Confusion

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 Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (2021)

  [image file=image_rsrcNP.jpg] In an interview in 2020, Donna Rotunno, the lawyer defending Harvey Weinstein in trial, said that ‘women need to be very clear about their intentions,’ and ‘prepared for the circumstances they put themselves in.’ Likewise, the consent discourse urges women to know their desires ahead of sex, to ‘know what you want and what your partner wants’. How useful is this injunction to self-knowledge? Who exactly does it serve? That both Weinstein’s lawyer and consent advocates urge self-knowledge on us should give us pause. ‘A woman faced with sexual advances from her date’, wrote legal scholar Nicholas J. Little in a 2005 article making the case for affirmative consent, ‘will either want sexual intercourse or not want sexual intercourse’. But a woman, a woman like Girl X or Grace, or like you or me perhaps, might not either want or not want sex; she might be hovering between these stark stances. We don’t always begin with desire; it is not always there to be known. The rubric of consent is yet again not sufficient for thinking about sex, because it glosses over something crucial to acknowledge: that we don’t always know what we want. When did we buy the idea that we know what we want, whether in sex or elsewhere? The rhetoric of consent too often implies that desire is something that lies in wait, fully formed within us, ready for us to extract. Yet our desires emerge in interaction; we don’t always know what we want; sometimes we discover things we didn’t know we wanted; sometimes we discover what we want only in the doing. This – that we don’t always know and can’t always say what we want – must be folded into the ethics of sex rather than swept aside as an inconvenience. Another key reason, then, that consent cannot bear the weight we place on it is that it insists on an unrealizable condition for women’s pleasure and safety. Desire is uncertain and unfolding, and this is unsettling. It is unsettling because it opens up the possibility of women not knowing themselves fully, and of men capitalizing on that lack of certainty by coercing or bullying them. Should we then deny this aspect of desire as a consequence? No. We must not insist on a sexual desire that is fixed and known in advance, in order to be safe. That would be to hold sexuality hostage to violence.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  Psychoanalysts have no trouble finding empirical confirmations of their theories: it is known that if Ptolemy’s system is subtly complicated, his version of the position of the planets could be upheld for a long time; if an inverse Oedipus complex is superimposed onto the Oedipus complex and by showing a desire in every anxiety, the very facts that contradicted Freudianism will be successfully integrated into it. For a figure to be perceived, it must stand out from its background, and how the figure is perceived brings out the ground behind it in positive delineation; thus if one is determined to describe a particular case from a Freudian perspective, one will find the Freudian schema as the background behind it; but when a doctrine demands the multiplication of secondary explanations in an indefinite and arbitrary way, when observation uncovers as many anomalies as normal cases, it is better to give up the old frameworks. Today as well, every psychoanalyst works at adapting Freudian concepts to suit himself; he attempts compromises; for example, a contemporary psychoanalyst writes: “Whenever there is a complex, there are by definition several components … The complex consists in grouping these disparate elements and not in representing one of them by the others.”4 But the idea of a simple grouping of elements is unacceptable: psychic life is not a mosaic; it is altogether complete in every one of its moments, and this unity must be respected. This is possible only by recovering the original intentionality of existence through the disparate facts. Without going back to this source, man appears a battlefield of drives and prohibitions equally devoid of meaning and contingent. All psychoanalysts systematically refuse the idea of choice and its corollary, the notion of value; and herein lies the intrinsic weakness of the system. Cutting out drives and prohibitions from existential choice, Freud fails to explain their origin: he takes them as givens. He tried to replace the notion of value with that of authority; but he admits in Moses and Monotheism that he has no way to account for this authority. Incest, for example, is forbidden because the father forbade it: But why did he forbid it? It is a mystery. The superego interiorizes orders and prohibitions emanating from an arbitrary tyranny; instinctive tendencies exist, but we do not know why; these two realities are heterogeneous because morality is posited as foreign to sexuality; human unity appears as shattered, there is no passage from the individual to the society: Freud is forced to invent strange fictions to reunite them.5 Adler saw clearly that the castration complex could be explained only in a social context; he approached the problem of valorization, but he did not go back to the ontological source of values recognized by society, and he did not understand that values were involved in sexuality itself, which led him to misunderstand their importance.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  Still I liked the idea of Laura wanting me, though I wasn’t sure if I liked that I liked it. This was harder to parse. I couldn’t imagine dating her, or any sort of ongoing thing, a relationship. It had been a leap to imagine anything, to sit at the bar next to her and understand that I wanted to kiss her. In that moment I’d been there and also not there: a version of me had hovered near the ceiling, watching, wondering which was the “real” me. Was I the person in the chair down there, or was I this one, up here? How would I know? Then the minute had passed, and I’d floated back down to my seat. I’d stayed. I rode in Laura’s car, I sat on her sofa, I told her what I wanted. I became someone who surprised me, someone interesting. And then nothing happened. Nothing happened, but I felt bigger somehow. That I could be attracted to a woman, this woman, the way I was to men—the knowledge of this made me feel larger, my body capable of pulling in more air. I had imagined it would feel different to want a woman, different from wanting a man, but it didn’t. It felt expansive. Expansive, a word I couldn’t remember ever using, now instinctively in my mouth. But alongside this feeling came another: I was relieved. I was relieved that nothing had happened, that the decision had been made for me. The thing was out of my hands. At least I won’t have to tell my parents I’m a lesbian. Summer dwindled into fall, and I moved back to campus. I thought about Laura for a few weeks. Thanksgiving came, and I spent the long weekend at Tina’s house. I went to the store, but Laura was gone, had taken a new job elsewhere. I didn’t reach out, though sometimes I wanted to. I was taking a medical anthropology class that quarter, and there was a boy who usually sat in the row ahead of me, with auburn hair and cheekbones like twin mesas. I had a crush. It was fun, like it always was. The next summer I worked again at Whole Foods, this time in the cheese department, Laura’s old domain. The manager now was a soft-spoken man who’d spent some years living in Spain. He taught me how to pronounce the Basque cheese Idiazábal, letting my tongue glance off my front teeth, turning the z into a th. It was a different summer, less fraught. I didn’t look at a woman again the way I’d looked at Laura. I didn’t even think to look at a woman that way for fifteen years, until the morning I walked into the courtroom.

