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 Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  “I’m the one beguiled,” I whisper. He gazes at me. His expression is disconcerted, alarmed even. Placing his hands on either side of my face, he holds my head in place. “You. Are. Mine.” Each word staccato. “Do you understand?” He’s so earnest, so impassioned—a zealot. The force of his plea is so unexpected and disarming. I wonder why he’s feeling like this. “Yes, yours,” I whisper, derailed by his fervor. “Are you sure you have to go to Georgia?” I nod slowly. And in that brief moment, I watch his expression change and the shutters coming down. Abruptly he withdraws, making me wince. “Are you sore?” he asks, leaning over me. “A little,” I confess. “I like you sore.” His eyes smolder. “Reminds you where I’ve been, and only me.” He grabs my chin and kisses me roughly, then stands and holds his hand out to help me up. I glance down at the foil packet beside me. “Always prepared,” I muse. He looks at me confused as he redoes his fly. I hold up the empty packet. “A man can hope, Anastasia, dream even, and sometimes his dreams come true.” He sounds so odd, his eyes burning. I just don’t understand. My postcoital glow is fading fast. What is his problem? “So…on your desk…that’s been a dream?” I ask, trying humor to lighten the atmosphere between us. He smiles an enigmatic smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, and I know immediately this is not the first time he’s had sex on his desk. The thought is unwelcome. I squirm uncomfortably as my postcoital glow evaporates. “I’d better go have a shower.” I stand and start to move past him. He frowns and runs a hand through his hair. “I’ve got a couple more calls to make. I’ll join you for breakfast once you’re out of the shower. I think Mrs. Jones has laundered your clothes from yesterday. They’re in the closet.” What? When the hell did she do that? Jeez, could she hear us? “Thank you,” I mutter. “You’re most welcome,” he replies automatically, but there’s an edge to his voice. I’m not saying thank you for fucking me. Although, it was very… “What?” he asks, and I realize I’m frowning. “What’s wrong?” I ask. “What do you mean?” “Well, you’re being more weird than usual.” “You find me weird?” He tries to stifle a smile. “Sometimes.” He regards me for a moment, his eyes speculative. “As ever, I’m surprised by you, Miss Steele.” “Surprised how?” “Let’s just say that was an unexpected treat.” “We aim to please, Mr. Grey.” I cock my head to one side like he often does to me and give his words back to him. “And please me you do,” he says, but he looks uneasy. “I thought you were going to have a shower?” Oh, he’s dismissing me. “Yes, um, I’ll see you in a moment.” I scurry out of his office completely dumbfounded.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “I’ve been so outspoken about the doctors that I think I’ve been medically blacklisted. I can’t get good medical care any longer. All the doctors of the Larchwood Clinic are in on it. Yet I can’t switch clinics—my insurance forces me to get my treatment there. And with my medical condition, what other insurance company would touch me? I’m convinced they’ve treated me unethically—their treatment is responsible for my lupus. There’s been definite malpractice! They’re afraid of me! They write some of my medical notes in red ink so they can quickly identify and remove them from my chart in case of a subpoena. They’re using me as a guinea pig. They deliberately withheld steroids until it was too late. Then they abused the dosage. “I honestly think they want me out of the way,” Paula continued. “I spent this entire week composing a letter exposing them to the medical board. Yet I haven’t mailed it—mainly because I began to worry about what will happen to the doctors and to their families if they lose their licenses. On the other hand, how can I allow them to continue injuring patients? I cannot compromise. I remember once telling you that a compromise cannot exist alone: it breeds, and before long you have lost what you most dearly believe. And silence here, now, is a compromise! I’ve been praying for guidance.” My dismay rose. Maybe there was some small crystal of truth in Paula’s charges. Maybe some of her doctors were, like Dr. Lee many years before, so put off by her manner as to dismiss her. But charts written in red ink, guinea-pig trials, withholding necessary medication? These were absurd accusations, and I was certain they were signs of paranoia. I knew some of these doctors and believed in their integrity. Once again she had placed me in the position of having to choose between her strong beliefs and my strong beliefs. More than anything, I did not want her to believe I was deserting her. Yet how could I stay with her? I felt trapped. Finally, after all these years, Paula was making a direct appeal to me. I could see only one way to respond: to consider her a highly disturbed individual and treat her—“treat” in the dark, false sense of the word, in the sense of “handling.” That had been what I had always wanted to avoid with Paula—with anyone, for that matter—because “handling” someone is to relate to him or her as an object and, thus, is the antithesis of being with that person.