Bewilderment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  commonly spoke of spirits and provided explanations of the mysteries of world origins and creation: so did this book. It was full of genealogies: most African societies delighted in such repetitions, when they bored or baffled pious Europeans, who had often turned to Africa precisely to make their mark unhampered by the snobbery of long-pedigreed gentry back home. In fact, Africans might take the book more seriously than the missionaries who brought it, in the sense that they confidently expected concrete results from the power of God. That was a challenge to European Evangelicals, who were likewise convinced that God wrought miracles in his world, but whose rationalism (born at whatever remove from the Enlightenment) provoked them into alarm at a literalism which differed from their own. The Bible speaks without reserve about witches and at one point it suggests that they should not be allowed to live.42 African societies knew witches well, and many allotted power to witch-finders. Europeans did not want to encourage these rivals in charisma, particularly when the witch-finders encouraged the killing of witches, but if Europeans expressed scepticism, indigenous Christians might ignore them and take matters into their own hands. In the twentieth century, the results grew increasingly fatal in certain parts of rural Africa, where witch-killings marched in step with the growth of African-initiated Churches.43 This was by no means the only matter on which African Christians might look for specific action from their God beyond missionary expectations. In arid zones, missionaries were repeatedly expected to bring rain where there was no rain. They were after all travelling men preaching biblical power, and they ought to be able to do better than traditional rainmakers, who were often also charismatic wanderers, and as much their competitors as the witch-finders. Once more, even the most uncompromising European Evangelicals were likely to doubt that in God’s providence the weather worked quite like that. It was particularly testing, as the Wesleyan Methodist William Shaw discovered after staging a round of sermons and prayers for rain to outface challenges from a non-Christian rainmaker, to turn off God’s bounty once the recipients had had enough.44 Rainmaking (or rather the lack of it) ended the personal missionary career of the great Scottish missionary publicist and explorer David Livingstone. His one known convert, Setshele, King of the BaKwêena in what is now Botswana, was a perfect prize, intellectually gifted and a fine orator, but he was also his people’s rainmaker, and his powers appeared to have ended when he accepted Christian baptism. To Livingstone it was folly to worry about this; to Setshele it was crucial. In his frustration, the King broke with Livingstone on another matter which from different standpoints mattered very much to both of them; he took back his multiple wives. There was general satisfaction among the

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  makes him question what he saw. What’s a Mer-say-dees doin’ out here? And that woman on the passenger’s side, what was that white thing over her eyes? Somethin’ over the kids’ eyes too. Brother Terrell wrapped blessed handkerchiefs the size of bandanas around the eyes of my mother and sisters, trying without success to avoid tangling strands of his daughters’ fine blond hair in the double knots he tied at the backs of their heads. Just another happy family out for a Sunday drive, mother and kids blindfolded. The trips to the ranch were plagued by bouts of motion sickness, forcing Brother Terrell to pull over and let one or all of the girls heave, blindfolds lifted just enough to let them see, and miss, their feet. When the car finally stopped, my sisters found themselves in the middle of a seven-hundred- plus-acre ranch with a guitar-shaped swimming pool. The pool was modeled on the one Elvis had put in at his Memphis house. My sisters thought of the ranch as a mysterious place. They parked their bikes in one place when they left and found them in another when they returned. Their toys, too, seemed to have a life of their own and were always someplace other than where they had left them. When the girls asked their dad what was up with the toys, he said they had most likely forgotten where they had left them or that the cleaning people had probably put a few items back in the wrong place. The truth was more surreal. Brother Terrell had another secret family he brought to the ranch between my mom’s and sisters’ visits. He had become involved with a woman preacher who traveled with him, and they had a daughter together who was the same age as the twins. They kept the girl’s parentage a secret by telling her and everyone in the ministry that she was adopted. To complicate matters, Brother Terrell had adopted a young boy from Mexico around the same time, and he and the girl grew up as adopted siblings. Years later, the girl and the boy would tell my sisters that they had often wondered why there were three ponies, three beds, three bikes, three of everything, when there were only two of them. I became suspicious of Brother Terrell’s relationship with the woman when I noticed on my visits to Bangs that they were almost always together. Instead of referencing Mama from the platform as he had once done, he talked about the preacher woman, calling her a great woman of God. She had replaced Brother Starrs, who had replaced Brother Cotton a few years back, and was now the one who introduced Brother Terrell. She had become his de facto second-in- command. I often glimpsed them getting out of the Mercedes together at the back of the tent. Then one day I saw her with Pam and Brother Terrell’s other daughters. There was something about their body language, the ease and