• From The Principle of Desire (2013)

  When Beth was eighteen she had written a list of desirable qualities in a mate, on the back page of her diary like an appendix clarifying guiding principles. Thinking about it now made her shake her head. Tall. Handsome—although she knew looks shouldn’t matter. In good shape. Good sense of humor. Nice smile. Nice manners, like a gentleman. Educated. Intelligent. Rich...she’d actually written that down, though she’d qualified it with a mitigating smiley. There were other items, equally naive and meaningless. Ed had a nice smile. He met her “educated” and “intelligent” criteria many times over, though she hadn’t been thinking of STEM field practitioners at the time but men who could discuss literature, philosophy, classics. The way Aaron did...all the time. And Ed’s sense of humor was wicked, though he usually hid it under his grouchy front. As for the rest, it wasn’t that he didn’t meet her specifications, but that those youthful ideals seemed completely irrelevant to the reality that was Ed. The story on paper told so little about the man. If the list mattered, she would have never left Aaron. On the other hand, Beth acknowledged—as she stood at the vast kitchen island contemplating the meticulously landscaped backyard through a bay window—that this life Aaron offered was tempting. It would be the easy path in so many ways. Aaron would probably consider her a trophy wife, a prospect that didn’t thrill her, but he would treat her well in his own way. It was the lifestyle she had always pictured for herself, and a part of her still wanted it. Another part of her realized she would have to miss this week’s game night, and wondered how the Fighting Perdedors would fare without her. * * * Hey you! How’s the not-so-patient? Walking on crutches. Putting weight on cast. They decided his fracture was stable? Whatever that means. So he’s up. Moving independently. \0/ Ed tapped his finger on the edge of his phone, thinking through his next text. Probably overthinking. He wanted to convey eagerness without desperation, a certain level of attraction without revealing sheer horniness. As Beth had been somewhat cryptic about the timetable for Aaron’s recovery, Ed was also working hard to avoid any implication of jealousy. When can I see you He deleted the line and started again. Professor and Lindsey are doing a suspension demo at the club tonight. Will I see No, still too needy. After deleting Will I see, he continued in what he hoped was a more neutral tone. Professor and Lindsey are doing a suspension demo at the club tonight. I’ll save a space on my dance card in case you can make it! He regretted the exclamation point as soon as he’d hit “Send” but it was too late. All he could do was cross his fingers and see what happened. Prof and Lindsey? That should be good. If he’s not too tired I’ll be there.

• From The Principle of Desire (2013)

