought spiral kept tightening anyway. I could hear Dr. Singh saying I shouldn’t get out my phone, that I mustn’t look up the same questions over and over, but I got it out anyway, and reread the “Human Microbiota” Wikipedia article. The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely. —I sealed the Ziploc bag around the last quarter of my sandwich, got up, and tossed it into an overfilled trash can. I heard a voice from behind me. “How concerned should I be that you haven’t said more than two words in a row all day?” “Thought spiral,” I mumbled in reply. Daisy had known me since we were six, long enough to get it. “I figured. Sorry, man. Let’s hang out today.” This girl Molly walked up to us, smiling, and said, “Uh, Daisy, just FYI, your Kool-Aid dye job is staining your shirt.” Daisy looked down at her shoulders, and indeed, her striped top had turned pink in spots. She flinched for a second, then straightened her spine. “Yeah, it’s part of the look, Molly. Stained shirts are huge in Paris right now.” She turned away from Molly and said, “Right, so we’ll go to your house and watch Star Wars: Rebels .” Daisy was really into Star Wars—and not just the movies, but also the books and the animated shows and the kids’ show where they’re all made out of Lego. Like, she wrote fan fiction about Chewbacca’s love life. “And we will improve your mood until you are able to say three or even four words in a row; sound good?” “Sounds good.” “And then you can take me to work.

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

  Thus monastic leadership survived in the Church of the East, aided by a resolution of the energetically reforming Patriarch Aba I at a moment of favourable relations with the Sasanian regime in 544 that henceforth the Patriarch himself should be a celibate. Other bishops were forbidden marriage only as late as the twelfth century.[54] It is worth noting how remote much of the argument in these disputes was from the discourse of holiness and virginity in the Mediterranean Churches. There were severe practicalities to consider in a Church dominated by external power: survival and distinct identity. Patriarch Yosep presented his Synod in 554 with a canon on the marriage of bishops, which pointed out that a married episcopate was liable to lead to corrupt appropriation of Church land for the benefit of the family: worse still, a female descendant of the erring bishop might marry a Zoroastrian, and so former Church property might be lost to the ‘entire community of Christianity’.[55] Despite the central importance of marriage for Zoroastrians, their practice of it was disconcertingly at odds with Christian custom. The Church did not have the advantage it had enjoyed in entering Graeco-Roman society where the dominant culture was monogamous; Zoroastrians allowed polygyny, and they also made close-kin marriage not merely an honourable custom but a religious duty, whereas as we have seen the Romans particularly detested it (above, Chapter 3). One can sample Syrian Christians wrestling with the resulting difficulties in their relations with the Zoroastrian authorities through an extraordinary Syriac text entitled The Cave of Treasures, probably composed in the sixth century. This once popular and widely circulated book is nothing less than a retelling of the whole biblical story from Creation to the coming of the Holy Spirit to the disciples after Jesus’s Ascension, with special reference to the Sasanian world; it includes extra material, but also omits much biblical content that did not suit the author’s purposes.[56] The agendas within the Cave are multiform, but overall are intended not merely to glorify Syriac Christianity over against that of the Roman Empire, but to conciliate the Sasanian dynasty and disarm potential hostility to the Church. One symptom of that, for instance, is that the three ‘wise men’ who came from the East to worship the baby Jesus are here not actually magi (magicians or astronomers, who might be taken to be Zoroastrian priests), but kings, bearing the names of three late fifth-century Sasanian shahs.[57] On marriage, the Cave devotes some energy to distancing the practice of close-kin marriage from the founders of the Zoroastrian religion, including Zoroaster himself, implying that it is an illegitimate and undesirable innovation. Having demonstrated that to his own satisfaction, the author feels free to criticize the custom, emphasizing its close link to the Zoroastrian priesthood in particular, and associating it with demonic forces; all of which is a sure sign that some of his Christian readers were perfectly happy with it.[58]

