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 55 of 501 · 20 per page

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  The suspicious man inside stood with his arms folded while I used the phone in the entryway. On the wall was a gallery of Navy photos. I scanned from them to the crudely rendered tattoos on his forearms. On one was an anchor. On the other was a nude woman drafted in thick, tasteless lines. It was much too crude to be a portrait. It was more symbolic, like the anchor. I finished the call and waited. It was probably only ten minutes but it seemed like two hours, as I anticipated what I would receive when I got home. Dad was going through his black and blue period and had been for as long as I could recall. “Scott, this is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you,” was his mantra. On this occasion he would be right. He broke two bones in his hand. But before he drove me home for the inevitable, Dad paused to admire the gallery of Navy ships. The ex-sailor eyed Dad’s upper arm. Dad proudly pulled his sleeve up to reveal a dark green and red dragon tattoo. “That’s a beauty.” The sailor grinned. Dad smiled, but his eyes glared at me. “Thanks.” Leeny shrugged. Her hand disappeared in her pocket and she pulled out the ten. “I'll keep the five for my trouble.” Her coat gave the soft groan of hardened old leather as one arm disappeared inside it. I looked at that sturdy but very feminine body and her pale skin. That hair and those eyes. Damn. “No, wait.” She turned back and waited. I nodded softly, and she set the coat back down on a rusty Samsonite chair. I pointed to the brightly lit chaise longue. It was my models’ favorite platform back in the day. Canvas Back 383 It had a pristine carved frame and its richly padded sangria red velvet covering was comfortable enough to sleep on. I was glad I’d decided not to sell it for noodles during one of my many “I’d eat cockroaches” periods. Leeny kicked off her ratty tennis shoes and looked at the black fabric draped all around the chaise. She reached her hand under the lights, testing their warmth like the shallow end of a pool. She nodded then unbuttoned her jeans and let them fall. She hooked a prehensile big toe in one belt loop and ably tossed the jeans to the seat of the Samsonite. She peeled her tank top and tossed it atop the jeans. There was no hesitation to her stripping. There was a crude art to how she moved.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  It’s like living in Argentina during the 1970s. Every week someone else is no longer sitting at their desk, and we get an email from Cranium telling us that so-and-so has graduated, and hey ho, let’s all wish them well. One guy, who worked with Trotsky at his last company, and whom Trotsky recruited, lasts only for a few weeks and then gets the axe when someone decides they don’t need him after all. So many people are being let go that at one of our weekly marketing department meetings someone submits an anonymous question to Cranium: “Over the last two months, we have lost at least one male employee every week. Are the remaining males safe?” Cranium tries to make a joke of it. He assures us that HubSpot is not cutting costs, that companies make adjustments all the time. He says he is actively hiring, and the company is growing, and everything is awesome. In our next one-on-one beanbag chair bull session, I tell Trotsky that it seems to me that the company is trying to cut costs. I realize that I’m probably being paid more than most of the young people in our department, and it makes sense to cut me loose, I will understand. “All I ask,” I say, “is that you give me a little bit of warning. I’m asking this not as an employee, but as a friend. Just give me a little time, and I’ll go find another job. I’ll get out of your hair.” Trotsky assures me there is no pressure on him to cut his budget, but if things change, he will let me know. For a few months in the first half of 2014, things actually get better. I’m now working up on the fourth floor, in a newly renovated space, a world away from the ring of hell that is the telemarketing room. I’m writing e-books aimed at venture capitalists and chief marketing officers, which isn’t as fun as being a columnist at Newsweek, but it’s better than explaining HTML to Marketing Mary. I’m also helping write an update to Inbound Marketing, the book that Halligan and Dharmesh published in 2009. On the side, I’ve started picking up some freelance work, writing articles for Newsweek Japan on topics like robotics and artificial intelligence. Sure, there are still days when I go home and tell Sasha about some astonishingly stupid thing that some bozo has done, but most of the time I can just tune things out. The best thing is that I no longer have to work with Marcia, Jan, and Ashley, the women on the blog team, or Wingman. The only person I deal with is Trotsky, and he and I are becoming pals. I like Trotsky so much that one weekend I invite him and his family to a cookout at my house. I cook steaks and our kids play together.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Ward. and the present writer, in Mind, vol, xiii.—The present chapter is only the filling out with detail of an article entitled 'The Spatial Quale,' which appeared in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for January 1879 (xiii. 64). [296] Reprinted, with additions, from 'Mind' for July. [297] Compare this psychological fact with the corresponding logical truth that all negation rests on covert assertion of something else than the thing denied. (See Bradley's Principles of Logic, bk. i. ch. 3.) [298] See that very remarkable little work, 'The Anæsthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy,' by Benj. P. Blood (Amsterdam, N.Y., 1874).Compare also Mind, vii. 206. [299] To one whose mind is healthy thoughts come and go unnoticed; with me they have to be faced, thought about in a peculiar fashion, and then disposed of as finished, and this often when I am utterly wearied and would be at peace; but the call is imperative. This goes on to the hindrance of all natural action. If I were told that the staircase was on fire and I had only a minute to escape, and the thought arose—' Have they sent for fire-engines? Is it probable that the man who has the key is off hand? Is the man a careful sort of person? Will the key be hanging on a peg? Am I thinking rightly? Perhaps they don't lock the depot'—my foot would be lifted to go down; I should be conscious to excitement that I was losing my chance; but I should be unable to stir until all these absurdities were entertained and disposed of. In the most critical moments of my life, when I ought to have been so engrossed as to leave no room for any secondary thoughts, I have been oppressed by the inability to be at peace, and in the most ordinary circumstances it is all the same. Let me instance the other morning I went to walk. The day was biting cold, but1 was unable to proceed except by jerks. Once I got arrested, my feet in a muddy pool. One foot was lifted to go, knowing that it was not good to be standing in water, but there I was fast, the cause of detention being the discussing with myself the reasons why I should not stand in that pool.'' (T. S. Clouston, Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases, 1883, p. 43. See also Berger, in Archiv f. Psychiatrie, vi. 217.)" [300] Note to Jas. Mill's Analysis, I. 412-423 [301] Classics editor's note: James' Insertion. [302] Classics editor's note: James' Insertion. [303] Classics editor's note: James' Insertion. [304] For an excellent account of the history of opinion on this subject see A. Marty, in Vierteljahrsch. f. wiss.