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  and choral commentaries in German on the preaching and liturgical themes set for the day, incorporating some of the great German hymns of the Reformation — are one of Lutheranism’s greatest creative contributions to the Western cultural tradition. It is questionable whether many contemporary Pietists would have been enthusiastic for them. Bach was never an easy man to employ or to live with, and the St Thomas congregation did not altogether appreciate what they were being offered in his barrage of musical composition — which in the end included five complete yearly cycles of cantatas (see Plate 36). When his St Matthew Passion was performed for the first time, influential members of the congregation became steadily more bewildered by the way that the music branched out from the chorales that they knew, and one elderly widow cried, ‘God help us! ‘tis surely an opera-comedy!’47 In one sense, she was right: Bach had poured his choral creativity into his cantatas and, mysteriously, was the only major composer of his time never to write an opera. In later years he concentrated more and more of his talent on solo works for keyboard and other instruments, which had little to do with his official church duties, and that may reflect his growing impatience at the quarrels in which he had become involved at St Thomas’s. His monumental late work, the Latin Mass in B minor, escapes beyond the requirements of Lutheran liturgy, for which its first components, written in 1733 for the Elector of Saxony, had still been appropriate. Taking its cue from the Elector’s own conversion to Catholicism in defiance of his affronted subjects in the heartland of the Reformation, the Mass transcends the battles of the previous two centuries, to reunite the divided Western Latin Church in music. No Protestant had previously written anything like it.48 While Lutheranism was largely able to contain the Pietist movement, the Pietists engendered one distinctive offshoot which, although never very large- scale, had a rapid and significant effect on Protestantism worldwide. This was the Moravian Church, a radical restructuring of some of the last remnants from the pre-Reformation movement of dissent in the kingdom of Bohemia, the Unitas Fratrum (see p. 573). From 1722, a handful of these refugees from Moravia in Bohemia, victims of the inexorable Habsburg recatholicization of central Europe, were given shelter to the north of the Habsburg frontiers by a Lutheran nobleman, a Pietist with the strongest credentials as a former student of Francke at Halle and a godson of Spener. Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf used his estate in the hills of southernmost Saxony to build a showcase village for a growing collection of protégés. He named it Herrnhut, a place for craftwork and farming, the first of a network of communities which eventually spread as far as Russia, Great Britain and across the Atlantic.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  hence any discussion of that history is a delicate matter, and no doubt many will contest the following attempt to reconstruct it.3 The first book of scripture, Genesis, has accounts of leaders who have come to be known as Patriarchs, beginning with Abram, who is pictured as coming from Ur in what is now Iraq and receiving a repeated promise from God that his descendants will receive the land, symbolized by a new name given him by God, Abraham, ‘Father of Multitudes’.4 Around Abraham’s rackety grandson Jacob are woven several engaging tales of outrageous cheating and deceit, and they culminate in an all- night wrestling match with a mysterious stranger who overcomes Jacob and is able to give him another new name, Israel, meaning ‘He who strives with God’.5 Out of that fight in the darkness, with one who revealed the power of God and was God, began the generations of the Children of Israel. Few peoples united by a religion have proclaimed by their very name that they struggle against the one whom they worship. The relationship of God with Israel is intense, personal, conflicted. Those who follow Israel and the religions which spring from his wrestling match that night are being told that even through their harshest and most wretched experiences of fighting with those they love most deeply, they are being given some glimpse of how they relate to God. Using the Bible’s own internal points of reference, the promises to the Patriarchs would have been made in a period around 1800 BCE. But this raises problems, even if one simply reads the whole biblical text attentively. One silence is significant: there is very little reference to the Patriarchs in the pronouncements of ‘later’ great prophets like Jeremiah, Hosea or the first prophet known as Isaiah, whose prophetic words date from the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. It is as if these supposedly basic stories of Israel’s origins a thousand years before were largely missing from the consciousness of Jeremiah, Hosea and Isaiah, whereas references to the Patriarchs appear abundantly in material which is of sixth-century or later date. The logic of this is that the stories of the Patriarchs, as we now meet them in the biblical text, post- date rather than predate the first great Hebrew prophets of the eighth and seventh centuries, even though various stories embedded in the Book of Genesis are undoubtedly very ancient.6 It is also striking that certain incidents in the stories of the Patriarchs mirror incidents which took place in a more definitely ‘historical’ context, six centuries after 1800. Obvious lurid examples are the duplicated threats of gang rape to guests in a city (with dire consequences for the perpetrators), to be found in both Genesis 19 and Judges 19. Similarly the Children of Israel, with a carelessness that Lady Bracknell would have deplored, twice put to the sword the unfortunate city of Shechem, once in Genesis 34 and again in Judges 9. Another problem:

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Greeks generally looked on this disconcerting lack of moral predictability among their divinities with cheerful resignation and did their best to secure the best bargain available from them by due ceremonial observances at home or in temples or shrines. Now Plato presented a very different picture of the ultimate God. His perspective looking beyond the traditional pantheon has a further dimension, which does actually in effect limit the way in which he envisaged the goodness of God. Although Plato’s supreme God is unlike the fickle, jealous, quarrelsome gods of the Greek pantheon, his God is distanced from compassion for human tragedy, because compassion is a passion or emotion. For Plato, the character of true deity is not merely goodness, but also oneness. Although Plato nowhere explicitly draws the conclusion from that oneness, it points to the proposition that God also represents perfection. Being perfect, the supreme God is also without passions, since passions involve change from one mood to another, and it is in the nature of perfection that it cannot change. This passionless perfection contrasts with the passion, compassion and constant intervention of Israel’s God, despite the fact that both the Platonic and the Hebrew views of God stress transcendence. There is a difficulty in envisaging how Plato’s God could create the sort of changeable, imperfect, messy world in which we live – indeed, have any meaningful contact with it. Even the created wholeness of the Forms would most appropriately have been created by one other than the God who is the Supreme Soul: perhaps an image of the Supreme Soul, an image which Plato describes in one of the most influential of his dialogues, Timaeus, as a craftsman or artificer (demiourgos, from which comes the English term ‘demiurge’).19 Creation was likely to extend away from God in a hierarchy of emanations from the supreme reality of the divine. Plato’s discussion of God fed into the commonplaces of discussion of divinity in the ancient world, and that, as we will see, became a problem for Christians as they tried to talk about their faith. But equally influential was the work of Plato’s pupil Aristotle. He was led in a very different direction in his quest for truth. While Plato had sought for reality in the ideals beyond the particular – feeling, for instance, that an ultimate Form of ‘treeness’ was more real than any individual tree – Aristotle sought for reality in individual and observable objects. He classified different sorts of tree. For him, the path to knowledge lay in searching out as much information and opinion as possible about the objects and forms which exist and can be described in the world of human senses. The difference can be seen by comparing the ways in which the two philosophers approached that perennial Greek preoccupation, government. Plato in his Republic presents an elite-dominated, authoritarian society. Although apparently an ideal, it directly confronts, indeed subverts, the Athenian democracy which