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  When I say that these two stories are “myths,” I mean it in the following way. A “myth” in this strict sense is a story that purports to be in some sense “historical” and that encapsulates and reinforces the strongly held beliefs of the community that tells it. Serious “myths” are regularly expressed not only in narrative, but also in symbol and action. Much of the life of the broadly “conservative” Western church acts out the first myth. Much of the life of “liberal” Christianity, on the one hand, and of the wider secular world, on the other, acts out the second. Both are very, very powerful stories. They have shaped the lives of millions, and they still do. But they are both, in this sense, myths. Neither of them will stand up to full-on, hard-edged, no-nonsense historical scrutiny. Or, for that matter, theological scrutiny. The underlying problem with both these myths is that they pose the question in the wrong place. First, “Did it all happen or didn’t it?” This is the plain, blunt question of a typical eighteenth-century Westerner. No frills, no metaphors, no interpretation, just “facts.” Did it happen or not? The “conservative” or “orthodox” brigade, driven onto the back foot (that’s a cricketing metaphor for what happens when the bowler sends down a hostile delivery), marshals its forces to say, “Yes, it really did happen.” And there the matter ends. Those in the “liberal” or “skeptical” brigade shrug their shoulders: “No, it didn’t really happen. Or not much of it, anyway.” Again, that’s the end of it. Facts or no facts. But what about meaning? The second related question—I was asked it just yesterday by a journalist—is: so was Jesus the Son of God, or wasn’t he? And for most people the phrase “son of God” carries with it all the connotations of that first myth, in which the supernatural being swoops down to reveal secret truth, do extraordinary “miracles” to prove his “divinity,” die a redemptive death, and get back to heaven at once, enabling others to get there too. And if I say—as I’m going to—that I don’t think that story is the right way to talk about Jesus, some will say, “So you don’t think he’s the Son of God, then?” and condemn me as a hopeless liberal. Whereas if I say—as I’m going to—that I do think Jesus was and is the “son of God,” albeit within a very different sort of story, others will condemn me as a hopeless conservative. The Problem of Historical Complexity And now at last we are ready to take up the third element in the perfect storm we face today when we talk about Jesus. Out in the Atlantic, but heading for shore fast, is a hurricane. It was coming anyway, but when it meets these two winds we should expect a storm of what people today, perhaps confusingly, call “apocalyptic” proportions.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Cooper also daringly “writ[es] her body” onto the pages of her own book.14 In one incident, she searched for a ladies room at a train station. When she found the bathroom, one door was marked “for ladies” and the other “for colored people.” This created a moment of cognitive and experiential dissonance for Cooper, who was left “wondering under which head I come.”15 Elizabeth Alexander reads this as a moment of textual resistance for Cooper, who is faced with a choice that will necessarily “eras[e] some crucial part of her identity.” The options presented to her “render her a literally impossible body in her time and space.”16 In this moment, “Cooper reminds her readers … that she lives and moves within a physical body with sensations and needs.”17 The discursive technologies of race that operate in the signs “for ladies” and “for colored” inherently constitute discursive and textual acts of misrecognition for Black women. The only way to achieve any recognition is to insert a body into the text that challenges the identities signified in the labels. The insertion of her body also demonstrates the ways in which public space was designed not only to render Black bodies as inferior, but Black female bodies as unrecognizable and unknowable in civic terms. Where Black women’s bodies had been inherently publicly knowable under the conditions of slavery, after freedom and the conferral of citizenship, Black women did not fully fit into the categories propagated under Jim Crow. Yet, Cooper’s colored and female body ontologically challenged the epistemological claims that those signs made. In other words, Cooper’s textually present Black female body demanded to be known, in the very ways the signs attempted to foreclose. She used representations of her body in A Voice to challenge the race-gendered logics of those signs, hoping in the process to expose the discursive logics of racism and sexism and also to transform those discourses at the same time. “By writing her body into the texts as she does,” Elizabeth Alexander reminds us, “Cooper forges textual space for the creation of the turn-of-the-century African-American female intellectual. … As such A Voice becomes a symbolic representation of the body of the African-American woman of letters newly created in the public sphere.”18

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  Did the fantasies, as Meana asked, “excite only because of social structure”? What about the narcissistic longing that lay beneath, that led to the grammar school principal, to the landowner’s son, to fantasizing about the rape against the pinball machine in The Accused—was this “an eroticization of disempowerment”? She raised the quandary that was always near: culture or genes? To think back to Deidrah was to see an immense societal impact. How else but culture to explain the vast difference between Deidrah’s aggressive sexuality, her stalking of mates, and women’s desire to be desired, which dictated the pleasure of being chased? Men made objects of girls and women; girls and women, living in a male-run world, absorbed the male outlook as their own and made objects of themselves. Hadn’t