  Ed texted her, they talked on the phone once or twice, but he seemed like an increasingly distant daydream. A sweet, almost vanilla daydream. Being with Aaron felt much more like the gritty reality Beth had come to expect. She liked to study psychology, and with Aaron she got to do that all the time. She was good at it; she knew how to manage this difficult man, which had an appeal all its own. “You’ve changed,” he told her on the fourth day of her stay. “I get that. I respect that. But Beth, if I met you today I’d still want to get to know you. If I saw you at the club or even at work. Don’t tell me you never think about what we had.” She couldn’t lie to him. “I do. Rarely in a good way, though.” “Let me change that. Let me show you I’ve changed, too. Give me another chance to show you I appreciate you.” He was so beautiful. So perfect, in the abstract. If she’d made a list of attributes she required in a man, he would have met most of them. And in fairness to Aaron, the lack of communication had been on both of them. He hadn’t taken her seriously because she’d never made him take her seriously in the past. If that could change, if they could really talk, it would be like a different relationship. But where would that leave Ed? Easy, implausibly loveable Ed. “You can keep him as a pet if you want,” Aaron offered. “Use him as a sub or a service bottom or whatever. It’s not like you were ever going to be serious about that guy anyway, right? Your relationship won’t even change that much. I’ll give you time for that, to go be a top, and at home you’ll be mine again. And we can go to counseling if you think that would help.” He thought he was being magnanimous. Beth didn’t mention that she’d already gotten serious with Ed, that she might be in love with him. Love was too complicated to think about. The rules weren’t clearly laid out on paper. With love, you worried about whether you were supposed to go help out the needy ex at ungodly hours, instead of just knowing whether or not that was allowed. You had secrets. She already had this one from Aaron, so maybe he was right and what they had was love. Maybe Ed had been her version of sowing wild oats. Wild vanilla-flavored oats. It was all too confusing.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] When Nora and I talked, I didn’t like who I became. Every conversation was a mirror, and I didn’t like the person I saw in it. This person wriggles uncomfortably in her seat, can’t seem to stay here or there. This person can’t do it right. She wants the wrong things. One version of the right thing: this person should have stayed in her marriage. She should have held fast to her commitment. She should have thought of her child first—her child’s need for security, consistency, an intact home. Another version of the right thing: this person should have left like a snake sheds its skin. She wanted to be free, right? Wipe off the dust and go. Interview your character. Ask her what she wants. “But now,” writes author Andrea Long Chu, “you begin to see the problem with desire: we rarely want the things we should.”33 This person wants neither. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Being with Nora was like riding a teeter-totter with someone much smaller or much larger than you are. This is what I tell my friend Matthew. Nora and I were always each at the mercy of the other, either floating up or thudding down, never at the same time. We were both afraid of being left up there. I think I’m homesick, I say to Matthew. It’s like I can’t get comfortable anywhere. It’s like I’m homesick for a comfort I don’t have anymore. He nods. I can’t stay in my marriage, I say, but I don’t want to burn it to the ground either. No one says you have to, he says. I have this daydream, I say. It’s me and Brandon, a couple of years from now. We’re sitting in the shade somewhere. We’re talking, maybe eating something. We’re just two friends, normal friends, catching up. From the corner of my eye I see Matthew’s lip curl into a mild smile. I amuse him. I know it sounds dumb, I say. Like I’ll burst into song and Brandon’ll do a tap dance and then the credits will roll. Ha, Matthew blurts. It does, a little. But I really want us to get there. You maybe can do it someday, says Matthew. But it’ll be a lot of work. I know. Well, he says, then go do it. 22The next day was a Wednesday, still late September. Brandon and I had a meeting with our CPA, and then with a corporate attorney. We had to decide what to do with the restaurants, whether we would continue to own them jointly. Between meetings, we got falafel for lunch and leaned against his car to eat it. It was windy, and I was wearing a blue skirt, I remember, because it was whipping around my calves when he said that he could see it now, that we hadn’t been real partners, romantic partners, for a long time. Maybe not since he moved from New York. We’ve just been best friends, he said. I nodded, swallowing.

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

  If a non-Christian does not recognize God, and does not consider the meaning of life to consist in the fulfilment of God's will, it is only calculation, that is, the consideration as to what is more profitable for him and for all men, the continuation of the robber's life or that of the child, which guides the choice of his acts. But to decide this, he must know what will become of the child which he saves, and what would become of the robber if he did not kill him. But that he cannot know. And so, if he is a non-Christian, he has no rational foundation for saving the child through the death of the robber. But if a man is a Christian, and so recognizes God and sees the meaning of life in the fulfilment of His will, no matter what terrible robber may attack any innocent and beautiful child, he has still less cause to depart from the law given him by God and to do to the robber what the robber wants to do to the child; he may implore the robber, may place his body between the robber and his victim, but there is one thing he cannot do,—he cannot consciously depart from the law of God, the fulfilment of which forms the meaning of his life. It is very likely that, as the result of his bad bringing up and of his animality, a man, being a pagan or a Christian, will kill the robber, not only in the defence of the child, but also in his own defence or in the defence of his purse, but that will by no means signify that it is right to do so, that it is right to accustom ourselves and others to think that that ought to be done. This will only mean that, in spite of the external education and Christianity, the habits of the stone age are still strong in man, that he is capable of committing acts which have long ago been disavowed by his consciousness. A robber in my sight is about to kill a child and I can save it by killing the robber; consequently it is necessary under certain conditions to resist evil with violence. A man is in danger of his life and can be saved only through my lie; consequently it is necessary in certain cases to lie. A man is starving, and I cannot save him otherwise than by stealing; consequently it is necessary in certain cases to steal. I lately read a story by Coppée, in which an orderly kills his officer, who has his life insured, and thus saves his honour and the life of his family. Consequently in certain cases it is right to kill.