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  humans, had long posed doubts about humanity’s single descent from the dwellers in Eden. More ambitiously still, others who accepted Copernican cosmology suggested that there were other inhabited worlds. A major contribution to that question in the years when Spinoza was reaching his moment of crisis with the Amsterdam synagogue was made by Isaac La Peyrère, a French Huguenot but with a name which reveals underneath its French guise a further descendant of the Iberian diaspora. His publication in Amsterdam and elsewhere of Prae-Adamitae (‘Men before Adam’) was one of the publishing sensations of 1655: reputedly it even became light reading for the Pope and his cardinals. La Peyrère was one of the most fervent apocalypticists of his day, and he urged Jews and Christians to reunite to bring on the Last Days, but his book, as its title indicated, threw the Creation story into the melting pot by arguing that there had been races of humans earlier than Adam and Eve, who were the ancestors of the Jews only. La Peyrère’s argument in fact gave a particular privilege to the Jewish race, but it also wiped out the Western Christian doctrine of original sin: if the Gentiles were descended from the race before Adam, presumably they could not be participants in Adam’s Fall. La Peyrère was imprisoned, embraced Catholicism and died in a French monastery, but at least he did not suffer the fate of Jacob Palaeologos, a Greek exile in Prague who a century before had made the same argument about Adam, and had been executed in Rome in 1585. Prae-Adamitae went on selling, and did so because its author was increasingly not alone in his questions. If there were other worlds, not merely original sin seemed a dubious doctrine; how could the Church proclaim the uniqueness of biblical revelation?31 Around 1680 there followed yet another work from the Netherlands. The anonymous Treatise of the three impostors was too shocking to put in print until 1719, but it had circulated widely throughout Europe in manuscript, often with a false attribution to Spinoza to give it authority. Written in French, probably by renegade Huguenots in exile from France, it was a crude attempt to popularize an anti-religious version of the message of Spinoza’s Tractatus, married with ideas freely adapted from Hobbes and other sceptical writers. Its ‘three impostors’ were Moses, Jesus Christ and Muhammad, and in its condemnation of all three Semitic faiths, it proclaimed that ‘there are no such things in Nature as either God or Devil or Soul or Heaven or Hell … [T]heologians … are all of them except for some few ignorant dunces … people of villainous principles, who maliciously abuse and impose on the credulous populace’.32 Behind the stories of doubters from Spinoza and La Peyrère to Bayle and the Treatise of the three impostors were two imperilled and highly articulate

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  such matters, the outcome of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 was dictated by political circumstances and did not carry the whole Christian world with it. The schisms which followed were made permanent by the political bitterness aroused by the Western Crusades of the High Middle Ages, their transmutation into attacks on Eastern Christians and their eventual failure either to recapture the Holy Land or to defend Eastern Christianity against Islam. All these cataclysmic human events stemmed from an idea constructed by a council of bishops. The Bible of the Church was itself a disputed text at least until late in the second century of the Christian era. But even when Christians had argued their way to a consensus as to which texts should be included in the Bible and which should not, they encountered a problem common to all Peoples of the Book. Judaism, Christianity and Islam have all discovered that the text between the covers cannot provide all the answers. Hence the growth of a vast array of pronouncements, interpretations and pragmatic solutions to new problems which formed bodies of tradition in various parts of Christianity. As early as the fourth century CE, a respected Christian authority in the eastern Mediterranean, Basil of Caesarea, was saying that some traditions were as important and authoritative as the Bible itself. It was one of the big issues of the European Reformation, whether any of this tradition beyond scripture should be regarded as part of the essential kit of being a Christian. Roman Catholics said yes – the official Church was the guardian of the tradition and must be obeyed in all things. Protestants said no – most of the tradition was part of the confidence trick played on ordinary Christians by the Church, diverting them from the glorious simplicity of the biblical message. Protestants were not consistent on this, for otherwise they could not justify aspects of their own Christianity not found in scripture, like the universal baptism of infants. Radicals who believed in scripture alone criticized them as hypocrites, with some justice. All the world faiths which have known long-term success have shown a remarkable capacity to mutate, and Christianity is no exception, which is why one underlying message of this history is its sheer variety. Many Christians do not like being reminded of Christianity’s capacity to develop, particularly those who are in charge of the various religious institutions which call themselves Churches, but that is the reality and has been from the beginning. This was a marginal branch of Judaism whose founder left no known written works. Jesus seems to have maintained that the trumpet would sound for the end of time very soon, and in a major break with the culture around him, he told his followers to leave the dead to bury their own dead (see p. 90). Maybe he wrote nothing because he did not feel that it was worth it, in the short time left to humanity. Remarkably quickly, his followers seemed to question the idea that history was