culture taken Deidrah’s drive and, in women, both partially quelled and completely recast it? Yet when Meana contemplated the psyche, she called herself an essentialist, mostly. About the interplay between nature and nurture, she placed more weight on the inborn. She placed the weight gingerly. Her essentialism was a hunch, a sensibility; there was no way, she knew, to measure the inherent against the acquired, not for the time being; there was no way to assign a percentage to its role in narcissism, in rape fantasies. (A wealth of pop psychology writing declares confidently that there is an all-determining link between inborn levels of testosterone and myriad forms of aggression or passivity—sexual forms high among them—in men and women. Genetic factors give boys and men a lot more of the hormone, as counted in the bloodstream, and this makes boys and men a lot more aggressive. But among the list of problems with this seductively simple logic is evidence that comes, again, from Deidrah. Compared with male rhesus, females have as little testosterone as women do in contrast with men. Yet female rhesus run the sexual show, incite warfare, and rule the world of rhesus politics.) Meana’s intuitive leaning toward the innate added to her uneasiness about the appeal of the alley scene. Emphasizing the genetic meant that there was no escape; it meant that the allure was fundamental.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  A modern skeptic will find it impossible to accept Steiner’s conclusion that “what lies beyond man’s word is eloquent of God.”12 But perhaps that is because we have too limited an idea of God. We have not been doing our practice and have lost the “knack” of religion. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a time that historians call the early modern period, Western people began to develop an entirely new kind of civilization, governed by scientific rationality and based economically on technology and capital investment. Logos achieved such spectacular results that myth was discredited and the scientific method was thought to be the only reliable means of attaining truth. This would make religion difficult, if not impossible. As theologians began to adopt the criteria of science, the mythoi of Christianity were interpreted as empirically, rationally, and historically verifiable and forced into a style of thinking that was alien to them. Philosophers and scientists could no longer see the point of ritual, and religious knowledge became theoretical rather than practical. We lost the art of interpreting the old tales of gods walking the earth, dead men striding out of tombs, or seas parting miraculously. We began to understand concepts such as faith, revelation, myth, mystery, and dogma in a way that would have been very surprising to our ancestors. In particular, the meaning of the word “belief” changed, so that a credulous acceptance of creedal doctrines became the prerequisite of faith, so much so that today we often speak of religious people as “believers,” as though accepting orthodox dogma “on faith” were their most important activity. This rationalized interpretation of religion has resulted in two distinctively modern phenomena: fundamentalism and atheism. The two are related. The defensive piety popularly known as fundamentalism erupted in almost every major faith during the twentieth century.13 In their desire to produce a wholly rational, scientific faith that abolished mythos in favor of logos, Christian fundamentalists have interpreted scripture with a literalism that is unparalleled in the history of religion. In the United States, Protestant fundamentalists have evolved an ideology known as “creation science” that regards the mythoi of the Bible as scientifically accurate. They have, therefore, campaigned against the teaching of evolution in the public schools, because it contradicts the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Henry IV, and the goldencased tooth of John the Baptist. But the net effect of the excommunications and counter-excommunications, the hurling of spiritual power into the mundane battle, was to produce a certain confusion in the participants, especially the minor agents or the innocent, who did not know which to fear most – an armed imperialist or a cursing papalist cleric. And then, legitimate spiritual power so often appeared to fail. Thus the anti-imperialist troops of Milan, mysteriously beaten at Cortenuovo by the excommunicate troops of Frederick II, ‘raised their heels against God’ in consequence; they turned the crucifixes upside down in their churches, hurled sewage on the altars, threw out the clergy, and gorged themselves on meat throughout Lent. In an increasing number of ways, the contest appeared to be subversive of the whole natural and moral order. Thus, to devalue the emperor, Innocent III built up the power of the German princes, especially the ecclesiastical ones; they ceased to be one of the chief supports of the central authority and looked, instead, to the selfish advancement of their principalities. Again, other monarchs and powers were brought into papal coalitions, the humbling of the imperial authority being considered to justify any arrangement, however artificial. But then, the theory of papal plenary power meant that all moral or written laws were suspended, inoperative, in the Pope’s case, since he was subject only to heavenly judgment. Thus Gregory IX, who became Pope in 1227, and persecuted heretics, antinomians and deviants with relentless ferocity, said that the moral law did not apply to his anti-imperial campaign: his conduct towards Frederick II could not be judged as immoral or unethical, his methods being unrelated to the standards of conduct common to mankind since they were subject only to God’s estimation of their acceptability. To emphasize the point, in 1239 he produced the relics of the two unassailable guardians of the papal city: ‘the heads of the apostles Peter and Paul’ were carried ‘in solemn procession’ through Rome, and in front of a huge crowd Gregory removed his tiara and placed it on the head of St Peter. 