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

  The allegorical or typological approach to sacred text was best exemplified in the voluminous writings of an Alexandrian Jewish intellectual who was a rather older contemporary of Jesus, Philo. Philo’s work was later more esteemed by Christians than by Jews, particularly because it enabled Christians to explore their whole Bible, ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Testaments together, using his method to reconcile their varied messages: to begin with, in Alexandria, but later throughout the Christian world. There were, after all, already clear examples of allegorical meaning in the biblical text. For instance, Jesus told his disciples to beware of ‘the leaven of the Pharisees’, helpfully explaining that by ‘leaven’ he meant their teaching (Matt. 16.12). Noting that enabled the reader of Scripture to be alert to any use of the word ‘leaven’ anywhere in the biblical text, and then to explore it in the same way. The problem, of course, is that one may sift the biblical text with some particular agenda and come up with allegories to prove the correctness of that proposition. Commentators have frequently found allegory and typology a lifeline to boost some particular argument on sex and marriage, and we will be meeting with more than one example. Sixteenth-century Protestants, infuriated by what they considered absurd over-use of the method in biblical commentary from the Western Latin Church, compared the results to a ‘nose of wax’, a comic false nose such as people wore at carnival time, capable of being twisted in any shape to please the wearer. They might have a point, though they themselves were not above resorting to the allegorical method when all else failed. [3] Both Jews and Christians reading the Septuagint through such Hellenistic lenses might be drawn to think of the God of Abraham rather as Greek admirers of Plato viewed the transcendence and perfection of the supreme deity of the Greek pantheon. Yet even in its Septuagintal form, the Hebrew Bible obstinately pulled its readers back to the physicality of their God. That problem was one of the perpetual fault lines between Judaism and Hellenism. It passed into Christianity and has never been resolved, especially since Christianity adds to the mix the audacious claim that in Jesus the Christ there is God. If that is so, then which God is it: Jewish or Greek? Christians spent the first five centuries after the life of Christ trying to find answers to the conundrum; they have never satisfied everyone. * The second century BCE witnessed a more violent and immediate confrontation between Judaism and Hellenism. In 198 BCE, the Hellenistic Seleucid dynasty of Syria wrested control of Judaea from the Ptolemies of Egypt. That led to open revolt in Judaea in 167 led by Judas Maccabeus, when the Seleucid king Antiochos IV grossly interfered with the cult at the Temple in Jerusalem. His religious aggression was most uncharacteristic in Mediterranean society, but all of a piece with the King’s megalomaniac award to himself of the title Epiphanēs or ‘God manifest’.

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

  Lurking in the background in the USA was the defeat of the slave-holding Confederacy in the Civil War of 1861–5, which left many Southern Evangelicals unreconciled to the idea of equality for African Americans; that racist ethos had actually been the raison d’être for the Southern Baptist Convention separating from abolitionist Baptists in the North in 1845. [26] Protestant identity would in the end splinter into two contrasting directions for world Christianity, but in 1914 the present-day divisions between liberal and conservative theologies were not yet at all fixed, let alone the global political consequences that have flowed from them. An important stage in the process was a series of very widely distributed short British and American essays published in twelve volumes between 1910 and 1915, The Fundamentals. They articulated increasing unease among some Evangelicals about nineteenth-century Protestant explorations of the Bible, and set out a series of points to be defended. These five main principles were ‘verbal inerrancy’ (that is, no possibility of the Bible being mistaken in its literal meaning); the divinity of Jesus Christ; his Virgin Birth; the affirmation that Jesus died on the cross in the place of sinful humanity (a theory technically known as penal substitution); and the proposition that Christ was physically resurrected to return again in the flesh. [27] In 1919 the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association was founded, expanding through its use of mass rallies from a mainly Baptist base, with Pentecostalism a growing component, to affect most Protestant Churches. It was then not at all obvious that within a century matters of sex and gender would be the chief battleground on which Fundamentalists would take their stand, in alliance with other varieties of conservative Christians. Yet already the expansion of anglophone Protestantism through formal and informal imperialism had turned its theological debate on sex into a global conversation. VICTORIAN VALUES AND IMPERIAL CULTURES As nineteenth-century Britain built up an increasingly vast empire on the back of generally successful achievements by its army and navy, so it evolved a masculine ethos similar to that of the citizen armies of mainland Europe in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. There were important differences: this was a patriotism of deference, shaped by British pride in its constitutional monarchy and attendant aristocracy, both of which had been strengthened after previous humiliations in the American War of Independence by their epic achievements contributing to Napoleon’s defeat. All that was framed from 1837 by the long reign of Queen Victoria, who by 1901 had managed to outlive any previous ruler in the Atlantic Isles, and who learned over time how to play the role of grandmotherly figurehead for her subjects worldwide. British territorial reach continued to expand into the 1920s (its largest nominal extent came with its acquisition of a League of Nations’ mandate over the former Ottoman territories of Palestine in 1923).