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  65. Subverting many devotional themes of Christian art, the Virgin Mary spanks the Christ Child, 1926. Watching through a window are the artist, Max Ernst, and his Surrealist friends André Breton and Paul Éluard. Symptomatic of modern doubt, it nevertheless reflects very ancient apocryphal Christian traditions about the childhood of Christ. 66. In a suburb of Accra, Ghana, the Twelve Apostles Church customarily holds its healing service on Fridays, dominated by women market traders, who have awarded themselves the day off. Gourdcalabashes banish evil spirits, and teenage drummers lead the music. 67. The Temple of Saint Sava, Belgrade, was begun in 1935 in the style of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and work resumed under the rule of Slobodan Miloševi’ c in 1985. A fine example of modern Christian political architecture, it self-consciously embodies Serbian Orthodox nationhood. Here the congregation mourns the assassinated Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindji’ c in 2003. 68. The Yoido Full Gospel Church, Seoul, South Korea, founded by Pentecostal Pastor David Yonggi Cho, claims the largest single congregation in the world and over three quarters of a million members worldwide, having started from a service attended by six in 1958. The main auditorium can seat 26,000; there are several packed services on Sundays.       
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• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Christianity, to look beyond the immediate and everyday to the universal or ultimate. In his dialogue The Republic, he represents Socrates as telling a story which in more than one sense illuminates the Platonic view of the human condition. Prisoners are chained in a cave, facing a wall; their bonds are fixed in such a way that the wall is all they can see. Behind them a great fire roars, but between them and the fire is a walkway, on which people parade a series of objects, such as carved images of animals or humans, whose shadows fall on the wall under the prisoners’ gaze. The bearers pronounce the names of the objects as they pass and the echoes of the names bounce off the wall. All the prisoners can experience, therefore, are shadows and echoes. That is what they understand to be reality. If any of them are released, the brightness of the sun’s real light is blinding, and makes their sight of any of the real objects less convincing than the shadows which they have come to know so well, and the echoing names which they have heard.18 Human life is an imprisonment in the cave. The particular phenomena we perceive in our lives are shadows of their ideal ‘Forms’, which represent truer and higher versions of reality than the ones which we can readily know. We should not be content with these shadows. An individual human soul should do its best to find its way back to the Forms which lie behind the world of our clouded senses, because there we may find aretē – excellence or virtue. The path is through the intellect. ‘Excellence [aretē] of soul’ is our chief purpose or direction, because beyond even the Forms is the Supreme Soul, who is God and who is ultimate aretē. Plato’s second major contribution to Christian discussion is his conception of what God’s nature encompasses: oneness and goodness. Plato took his cue from Socrates’s radical rethinking on the traditional Greek range of gods (the ‘pantheon’), looked beyond it and made ethics central to his discussion of divinity. The pantheon portrayed in both Greek myth and the Homeric epics can hardly be said to exemplify virtue: the origins of the gods in particular make up an extraordinary catalogue of horrors and violence. Hesiod’s Theogony named the first divinity as Chaos; among the divinities who emerged from him, representing the cosmos spawned out of chaos, was Gaia, the Earth. Gaia’s son Ouranos/Uranus (the Sky) incestuously mated with his mother and had twelve children, whom he forced back into Gaia’s womb; Gaia’s youngest son, Kronos/Cronus, castrated his father, Ouranos, before in turn committing incest with his sister and attempting to murder all their children. How unlike the home life of the Christian Trinity. Matters only marginally improved in the generation of Zeus. If one were compiling a school report on the behaviour of the Olympian gods, it would have to include comments on their lack of moral responsibility, consistent pity or compassion.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  edition in the same period, far outclassing its sales in Britain and the USA. These books were part of a crash-course in the useful aspects of modernity, just as Japanese bureaucrats adopted Western dress when they went to work, and as Buddhist vegetarianism was violated by a fashion for eating beef, since beef seemed to have done so much good for the building up of empires by Westerners.89 Christian origins in Korea are a curious sport from the worldwide Christian expansion in the Counter-Reformation, which was experienced here remarkably late, just when elsewhere the Catholic tide had ebbed, and a mere decade before the great Protestant ‘take-off’ of the 1790s. Christianity was indigenously propagated in Korea from the unlikely base of the struggling and only semi-legal Catholic mission in the Chinese imperial capital, Beijing.90 It experienced intense suffering and persecution such as Christianity had not known since the Japanese and Canadian missions of the seventeenth century; in the same decade that French Revolutionaries committed atrocities against Catholic Christians, Catholics were here pitted also against a hostile state. The Korean monarchy patronized a native shamanism much cross-fertilized by Buddhism and its guiding philosophy was a form of Confucianism long ago imported from China. By the late eighteenth century, the Korean state was in trouble, and seemed to be incapable of reconstruction after a series of natural disasters which, in combination with chronic misgovernment, saw the population actually falling. What did that say about Korean religion’s capacity to protect this inward- looking kingdom? The question much perplexed reformist-minded members of Korea’s scholar-bureaucrat elite (yangban), who, in Confucian fashion, regarded themselves as the divinely appointed guides of the realm. One yangban, Yi S ng-hun, provided a new answer to this crisis of authority: while in Beijing serving as a diplomat, he was baptized a Catholic Christian and went home to propagate his faith. He was met with outrage (including from his father), accused of betraying his social position and proper respect for his ancestors, but it was by using family connections and social links with other reformists that he spread his faith.91 At first the government regarded Catholicism as ‘no more than a collateral sect of Buddha’ and merely burned its books. ‘Alas!’ it lamented, in a fashion that later Korean Protestants might have found congenial. ‘How could one replicate so easily the form of the Divine Being that is so far away and silent and orderless? What other crime could be more desecrating than the crime of worshipping a portrait of another human being in place of the Divine Being and calling it “Jesus”?’92 The authorities were soon forced into more drastic action. From Yi Sŭng-hun’s return in 1784 to the first great persecution of 1801, Korean Catholicism spread beyond its elite