1 The Pope was acting on Peter’s instructions – and how could Peter do wrong? A few years later, in 1246, Gregory’s successor, Innocent IV, was almost certainly a party to the attempted murder of the Lord’s Anointed, Frederick II; the plot misfired – the conspirators were blinded, mutilated and burned alive – but there was no let-up in the papal campaign. Observers, participants indeed, saw it as an eschatological conflict, as in the apocalyptic books of the Old Testament; Antichrist was loose on

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  These important details have been recounted innumerable times and are being confidently recounted this minute, told in tours of Luther sites around Germany in many languages, being written and read in otherwise excellent books about Luther, and posted in online articles and blogs. But not a single one of these seven things is true. They are each sloppy glosses on the actual facts and have over time congealed and finally ossified into the marmoreal narrative that has existed for half a millennium. Parson Weems’s pious legends of Washington chopping down cherry trees and casting silver dollars across the wide Potomac persisted for about 150 years, but these false details about Luther have persisted for more than three times as long. Their cultural roots are therefore that much deeper. It is my hope that what follows in this volume will do its humble part in uprooting them. The Madness of Martin LutherIt is not just Luther’s influence in history that is extraordinary. His demeanor and character and behavior—all of which led to these events that changed history—are themselves extraordinary. But these things were not so much innate attributes as ones that revealed themselves unannounced and by degrees at some point after 1517. So we must wonder what can account for the change in his personality in the years following the publishing of his theses. How can history reconcile the intense and dourly over-pious monk of his earlier years with the bold, courageous, and even sometimes raucous joke-and-insult-producing machine of later years? Whereas he had earlier been obsessively serious, he later became fun loving, sometimes rising to rarefied heights of gag-inducing scatology and buffoonery. Although the change in him did not have the speed of Paul’s on the Damascus Road, it nonetheless is obvious and important. And whatever it was that happened, he eventually seemed born anew and became a kind of giddy pied piper for that newness and freedom and joy, so much so that many thought he must be demon possessed—or at least simply mad.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The Trinity has been very puzzling to Western Christians, but it has been central to Eastern Orthodox spirituality.38 In the early modern period, when the West was developing a wholly rational way of thinking about God and the world, philosophers and scientists were appalled by the irrationality of the Trinity. But for the Cappadocian fathers—Basil, Gregory, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus (329–90)—the whole point of the doctrine was to stop Christians from thinking about God in rational terms. If you did that, you could only think about God as a being, because that was all our minds were capable of. The Trinity was not a “mystery” that had to be believed but an image that Christians were supposed to contemplate in a particular way. It was a mythos, because it spoke of a truth that was not accessible to logos, and, like any myth, it made sense only when you translated it into practical action. When they meditated on the God that they had known as Three and One, Christians would become aware that God bore no relation at all to any being in their experience.39 The Trinity reminded Christians not to think about God as a simple personality and that what we call “God” was inaccessible to rational analysis.40 It was a meditative device to counter the idolatrous tendency of people like Arius, who had seen God as a mere being. When they presented the Trinity to their new converts after the initiation of baptism, the three Cappadocians distinguished between the ousia of a thing, its inner nature, which made it what it was, and its hypostases, its external qualities. Each one of us has an ousia that we find very difficult to pin down but that we know to be the irreducible essence of our personality. It is what makes us the person we are, but it is very difficult to define. We try to express this ousia to the outside world in various hypostases—our work, offspring, possessions, clothes, facial expressions, and mannerisms, which can give outsiders only a partial knowledge of our inner, essential nature. Language is a very common hypostasis: my words are distinctively my own, but they are not the whole of me; they nearly always leave something unsaid. So in God there was, as it were, a single, divine self-consciousness that remained unknowable, unnameable, and unspeakable. But Christians had experienced this ineffability in hypostases that had translated it into something more accessible to limited, sense-bound, time-bound human beings. The Cappadocians sometimes substituted the term prosopon (“face,” “mask”) for hypostasis; the word also meant a facial expression or a role that an actor had chosen to play. When prosopon was translated into Latin, it became persona, the “mask” used by an actor that enabled the audience to recognize his character and contained a sound-enhancing device that made him audible.