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

  Yet Cyril did not, like Augustine, exempt the Virgin from sin or infirmity, but, like Basil, he ascribed to her a serious doubt at the crucifixion concerning the true divinity of Christ, and a shrinking from the cross, similar to that of Peter, when he was scandalized at the bare mention of it, and exclaimed: "Be it far from thee, Lord!" (Matt. xvi. 22.) In commenting on John xix. 25, Cyril says: The female sex somehow is ever fond of tears,2044 and given to much lamentation .... It was the purpose of the holy evangelist to teach, that probably even the mother of the Lord Himself took offence2045 at the unexpected passion; and the death upon the cross, being so very bitter, was near unsettling her from her fitting mind .... Doubt not that she admitted2046 some such thoughts as these: I bore Him who is laughed at on the wood; but when He said He was the true Son of the Omnipotent God, perhaps somehow He was mistaken.2047 He said, ’I am the Life;’ how then has He been crucified? how has He been strangled by the cords of His murderers? how did He not prevail over the plot of His persecutors? why does He not descend from the cross, since He bade Lazarus to return to life, and filled all Judaea with amazement at His miracles? And it is very natural that woman,2048 not knowing the mystery, should slide into some such trains of thought. For we should understand, that the gravity of the circumstances of the Passion was enough to overturn even a self-possessed mind; it is no wonder then if woman2049 slipped into this reasoning." Cyril thus understands the prophecy of Simeon (Luke ii. 35) concerning the sword, which, he says, "meant the most acute pain, cutting down the woman’s mind into extravagant thoughts. For temptations test the hearts of those who suffer them, and make bare the thoughts which are in them."2050 Aside from his partisan excesses, he powerfully and successfully represented the important truth of the unity of the person of Christ against the abstract dyophysitism of Nestorius.

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

  A man who loves a race and is proud of it, knows that he loves the whole race of the Guelphs, or all the Ghibellines; he who loves the state knows that he loves France as far as the Rhine and the Pyrenees, and its capital, Paris, and its history, and so forth. But what does a man love, when he loves humanity? There is the state, the nation; there is the abstract conception—man; but there is not, and there cannot be, a real conception of humanity. Humanity? Where is the limit of humanity? Where does it end and where does it begin? Does humanity stop short of a savage, an idiot, an alcoholic, an insane person? If we are going to draw a line of demarcation for humanity, so as to exclude the lower representatives of the human race, where are we going to draw it? Are we going to exclude the negroes, as the Americans do, and the Hindoos, as some English do, and the Jews, as some do? But if we are going to include all men without exception, why include men only, and not the higher animals, many of whom stand higher than the lower representatives of the human race? We do not know humanity as an external object,—we do not know its limits. Humanity is a fiction, and it cannot be loved. It would indeed be very convenient, if men could love humanity just as they love the family; it would be very convenient, as the communists talk of doing, to substitute the communal for the competitive tendency of human activity, and the universal for the individual, so that every man may be for all, and all for every man, only there are no motives whatever for it. The positivists, the communists, and all the preachers of the scientific brotherhood preach the widening of that love which men have for themselves and for their families and for the state, so as to embrace all humanity, forgetting that the love which they advocate is the personal love, which, by spreading out thinner, could extend to the family; which, by spreading out still thinner, could extend to the natural country of birth, which completely vanishes as soon as it reaches an artificial state, as Austria, Turkey, England, and which we are not even able to imagine, when we come to humanity, an entirely mystical subject. "Man loves himself (his animal life), loves his family, loves even his country. Why should he not love also humanity? How nice that would be! By the way, this is precisely what Christianity teaches." Thus think the preachers of the positivist, communistic, socialistic brotherhoods. It would indeed be very nice, but it cannot be, because love which is based on the personal and the social conception of life cannot go beyond the state.