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  And for my brother and sisters. There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make individuals exceptional and eccentric. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience I understood the stillness behind the sky But never the words of men. Friedrich Hölderlin, “In My Boyhood Days” Prologue “DONNA, I DON’T KNOW IF YOU’RE COMING TO THE FUNERAL, BUT I HEARD Daddy’s gonna try to raise Randall from the dead. Call me.” My sister left the message as my husband and I stumbled into our darkened kitchen hauling groceries, deli takeout, and briefcases. We had finished another twelve mind-numbing hours at our marketing firm, making deals, finessing budgets, and placating clients, employees, and sometimes each other, racing toward every deadline as though it were life or death. The red light of the answering machine winked at us from the counter. My husband flipped on the overhead light. “That preacher’s going to resurrect his son? We’re going, right?” I shook my head no and said yes. Randall Terrell had been dead twenty-four hours. I was still deciding whether to attend his funeral and everyone else had moved on to resurrection. Even Jesus stayed in the tomb three days, but my family had not followed convention, not in life and apparently not in death. Randall, his sister Pam, and my brother Gary and I spent our formative years traveling the revival circuit known as the sawdust trail. Our families formed the inner circle of a Holy Roller tribe that preached, prayed, and scared sinners into the fold under giant gospel tents that eventually included the world’s largest—a red, white, and blue canvas almost as long as two football fields. I was three and Gary was one when my mother signed on as organist for Randall’s daddy. She sold everything and joined the caravan of eighteen-wheelers, faded station wagons, leaky campers, and other gimpy vehicles that limped and lurched from one breakdown to the next. In later years a fleet of Mercedes and a small jet would join the convoy, churning a wake of suspicion that eventually led to the downfall of Brother David Terrell: healer, end-time prophet, and as close to a father figure as I would get. We descended on towns like a flock of magpies, our public-address system crackling and squawking with cries of “Repent” and “Be Saved,” “Jesus Is Coming Soon” and “Be Healed,” the phrase that drew multitudes. When Brother Terrell asked those in need of prayer to come forward, most of the congregation rushed toward him. The lines looped around the tent in a human labyrinth of suffering. Strangers pressed against one another, sweat and breath mingling in a

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  the liturgical transformation involved is huge, not least the removal of a corpse’s final parting from the church, which is a community place of worship, a setting for all aspects of Christian life, to the crematorium, a specialized and often rather depressingly clinical office room for dealing with death. There are indeed signs that the disposal of ashes is creating a variety of inventive new personalized ritual, including the use of Roman candles to send the ashes of one Florida fireworks enthusiast into the heavens, and an unmanned satellite to speed various others still further from the earth. The theological implications are also profound. Death is not so much distanced as sanitized or domesticated, made part of the spectrum of consumer choice in a consumer society. The Church is robbed of what was once one of its strongest cards, its power to pronounce and give public liturgical shape to loss and bewilderment at the apparent lack of pattern in the brief span of human life.110 Changing attitudes to death and Hell mark a growth of this-worldly concerns in a large part of contemporary Christianity. That is as much exemplified in the concern for political justice in liberation theology as in the ‘Prosperity Gospel’ strand of Pentecostalism, even though the politics of both frequently stand in complete contrast. There are other contrasts: Pentecostals often seem preoccupied in their liturgy by the joy of their faith, while theologies of social justice are more inclined to remember that at the heart of Christian stories, after the birth of a helpless baby in an obscure province of the empire, there is a gallows built by the colonial power. A different sort of this-worldliness is to be found in the continuing fascination which Christian art, creativity and sacred places exercise over the Western mind, however secularized. In England, cathedrals and their choral music have never been better loved, cherished or maintained through public generosity. Their vigorous life, from Evensong to teashops, contrasts with the empty Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, in its emptiness a symbol of the troubled history of the modern French Church, and in its beauty a further twofold symbol. The Sainte-Chapelle speaks of the medieval conviction that the relics of the saints opened an entrance to Heaven (particularly for the king who paid for them), but with its modern turnstiles and sightseeing crowds, it also reflects the vague modern hope that beauty and antiquity might just open an entrance to Heaven. How does tourism relate to pilgrimage, and can the Church help tourists to become pilgrims? It is one of the curiosities of Western society since the Enlightenment that much of its greatest sacred music (though by no means all) has been the work of those who have abandoned any structured Christian faith. Edward Elgar, who created English Catholicism’s greatest modern sacred oratorio out of Cardinal Newman’s poem The Dream of Gerontius, exclaimed at the time of its first