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “Yes, Sister, very nice.” Mother Greta, the pale, delicate nun who was supervising our studies, smiled at me as she handed back my essay. “This is a very good piece of work.” “But Mother,” I suddenly found myself saying, “it isn’t true, is it?” Mother Greta sighed, pushing her hand under her tightly fitting cap and rubbing her forehead as if to erase unwelcome thoughts. “No, Sister,” she said wearily, “it isn’t true. But please don’t tell the others.” This did not mean that Mother Greta did not believe in the resurrection of Jesus, or that she had lost her faith. But she had studied at the prestigious Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and knew that the kind of essay I had written was no longer regarded as a respectable intellectual exercise. A careful study of the resurrection stories in the gospels, which consistently contradict one another, shows that these were not factual accounts that could ever satisfy a modern historian, but mythical attempts to describe the religious convictions of the early Christians, who had experienced the risen Jesus as a dynamic presence in their own lives and had made a similar spiritual passage from death to life. As I stared wordlessly back at Mother Greta, I knew that, if it had been up to her, she would have scrapped this course in apologetics and introduced us to a more fruitful study of the New Testament. But, like any nun, she was bound by the orders of her superiors. What I had written was not true, because the insights of faith are not amenable to rational or historical analysis. Even at this early stage, in a confused, incoherent way, I knew this, and Mother Greta knew that I knew it. It was a sobering moment, and when I look back now on that scene in the postulantship, with the autumn sun coming through the window, the older nun mentally tired and demoralized, while the postulant gazed at her blankly, both of us deliberately turning our minds away from the light, I wonder what on earth we all thought we were doing. I had been set a quite pointless task. For a week, while preparing my essay, writing it and learning how to dispose of the obvious problems with various mental sleights of hand, I had been doing something perverse. I had been telling an elaborate lie. I had deflected the natural healthy bias of my mind from a truth that was staring me in the face and forced it to deny what should have been as clear as day. Years later, while I was having my breakdown, I learned that Mother Greta had been very anxious indeed about the way we were being trained, had voiced her disapproval, and had been overruled. What had our superiors been about, and why did I not tear up that dishonest piece of work, or at least argue with Mother Greta? I had simply gone along with the whole unholy muddle.

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

  Assessing this central assertion of Paul on gender hierarchy is made more difficult by the nature of the texts that survive from his correspondence with the Corinthians: they are now presented as two letters but have possibly been stitched together from more. In any case, they react against particular conditions and assertions inside the Corinthian Christian community of which we know little, except as we glimpse them through Paul’s words. The glimpses reveal women who have independent wealth; women who have converted when their husbands have not; women who have similar roles of authority to men, and who assert themselves in public worship as filled with the Holy Spirit. Much of this goes against the conventions of both Jewish and Graeco-Roman society; it is justified by the unpredictable and hardly controllable presence of the Spirit active in the everyday lives of the assembly, to the extent that the Spirit will lead women as much as men to speak in languages beyond ordinary understanding, glossolalia.[12] The result in Paul’s texts is downright incoherent. His hierarchical gender definitions in 1 Cor. 11 are followed by a long discussion condemning long hair in men (‘degrading’) and insisting that women should publicly pray or prophesy only when veiled, among the justifications being that this is ‘because of the angels’ – a cryptic argument, but dependent on the common assumption in Judaism of the propensity of angels to lust after mortal women. A few chapters further on (1 Cor. 14.34–35) comes an emphatic assertion that women should simply keep silent in worship, ‘as in all the churches of the saints’. The inconsistency is so blatant that many commentators have seen the latter statement as a later insertion in the text, reflecting conflicts of a later generation; its placement in early manuscripts is significantly varied, perhaps indicating a degree of puzzlement about how to reconcile the two pronouncements.[13] The one unavoidable consistency between the two passages is their differential treatment of women and men, in line with the general tradition of Mediterranean society. That differential was then – and is now – in perpetual tension with the common inclusion of the sexes in baptism: a reflection of early Christianity’s perpetual ambiguity between presenting a radically new message and trying to ensure an appeal in that message to all levels of surrounding society.

