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

  here the imponderables enter, for we do not have at our disposal all the prior events (nor all the subsequent ones). 13 Maybe Valentinus was influenced not by Colossians but by Christian thinkers of Alexandria thus far unknown? The question is this: can the actual historical connections which are asserted be demonstrated? Robinson may be attempting to respond to this sort of question when he writes that the connections shown in the essays in Trajectories through Early Christianity 'are not only of the usual cause-and effect kind, where one author necessarily depended upon the preceding one. Rather,' he continues, 'the connections are explored to show how the overarching movement of the trajectory itself comes successively to expres sion as one moves downstream from the point of departure' (p. 17). This in no way retracts his belief in continuous sequential development; it simply asserts that sequential development will still continue even where definite cause and effect cannot be shown. Thought progresses. In this case the question would be: can one show that Marcion and subsequent heresies represent the development of the kind of Paulinism seen in Colossians, and of no other? (Although in the present case Robinson did say 'via', indicating a concrete connection.) We may cite two other examples of Robinson's belief in sequential development leading to a goal or terminal point. In his essay 'LOGOI SOPHON: On the Gattung of Q'.,14 he argued that the literary genre of sayings collections has a 'gnosticizing proclivity'. The proclivity of the genre to move toward gnosticism was blocked by Matthew and Luke, both of whom imbedded it 'in the Marean gospel form', 15 but it still followed out a developmental sequence which ended up in gnosticism. 16 Elsewhere, he argued that the similarity in form between Mark and John can be explained by their being at the same relative point on a developing trajectory within early Christianity. Later in the sequential development from aretalogy through the Marean-type gospel to the final stage in the development of the orthodox gospel (a conflation of the Marean and the Qform), Matthew and Luke independently and naturally made the same sort of revisions in the gospel form, since the point had been reached 'where this is the thing to do'.11 What is wrong with this is that history is not in fact always composed of sequential developments which lead to terminal points. 18 This is not to say 13 Cf. Sandmel, Tire First Christian Century, p. 8. 14 Trajertories, 1971, pp. 71-113. An earlier version appeared in 1964 in Zeit und Gesclriclrte: Danl:es gabe an Rudolf Bultmann. It also appears in the ET of part of the latter book, Tire Future of our Religious Past, 1971. 15 Robinson, 'The Problem of History in Mark, Reconsidered', USQR 20, 1965, p. 135; cf. p. 137. 16 Trajectories, p. 104. 17 'The Johannine Trajectory', in Trajectories, pp. 235, 266-8; cf. earlier 'The Problem of History in Mark, Reconsidered', p. 137. 18 Cf. Sandmel, Tire First Christian Century, p. 24.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  A must-read for those struggling with mental illness, or for their friends and family.” —SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE ★ “Superb.” —BOOKLIST Copyright © 2017 by John Green ONEAT THE TIME I FIRST REALIZED I might be fictional, my weekdays were spent at a publicly funded institution on the north side of Indianapolis called White River High School, where I was required to eat lunch at a particular time—between 12:37 P.M. and 1:14 P.M. —by forces so much larger than myself that I couldn’t even begin to identify them. If those forces had given me a different lunch period, or if the tablemates who helped author my fate had chosen a different topic of conversation that September day, I would’ve met a different end—or at least a different middle. But I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell. Of course, you pretend to be the author. You have to. You think, I now choose to go to lunch , when that monotone beep rings from on high at 12:37. But really, the bell decides. You think you’re the painter, but you’re the canvas. Hundreds of voices were shouting over one another in the cafeteria, so that the conversation became mere sound, the rushing of a river over rocks. And as I sat beneath fluorescent cylinders spewing aggressively artificial light, I thought about how we all believed ourselves to be the hero of some personal epic, when in fact we were basically identical organisms colonizing a vast and windowless room that smelled of Lysol and lard. I was eating a peanut butter and honey sandwich and drinking a Dr Pepper. To be honest, I find the whole process of masticating plants and animals and then shoving them down my esophagus kind of disgusting, so I was trying not to think about the fact that I was eating, which is a form of thinking about it. Across the table from me, Mychal Turner was scribbling in a yellow-paper notebook. Our lunch table was like a long-running play on Broadway: The cast changed over the years, but the roles never did. Mychal was The Artsy One. He was talking with Daisy Ramirez, who’d played the role of my Best and Most Fearless Friend since elementary school, but I couldn’t follow their conversation over the noise of all the others. What was my part in this play? The Sidekick. I was Daisy’s Friend, or Ms. Holmes’s Daughter. I was somebody’s something. I felt my stomach begin to work on the sandwich, and even over everybody’s talking, I could hear it digesting, all the bacteria chewing the slime of peanut butter—the students inside of me eating at my internal cafeteria. A shiver convulsed through me. “Didn’t you go to camp with him?” Daisy asked me. “With who?” “Davis Pickett,” she said. “Yeah,” I said. “Why?” “Aren’t you listening?”