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Fired? Really? Over a Facebook comment? This makes no sense. “I’m going to talk to Cranium and see what he wants to do,” Trotsky says. “I’ll get back to you.” Later in the day Trotsky starts badgering me to get on the phone with him. I’m with my kids at Six Flags, and it’s their last day in California, and I’d really like to spend the day focusing on them but Trotsky insists on talking now. I’m still reeling from Trotsky’s earlier remark about me being as close to fired as you can get without being fired. Early in the afternoon I see the news that HubSpot has filed its IPO registration paperwork. I realize that this might have something to do with why everyone is so hyped up. We agree to talk at four o’clock my time, seven back East. I call Trotsky from the car, inching along on the 405 freeway in stop-and-go traffic. The kids are in the backseat, wiped out. I’m talking on earbuds so they can’t hear what Trotsky says. I figure it won’t be pleasant. For all I know he’s going to fire me, and if so, I would just as soon they didn’t hear that. I’d rather wait until tomorrow to have this chat, so I would not have to do this in front of my kids, but Trotsky won’t relent. He enumerates the problems my joke has caused and how it demonstrates poor judgment on my part. His tone is officious. He seems to be choosing his words carefully, as if he has written down everything he is going to say and is working his way through a list. Instead of Trotsky, my pal, the guy with the raunchy sense of humor, the one who was so friendly with me that the blog women complained about us, now there is a new Trotsky, and this one is telling me, in a very serious and solemn voice, that I have committed a grievous crime against the Cult of the Orange People, a near mortal sin as far as HubSpot is concerned. Maybe it’s because I’ve been spending weeks on end sitting in a room with writers who talk about huge cocks and dry vaginas, but really, honestly, my little comment on Atticus’s post does not seem like a big deal to me. But it is, Trotsky says. This thing I have done is very, very serious. It is very bad. This is a huge problem. It is going to take a lot of hard work for me to earn back the trust of my colleagues. “You’ve dug yourself into a hole,” he says. “I’m not sure you’ll ever be able to climb back out of it.” I don’t argue with him, or mention that it’s creepy to have people watching what I post on Facebook and then threatening to fire me over it. I’ve resolved to just hear him out, listen to everything he says, and find out what happens next.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  At worst, it confirmed their darkest fears about what a Clinton presidency would mean. Conservatives also painted Clinton as a virulent opponent of religious freedom, only heightening their anxiety over the election and what it would mean for the future of the Supreme Court.2 Then there was the matter of her gender. John Piper had given a special dispensation to vote for the McCain/Palin ticket, but Hillary Clinton was no Sarah Palin. All policy issues aside, the fact that Clinton was a woman disqualified her in the eyes of many conservative evangelicals. But in the 2016 election, evangelical views of gender didn’t just affect Clinton’s appeal—or lack thereof. Gender was also a key factor in shoring up support for the unconventional, morally challenged Republican candidate, Donald J. Trump. EVANGELICAL INFATUATION with Donald Trump wasn’t instantaneous, and it didn’t start with leadership. Initially, prominent evangelicals preferred more traditional Republican candidates, and they had plenty to choose from. Candidate Mike Huckabee wasted no time in denouncing same-sex marriage, reproaching “trashy” women who swore, criticizing the Obamas for letting their girls listen to Beyoncé, warning that ISIS was a greater threat than the “sunburn” people might get from climate change, and declaring “war against a ‘secular theocracy.’” Ben Carson, too, was popular among evangelicals. An African American conservative, Carson knew how to play to the white evangelical crowd. He suggested that a Muslim should be disqualified from serving as president, defended the right to fly the Confederate flag, compared political correctness to the practices of Nazi Germany, and suggested that the Holocaust would not have happened if Jews had been armed. Carson appealed to evangelicals who claimed, and often sincerely believed, that they held no racist convictions, without requiring them to sacrifice any of their social and political commitments. Marco Rubio, meanwhile, was making a strong play for the evangelical vote. He had gathered a “religious liberty advisory board” that included Wayne Grudem and other evangelical academics and faith leaders, and his appeal was especially strong among northern establishment evangelicals—the Wheaton and Christianity Today types.3 Texas senator Ted Cruz also emerged as a contender. The son of a traveling evangelist, Cruz was raised in the dominionist tradition, and even more than Huckabee, Rubio, and Carson, he knew how to stoke the fears of conservative Christians. Cruz drew stark distinctions between good and evil; he, of course, was on God’s side, opposing the forces of evil. He talked of the need to “Restore America” and he echoed the militarized vocabulary that had come to permeate American evangelicalism. The nation was “under attack” and it was only going to get worse. With the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Cruz painted a doomsday scenario of what could happen with a liberal appointment to the Court: unlimited abortion-on-demand, the end of religious freedom, the Second Amendment disappearing from the Constitution. After his victory in the Iowa caucuses, Cruz drew endorsements from James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Gary Bauer, and Glenn Beck.