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

  There was another important novelty in the Christian practice of marriage in the Gregorian revolution. In the snappy phrase of the historian Dyan Elliott, ‘a clerical celibate elite requires a copulating laity’ – the emphasis is on the word ‘requires’.[45] This new syllogism would be a severe blow to several centuries of structurally chaste marriages: now the Church would expect marriages to produce children. That is a remarkable turnaround, and it is hardly surprising that a continuing if diminished practice of celibate marriage survived in Western Europe. The case of the visionary Christina of Markyate in twelfth-century Hertfordshire illustrates both that persistence and the complications that made it increasingly problematic for the Church hierarchy. We read her story against the grain of the text of an effort to write up her life as the Vita of a saint, which exists in a single surviving manuscript in a significantly unfinished state. [image "MYK6BP . English: St. Alban's Psalter with artwork of the woman thought to be Christina of Markyate. between 1120 and 1145. Unknown English Painter 345 Margate lg" file=image_rsrcC31.jpg] 16. In this mid-twelfth-century Psalter written in St Albans Abbey probably for Christina of Markyate herself, Christina poses with Christ in an historiated initial – poised for a sainthood that she never achieved. As a girl, Christina invented for herself ceremonies to express her marriage to the Church, but, later, her family married her off against her will, under pressure from Ranulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham, who had himself shown a less than episcopal interest in her. She eventually ran away from her husband (a protégé of the Bishop) and entered spiritual living arrangements with successive celibates, one of whom was the formidable figure of Abbot Geoffrey de Gorron of St Albans. Out of the huge resources of one of England’s wealthiest Benedictine abbeys, Geoffrey lavished gifts on Christina which included founding a whole nunnery for her at Markyate, over which she presided as prioress (plus male hermit companions). Evidently possessed of considerable sexual or emotional charisma, she sparked deep divisions between admirers and scandalized detractors in the Abbey. Abbot Geoffrey’s death broke her power at St Albans; under the more discreet leadership of Geoffrey’s nephew Abbot Robert, the Abbey began to recover. His successor wrote Christina out of St Albans’ history and fostered a new cultic enthusiasm for an ancient and safely male companion of the Abbey’s martyr-saint Alban, Amphibalus by name and probably fictional by nature. A syneisactic prioress had failed to make it through to sainthood.[46]

• From How the Bible Actually Works (2019)

  that he spoke to Elijah earlier in 2 Kings 10:17. But another prophet, Hosea, seems to have taken issue with this coup—or better, according to Hosea, God takes issue with it . In a little while I will punish the house of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel, and I will put an end to the kingdom of the house of Israel. On that day I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel. (Hos. 1:4–5) So, which is it? How does God feel about Jehu’s coup? It depends on which book of the Bible you’re reading. These two authors give polar opposite perspectives on Jehu’s act. To explore why exactly these two authors handle Jehu’s coup in opposite ways is a very interesting topic, but ultimately speculative. Let’s not get into all that. My point is simply that the Bible does this sort of thing, and when it does, we need to see it not as a problem, but an invitation. These scenes crack open for us a window onto a different way of experiencing God through the Bible. The circumstances of Ezekiel and Hosea’s days required a different “word from the Lord” than what had been in effect earlier. Does this mean God changes? I don’t think so (though some do * ). It means, rather, as I see it, that different times and different circumstances call for people of faith to perceive God and God’s ways differently. God doesn’t change, but God—being God—is never fully captured by our perceptions. As people continue to live and breathe and experience life, how they see God changes too. I’m sure as a parent I’ve said to one or more of my children, “Watch what you do, because the habits you form now will stay with you for life and even be passed down to your own children without your even knowing it.” In fact, I can vouch for that as a parent—tendencies I picked up from my parents were downloaded onto my children, and I didn’t even realize it until they were in their teens. But then at other times, like after a discouraging failure, I might say, “Don’t worry. Your life script isn’t written by this one moment. Tomorrow’s another day, and you can always start afresh.” These are two separate parenting moments that require a different word. The same holds for clergy when caring for people—the moment, not the rulebook, dictates the words spoken. It takes wisdom to know what to say in what situation, because different situations call for different types of pastoral responses. So why can’t the biblical writers, and God who is somehow mysteriously behind them, do the very same thing? I think they can, and in fact they do— especially when in crisis mode. And speaking of which . . . Chapter 5 When Everything Changes