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  estimation problem will induce an anchoring effect. We were not the first to observe the effects of anchors, but our experiment was the first demonstration of its absurdity: people’s judgments were influenced by an obviously uninformative number. There was no way to describe the anchoring effect of a wheel of fortune as reasonable. Amos and I published the experiment in our Science paper, and it is one of the best known of the findings we reported there. There was only one trouble: Amos and I did not fully agree on the psychology of the anchoring effect. He supported one interpretation, I liked another, and we never found a way to settle the argument. The problem was finally solved decades later by the efforts of numerous investigators. It is now clear that Amos and I were both right. Two different mechanisms produce anchoring effects—one for each system. There is a form of anchoring that occurs in a deliberate process of adjustment, an operation of System 2. And there is anchoring that occurs by a priming effect, an automatic manifestation of System 1. Anchoring as Adjustment Amos liked the idea of an adjust-and-anchor heuristic as a strategy for estimating uncertain quantities: start from an anchoring number, assess whether it is too high or too low, and gradually adjust your estimate by mentally “moving” from the anchor. The adjustment typically ends prematurely, because people stop when they are no longer certain that they should move farther. Decades after our disagreement, and years after Amos’s death, convincing evidence of such a process was offered independently by two psychologists who had worked closely with Amos early in their careers: Eldar Shafir and Tom Gilovich together with their own students—Amos’s intellectual grandchildren! To get the idea, take a sheet of paper and draw a 2½-inch line going up, starting at the bottom of the page—without a ruler. Now take another sheet, and start at the top and draw a line going down until it is 2½ inches from the bottom. Compare the lines. There is a good chance that your first estimate of 2½ inches was shorter than the second. The reason is that you do not know exactly what such a line looks like; there is a range of uncertainty. You stop near the bottom of the region of uncertainty when you start from the bottom of the page and near the top of the region when you start from the top. Robyn Le Boeuf and Shafir found many examples of that mechanism in daily experience. Insufficient adjustment neatly explains why you are likely to drive too fast when you come off the highway onto city streets—especially if you are talking with someone as

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  more than half a century after its foundation, it is clear that it has not (or at least not yet) assumed the central place in Christianity that seemed possible in its first decades. Likewise, the Ecumenical Movement’s successes have not been those expected by Oldham and the other founding fathers (fathers indeed, mostly male and mostly clerical): results have been low key, local, pragmatic.Perhaps the problem lay in the very institutions which Oldham and his colleagues excelled in creating: conferences, committees, movements with secretariats, carefully drafted and redrafted agreed statements. Liberal Protestantism was inclined to find the spontaneity of the Holy Spirit rather unnerving. Not so the mushroom-like new Church bodies which we have already noted in Africa and America at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As so often in the history of Christianity, at first the mainstream Churches scarcely noticed what was happening beyond them, or if they did notice, they hardly took seriously what they saw among what seemed like small groups of eccentrics. It has been argued by one of the most perceptive observers of Pentecostalism that not until the late 1950s was the wider American public made aware of its existence.91 Indeed, it is difficult for outsiders to keep track of movements which have generated a bewildering array of names, acronyms and slogans. All were intended to express their multiform identities and zestful efforts to capture experiences life-transforming but, by their very nature, often difficult to put into words – particularly by those who lacked the benefit of higher education in the style of Oxbridge or Berlin. Pentecostal disagreements trivial to observers, momentous to participants, threw long shadows over the future. In 1916, for instance, a significant section of American Pentecostalism split in two, in an argument which leapt back to some of the earliest recorded disputes about the Trinity. Evangelicals in the Keswick Conference tradition were inclined to invoke the name of Jesus with a frequency which would have struck a chord with late medieval northern European Catholics or Orthodox exponents of Hesychasm; yet in this case, devotional enthusiasm led to an assertion by the Canadian preacher Robert McAlister that early Christians had baptized not in the name of the Trinity, but in the name of Jesus. Did not Peter say as much in Acts 2.38? From there, McAlister developed the proposition that ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’ were only titles for the God who was named Jesus. This was a new form of that early Christian assertion of oneness in the Godhead, modalist Monarchianism (see p. 146). Since ‘baptism’ was a word constantly echoing through Pentecostalist conversation, there could hardly have been a more explosive intervention. Schism followed in the only recently formed Assemblies of God, and the ‘Oneness’ folk went their own way, preserving a commitment to racial inclusiveness which was now notably lacking

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  Nobody reads book reviews in the Voice , but you admire the diligence exhibited by Fox’s assistant in tracking the thing down. He mentions an opening at Harper’s that might be right for you, and says that he could put in a good word. He is too kind. He wasn’t nearly so friendly when you met him at the publication party for his last book. “I met Clara Tillinghast a few weeks ago,” he says. “No man I’d care to drink with could put up with that for long. My sources tell me she had it in for you from the start.” “Short honeymoon, long divorce.” “Would it be accurate to say that she is something of a bitch on wheels?” “I think she has treads, actually. Like a Sherman tank. But it would be a tough thing to verify.” “I guess you know I’m writing a piece on the magazine.” “Really?” “I was hoping you might be able to give me some background. You know—human interest, anecdotes.” “You want smut?” “Whatever you’ve got.” A baby cockroach is working its way up the wall next to the phone. Should you crush it or let it pass? “I was just a little worker bee. I don’t think I could tell you anything of national interest.” “Let’s face it. The stagehands have the best view in the house.” “It’s a pretty dull place,” you say. Already it seems so far behind you, the office politics and the broom-closet affairs no more interesting there than elsewhere. “Why feel loyal to them? They threw you out on your ass.” “The whole subject just bores me.” “Let’s have lunch. Bat some ideas around. Say, Russian Tea Room at one-thirty?” You tell him you don’t have any ideas. Your information is imperfect. Everything you thought you knew turned out to be wrong. You tell him you are an unreliable source. He appeals to the public’s right to know. He appeals to your sense of vengeance. He gives you his phone number in case you change your mind. You don’t write it down. You go out for a bite and the Post . It’s almost two o’clock. Not for the first time, you wonder why all the coffee shops in the city are run by Greeks. The take-out cups have pictures of seminude classical Greek figures. O Attic shape … of paper men and maidens overwrought … You spread the newspaper out on the counter and learn that Coma Baby was delivered six weeks premature in an emergency Caesarean and that Coma Mom is dead. Coming up West Twelfth from Seventh Avenue you see someone sitting on the steps of your apartment building. It looks an awful lot like your brother Michael. Whoa! You slow down. Then you stop. It is Michael. What is he doing here? He should be home in Bucks County. He doesn’t belong here. He sees you. He stands up, starts toward you. You turn and bolt.