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  When I was about fourteen I discovered that to think of love before going to sleep was to dream of it during the night. And this experience taught me something else; if I repeated any lesson just before going to sleep, I knew it perfectly next morning; the mind, it seems, works even during unconsciousness. Often since, I have solved problems during sleep in mathematics and in chess that have puzzled me during the day. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ SCHOOL DAYS IN ENGLAND. Chapter III. In my thirteenth year the most important experience took place of my schoolboy life. Walking out one day with a West Indian boy of sixteen or so, I admitted that I was going to be “confirmed” in the Church of England. I was intensely religious at this time and took the whole rite with appalling seriousness. “Believe and thou shalt be saved” rang in my ears day and night, but I had no happy conviction. Believe what? “Believe in me, Jesus.” Of course I believe; then I should be happy, and I was not happy. “Believe not” and eternal damnation and eternal torture follow. My soul revolted at the iniquity of the awful condemnation. What became of the myriads who had not heard of Jesus? It was all a horrible puzzle to me; but the radiant figure and sweet teaching of Jesus just enabled me to believe and resolve to live as he had lived, unselfishly—purely. I never liked that word “purely” and used to relegate it to the darkest background of my thought. But I would try to be good—I’d try at least! “Do you believe all the fairy stories in the Bible!” my companion asked. “Of course I do”, I replied, “It’s the Word of God, isn’t it?” “Who is God?” asked the West Indian. “He made the world”, I added, “all this wonder”—and with a gesture I included earth and sky. “Who made God!” asked my companion. I turned away stricken: in a flash I saw I had been building on a word taught to me: “who made God?” I walked away alone, up the long meadow by the little brook, my thoughts in a whirl: story after story that I had accepted were now to me “fairy stories.” Jonah hadn’t lived three days in a whale’s belly. A man couldn’t get down a whale’s throat. The Gospel of Matthew began with Jesus’ pedigree, showing that he had been born of the seed of David through Joseph, his father, and in the very next chapter you are told that Joseph wasn’t his father; but the Holy Ghost. In an hour the whole fabric of my spiritual beliefs lay in ruins about me: I believed none of it, not a jot, nor a tittle: I felt as though I had been stripped naked to the cold.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  One day when he had just come into his room, I shot a question at him and he stopped, came over to me and put his arm on my shoulder as he answered. I don’t know how I knew; but by some instinct I felt a caress in the apparently innocent action. I didn’t like to draw away or show him that I objected; but I buried myself feverishly in the Trigonometry and he soon moved away. When I thought of it afterwards, I recalled the fact that his marked liking for me began after my fight with Jones. I had often been on the point of confessing to him my love-passages; but now I was glad I had kept them strenuously to myself, for day by day I noticed that his liking for me grew or rather his compliments and flatteries increased. I hardly knew what to do: working with him and in his room was a godsend to me; yet at the same time I didn’t like him much or admire him really. In some ways he was curiously dense; he spoke of the school life as the happiest of all and the healthiest; a good moral tone here, he would say, no lying, cheating or scandal, much better than life outside. I used to find it difficult not to laugh in his face. Moral tone indeed! when the Doctor came down out of temper, it was usually accepted among the boys that he had had his wife in the night and was therefore a little below par physically. Though a really good mathematical scholar and a first-rate teacher, patient and painstaking, with a gift of clear exposition, Stackpole seemed to me stupid and hidebound and I soon found that by laughing at his compliments I could balk his desire to lavish on me his unwelcome caresses. Once he kissed me, but my amused smile made him blush while he muttered shamefacedly, “You’re a queer lad!” At the same time I knew quite well that if I encouraged him, he would take further liberties. One day he talked of Jones and Henry H… He had evidently heard something of what had taken place in our bedroom; but I pretended not to know what he meant and when he asked me whether none of the big boys had made up to me, I ignored big Fawcett’s smutty excursions and said “No” adding that I was interested in girls and not in dirty boys. For some reason or other Stackpole seemed to me younger than I was and not twelve years older, and I had no real difficulty in keeping him within the bounds of propriety till the Math Exam.