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Like most students of psychology, I had read that each emotion is supposed to have a distinct pattern of physical changes, roughly like a fingerprint. Each time you grasp a doorknob, the fingerprints that you leave behind may vary depending on the firmness of your grip, how slippery the surface is, or how warm and pliable your skin is at that moment. Nevertheless, your fingerprints look similar enough each time to identify you uniquely. The “fingerprint” of an emotion is likewise assumed to be similar enough from one instance to the next, and in one person to the next, regardless of age, sex, personality, or culture. In a laboratory, scientists should be able to tell whether someone is sad or happy or anxious just by looking at physical measurements of a person’s face, body, and brain. I felt confident that these emotion fingerprints could provide the objective criteria I needed to measure emotion. If the scientific literature was correct, then assessing people’s emotional accuracy would be a breeze. But things did not turn out quite as I expected. … According to the classical view of emotion, our faces hold the key to assessing emotions objectively and accurately. A primary inspiration for this idea is Charles Darwin’s book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, where he claimed that emotions and their expressions were an ancient part of universal human nature. All people, everywhere in the world, are said to exhibit and recognize facial expressions of emotion without any training whatsoever.3 So, I thought that my lab should be able to measure facial movements, assess our test subjects’ true emotional state, compare it to their verbal reports of emotion, and calculate their accuracy. If subjects made a pouting expression in the lab, for instance, but did not report feeling sad, we could train them to recognize the sadness they must be feeling. Case closed. The human face is laced with forty-two small muscles on each side. The facial movements that we see each other make every day—winks and blinks, smirks and grimaces, raised and wrinkled brows—occur when combinations of facial muscles contract and relax, causing connective tissue and skin to move. Even when your face seems completely still to the naked eye, your muscles are still contracting and relaxing.4 [image file=image_rsrc7A9.jpg] Figure 1-1: Muscles of the human face According to the classical view, each emotion is displayed on the face as a particular pattern of movements—a “facial expression.” When you’re happy, you’re supposed to smile. When you’re angry, you’re supposed to furrow your brow. These movements are said to be part of the fingerprint of their respective emotions.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  First, Vitalis sued Petronius and was awarded Justa, but with all the child’s earlier upkeep costs going to Petronius. Next, Vitalis and Petronius both died. Then, Calatoria sued Justa. She claimed Vitalis was still a slave when Justa was born, so Justa was slave-born, and she demanded that Justa and all her by then extensive property be returned to her. Justa defended herself, but Vitalis had been freed by oral declaration rather than formal manumission, so there was no written evidence of when it happened, and none, therefore, on whether Justa was born before or after her mother’s freedom. If before, she was slave-born; if after, she was freeborn. With no documents available, everything depended on witnesses. The case was too much for the Herculaneum authorities, and it was relegated to the urban praetor in the Forum of Augustus at Rome (remember those courts from Chapter 2?). Two witnesses, both freedmen, spoke for Calatoria. Five witnesses, two freeborn, two freed, and one whose name is lost, spoke for Justa. Of those the most important voice was that of the freedman Caius Petronius Telesphorus, whose Greek name was now preceded as usual by the first two names of the master who had manumitted him. For the first act of the drama, in December of 75, Telesphorus, who, as Calatoria’s tutor, had come with her to Petronius’s house, stood bail for her reappearance in court. But, in the second act, Calatoria has a new bondsman, and Telesphorus swore that Vitalis was his colliberta, freed along with him, that he himself (probably as Petronius’s steward) had overseen the repayment of those upkeep costs for Justa, and that he knew her to have been freeborn. You do not know the outcome of the case or whether that dossier belonged to Calatoria or Justa. Apparently no decision was handed down from Rome between 75 and 78, and by 79 Vesuvius rendered the case quite terribly moot. But you think long about its implications. Justa must have done very well to have sustained a long-distance court case at Rome with all the attendant expenses for herself and her witnesses. Female and male, freeborn and freed interacted within boundaries that might have been all quite clear in theory, but were marvelously messy in practice. In Herculaneum’s Insula V.13–18 ambiguities of architecture and structure intersect with those of social status and family relationship. Shrine of the Augustales