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  I hope it was amusing. But you should know I cannot accept any responsibility for what comes out of my mouth when I am unconscious. In fact—you probably misheard me. A man of your advanced years is surely a little deaf. From: Christian Grey Subject: Pleading Guilty Date: June 2 2011 19:52 To: Anastasia Steele Dear Miss Steele, Sorry, could you speak up? I can’t hear you. Christian Grey CEO, Grey Enterprises Holdings, Inc. From: Anastasia Steele Subject: Pleading Insanity Again Date: June 2 2011 22:54 ET To: Christian Grey You are driving me crazy. From: Christian Grey Subject: I Hope So… Date: June 2 2011 19:59 To: Anastasia Steele Dear Miss Steele, I intend to do exactly that on Friday evening. Looking forward to it. ;) Christian Grey CEO, Grey Enterprises Holdings, Inc. From: Anastasia Steele Subject: Grrrrrr Date: June 2 2011 23:02 ET To: Christian Grey I am officially pissed at you. Good night. Miss A. R. Steele From: Christian Grey Subject: Wild Cat Date: June 2 2011 20:05 To: Anastasia Steele Are you growling at me, Miss Steele? I possess a cat of my own for growlers. Christian Grey CEO, Grey Enterprises Holdings, Inc. Cat of his own? I’ve never seen a cat in his apartment. No, I am not going to answer him. Oh, he can be so exasperating sometimes. Fifty shades of exasperating. I clamber into bed and lie glaring at the ceiling as my eyes adjust to the dark. I hear another ping from my computer. I am not going to look. No, definitely not. No, I am not going to look. Gah! Like the fool I am, I cannot resist the lure of Christian Grey’s words. From: Christian Grey Subject: What You Said in Your Sleep Date: June 2 2011 20:20 To: Anastasia Steele Anastasia, I’d rather hear you say the words that you uttered in your sleep when you’re conscious. That’s why I won’t tell you. Go to sleep. You’ll need to be rested with what I have in mind for you tomorrow. Christian Grey CEO, Grey Enterprises Holdings, Inc. Oh no. What have I said? It’s as bad as I think, I’m sure. Chapter Twenty-FiveMy mother hugs me tightly. “Follow your heart, darling, and please, please—try not to overthink things. Relax and enjoy yourself. You are so young, sweetheart. You have so much of life to experience yet, just let it happen. You deserve the best of everything.” She whispers in my ear, her heartfelt words comforting. She kisses my hair. “Oh, Mom.” Hot, unwelcome tears prick my eyes as I cling to her. “Darling, you know what they say. You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince.” I give her a lopsided, bittersweet smile. “I think I’ve kissed a prince, Mom. I hope he doesn’t turn into a frog.” She gives me her most endearing, motherly, absolute-unconditional-love smile, and I marvel at the love I feel for this woman as we hug again.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  What I am getting at is the new centrality of constructed orders and artifacts in mental and moral life. We saw this in one way with the new notions of procedural reason, both speculat ive and practical . Knowledge comes not from connectin g the min d to the order of things we find but in framing a representation of reality accordi ng to the right canons. Descartes's insight that our knowledge of things is our own cons truct was the basis · for his deep confidence, wh ich seems to have preceded the arguments th at articulate its justification, that we could attain certainty. This must be attainab le, because we can reflect on our own activity of thin king: because thin king is somet hing we do, we can achieve certainty about it. Descartes's representational model of knowledge was taken up by the empiricists. Buildin g also on Hobbes, they emphasized further the construc tive dime nsion of our knowledge of the world . Hobbes, and later Locke, followed by his disciples in the eighteent h century, tho ught of our world picture as almost lite rally put together out of building blocks- which were ultim ately the sensations or ideas produced by experience. In the moral domain, Locke also bui lds on Descartes 's model of rational control and defines a task of self-rem aking which falls to the punctual self. Rathe r tha n followi ng the telos of nature, we become constructors of our own character. This emphasis on constructive activity leads to a new understanding of language, which one can see again arising in Hobbe s and Locke. It is an offsho ot of the nomin alist theories : words are ultima tely given their mea ning arbitraril y thro ugh definitions which attach them to certain things or ideas. But the function of language is to aid the construction of thought. We need language to build an adequate picture of things. We couldn't match the world with a painstaking combination of individu al bits of perception, individual ideas. Through language, we can combine them in whole bunche s, in whole classes, and this alone makes it poss ible to have genuine know ledge. 20 It follow s, of course, that words can also be terribly dangerous . They can he that thro ugh which we utterly lose contact with reality, if they are not 198 • I NWA RDN ES S properly anchor ed in experience through definitions . That is why both Hobbes and Locke are wary of them and at times almos t obse ssio nally anxious that our words not run away with us. This fear of losing control is the natural outgrowth of the role given to language here: to help us to master and mar sh all our thoughts.