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  When we went into the “airlock” and they turned on one aircock after another of compressed air, the men put their hands to their ears and I soon imitated them for the pain was very acute. Indeed, the drums of the ears are often driven in and burst if the compressed air is brought in too quickly. I found that the best way of meeting the pressure was to keep swallowing air and forcing it up into the middle ear where it acted as an air-pad on the inner side of the drum and so lessened the pressure from the outside. It took about half an hour or so to “compress” us and that half an hour gave me lots to think about. When the air was fully compressed, the door of the airlock opened at a touch and we all went down to work with pick and shovel on the gravelly bottom. My headache soon became acute. The six of us were working naked to the waist in a small iron chamber with a temperature of about 180 Fahrenheit: in five minutes the sweat was pouring from us and all the while we were standing in icy water that was only kept from rising by the terrific air pressure. No wonder the headaches were blinding. The men didn’t work for more than ten minutes at a time, but I plugged on steadily, resolved to prove myself and get constant employment; only one man, a Swede named Anderson, worked at all as hard. I was overjoyed to find that together we did more than the four others. The amount done each week was estimated, he told me, by an inspector. Anderson was known to the Contractor and received half a wage extra as head of our gang. He assured me I could stay as long as I liked, but he advised me to leave at the end of a month: it was too unhealthy: above all, I mustn’t drink and should spend all my spare time in the open. He was kindness itself to me as indeed were all the others. After two hours’ work down below we went up into the airlock room to get gradually “decompressed”, the pressure of air in our veins having to be brought down gradually to the usual air pressure. The men began to put on their clothes and passed round a bottle of Schnapps; but though I was soon as cold as a wet rat and felt depressed and weak to boot, I would not touch the liquor. In the shed above I took a cupful of hot cocoa with Anderson which stopped the shivering and I was soon able to face the afternoon’s ordeal.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Yet somehow my little comment, with no names mentioned, constitutes a firing offense, something that we need to spend a whole day going back and forth about, and which has put me into a hole so deep that I might never dig out. I’m sorry, but I’m not buying it. When Trotsky finishes working through his list, I say, “Okay. So what do you want me to do?” He doesn’t know. We’ll have to keep talking. “Do you have any questions for me?” he says. “Well,” I say, “the one thing that puzzles me is I kind of think you’re blowing this out of proportion. I guess the only question I would have is why you guys are making such a big deal out of this. I understand there’s extra sensitivity today because of the IPO announcement. Obviously I didn’t know that was happening. I’m sorry about the timing. But it all seems like such a small thing and I’m taken aback by the response.” I ask him if the HR department is going to get involved. He says he doesn’t know. They might be. “Are you filing an official report about this to HR?” I say. “Is all of this going to be documented somewhere, in my employee file?” “I don’t know,” he says. “Well I’m concerned because the way you’re handling this feels like you’re starting to build some documentation that can be used to support a case for firing me. Is that what HubSpot is doing? Are you starting a file on me, a sort of paper trail that you can use later if you want to fire me?” That’s when Trotsky delivers a line I will never forget: “The company,” he says, “doesn’t need a reason to fire you. The company can do whatever it wants.” A week later, on September 2, the Tuesday after the Labor Day weekend, Trotsky forwards me an email that Cranium has sent around to everyone in the marketing department. We’re all getting an amazing gift: customized Bose QuietComfort 15 headphones. “Congratulations for earning your place as the best marketing team in the world,” Cranium writes. “Workday, NetSuite, Salesforce, Rackspace, LinkedIn, and Facebook all look up to you and want to do marketing like you do (all of those companies have asked me to teach them how you guys do it).” Cranium says he knows everyone is working long hours getting ready for the Inbound conference, which takes place in two weeks. “We have a lot to do and a lot of pressure. But I know you guys can do it and once again prove you’re the best marketing team in the world. With your help we can rock INBOUND, crush the product launches, and exceed our revenue goals in Q4.”