• From The Greatest Controversies of Early Christian History (2013)

  50 Lecture 8: What Secrets Did Judas Betray? What Secrets Did Judas Betray? Lecture 8 I n this lecture, we move from considering controversies surrounding Jesus’s birth and life to those surrounding his death and the reports of his resurrection. The focus of this lecture is on Jesus’s most infamous disciple and one of the true villains of Christian history, Judas Iscariot, the man who betrayed Jesus. What was it, exactly, that Judas betrayed? The traditional view is that Judas betrayed Jesus’s whereabouts so that he could be arrested without causing a wider disturbance. But scholars have disagreed on this point for at least a century. In this lecture, we’ll look an alternative theory about the secret that Judas betrayed. The Meaning of “Iscariot”  Speculation about Judas Iscariot has been carried out not only in the halls of scholarship but also in novels and fi lm, at least partially because this enigmatic fi gure has been widely seen as the most intriguing and puzzling of the New Testament. One area of speculation concerns his name.  As we’ve seen, in ancient Judaism (and other cultures of the time), people did not have last names, which means that some other method of identi fi cation was needed. Jesus, for example, is often identifi ed as Jesus of Nazareth. There are a number of people in the New Testament known as Judas or Jude, and in fact, Jesus had two disciples who were named Jude or Judas.  The name Iscariot is obviously some kind of identifying feature about this man, but there have been signifi cant debates over exactly what this feature is. o Various scholars have argued that it identi fi es Judas as someone who hanged himself, made money out of friendship, had a ruddy complexion, or was a member of the Sicarii, a group of Jewish zealots known to have assassinated Roman aristocrats or Jewish cooperators with Romans. None of these

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  “Not funny.” “Just trying to boost sales. Consider me your agent.” “I’m not amused. Bad taste.” “Taste,” says Tad, “is a matter of taste.” You are dancing with Elaine. Tad is dancing with Theresa. Elaine moves with an angular syncopation that puts you in mind of the figures on Egyptian tombs. It may be a major new dance step. Whatever it is, she is making you feel self-conscious. She’s a tough act to accompany. You feel like a recent transplant from the junior prom. You are not particularly attracted to Elaine, who’s too hard-edged in your view. You do not even think she is a particularly nice person. Yet you have this desire to prove that you can have as good a time as anyone, that you can be one of the crowd. Objectively, you know that Elaine is desirable, and you feel obligated to desire her. It seems to be your duty to go through the motions. You keep thinking that with practice you will eventually get the knack of enjoying superficial encounters, that you will stop looking for the universal solvent, stop grieving. You will learn to compound happiness out of small increments of mindless pleasure. “I really enjoyed Amanda,” Elaine says between songs. “I do hope I see her again.” There is something confidential in her manner, as if you shared a secret with regard to Amanda. You would be happier if she had said she didn’t like Amanda. Being still unable to think the worst of her, you need other people to think it and speak it for you. Tad and Theresa have disappeared. Elaine excuses herself and says she will be right back. You feel abandoned. You consider the possibility of conspiracy. They have planned to meet at the door and ditch you. You are doing bad things to their mood. Or, worse yet, you are missing out on drugs. You get yourself a drink. You wait five minutes and then decide to reconnoiter. You check the Men’s Room first and then the Ladies’. A woman in a leather jump suit is teasing her hair at the mirror. “Plenty of room,” she says. You hear sounds coming from one of the stalls. Giggling. Looking down, you see Elaine’s pumps and Theresa’s sandals under the door. “Save a little for me,” you say, pushing on the door of the stall, which yields just enough to allow you to stick your head in and discover Elaine and Theresa engaged in an unnatural act. You look on in wonder and confusion. “Want to join the party?” Elaine asks. “Bon appétit, ” you blurt, and you lurch out of the Ladies’ Room. You emerge into a din of bodies and music. It is very late. A WOMB WITH A VIEWYou dream about the Coma Baby. You sneak into the hospital, past the nurses and reporters. Nobody can see you. A door with a plaque reading L’Enfant Coma opens into the Department of Factual Verification.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  gleaming substance lative, that we are rarely charmed or deceived by them. We have grown having luster, glitter, and increasingly cynical. Try to persuade a person by appealing to their con-sparkle . . . those rays of sciousness, by saying outright what you want, by showing all your cards, and the eye are reflected back, what hope do you have? You are just one more irritation to be tuned out. and the observer then beholds himself and To avoid this fate you must learn the art of insinuation, of reaching the obtains an ocular vision of unconscious. The most eloquent expression of the unconscious is the his own person. This is dream, which is intricately connected to myth; waking from a dream, we what you see when you look into a mirror; in that are often haunted by its images and ambiguous messages. Dreams obsess us situation you are as it were because they mix the real and the unreal. They are filled with real charac-looking at yourself through ters, and often deal with real situations, yet they are delightfully irrational, the eyes of another. pushing realities to the extremes of delirium. If everything in a dream were —IBN HAZM, THE RING OF THE D O V E : A TREATISE ON THE realistic, it would have no power over us; if everything were unreal, we ART AND PRACTICE OF ARAB would feel less involved in its pleasures and fears. Its fusion of the two is LOVE, TRANSLATED BY A . J . what makes it haunting. This is what Freud called the "uncanny": some-ARBERRY thing that seems simultaneously strange and familiar. We sometimes experience the uncanny in waking life—in a déjà vu, a miraculous coincidence, a weird event that recalls a childhood experience. The only important constellation of collective People can have a similar effect. The gestures, the words, the very being of seduction produced by men like Kennedy or Andy Warhol, for example, evoke both the real and modern times [ is] that of the unreal: we may not realize it (and how could we, really), but they are film stars or cinema like dream figures to us. They have qualities that anchor them in reality— idols. . . . They were our only myth in an age sincerity, playfulness, sensuality—but at the same time their aloofness, their incapable of generating superiority, their almost surreal quality makes them seem like something great myths or figures of out of a movie. seduction comparable to those of mythology or art. • These types have a haunting, obsessive effect on people. Whether in The cinema's power lives in public or in private, they seduce us, making us want to possess them both its myth. Its stones, its physically and psychologically. But how can we possess a person from a psychological portraits,