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  The girls I met talked about feeling both powerful and powerless while dressed in revealing clothing, using words like liberating, bold, boss bitch, and desirable, even as they expressed indignation over the constant public judgment of their bodies. They felt simultaneously that they actively chose a sexualized image—which was nobody’s damned business but their own—and that they had no choice. “You want to stand out,” one college sophomore told me. “You want to attract someone. So it’s not just about being hot, but who can be the hottest. One of my friends has gotten to the point where she’s practically naked at parties.” Girls shifted between subject and object day by day, moment by moment, sometimes without intending to, sometimes unsure themselves of which they were. Camila, for instance, had worn a brand-new bustier top to school the previous day. “When I got dressed I was like, ‘I feel super comfortable with myself,’” she said. “‘I feel really hot and this is going to be a good day.’ Then, as soon as I got to school, I felt like”—she snapped her fingers—“automatically I wasn’t in control. People are staring at you, looking you up and down, saying things. I started second-guessing myself, thinking, ‘I shouldn’t have worn this shirt. It’s too revealing, it’s too tight.’ It was dehumanizing.” Listening to Camila, I was struck by the assertion that how “hot” she felt would determine the quality of her day; also that, midway through her story, she switched to the second person—as if she, like those around her, suddenly saw herself as an object. I used to say, when speaking publicly on college campuses or to groups of parents, that one could disentangle sexualization from sexuality by remembering that the first is foisted on girls from the outside, the other cultivated from within. I’m no longer sure it’s so simple. It may seem clearly unhealthy when a three-year-old insists on wearing high heels to preschool every day or a five-year-old asks if she’s “sexy” or a seven-year-old begs for that padded bikini top from Abercrombie (an item that was pulled from the shelves after parental protest). But what about the sixteen-year-old who washes her boyfriend’s car clad in a bikini top and Daisy Dukes? What about that strip aerobics class the college freshman is taking? And what about, you know, that outfit? As Sydney, a Bay Area high school senior sporting oversize geek-chic glasses, asked me, “Isn’t there a difference between dressing slutty because you don’t feel good about yourself, and you want validation, and dressing slutty because you do feel good about yourself and don’t need validation?” “Could be,” I replied. “Explain how you know which is which.”

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Some girls considered sexting and sexy video chatting a way to experiment with sex safely (at least as they saw it). “I would do really graphic sexting over IM in middle and high school,” a freshman at a mid-Atlantic college told me, “or do stripteases on Skype. I wasn’t ready to lose my virginity, but I loved being the bad girl.” She didn’t worry that her recipients might share her performances; she believed she could use her body to intimidate as well as entice. “I’m six feet tall,” she said. “I’m not this dainty little thing. I was like, if you pass this around you will not have balls anymore. I will hurt you. So I felt in control.” Are selfies empowering or oppressive? Is sexting harmful or harmless? Is that skirt an assertion of sexuality or an exploitation of it? Try this: looking up at the ceiling, raise your hand over your head and trace a clockwise circle with your index finger. Continue to trace the circle while slowly lowering your arm so that your finger is at eye level. Now, still tracing, lower your arm further until it’s at your waist. Look down at the circle. Which direction is it spinning? Although it would seem impossible, the circle moves clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. Management consultants use that “both/and” concept to break down rigid “either/or” thinking. Deborah Tolman has suggested that it’s equally useful when considering young women’s complicated relationships to their bodies, their sexuality, and sexualization. That’s the challenge to both parents and girls themselves: whether you’re discussing dress codes, social media, or the influence of pop culture, there is rarely a clear-cut truth. Parts Is Parts 2014 was “all about that bass,” the lyrics to Meghan Trainor’s wildly popular confection themselves riddled with both/and contradiction. The song ostensibly celebrated the body positive, rejecting the “stick-figure silicone Barbie doll” ideal. Yet it contained a Trojan horse: not only did Trainor take a gratuitous swipe at “skinny bitches” (followed by a coy “No, I’m just playing”), but she also reassured young women that “boys, they like a little more booty to hold at night.” So, sure it’s fine to be curvier—as long as guys still think you’re hot.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  The show was unquestionably graphic but not especially erotic. The images and actions were too random, too devoid of larger meaning or purpose. They were just so much flotsam and jetsam seemingly thrown out to stimulate reaction—any reaction. Look, a thirty-foot cat! Miley in a cannabis body suit! Miley getting off on the hood of a car! Miley astride a giant, airborne hot dog! Cyrus, her pixie-cut hair dyed platinum, was thinner than she’d been five years before, with no curve to her hips or breasts. She looked surprisingly androgynous, an R-rated Cathy Rigby, a tripped-out Peter Pan. Watching her, I recalled Ariel Levy’s observation that Paris Hilton was the perfect celebrity for a time when interest in the appearance of sexiness had surpassed interest in the existence of sexual pleasure. In Hilton’s famed sex tapes, she looks excited only when posing for the camera; during the actual sex, she seems bored, even taking a phone call in the midst of intercourse. Today’s “raunch culture,” Levy wrote, is not liberating or progressive, not about “opening our minds to the possibilities and mysteries of sexuality.” There’s a disconnect between its representation of “hotness” and sex itself. Even Hilton, Levy pointed out, has said, “My boyfriends always tell me I’m not sexual. Sexy, but not sexual.” Maybe Miley provides a release for her fans, an escape from respectability, a vision, however compromised, of a girl who doesn’t dither over whether anyone (parents, other entertainers, the media) thinks she is “too slutty.” The crotch slapping, the butt shaking, the crude talk, the simulated sex acts—all gave the illusion of sexual freedom, the illusion of rebellion, the illusion of defiance, the illusion that she “doesn’t care.” But of course Miley does care. As someone trying to maintain her status as a celebrity, as a chart topper, she cares very, very much. I keep coming back to her because I find her not unique, but the opposite: she’s a human Rorschach, a lint trap of images and ideas about mainstream, middle-class girlhood. When she was fifteen, that meant wearing a “purity ring” and vowing to be a virgin until marriage; at twenty-three, it meant performing mechanistic, mock sex acts on a dwarf while dressed in a racy leotard emblazoned with pictures of money—and calling that liberation. Perpetually striving to mix the perfect cocktail in her cultural blender, she both reflects and rejects what a young woman needs to do to maintain celebrity, to snag attention, to be noticed, to be “liked”—all without seeming to try. And isn’t that what every girl is struggling to do, writ very, very large? In the middle of the show, Miley took a break from singing to address the audience. “How the fuck are you?” she bellowed. Then she turned around, lifted her iPhone high over her head, stuck out her tongue, snapped a selfie with the crowd as backdrop, and posted it immediately to Instagram. She was, it seemed, just like them. Pop Goes the Porn