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

  [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

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “I guess Mr. Locker is all right”, I cried laughing; “I propose he should help us and take two or three hundred head as payment, or the value of them—” “Now you’re talking”, said Locker. “I call that sense. There is a herd of mine about a mile further on; if two or three hundred of your José steers join it, I can’t hinder ’em; but I’d rather have dollars; cash is scarce!” “Are they herded?” asked Bob. “Sure”, replied Locker. “I am too near the river to let any cattle run round loose though nobody has interfered with me in the last ten years.” Bob and I began moving the cattle on leaving Bent with Locker to conclude the negotiations. In an hour we had found Locker’s herd that must have numbered at least six thousand head and were guarded by three herdsmen. Locker and Bent had soon come to a working agreement. Locker it turned out had another herd some distance to the east from which he could draw three or four herdsmen. He had also a couple of boys, sons of his, whom he could send to rouse some of the neighboring farmers if the need was urgent. It turned out that we had done well to be generous to him for he knew the whole of the countryside like a book and was a good friend in our need. Late in the afternoon, Locker was informed by one of his sons, a youth of about sixteen, that twenty Mexicans had crossed the river and would be up to us in a short time. Locker sent him after the younger boy to round up as many Texans as possible but before they could be collected, a bunch of greasers, twenty or so, in number, rode up and demanded the return of the cattle. Bent and Locker put them off and as luck would have it, while they were arguing, three or four Texans came up, and one of them, a man of about forty years of age named Rossiter, took control of the whole dispute. He told the Mexican leader, who said he was Don Luis, a son of Don José, that if he stayed any longer he would probably be arrested and put in prison for raiding American territory and threatening people. The Mexican seemed to have a good deal of pluck, and declared that he would not only threaten but carry out his threat. Rossiter told him to wade right in. The loud talk began again, and a couple more Texans came up and the Mexican leader realizing that unless he did something at once he would be too late, started to circle round the cattle, no doubt thinking that if he did some thing his superior numbers would scare us.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  The book promoted “male headship,” the notion based on New Testament teachings that the husband was “the head of the wife,” that he had authority over her and was responsible for her; for LaHaye, this was particularly relevant in matters of finances. In addition to other more mundane topics, LaHaye included a chapter on “Physical Joys” that contained a helpful glossary of terms (“clitoris,” “vulva area,” “glans penis,” “areas of sexual sensitivity”) and two detailed charts of male and female sexual anatomy. This book was published by the evangelical Tyndale House Publishers two years before the feminist classic Our Bodies, Ourselves , and by 1973 it was already in its sixteenth printing, with more than 300,000 copies in print.2 LaHaye’s marital sex guide came at a time when evangelicals were increasingly concerned about sex in general. In 1960, the FDA approved the first birth control pill. In 1962, Helen Gurley Brown published Sex and the Single Girl , and two years later Newsweek heralded a “new morality” that required only a “meaningful relationship” to legitimate sexual intimacy. To conservative evangelicals, there was nothing remotely moral about this new morality, and as the morality gap grew, so, too, did evangelicals’ worry over what was being taught about sex in public schools. With no more consensus over moral values, which values would be conveyed to their children?3 This was not a question to take lightly, and Billy James Hargis—the fundamentalist pastor who helped spearhead Christian anticommunism in the 1950s and 1960s—took it upon himself to safeguard the sexual purity of America’s children. When Hargis turned his attention to sex in the mid-1960s, he didn’t do so at the expense of his anticommunism. Like Graham, Hargis considered sexual morality critical to the nation’s defense against communism. Others soon joined his new crusade. With none-too-subtle pamphlets like Is the School House the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex? conservative Christian leaders sounded the alarm, and battles over sex ed soon broke out in nearly half of all school districts across the nation. Many of the citizens who waged this battle were the same ones who were fighting against gun control and unsettled by the prospects of interracial dating at desegregated schools. Organizations like the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan teamed up with Hargis. Hargis’s career would be cut short in 1976, when Time magazine published an exposé of the crusader’s sexual improprieties. The allegations came to light after a student at Hargis’s college revealed to his bride on their honeymoon that he’d had sex with Hargis, only to discover that she had, too. But others took up Hargis’s crusade where he left off.4 The year of Hargis’s downfall, LaHaye and his wife Beverly coauthored a more detailed Christian sex manual, The Act of Marriage . The LaHayes were also deeply concerned about changing sexual mores, but like Marabel Morgan, they were not anti-sex.

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

  These pilgrimages were not seriously interrupted by the Mohammedans after their conquest of Jerusalem by Omar in 637, until Syria and Palestine passed into the hands of the sultans of Egypt three centuries later. Under Hakim, 1010, a fierce persecution broke out against the Christian residents of Palestine and the pilgrims. It was, however, of short duration and was followed by a larger stream of pilgrims than before. The favorite route was through Rome and by the sea, a dangerous avenue, as it was infested by Saracen pirates. The conversion of the Hungarians in the tenth century opened up the route along the Danube. Barons, princes, bishops, monks followed one after the other, some of them leading large bodies of pious tourists. In 1035 Robert of Normandy went at the head of a great company of nobles. He found many waiting at the gates of Jerusalem, unable to pay the gold bezant demanded for admission, and paid it for them. In 1054 Luitbert, bishop of Cambray, is said to have led three thousand pilgrims. In 1064 Siegfried, archbishop of Mainz, was accompanied by the bishops of Utrecht, Bamberg, and Regensburg and twelve thousand pilgrims.321 In 1092 Eric, king of the Danes, made the long journey. A sudden check was put upon the pilgrimages by the Seljukian Turks, who conquered the Holy Land in 1076. A rude and savage tribe, they heaped, with the intense fanaticism of new converts, all manner of insults and injuries upon the Christians. Many were imprisoned or sold into slavery. Those who returned to Europe carried with them a tale of woe which aroused the religious feelings of all classes. The other appeal, coming from the Greek emperors, was of less weight.322 The Eastern empire had been fast losing its hold on its Asiatic possessions. Romanus Diogenes was defeated in battle with the Turks and taken prisoner, 1071. During the rule of his successor, an emir established himself in Nicaea, the seat of the council called by the first Constantine, and extended his rule as far as the shores of the sea of Marmora. Alexius Comnenus, coming to the throne 1081, was less able to resist the advance of Islam and lost Antioch and Edessa in 1086. Thus pressed by his Asiatic foes, and seeing the very existence of his throne threatened, he applied for help to the west. He dwelt, it is true, on the desolations of Jerusalem; but it is in accordance with his imperial character to surmise that he was more concerned for the defence of his own empire than for the honor of religion. This dual appeal met a response, not only in the religious spirit of Europe, but in the warlike instincts of chivalry; and when the time came for the chief figure in Christendom, Urban II., to lift up his voice, his words acted upon the sensitive emotions as sparks upon dry leaves.323