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

  The first misconception about the impracticableness of the teaching consists in this, that the men of the social comprehension of life, being unable to comprehend the method by means of which the Christian teaching guides men, and taking the Christian indications of perfection to be rules which determine life, think and say that it is impossible to follow Christ's teaching, because a complete fulfilment of this teaching destroys life. "If a man fulfilled what was preached by Christ, he would destroy his life; and if all men should fulfil it, the whole human race would come to an end," they say. "If we care not for the morrow, for what we shall eat and drink and be clothed in; if we do not defend our lives; if we do not resist evil with force; if we give our lives for our friends, and observe absolute chastity, no man, nor the whole human race, can exist," they think and say. And they are quite correct, if we take the indications of perfection, as given by Christ, for rules, which every man is obliged to carry out, just as in the social teaching everybody is obliged to carry out the rule about paying the taxes, about taking part in court, etc. The misconception consists in this, that Christ's teaching guides men in a different way from the way those teachings guide which are based on a lower life-conception. The teachings of the social life-conception guide only by demanding a precise execution of the rules or laws. Christ's teaching guides men by indicating to them that infinite perfection of the Father in heaven, toward which it is proper for each man to strive voluntarily, no matter at what stage of perfection he may be. The misconception of people who judge about the Christian teaching from the social point of view consists in this, that they, assuming that the perfection pointed out by Christ may be attained completely, ask themselves (even as they question themselves, assuming that the social laws will be fulfilled) what will happen when all this shall be fulfilled. This assumption is false, because the perfection pointed out by Christ is infinite and can never be attained; and Christ gives His teaching with this in view, that complete perfection will never be attained, but that the striving toward complete, infinite perfection will constantly increase the good of men, and that this good can, therefore, be increased infinitely. Christ does not teach angels, but men, who live an animal life, who are moved by it. And it is to this animal force of motion that Christ seems to apply a new, a different force of the consciousness of divine perfection, and with this He directs the motion of life along the resultant of two forces.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  As I have also explained, for me masturbation was initially, and for a long time, not a question of addressing the clitoris directly, but of sliding the lips of the vulva against each other. It wasn’t that I didn’t know it existed, it was that I hadn’t needed to worry about it in order to experience my pleasure. I belong to the generation of women targeted by feminist books with the aim of guiding them in the exploration of their own bodies. I have squatted on a mirror and looked at my genitals, but that only confused me. Perhaps I found it difficult to follow a very scientific description. Perhaps I was slightly prejudiced against the feminists’ approach which I thought was intended for women who were inhibited or were experiencing difficulties in their sexual relationships, which didn’t include me because, for me, fucking was easy. Perhaps I didn’t want to call this easiness into question: Yes, I fucked for the pleasure of it, but didn’t I also fuck so that fucking wasn’t a problem? Perhaps on that occasion I closed my thighs the way you would close a medical dictionary: for fear of finding in yourself the illnesses they describe which would preclude you from some very enjoyable habits… I was absolutely right because when, much later, I opened the dictionary of received wisdom, my worries started to well up. At that stage I had a relationship with one man, and then a second, and I got it into my head that I should feel the same spasms when I was making love to them as I did when I was masturbating. Was I sufficiently familiar with my own organs to achieve this? And, as if my sexual life were happening in reverse, as if I had to ask myself the naive questions after acquiring and then forgetting all my experience, I was full of doubt about my clitoral antenna. Did it respond when I aroused myself with a manic finger? For a while I thought I didn’t have one or that it had atrophied. A man with the best intentions but nevertheless not very adept, and whose finger kept missing the mark, didn’t help. Eventually I cottoned on: the clitoris was not an obvious landmark like a nail on a wall, a steeple in a landscape or a nose on a face, it was a sort of muddled knot, with no true shape, a minute chaos where two little tongues of flesh meet like when a backwash throws two waves together.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  —Tell me I’m totally wide of the mark, he said. Tell me it’s all in my head. Janey smiled sadly. She had her own problems. He made it back in time for dinner. The erotics of adultery are well documented. In the guest room, thinking back, Hood drank again. Maybe he honored his wife in this way; maybe it was for her . Maybe he fucked against the notion of family, to escape its constraints. Maybe he adultered because of his keen appreciation of beauty. Maybe he celebrated the freedom of the new sexuality . Maybe he did it to abase himself. Maybe he did it to hurt Janey Williams, or to injure her husband—they were more attractive than he was, they were more at ease. Maybe it was her husband he wanted to fuck, and it was such a terrible, dark secret that it was secret even from Benjamin. Maybe he wanted to get caught. Maybe he did it to escape, from his job, his anxieties, his psychosomatic complaints. Maybe he did it because his parents, too, had done it (or so he supposed) and the desire to cheat boiled in his genes. Maybe, at last, he did it simply because he wanted what he couldn’t have. Touching briefly—in the guest room—on this shortage theory of adultery, Hood arrived at a brilliantly incorrect understanding of Janey’s absence. He believed suddenly that he understood the afternoon. Of course! He was supposed to look for her! In the overdecorated chambers of her house, he was to embark on a quest, a Buzz Aldrin or Neil Armstrong sort of a quest. He would have to work for this oblivion he wanted. He was dressed but ready to disrobe. He poured a fresh tumbler of vodka and set off on the tour. —Janey …? Janey …? To the right lay Sandy’s room. Jim and Janey’s prized, brainy, creepy son. The jigsaw-puzzling son. The son who did puzzles of popcorn—just popcorn, or just M&M’s. The brainy son who memorized Nolan Ryan’s E.R.A. going back into the late sixties, who explained the physics of curveballs and kept track of the dead in Vietnam. He wouldn’t permit his photograph to be taken. He was afraid of water. Sandy’s room was tentatively decorated, as if he suspected he would be moving soon. A lone Yale pennant was tacked up over his bed. It served only to confirm the emptiness of the space. There was a bookshelf full of strange-but-true baseball stories, strange-but-true ghost stories—The Thing at the Foot of the Bed —and the 1972 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records . (Heaviest man, Robert Earl Hughes of Monticello, Ill., who achieved a peak heft of 1,069 pounds. Buried in a piano case.) On top of the bookshelf, several small fish tanks full of Magic Rocks. —Janey! Hood whispered, in the center of this unnaturally clean space. He slid back the door to Sandy’s closet. A mound of dirty laundry piled there.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  An earlier edition of the Gospel appears to have ended with the words I have just quoted from 20:30-31, which certainly sound like the ending of a book. The final chapter was added later to record one other incident of significance to the author (see box 10.5). It is here that Jesus indicates that Peter will be martyred for his faith and where he is mistakenly understood to say that the unnamed "beloved disciple" will not die prior to his own return. THE SOCIO- HISTORICAL METHOD Now that we have examined the Fourth Gospel in light of all of the other methods of analysis that we have learned, we are in a position to explore yet another approach that scholars have taken in studying the New Testament narratives. The socio- 146 THE NEW TESTAMENT: A HSTOaC, INTRODUCTION SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT Box 10.5 The Death of the Beloved Disciple in the ]ohannine Community John 21:21-3 preserves an interesting conversation between the resurrected Jesus and Peter. When Peter asks him about the unnamed "beloved disciple," Jesus responds, "If it is my explicitly said this. Why would the author of this story want to correct this misunderstanding? In the opinion of some scholars, it was because some members of the Johannine commu- nity had expected that their beloved leader, this unnamed disciple, would not die before the coming of the end. When he did, they were thrown into confusion. Had the Lord gone back on his promise? This author constructs the story to explain that Jesus never had said "that he would not die" (21:23). If this interpretation is correct, then the Gospel would have been published in its final form, with the addition of chapter 21, only after the death of the beloved disciple, and probably after the martyrdom )f Peter as well (see 21:18-19}. � historical method asks an entirely different set of questions from those we have already addressed, but it bases these questions, and their answers, on the kinds of inforrnation that we have just uncov- ered in our study. We have seen that the author of the Fourth Gospel created a Greco-Roman biogra- phy of Jesus based on a number of written and oral sources that were available to him. We have exam- ined some of the important themes in his final product and have seen how these themes differ from those found in other early Gospels. I have hinted, though, that the themes found in the Fourth Gospel are not always internally con- sistent, that is to say, there appear to be several dif- ferent perspectives embodied here, rather than only one. This should come as no surprise given what we have seen about the sources of this book.