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Sydney gazed down at the chipped black polish on her nails and began flipping one of her silver rings from finger to finger and back again. “I can’t,” she said after a moment. “My whole life is an attempt to figure out what, in the core of myself, I actually like versus what I want to hear from other people, or wanting to look a certain way to get attention. And part of me feels cheated out of my own well-being because of that.” Girls do push back against the constraints of “hot,” the contradictory message that it is mandatory yet also the justification for their harassment or assault. A spontaneous movement of “Slutwalks” exploded in 2011, after a Toronto policeman suggested that college women who wanted to avoid sexual assault shouldn’t dress so provocatively. Infuriated, young women across the globe, many in fishnets and garters, hit the streets bearing signs reading such things as “My Dress Is Not a Yes!” and “My Ass Is Not an Excuse for Assault!” At the other end of the spectrum, Generation Y made news both by growing out their armpit hair and rejecting the torture device commonly known as thong underwear (some in favor of “granny pants” with “Feminist” stamped across the rump), proving they could be sexy without pandering to “hot.” On a more personal level, one of the young women I met, an art student, told me that, tired of the “costume” that girls were expected to don at college parties, she was opting for a different one, showing up dressed as a sparkly unicorn. “I feel liberated,” she told me. “It’s still kind of body-conscious, and there is a lot of makeup involved, but I’m also fully covered. And I’m one-of-a-kind.” Hot or Not: Social Media and the New “Body Product” Girls did not always organize their thinking about themselves around the physical. Before World War I, self-improvement meant being less self-involved, less vain: helping others, focusing on schoolwork, becoming better read, and cultivating empathy. Author Joan Jacobs Brumberg highlighted this change in her book The Body Project by comparing the New Year’s resolutions of girls at the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: “Resolved,” wrote a girl in 1892, “to think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self-restrained in conversations and actions. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others.” And one hundred years later: “I will try to make myself better in any way I possibly can. . . . I will lose weight, get new lenses, already got new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories.”

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Maybe it was just the butt’s turn: After all, how many more hours could women while away obsessing over their stomachs, breasts, hips, upper arms, necks, and faces? How many more cosmetic procedures could they undergo? Something had to fill the breach. Truly, you’d think that after buying into the horror of the “thigh gap,” women would resist being defined by yet another body part, particularly this one. As Amy Schumer rapped in “Milk, Milk, Lemonade,” her brilliant send-up of the booty craze, we’re “talkin’ ’bout my fudge machine.” The girls I met, though, didn’t see it that way. Matilda Oh suggested I was hypocritical for dismissing Nicki Minaj as self-objectifying in “Anaconda” but hailing Lena Dunham as subversive for playing Ping-Pong topless on Girls. But Dunham wasn’t trying to be hot. Quite the opposite: she is dough-bellied and soft-chinned, with natural, lopsided breasts. Her “bass” is perhaps a little profundo. In other words, she looks like an average American woman. She uses her body to shatter taboos against showing the imperfectly ordinary, to challenge our pneumatic, implant-propelled expectations. “Nicki Minaj is challenging, too,” Matilda countered. Minaj cast off shame, rejected the male-generated shackles of “respectable” female sexual behavior, refused to see the behind—especially when it’s large, especially when it’s attached to a woman of color—as “dirty.” “People always gripe about Nicki Minaj’s butt,” Matilda said, “but I think it’s kind of ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t.’ If you emphasize it, you could potentially normalize black bodies in the mainstream, but you’ll also be accused of ‘objectifying’ yourself. If you don’t do it, though, you are arguably participating in a culture of body shame. So how is a woman of color supposed to ‘take control of her sexuality’ or be ‘body-positive’ without it being construed as internalized fetishization?” Is Minaj’s butt transgressive? What about Gaga’s? What about those Sports Illustrated swimsuit models’? How can one tell which of these images is defiant and which is complicit; which liberates and which limits; which undermines standards of beauty and which creates new ones? Can they do both simultaneously? “I love Beyoncé,” a freshman at a West Coast college told me. “She’s one of my idols. She’s, like, a queen. But I wonder, if she wasn’t beautiful, if people didn’t think she was so sexy, would she be able to make the feminist points she makes?” Feminist scholar bell hooks, who kicked the Beyhive in 2014 when she called Beyoncé a “terrorist, especially in terms of her impact on young girls,” has suggested that the fascination with the butt is nothing more than the latest way to reduce a woman to a body part: the latest PG-13 stand-in for “the pussy.” The obsession is no different, no more subversive, and no more “empowering” to women than the fetishization of the breast or the wet, open mouth. As with those pop culture memes, she said, it raises the basic question: “Who possesses and who has rights to the female body?”