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  No one said, “Look, this isn’t going to happen.” Several of us had left the ministry decades earlier to pursue nursing, software development, accounting, and other careers built on reason and rationality, but that evening we had once again taken our places in a universe where the impossible could happen, whether you really wanted it to or not. The next morning, my husband steered the car down Highway 84 toward the funeral in Bangs. I gazed out the window, puzzled at the unreality of finding myself en route to a place I had left so far behind, a place I turned away from at every juncture. When friends said things like, “Nothing happens in God’s world without a reason,” and “There are no coincidences,” I rolled my eyes and shuddered. They had no idea where that kind of thinking could lead. Everything within me had shifted, from belief to atheism to agnosticism to a sort of “cultural Christianity,” yet the stretch between Brownwood and Bangs remained unchanged. I thought I recognized every dusty outcropping of rock, every stand of cedar and pad of prickly pear. The person who looked out the window, the woman who had changed the way she thought, spoke, dressed, prayed, or didn’t pray, the woman who had sold her birthright, she was the one I didn’t know.I pointed out a gravel road. “Slow down. Turn right.”My husband swerved, and all at once we were there. Dusty cars of every make and model were scattered across the scrubby field. Small groups of people streamed toward a large utilitarian building, the Terrellite church, positioned in what appeared to be the same spot the tent had occupied during the run-up to the end-time. My husband parked the car and we stepped out into the sunlight of a mild November day. A light breeze played at the edges of my suit jacket. No west Texas gusts pulled or pushed at me. No need to pull my coat tighter about me. No need for a coat at all. We picked our way across the dry, rocky terrain, moving ever closer to the church. I remembered the times I had backed away, literally and figuratively, from anything that had evoked this place, these people. The pop singer who crooned “Job’s God Is True” at the after-hours party, the sad little gospel tent in Boston Common, the voice of a street preacher wafting through a hotel window ten stories above San Francisco, the French Holy Rollers who tried to convert me in Nice. Trickster spirits that winked at me from unexpected corners of my life, reminders that all was not as it seemed, that I was not as I seemed.Family members clustered outside the church doors, arranging themselves in two long wobbly lines. My sisters stood near the front of the line, an ordinary and astonishing sight. A remnant of scripture came to mind: “. . .

• From Middlesex (2002)

  floor, but on the way they took him lots of other places as well. There was a landing, for instance, overhung with a mobile. The stairway walls had peepholes and shelves cut into them. As you climbed, you could see the legs of someone passing along the hallway above. You could spy on someone down in the living room. "Where are the closets?" Tessie asked as soon as we got inside. "Closets?" "The kitchen's a million miles away from the family room, Milt. Every time you want a snack you have to traipse all the way across the house." "It'll give us some exercise." "And how am I supposed to find curtains for those windows? They don't make curtains that big. Everyone can see right in!" "Think of it this way. We can see right out." But then there was a scream at the other end of the house: "Mana!" Against her better judgment, Desdemona had pressed a button on the wall. "What kind door this is?" she was shouting as we all came running. "It move by itself!" "Hey, cool," said Chapter Eleven. "Try it, Cal. Put your head in the doorway. Yeah, like that . ." . "Don't fool with that door, kids." "I'm just testing the pressure." "Ow!" "What did I tell you? Birdbrain. Now get your sister out of the door." "I'm trying. The button doesn't work." "What do you mean it doesn't work?" "Oh, this is wonderful, Milt. No closets, and now we have to call the fire department to get Callie out of the door." "It's not designed to have someone's neck in it." "Mana!" "Can you breathe, honey?" "Yeah, but it hurts." "It's like that guy at Carlsbad Caverns," said Chapter Eleven. "He got stuck and they had to feed him for forty days and then he finally died." "Stop wriggling, Callie. You're making it—" 259 "I'm not wriggling—" "I can see Callie's underwear! I can see Callie's underwear!" "Stop that right now" "Here, Tessie, take Callie's leg. Okay, on three. A-one and a-two and a-three!" We settled in, with our various misgivings. After the incident with the pneumatic door, Desdemona had a premonition that this house of modern conveniences (which was in fact nearly as old as she was) would be the last she would ever live in. She moved what remained of her and my grandfather's belongings into the guest house— the brass coffee table, the silkworm box, the portrait of Patriarch Athenagoras— but she could never get used to the skylight, which