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  “fact” to “implications.” For him the “fact” was that Jesus was alive again, as he knew from having seen him. From there Paul started reasoning backward. This backward reasoning must have proceeded through a number of steps ending in a remarkable place: Paul came to believe that he himself had been chosen and commissioned by God to fulfill the predictions of Jewish Scripture. Divinely inspired prophecies delivered centuries earlier were looking forward to his day, his labors, and him personally. Paul cannot be faulted for thinking small. Here is how the thought process appears to have worked.!4 Paul started with the “fact” that Jesus was alive again. Since Paul also knew that Jesus had died by crucifixion, his reappearance meant that he had experienced a resurrection. God performed a miracle by raising Jesus from the dead. If God raised Jesus from the dead, that would mean that Jesus really was the one who stood under God’s special favor, the one chosen by God. But if he was in God’s special favor, why would God let him be executed? Would God require him to be tortured to death? Is this what God does to the one he favors? What does he do to his enemies? The matter was even more complicated for Paul, because Jesus did not die just any death or even just any excruciating death. He was killed on a wooden cross. That was a particular problem, because Paul knew full well that Scripture itself pronounces God’s curse on anyone who dies on a tree, as Paul himself indicates in Galatians 3:13; quoting Deuteronomy 21:23: “Cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree.” If Jesus was the one blessed by God, how could he be the one cursed by God? Paul drew what for him was the natural conclusion: Jesus must not have died for anything he himself had done wrong, since God favored him. He was not being cursed for his own deeds. He must have been cursed for the deeds of others.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  We might suppose that it was not to become so until Christ returned to bring in the new age. That is to say, men and women had not yet been granted full social equali- ty any more than masters and slaves had been, for Christians had not yet experienced their glorious resurrection unto immortality. While living in this age, men and women were to continue to accept their "natural" social roles, with women subordi- nate to men just as men were subordinate to Christ and Christ was subordinate to God (1 Cor 11:3). WOMEN IN THE AFTERMATH OF PAUL Paul's attitude toward women in the church may strike you as inconsistent, or at least as ambiva- lent. Women could participate in his churches as ministers, prophets, and even apostles, but they were to maintain their social status as women and not appear to be like men. This apparent ambiva- lence led to a very interesting historical result. When the dispute over the role of women in the church later came to a head, both sides could appeal to the apostle's authority to support their CH/qr[P. 23 WOMEN IN 0I.Y CHRi-TIANITY 345 views. On one side were those who urged complete equality between men and women in the church- es. Some such believers told tales of Paul's own female companions, women like Thecla, who renounced marriage and sexual activity, led ascetic lives, and taught male believers in church. On the other side were those who urged women to remain in complete submission to men. Believers like this could combat the tales of Thecla and other women leaders by portraying Paul as an apostle who insisted on marriage, spumed asceticism, and forbade women to teach. Which side of this dispute produced the books that made it into the canon? Reconsider the Pastoral epistles from this perspective. These let- ters were allegedly written by Paul to his two male colleagues, Timothy and Titus, urging them to tend to the problems in their churches, including the problem of women. These pastors were to appoint male leaders (bishops, elders, and dea- cons), all of whom were to be married (e.g., 1 Tim 3:2-5, 12) and who were to keep their households, including of course their wives, in submission (1 Tim 2:4). They were to speak out against those who forbade marriage and urged the ascetic life (1 Tim 4:3). They were to silence the women in their churches; women were not to be allowed to tell old wives' tales and especially not to teach in their congregations (1 Tim 4:7). They were to be silent and submissive and sexually active with their spouses; those who wanted to enjoy the benefits of salvation were to produce babies (1 Tim 2:11-13). The Pastoral epistles present a stark contrast to the views set forth in The Acts of Paul and Thecla.