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  I turned to look at Kesey watching Neal Cassady. The look on his face. Sitting there in the dark with the last ditch disciples. His smile was crooked - an inside joke kind of smile. His eyes narrowed. He chuckled once or twice. Then I saw him rub his forehead - no doubt a migraine - but in the glow of Neal Cassady it looked to me more like a man trying to rub out time. The whole experience made me feel like Alice in Wonderland. How was it again I was in a room with Ken Kesey watching a video of Neal Cassady with a group of people who were “writers?” Who were we? After the video Ken talked a little and we asked him a few questions. Then he had to go to bed. It was 4:30 p.m. I felt like we’d failed at something but I had no idea what. The end of the year of Kesey culminated in a reading and reception for the book in Gerlinger Lounge at U of O. We all wore 1930s vintage clothing to mimic the characters in the book. We drank peppermint schnapps one at a time from Kesey’s flask, which sat up at the podium like a flag of his disposition. We’d been interviewed by People. We’d had a photo in Rolling Stone. There were a few parties after that. I barely remember them. My father actually flew up to Eugene from Florida to attend the reading. He sat in the audience in a $400 grey twill suit. He looked proud. Of something. In Kesey’s presence. When I was born, we lived in a house in the hills over Stinson Beach. 1963. Close enough to ride a bike to La Honda, where Kesey began his parties and acid tests the same year. When it was my turn to read I drank from the flask and looked out at the audience. My father’s steely architectural gaze. His unforgettable hands. Then I looked at Kesey. He pinched his own nipples and smiled and made me laugh. At the end of the reading my father shook Kesey’s hand and said “I’m a great admirer of yours.” I knew it was true. I watched their hands press together. When he met Kesey, my father’s voice tremored. In parting, Kesey said to my father, “You know, Lidia can hit it out of the park.” Having gotten as far as a tryout with the Cleveland Indians, that meant something to my father. The phrase, I mean. The relatively crappy novel that came out of us, Caverns, was inspired by an actual news clipping, an Associated Press story on October 31, 1964 entitled “Charles Oswald Loach, Doctor of Theosophy and discoverer of so-called ‘SECRET CAVE OF AMERICAN ANCIENTS,’ which stirred archaeological controversy in 1928.” Set in the 1930s, Loach is imagined as a convicted murderer who is released from San Quentin Prison, in the custody of a priest, to lead an expedition to rediscover the cave.

• From The Confessions (400)

  Lord, I, truly, toil therein, yea and toil in myself; I am become a heavy soil requiring over much sweat of the brow. For we are not now searching out the regions of heaven, or measuring the distances of the stars, or enquiring the balancings of the earth. It is I myself who remember, I the mind. It is not so wonderful, if what I myself am not, be far from me. But what is nearer to me than myself? And lo, the force of mine own memory is not understood by me; though I cannot so much as name myself without it. For what shall I say, when it is clear to me that I remember forgetfulness? Shall I say that that is not in my memory, which I remember? or shall I say that forgetfulness is for this purpose in my memory, that I might not forget? Both were most absurd. What third way is there? How can I say that the image of forgetfulness is retained by my memory, not forgetfulness itself, when I remember it? How could I say this either, seeing that when the image of any thing is impressed on the memory, the thing itself must needs be first present, whence that image may be impressed? For thus do I remember Carthage, thus all places where I have been, thus men's faces whom I have seen, and things reported by the other senses; thus the health or sickness of the body. For when these things were present, my memory received from them images, which being present with me, I might look on and bring back in my mind, when I remembered them in their absence. If then this forgetfulness is retained in the memory through its image, not through itself, then plainly itself was once present, that its image might be taken. But when it was present, how did it write its image in the memory, seeing that forgetfulness by its presence effaces even what it finds already noted? And yet, in whatever way, although that way be past conceiving and explaining, yet certain am I that I remember forgetfulness itself also, whereby what we remember is effaced.