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

  The communities became more and more the objects of suspicion, and a sharp blow was struck at them in 1312 by Clement V. and the council of Vienne. The council forbade their communal mode of life, and accused them of heresies.1048 They were accused of refusing to adore the host and of holding that it is possible to reach a state of perfection in this world. A person reaching this state is under no obligation to fast and pray, but may yield himself without sin to all the appetites of the body.1049 Clement’s bull erred by its failure to discriminate between heretical and orthodox communities, a defect which was corrected by John XXII. This pope expressly gave protection to the orthodox communities. In the fourteenth century, the number of houses increased very rapidly in Germany and by 1400 there was scarcely a German town which had not its beguinage. Up to that date, fifty-seven had been organized in Frankfurt, and in the middle of the fifteenth century there were one hundred and six such houses in Cologne and sixty in Strassburg. In 1368 Erfurt had four hundred Beguines and Beghards.1050 In the earlier part of the fourteenth century, the Beguines appeared in Southern France, where the Inquisition associated them closely with the Tertiaries of St. Francis and accused them of adopting the views of John Peter Olivi.1051 In the latter part of the fourteenth century, the Inquisition broke up many of the houses in Germany, their effects being equally divided between itself, the poor, and the municipality. Gregory XI., 1377, recognized that many of the Beghards were leading good lives. Boniface IX., 1394, made a sharp distinction between the communities and classed the heterodox Beghards with Lollards and Swestriones.1052 But to other "Beghards and Beguines, who practised voluntary poverty"1053 and devoted themselves to the good of the people, he gave papal recognition. To avoid persecution, many of them took refuge with the Franciscans and enrolled themselves as Tertiaries of the Franciscan order. With the Reformation the Beghards and Beguines for the most part disappear as separate communities.1054 These sectaries were in part forerunners and contemporaries of other communities with a pious and benevolent design developed in Holland in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and with which German mysticism is closely associated. § 84. The Waldenses. "O lady fair, I have yet a gem which a purer lustre flings Than the diamond flash of the jewelled crown on the lofty brow of kings; A wonderful pearl of exceeding price, whose virtue shall not decay, Whose light shall be as a spell to thee and a blessing on thy way!" Whittier, The Vaudois Teacher.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “Yeah, did you run those IDs? Christ, they’re legitimate? We can’t even hold these people? It’s a fucking massacre here. What? Mullens? Yeah, hang on.” He uncuffed Locan and handed him the phone. eYeS2" “For Christ’s fucking sake, what’s with you two?” ““Mullens ... do you have any idea who the hell these people are?” “They used to be a husband and wife hit team. Do you believe in coincidences?” “Not really.” “They were hunting down the runaway wife of one of the biggest money launderers on the West Coast. We were too, trying to get to the lovelorn couple before they did. They were contracted to kill her and the boyfriend. We’d just located the couple at the Quality Inn about a half mile from where you’re staying. Then all hell broke loose. Seems you and your partner are the victims of mistaken identity; although, the way things turned out, maybe you weren’t the victims. “Anyway, the couple we got here, the guy looks a lot like you, and the wife, well, she’s blonde but she was traveling as a brunette.” “You’ve explained things to the local constabulary then?” 230 Robert Buckley “Yeah, you’re free to go, but I gotta tell you, Rome’s been in touch. They’re mightily put out that you haven’t been maintaining a low profile; in fact, they’re pissed. They want you and your partner back there the day before yesterday.” “Thanks, they'll have to wait.” “For crying out loud, try not to kill anyone for a while, will you?” “You know me, turn the other cheek.” “Shit. Get outta there.” They were allowed to dress and take their belongings. A police car escorted them back to the Interstate. Rachel sat still, her legs drawn up as she gnawed on the knuckles of one hand. “Hey, cut that out, will you? You’ll draw blood.” “T killed her didn’t I? They were the couple we saw making love in the window.” “Were they?” “You know they were. Did they have souls?” “Doesn’t matter — self defense.” “God, it was horrible, but why can’t I remember? Going dark?” “Yes, a pretty useful talent in our line of work.” “Stop! Just tell me what’s happening to me. I was dead asleep and I woke right up. I knew they were there before I even knew I was awake.” “Sometimes your senses will become acutely heightened.” “Sometimes?” “For instance, when you’ve just had really good sex.” “Cripes:” “Or whenever you feel threatened, or angry . “When are you going to tell me what’s happening to me... what . or even happy.” . Iam?” “Soon, Racey. Very soon.” “Rachel,” she insisted, though her chin trembled and a tear spilled over her cheek. “T promise you.”