• From Theology: A Very Short Introduction (2013)

  the other things that are needed to reconstruct history with any richness and depth. Other ‘things’ raise different problems. How do you establish the reality of somebody else’s thoughts or feelings or dreams or intentions? Or of your own? What about the ‘real meaning’ of a historical record or a novel or a poem? What sense can be made of the reality of values, of goodness, of evil, of lies? What sort of reality is the English language, ‘existing’ in the past, in the present, in all sorts of people, written texts, films, conversations, dialects, and so on? What about the reality of a legal system, or improvised music, or a scientific theory, or a light year, or a smile? In all this diverse ‘reality’ it must be clear that there is no one simple criterion for what is real or not. Great confusion follows from applying the wrong criteria. This page that you are reading could be analysed in terms of physics and chemistry—its paper and ink. But that sort of analysis would completely miss the reality of the meaning of the words—to analyse that meaning requires knowing the language it is written in, and also having a certain sort of education. So what about God? Much discussion (especially of a dismissive sort) looks like a physics and chemistry approach to the meaning of this page. Having applied some predetermined criterion of ‘reality’ to some predetermined conception of ‘God’, the conclusion is that no such being can be shown to exist. This sort of dismissal, however, still leaves the problem of why so many people affirm God’s reality, and various explanations can be offered for that. Recent centuries have produced explanation after explanation for the phenomenon labelled God. The most common suggestion (which goes back to the ancient Greeks) is that God is projected by the human imagination, and fulfils a range of functions. The trouble with this explanation is that people can have imaginings that are true, false, or a mixture of truth and falsehood. Yet it can gain force if the ‘imaginings’ can be explained as exhaustively as possible by some discipline or combination of disciplines. Some practitioners in every major area of human knowledge and interpretation have offered ‘reductionist’ accounts of ‘God’— philosophers, historians, psychologists, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, sociologists, economists, evolutionary biologists, geneticists, neurologists, information theorists, and others. On the other hand, different practitioners in the same fields have claimed that the explanations, for all their elements of truth, are

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

  It was possible for a man, who regarded the heaven as a finite, firm vault, to believe, or not, that God created the heaven, that heaven was opened, that Christ flew to heaven; but for us these words have no meaning whatsoever. Men of our time can only believe that they must believe so; but they cannot believe in what has no meaning for them. But if all these expressions are to have a figurative meaning and are emblems, we know that, in the first place, not all churchmen agree in this, but that, on the contrary, the majority insist on understanding Holy Scripture in a direct sense, and, secondly, that these interpretations are varied and not confirmed by anything. But even if a man wishes to make himself believe in the doctrine of the churches, as it is imparted,—the general diffusion of knowledge and of the Gospels, and the intercourse of men of various denominations among themselves, form for this another, even more insuperable obstacle. A man of our time need but buy himself a Gospel for three kopeks and read Christ's clear words to the woman of Samaria, which are not subject to any other interpretation, about the Father needing no worshippers in Jerusalem, neither in this mountain, nor in that, worshippers in spirit and in truth, or the words about a Christian's being obliged to pray, not in temples, as the pagans do, and in the sight of all, but in secret, that is, in his closet, or that a disciple of Christ must not call any one father or teacher,—a man needs but read these words, to become convinced that no ecclesiastic pastors, who call themselves teachers in opposition to Christ's teaching, and who quarrel among themselves, form an authority, and that that which the churchmen teach us is not Christianity. But more than that: if a man of our time continues to believe in miracles and does not read the Gospel, his mere intercourse with men of other denominations and faiths, which has become so easy in our time, will make him doubt in the authenticity of his faith. It was all very well for a man who never saw any men of another faith than his own to believe that his own faith was the correct one; but a thinking man need only come in contact, as he now does all the time, with equally good and equally bad men of various denominations, which condemn the doctrines of one another, in order to lose faith in the truth of the religion which he professes. In our time only a very ignorant man or one who is quite indifferent to the questions of life, which are sanctified by religion, can stay in the church faith.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  The tape skips. Now she is kneeling on the floor of our living room with a packet filled with collaged pictures of vegetables. She is presenting a preschool project on the food pyramid, and I am surprised to find that I had a British accent. “Oranges have VITT-amin C,” the little girl announces with a smile, showing off two adorable dimples. I don’t have those anymore, either. Now it is Easter, and she is hunting for plastic eggs, crawling around the couch and filling up her little basket. The house I grew up in looks unfamiliar, too—it is sparse, nothing on the walls; our living room furniture is awkwardly small. I count backward and realize that at this point we had been in the United States for less than two years. We hadn’t yet filled our rooms with painted Chinese screens and tchotchkes from Country Clutter, framed batik prints, and an upright piano. All we had was the rattan furniture we’d shipped from Malaysia, covered in floral cushions too thin to hide an egg underneath. The scene changes for the final time, and the camera turns to my mother and the girl. They are on our front lawn near our rose bushes, which are in full pink and yellow bloom. My mother is pretty in an oversize button-down shirt, jeans, and bare feet. She looks so calm and confident, and she is blowing bubbles. The girl chases the bubbles, giggling breathlessly, running in unsteady circles in the grass. Finally she yells, “I want to try, I want to try,” and my mother ignores her for a bit. My adult self is fully prepared to judge my mother in this video. To hate her. She won’t let me. She thinks I can’t do it. But then she does lower the wand to my lips. I blow too hard and the soap splatters. She dips the wand again, lovingly coaxing me to try until I get it right, and a single bubble floats into the sky. The scene feels like too much and not enough. Wait—who is this woman? What is this carefree life? This isn’t how it was. This isn’t the full story. Show me more. But the tape cuts out, and that’s it. Just fuzzy static. — My family didn’t come to America to escape. We came to thrive. I was two and a half when we left Malaysia and settled in California. My father worked in tech, and his company gave us a down payment for a home in Silicon Valley as part of our relocation package. For my father, it was a return.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  far more instructive spiritually to see these different views side by side than to see them mangled and forced into conformity. 5. The most troublesome problem at present is to determine what Jesus himself thought about the future. A group of able scholars has put such emphasis on the eschatological sayings of Jesus that he himself has been turned into an apocalyptic enthusiast and the authority of his ethical teaching has been impaired by being yoked with apocalyptic expectations. This school of thought has done valuable work, but the future will probably show that it has overworked its working hypothesis. Ordinary critical analysis eliminates a good deal of eschatological material as later accretions. The earliest of the documentary sources of the gospels, “Q,” contains least. All human analogies make it certain that his followers coloured his ideas with their own previous conceptions. They could not help it. Language is rich on the lower, and thin on the higher, spiritual levels. Men of high religious power have often become poetical makers of language because they had to wrestle with their medium of expression and coin new figures and terms. They must use the lower terminology to express the inexpressible. Their followers, the loyal lower souls, invariably coarsen and materialize their teachings, taking the figures for realities and the accidental for the substance. The more original and spiritual a teacher is, the larger will be the inevitable ratio of misunderstanding. We must remember that the sayings of Jesus were repeated and transmitted orally for years before our earliest documents were written. We see the whole situation incorrectly when we tacitly assume that the ideas of Jesus were uniform throughout his teaching ministry. If we take the doctrine of his real humanity seriously, he was a growing personality, and his ideas were in the making. A man’s ideas are developed by reacting on the ideas of his fellow men by assent or dissent. It is vital to this problem to know in what direction Jesus was working, into apocalypticism or out of it. We can see that he began with a Jewish horizon and broke his way into a world-wide and human world. How about his eschatology? His earliest parables are a decisive answer. He chose that form of teaching because he wanted to veil and yet reveal his polemical departure from current messianic ideas. He took his illustrations from organic life to express the idea of the gradual growth of the Kingdom. He was shaking off catastrophic ideas and substituting developmental ideas. John had put the judgment at the beginning of the Messiah’s work; Jesus pushed it over to the end. He had no taste for that part of the Messianic program. In short, apocalypticism was part of the environment in which he began his thinking; it