• From The Confessions (400)

  What, when I name forgetfulness, and withal recognise what I name? whence should I recognise it, did I not remember it? I speak not of the sound of the name, but of the thing which it signifies: which if I had forgotten, I could not recognise what that sound signifies. When then I remember memory, memory itself is, through itself, present with itself: but when I remember forgetfulness, there are present both memory and forgetfulness; memory whereby I remember, forgetfulness which I remember. But what is forgetfulness, but the privation of memory? How then is it present that I remember it, since when present I cannot remember? But if what we remember we hold it in memory, yet, unless we did remember forgetfulness, we could never at the hearing of the name recognise the thing thereby signified, then forgetfulness is retained by memory. Present then it is, that we forget not, and being so, we forget. It is to be understood from this that forgetfulness when we remember it, is not present to the memory by itself but by its image: because if it were present by itself, it would not cause us to remember, but to forget. Who now shall search out this? who shall comprehend how it is?

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  It would be easy for us, anxious as we are to keep up our profile as sophisticated children of the Enlightenment, to dismiss all this as standard first-century religious polemic. Certainly that is one element in the package, as we can see when Jesus’s own accusers (note the irony) accuse him of being in league with the Accuser. Jesus’s answer shows his own remarkable perspective on what’s going on, on what is really involved when God’s kingdom comes on earth as in heaven. It’s a clash of kingdoms: the satan has his kingdom, God has his, and sooner or later the battle between them will be joined. It is, once again, fatally easy to misunderstand, to draw the lines wrong, to see “our present system” as automatically good, so that anyone who disturbs it—as Jesus was disturbing the system of the scribes and Pharisees—must be “satanic,” must be from the dark side. That road leads to the “war of the sons of light against the sons of darkness,” as at Qumran: the overbright light of an overrealized eschatology, enabling “us” to see ourselves as “children of light,” casting a surreal, overdramatized shadow over “them,” the “children of darkness.” Jesus will have none of it. First, it makes no sense to imagine the satan working against himself. Jesus is casting out demons, but why would the satan want to do that, destroying his own power base? Second, there are only two options at this point: if it isn’t the power of the satan that Jesus is drawing on to do what he’s doing, he must be doing it through the power of God. But that means that God’s kingdom, God’s sovereign and saving rule, really is breaking in, on earth as in heaven. Third, however, the victories Jesus is winning here and now, up close and personal, are signs that an initial victory has already been won. The “strong man” has already been “tied up,” which is why Jesus can now plunder his house (Matt. 12:29; Luke 11:21–22). Jesus declares that he has already seen the satan falling like lightning from heaven (Luke 10:18). These strands within Jesus’s teaching are all over the place. If we want to understand what he thought he was up to, we have to take them seriously and see the role they play in the whole picture.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  But He doesn’t leave us there; He draws us closer to Him and teaches us to hear Him better. And while that process is slow and can be difficult, it is immensely rewarding. Seek Him. Listen for Him. Be patient, persevere, and trust that He will help you. You will learn to hear His voice. HOW DO I KNOW IT’S GOD? Before we look at practical ways to hear from God, let’s talk about what God’s voice sounds like. How do we know if we are hearing from God or from our own desires? What is the difference between His thoughts and our thoughts? Did last night’s dream come from God or the gluten we ate? When it comes to hearing God’s voice, I think the challenge often isn’t so much hearing God’s voice as it is picking that voice out from the chaos of other voices that clamor for our attention. There are simply so many things clamoring for our attention that it’s hard to know which come from God and which don’t. Have you ever been at an airport gate or in some other crowded place, and somebody was watching videos on their phone . . . at full volume . . . without headphones? Meanwhile, everyone else is giving them passive-aggressive glances and wondering why they don’t have more self-awareness. I always wish I had extra headphones to give them so I could graciously enable their video consumption while protecting the sanity of the rest of us. What is fascinating, though, is how intently these headphonesless video watchers pay attention to the screen. They are surrounded by movement and noise and glares, but they are oblivious. They are tuned in to only one voice, one source of information. Now, the video that holds their rapt attention is probably a cat skydiving, or a gender reveal party gone wrong, or a potato that looks like the Eiffel Tower. But to them, it’s all that matters right then. I want that same laser focus when it comes to listening to God. He’s got a lot more to add to my life than goofy TikTok videos, after all. In a world full of noise and movement and stress and adrenaline, I want to be able to tune it all out when necessary, and just be with Jesus. I want to be able to pick His voice out from the cacophony around me. So how do you know whether what you are hearing is from God? Here are a few suggestions. 1. God’s voice agrees with His Word. God never contradicts His written Word, the Bible. What we think we are hearing Him say—in our hearts, through circumstances, from advice we receive, or any other way—is always subjective. That is, there’s an element of doubt in it because we are fallible humans.