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  The fact that some of the more militant fundamentalists had started their own organization (the American Council of Christian Churches, under the leadership of fundamentalist Carl McIntire) helped with this project, enabling the NAE to distance itself from more reactionary elements, and it was at this time that “evangelical” came to connote a more forward-looking alternative to the militant, separatist fundamentalism that had become an object of ridicule. But evangelicals never entirely abandoned a combative posture, and even as evangelicals worked to bring a new respectability to their “old-time religion,” fundamentalists fought to define the contours of that faith. The affinities ran deep, and it was not always possible to distinguish one from the other; eventually, fundamentalists would inject their militancy back into the broader evangelical movement. In his opening address of the first meeting of the NAE in 1942, the Reverend Harold John Ockenga warned his fellow “lone wolves” of the ominous clouds looming on the horizon that “spell[ed] annihilation” unless they decided to “run in a pack.” For decades, evangelicalism had “suffered nothing but a series of defeats,” but the time had come to usher in “a new era in evangelical Christianity.” As “children of the light,” they could learn a thing or two from “the children of this world,” from the Soviets and the Nazis. In matters of both church and state, defensive tactics had proven disastrous. Evangelicals must unite and take the offensive, before it was too late.13 Just how small was this remnant? When delegates came together the following year, news reports estimated that the NAE represented about two million members, based on denominational affiliation—a fraction of the 60 to 70 million Christians who were represented by the more liberal Federal Council of Churches. But the evangelical movement was never limited by denominational affiliation, and its influence was on the rise.14 The path forward was clear, and it would not be through denominational structures. To evangelize the nation, evangelicals needed magazines that could reach millions, and access to the airwaves for national radio broadcasts. They needed organizations for missions, and for evangelical colleges and Bible schools. They already possessed the resources and the brain power. What was missing was a network that would support and amplify these individual efforts.15 WHEN IT CAME TO evangelicals’ rebranding efforts, it was a handsome young North Carolina minister who would play the starring role. More than anything else, Billy Graham’s celebrity knit together the disconnected universe of American evangelicalism—so much so that historian George Marsden once quipped that the simplest definition of “evangelical” might well be “anyone who likes Billy Graham.” A one-time Fuller Brush salesman, Graham became the face of the new evangelicalism—and that face was an attractive, masculine one, a fact that rarely went unnoticed.

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

  The Quran seems aware that some Muslims would not be happy to hear that God had encouraged fighting: “Fighting has been ordained for you, though it is hateful to you.” 36 Once the ummah had started to engage in warfare, it seems that one group, which was strong enough to warrant extensive rebuttal, consistently refused to take part: Believers, why, when it is said to you, “Go and fight in God’s cause,” do you feel weighed down to the ground? Do you prefer this world to the world to come? How small is the enjoyment of this world compared with the life to come! If you do not go out and fight, God will punish you severely and put others in your place. 37 The Quran calls these people “laggers” and “liars,” and Muhammad was reproved for allowing them to “stay at home” during campaigns. 38 They are accused of apathy and cowardice and are equated with the kufar, the enemies of Islam. 39 Yet this group could point to the many verses in the Quran that instruct Muslims not to retaliate but to “forgive and forbear,” responding to aggression with mercy, patience, and courtesy. 40 At other times, the Quran looks forward confidently to a final reconciliation: “Let there be no argument between us and you—God will gather us together and to Him we shall return.” 41 The impressive consistency of this irenic theme throughout the Quran, Firestone believes, must reflect a strong tendency that survived in the ummah for some time—perhaps until the ninth century. 42 Ultimately, however, the more militant groups prevailed, possibly because by the ninth century, long after the Prophet’s death, the more aggressive verses reflected reality, since by this time Muslims had established an empire that could be maintained only by military force. A favorite text of those involved in the wars of conquest was the “Sword Verse,” which they regarded as God’s last word on the subject—though even here the endorsement of total warfare segues immediately into a demand for peace and leniency: When the forbidden months are over wherever you encounter the idolaters, kill them, seize them, besiege them, wait for them at every look-out post; but if they repent, maintain the prayer, and pay the prescribed alms let them go on their way, for God is most merciful and forgiving.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  The iconic cover of the April 1966 number of Time magazine posed a question, highlighted in red against a stark black background, that cut to the heart of the cultural debates of that age: Is God dead? Its March 2017 counterpart mimicked this dramatic style in posing the new question lying at the core of American public life: Is Truth dead? Do we live in an age of aggressively asserted private beliefs, rather than evidenced public truths? Was the sociologist and cultural critic Philip Rieff right in characterising the history of human civilisation as a shift from ‘fate’ to ‘faith’ – and finally to ‘fiction’? 1 Why are objective facts now less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to subjective emotion and personal belief? Is this just some transient form of generational narcissism, or is it the shape of the future? In such an environment, personal belief – that is, something that cannot be proved to be true but is believed to be reasonable – flourishes; the problem is that it is recategorised as ‘truth’. While some speak about a rejection of authority in western culture, we are really seeing a relocation of authority within individual private experience that leads to people becoming trapped in their own personal versions of reality, refusing to accept external referents that might call these into question. Many are alarmed at these developments, feeling that such an emphasis on context, discourse and history has led to a neglect of traditional concerns for truth and a responsible attempt to grasp a reality which ultimately lies beyond our control and to which we can be held accountable. We are caught up in a battle of ideas in which there is no criterion of adjudication accepted by both parties. Some claim that knowledge is independent of history, power and perspective, and others that knowledge is determined by history, power and perspective. A Post-Truth World: Conspiracy Theories and Wish-Fulfilment One of the most important manifestations of a post-truth culture is the surge in contemporary conspiracy theories. Dan Brown’s highly successful novel The Da Vinci Code (2002) fictionalised some controversial theories regarding early Christian history, arguing that the Catholic Church kept secret Jesus Christ’s marriage to Mary Magdalene, from which sprang a ‘holy lineage’ protected by a secret organisation known as the ‘Priory of Sion.’ 2 Despite its obvious evidential deficits – and the fact it is conceived as fiction – this theory achieved a huge following. It was what a lot of people wanted to believe. Some conspiracy theories are religious – for example, the idea that American government agencies have been infiltrated by Satanists.