• From The Vagina Monologues (1998)

  My mother gave me codeine. We had bunk beds. I went down and lay there. My mother was so uncomfortable. One night, I came home late and snuck into bed without turning on any lights. My mother had found the used pads and put them between the sheets of my bed. I was twelve years old, still in my underpants. Hadn’t gotten dressed. Looked down on the staircase. There it was. Looked down and I saw blood. Seventh grade; my mother sort of noticed my underwear. Then she gave me plastic diapers. My mom was very warm—“Let’s get you a pad.” My friend Marcia, they celebrated when she got hers. They had dinner for her. We all wanted our period. We all wanted it now. Thirteen years old. It was before Kotex. Had to watch your dress. I was black and poor. Blood on the back of my dress in church. Didn’t show, but I was guilty. I was ten and a half. No preparation. Brown gunk on my underpants. She showed me how to put in a tampon. Only got in halfway. I associated my period with inexplicable phenomena. My mother told me I had to use a rag. My mother said no to tampons. You couldn’t put anything in your sugar dish. Wore wads of cotton. Told my mother. She gave me Elizabeth Taylor paper dolls. Fifteen years old. My mother said, “Mazel tov.” She slapped me in the face. Didn’t know if it was a good thing or a bad thing. My period, like cake mix before it’s baked. Indians sat on moss for five days. Wish I were Native American. I was fifteen and I’d been hoping to get it. I was tall and I kept growing. When I saw white girls in the gym with tampons, I thought they were bad girls. Saw little red drops on the pink tiles. I said, “Yeah.” My mom was glad for me. Used OB and liked putting my fingers up there. Eleven years old, wearing white pants. Blood started to come out. Thought it was dreadful. I’m not ready. I got back pains. I got horny. Twelve years old. I was happy. My friend had a Ouija board, asked when we were going to get our periods, looked down, and I saw blood. Looked down and there it was. I’m a woman. Terrified. Never thought it would come. Changed my whole feeling about myself. I became very silent and mature. A good Vietnamese woman—quiet worker, virtuous, never speaks. Nine and a half. I was sure I was bleeding to death, rolled up my underwear and threw them in a corner. Didn’t want to worry my parents. My mother made me hot water and wine, and I fell asleep. I was in my bedroom in my mother’s apartment. I had a comic book collection. My mother said, “You mustn’t lift your box of comic books.” My girlfriends told me you hemorrhage every month.