• From Wild (2012)

  I walked on, a penitent to the trail, my progress distressingly slow. I’d generally been covering two miles an hour as I hiked most days, but everything was different in the snow: slower, less certain. I thought it would take me six days to reach Belden Town, but when I’d packed my food bag with six days’ worth of food, I didn’t have any idea what I’d encounter. Six days in these conditions were out of the question, and not only for the physical challenge of moving through the snow. Each step was also a calculated effort to stay approximately on what I hoped was the PCT. With my map and compass in hand, I tried to remember all I could from Staying Found, which I’d burned long ago. Many of the techniques—triangulating and cross bearing and bracketing—had perplexed me even when I’d been holding the book in my hand. Now they were impossible to do with any confidence. I’d never had a mind for math. I simply couldn’t hold the formulas and numbers in my head. It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story. So mostly I relied on the narrative descriptions in my guidebook, reading them over and over, matching them up with my maps, attempting to divine the intent and nuance of every word and phrase. It was like being inside a giant standardized test question: If Cheryl climbs north along a ridge for an hour at a rate of 1.5 miles per hour, then west to a saddle from which she can see two oblong lakes to the east, is she standing on the south flank of Peak 7503?

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But when you take seriously the existence and malevolence of nonhuman forces that are capable of using “us” as well as “them” in the service of evil, the focus shifts. As the hazy and shadowy realities come into view, what we thought was clear and straightforward becomes blurred. Life becomes more complex, but arguably more realistic. The traditional lines of friend and foe are not so easy to draw. You can no longer assume that “that lot” are simply agents of the devil and “this lot”—us and our friends—are automatically on God’s side. If there is an enemy at work, it is a subtle, cunning enemy, much too clever to allow itself to be identified simply with one person, one group, or one nation. Only twice in the gospel story does Jesus address “the satan” directly by that title: once when rebuking him in the temptation narrative (Matt. 4:10), and again when he is rebuking his closest associate (Mark 8:33) for resisting God’s strange plan. The line between good and evil is clear at the level of God, on the one hand, and the satan, on the other. It is much, much less clear as it passes through human beings, individually and collectively. This is precisely the kind of redefinition that was going on in Jesus’s Nazareth Manifesto. Traditional enemies were suddenly brought, at least in principle, within the reach of the blessing of God’s great jubilee. And traditional friends—those who might have thought that they were automatically on the right side—had to be looked at again. Perhaps one can no longer simply identify “our people” as on the side of the angels and “those people” as agents of the satan. That’s why Jesus was run out of town and nearly killed. He had suggested that foes could become friends and by implication was warning that the “good people”—Israel as the people of God—might become enemies. Ironically, his own townsfolk proceeded to prove the point by their reaction. Later, as we just noticed, he even warned his closest supporter, Simon Peter, of precisely this, calling him “Satan” when he tried to dissuade him from his vocation to suffer and die (Mark 8:33) and warning him, later again, that the satan had wanted to work him over violently (Luke 22:31). Jesus sees the satan at work among his hearers, snatching away the word of the kingdom, so that it won’t take root (Mark 4:15), and sowing weeds among the wheat (Matt. 13:39); and again at work in the dehumanizing and deforming ailments that have crippled an old woman (Luke 13:16). He recognizes that one of his own followers is an “accuser” (John 6:70), and the gospel writers pick up this point, seeing the satan at work in the “accusing” role of Judas Iscariot (Luke 22:3; John 13:2, 27). Tragically, even the people of God themselves, focused on the Temple in Jerusalem, are to be seen now as children of the devil (John 8:44).

• From How the Bible Actually Works (2019)

  Pick any one of them and you’ll hit some kind of ambiguity right away. How do you know when you are actually misusing God’s name? Is there a list of acceptable and unacceptable uses somewhere? * Can you say, “Oh my God, it’s raining”? Is God even God’s name or is it a title? And what does it mean not to have other gods “before” Yahweh? Is there wiggle room? “Okay, Lord, no other gods before you. Got it. But can I have one or two Canaanite gods alongside or perhaps tagging along behind you? You’d still be at the head of the line, of course.” On that last point, archaeologists have dug up hundreds of little clay figurines in the southern kingdom, Judah, dating to the seventh century BCE (the decades before the Babylonian exile). These figurines probably represent the Canaanite fertility goddess Asherah and were found in people’s homes. Maybe they kept them on the mantle or nightstand. The Bible takes a dim view of Israelites worshiping idols, and so we can be excused for thinking that all these figurines are just evidence of mass disobedience. But more likely the official view of Israel’s religious leaders, which is what we read about in the Bible, didn’t match the on-the-ground religious practices of the blue collar class. Judahite families of farmers and sheepherders might have thought, “Dang it all. My neighbor’s crops are doing great , and they chalk it all up to Asherah, so maybe I should get on board. What’s the harm? Yahweh is still first. He might even appreciate the company.” * Moving along, how exactly does one honor parents? Can they be questioned? Disobeyed—ever? Can you kill in self-defense, to protect your family, when ISIS is invading your village, or when someone brings a semiautomatic rifle into a preschool? Can you steal to save your child from starving? Someone else’s child? And where is the line between coveting and admiration? Strict legalism is a myth. Laws have a knack for ambiguity, and it only takes a moment of reflection to see that they have to be interpreted, which isn’t exactly breaking news. The entire history of Judaism and Christianity bears witness to people of faith doing just that. For me, though, a far more interesting question is lurking just below the surface. What are we to make of this ambiguity in, of all places, the Law beyond simply pointing out, “Hey, weird. That’s really ambiguous”? Biblical laws shout to us something about the Bible’s purpose. Even biblical laws, where one can’t be faulted for expecting absolute crystal clarity, invite—even instigate—a lively discussion. When handled with a humble rather than anxious heart, laws drive us toward healthy community—not

• From How the Bible Actually Works (2019)

  of the past) and Matthew 12:1–8 (Jesus himself “works” on the sabbath by plucking grain). So maybe for Christians sabbath keeping isn’t a thing at all. It’s really not clear either way, though that hardly keeps some Christians from almost coming to blows over it—and Calvinists know I’m only slightly kidding. I’m not belittling sabbath keeping. I actually think the practice is spiritually and emotionally healthy, and I try to keep at least a different pace on Sunday, though I respect those who are more intense about it than I am. I’m only pointing out that how (or whether) to keep the command isn’t clear. No, this law isn’t clear at all—even though in observing the day of rest the Israelites, at least according to the version in Exodus 20, are following God’s own pattern set up in Genesis 1, where God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. And in Deuteronomy 5, the motivation is different, but no less serious: since the Israelites were mistreated as slaves in Egypt, they must give their own slaves—and even animals—a day of rest. There’s a lot at stake here, but rather than clarity we get ambiguity. The law as written leaves its readers to ponder what it means and how to obey it here and now—in other words, to practice wisdom. Like it’s on purpose. Maybe You Didn’t Hear Me: I Want Clarity The challenge of keeping the sabbath command is only one example of a principle that holds for almost any law in the Old Testament, including the rest of the Ten Commandments. Here are all ten: i . Don’t worship other gods “before” Yahweh. * ii . Don’t make idols. iii . Don’t misuse God’s name. iv . Remember the sabbath day. v . Honor your mother and father. vi . Don’t murder. vii . Don’t commit adultery. viii . Don’t steal. ix . Don’t bear false witness. x . Don’t covet.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  That is more or less our challenge with the historical evidence for Jesus. We have the four “gospels,” written later by people who believed passionately that what Jesus had done and said, coupled with his death and what happened afterwards, were of massive ongoing significance. The gospels are highly detailed; one of the problems of writing the present book has been trying to decide what to leave out. They are clearly written from particular (pro-Jesus) points of view. But, unlike today’s historian studying JFK in his actual context, we have simply a history book written forty or fifty years later (by Josephus, an aristocratic Jew who went over to the Roman side in the war of AD 66–70) and a scattering of other material, bits and pieces, tracts, coins, letters, and so forth. Out of these very disparate sources we have to reconstruct the setting in which what Jesus did and said made the sense it did, so much sense that some thought he was God’s Messiah and others thought he had to be killed at once. If we don’t make the effort to do this reconstruction, we will, without a shadow of doubt, assume that what Jesus did and said makes the sense it might have made in some other context—perhaps our own. That has happened again and again. I believe that this kind of easy-going anachronism is almost as corrosive to genuine Christian faith as skepticism itself. This tropical storm—the challenge of writing history about Jesus—would be threatening enough even without the cultural pressures of the western wind (modernist skepticism) and the high-pressure system to the north (would-be “Christian” conservatism). Or, if you like, angry voices from the left, angry voices from the right, and a major historical puzzle sweeping in on us with full force. If, trying to make things simple, we fail to recognize this multilayered complexity, we will simply repeat the age-old mistake of imagining Jesus in our own image or at least placing him, by implication, in our own culture. And part of the whole point of the Christian message is that what happened back then, what happened to Jesus, what happened through him, was a one-time, never-to-be-repeated piece of history. Hence the perfect storm of present-day discussion. I have on my desk as I write two brand-new books about Jesus, one written by the pope himself and another by a well-known English skeptic. Both are learned, sophisticated, engaging. They cannot both be true. Behind me are twenty shelves of books about Jesus and the gospels written over the last two hundred years. They cannot all be true either. What are we to do?

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  I remember a conversation I had once in Chicago when I was still organizing. It was with a woman who’d grown up in a big family in rural Georgia. Five brothers and three sisters, she had told me, all crowded under a single roof. She told me about her father’s ultimately futile efforts to farm his small plot of land, her mother’s vegetable garden, the two pigs they kept penned out in the yard, and the trips with her siblings to fish the murky waters of a river nearby. Listening to her speak, I began to realize that two of the three sisters she’d mentioned had actually died at birth, but that in this woman’s mind they had remained with her always, spirits with names and ages and characters, two sisters who accompanied her while she walked to school or did chores, who soothed her cries and calmed her fears. For this woman, family had never been a vessel just for the living. The dead, too, had their claims, their voices shaping the course of her dreams. So now it was for me. I remember how, a few days after my visit to Sarah’s, Auma and I happened to run into an acquaintance of the Old Man’s outside Barclay’s Bank. I could tell that Auma didn’t remember his name, so I held out my hand and introduced myself. The man smiled and said, “My, my—you have grown so tall. How’s your mother? And your brother Mark—has he graduated from university yet?” At first I was confused. Did I know this person? And then Auma explained in a low voice that no, I was a different brother, Barack, who grew up in America, the child of a different mother. David had passed away. And then the awkwardness on all sides—the man nodding his head (“I’m sorry, I didn’t know”) but taking another look at me, as if to make sure what he’d heard was true; Auma trying to appear as if the situation, while sad, was somehow the normal stuff of tragedy; me standing to the side, wondering how to feel after having been mistaken for a ghost. Later, back in her apartment, I asked Auma when she had last seen Mark and Ruth. She leaned her head against my shoulder and looked up at the ceiling. “David’s funeral,” she said. “Although by then they had stopped speaking to us for a long time.” “Why?” “I told you that Ruth’s divorce from the Old Man was very bitter. After they separated, she married a Tanzanian and had Mark and David take his name. She sent them to an international school, and they were raised like foreigners. She told them that they should have nothing to do with our side of the family.”

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  And yet what strikes me most when I think about the story of my family is a running strain of innocence, an innocence that seems unimaginable, even by the measures of childhood. My wife’s cousin, only six years old, has already lost such innocence: A few weeks ago he reported to his parents that some of his first grade classmates had refused to play with him because of his dark, unblemished skin. Obviously his parents, born and raised in Chicago and Gary, lost their own innocence long ago, and although they aren’t bitter—the two of them being as strong and proud and resourceful as any parents I know—one hears the pain in their voices as they begin to have second thoughts about having moved out of the city into a mostly white suburb, a move they made to protect their son from the possibility of being caught in a gang shooting and the certainty of attending an underfunded school. They know too much, we have all seen too much, to take my parents’ brief union—a black man and white woman, an African and an American—at face value. As a result, some people have a hard time taking me at face value. When people who don’t know me well, black or white, discover my background (and it is usually a discovery, for I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites), I see the split-second adjustments they have to make, the searching of my eyes for some telltale sign. They no longer know who I am. Privately, they guess at my troubled heart, I suppose—the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds. And if I were to explain that no, the tragedy is not mine, or at least not mine alone, it is yours, sons and daughters of Plymouth Rock and Ellis Island, it is yours, children of Africa, it is the tragedy of both my wife’s six-year-old cousin and his white first grade classmates, so that you need not guess at what troubles me, it’s on the nightly news for all to see, and that if we could acknowledge at least that much then the tragic cycle begins to break down … well, I suspect that I sound incurably naive, wedded to lost hopes, like those Communists who peddle their newspapers on the fringes of various college towns. Or worse, I sound like I’m trying to hide from myself.

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  I lie back for a moment, staring through the windows at the lofty vista of Seattle’s skyline. Life in the clouds sure feels unreal. A fantasy—a castle in the air, adrift from the ground, safe from the realities of life—far away from neglect, hunger, and crack-whore mothers. I shudder to think what he went through as a small child, and I understand why he lives here, isolated, surrounded by beautiful, precious works of art—so far removed from where he started…mission statement indeed. I frown because it still doesn’t explain why I can’t touch him. Ironically, I feel the same up here in his lofty tower. I’m adrift from reality. I’m in this fantasy apartment, having fantasy sex with my fantasy boyfriend, when the grim reality is he wants a special arrangement, though he’s said he’ll try more. What does that actually mean? This is what I need to clarify between us to see if we are still at opposite ends on the seesaw or if we are inching closer together. I clamber out of bed feeling stiff and, for want of a better expression, well used. Yes, that would be all the sex, then. My subconscious purses her lips in disapproval. I roll my eyes at her, grateful that a certain twitchy-palmed control freak is not in the room, and resolve to ask him about the personal trainer. That’s if I sign. My inner goddess glares at me in desperation. Of course you’ll sign. I ignore them both, and after a quick trip to the bathroom, I go in search of Christian. He’s not in the art gallery, but an elegant middle-aged woman is cleaning in the kitchen area. The sight of her stops me in my tracks. She has short blond hair and clear blue eyes; she wears a plain white tailored shirt and a navy-blue pencil skirt. She smiles broadly when she sees me. “Good morning, Miss Steele. Would you like some breakfast?” Her tone is warm but businesslike, and I am stunned. Who is this attractive blond in Christian’s kitchen? I’m only wearing Christian’s T-shirt. I feel self-conscious and embarrassed by my lack of clothing. “I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage.” My voice is quiet, unable to hide the anxiety in my voice. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry. I’m Mrs. Jones, Mr. Grey’s housekeeper.” Oh. “How do you do?” I manage. “Would you like some breakfast, ma’am?” Ma’am! “Just some tea would be lovely, thank you. Do you know where Mr. Grey is?” “In his study.” “Thank you.” I scuttle off toward the study, mortified. Why does Christian only have attractive blonds working for him? And a nasty thought comes involuntarily into my mind: Are they all ex-subs? I refuse to entertain that hideous idea. I poke my head cautiously around the door. He’s on the phone, facing the window, in black pants and a white shirt. His hair is still wet from the shower, and I’m completely distracted from my negative thoughts.