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  These new experiments revealed something that had never been documented before: everyone we tested used the same emotion words like “angry,” “sad,” and “afraid” to communicate their feelings but not necessarily to mean the same thing. Some test subjects made fine distinctions with their word use: for example, they experienced sadness and fear as qualitatively different. Other subjects, however, lumped together words like “sad” and “afraid” and “anxious” and “depressed” to mean “I feel crappy” (or, more scientifically, “I feel unpleasant”). The effect was the same for pleasant emotions like happiness, calmness, and pride. After testing over seven hundred American subjects, we discovered that people vary tremendously in how they differentiate their emotional experiences. A skilled interior designer can look at five shades of blue and distinguish azure, cobalt, ultramarine, royal blue, and cyan. My husband, on the other hand, would call them all blue. My students and I had discovered a similar phenomenon for emotions, which I described as emotional granularity.2 Here’s where the classical view of emotion entered the picture. Emotional granularity, in terms of this view, must be about accurately reading your internal emotional states. Someone who distinguished among different feelings using words like “joy,” “sadness,” “fear,” “disgust,” “excitement,” and “awe” must be detecting physical cues or reactions for each emotion and interpreting them correctly. A person exhibiting lower emotional granularity, who uses words like “anxious” and “depressed” interchangeably, must be failing to detect these cues. I began wondering if I could teach people to improve their emotional granularity by coaching them to recognize their emotional states accurately. The key word here is “accurately.” How can a scientist tell if someone who says “I’m happy” or “I’m anxious” is accurate? Clearly, I needed some way to measure an emotion objectively and then compare it to what the person reports. If a person reports feeling anxious, and the objective criteria indicate that he is in a state of anxiety, then he is accurately detecting his own emotion. On the other hand, if the objective criteria indicate that he is depressed or angry or enthusiastic, then he’s inaccurate. With an objective test in hand, the rest would be simple. I could ask a person how he feels and compare his answer to his “real” emotional state. I could correct any of his apparent mistakes by teaching him to better recognize the cues that distinguish one emotion from another and improve his emotional granularity.

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

  One significant moment was the Council of Nicaea, presided over by the Emperor Constantine himself in 325, which did so much for both the future direction of theology and the organization of the Church in both East and West. The third of its canons, much copied by Councils thereafter, ‘altogether forbids any bishop, presbyter or deacon, or any of the clergy, to have a woman dwelling with him, excepting a mother, or sister, or aunt, or such persons only as are above all suspicion’. That sounds comprehensive, but there could be plenty of argument about what woman was ‘above all suspicion’: did that define or exclude a wife? The ambiguity had been absent from the pronouncements of a Council of bishops held at Elvira in Spain around twenty years before, which among much rigorist regulation had declared that clergy should ‘entirely keep themselves from their wives and not have children’, on pain of dismissal from their clerical orders. On Elvira’s reckoning, if clerical marriage were to continue it must strictly be without sex, in the syneisactic manner.[40] There was a strong movement at Nicaea to go down this same route, perhaps not surprisingly since Hosius, the chief ecclesiastical advisor of the Emperor at the Council, was himself a bishop from Spain. Supposedly it was defeated by the dramatic intervention of Paphnutius, an avowedly celibate Egyptian bishop and heroic survivor of persecution, ‘roaring at the top of his voice’ that his choice of continence should not be arbitrarily imposed by others. This story comes from a century later, in the writings of the Church historian Socrates of Constantinople, and may itself be a fiction that was part of an ongoing and unresolved argument.[41] At one extreme of that debate was a logical extension of the newly emerging role of the Church within Roman imperial structures: encouragement of clerical dynasties. It was a natural assumption among the Roman upper classes that son should follow father in the same honourable position. In 349 that led the Emperor Constantius II to propose legislation that the Christian priesthood should become a hereditary caste, like some levels of imperial officialdom. Although this met too much opposition from bishops to become a reality, the idea, and versions of it in practice, did not die away, as we will see in different settings and centuries.[42] At the other extreme was the effort of Bishop Eustathius of Sebaste in Armenia, who allegedly encouraged people to boycott liturgies performed by married priests; Eustathius faced condemnation at a Synod at Gangra in Asia Minor around 340, and his historian admirer Sozomen later sought to excuse him, clearly embarrassed.[43]

• From How the Bible Actually Works (2019)

  Let me say right here and now that the lesson we learn from these two little verses sums up not only how Proverbs works, but how the Bible as a whole works as a book of wisdom. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Anyone who hangs out on social media at all knows how effortlessly it can bring out the worst in us. Not me, of course, but everyone else. I’m an angel. Sometimes the comments are rude, condescending, insulting, passive- aggressive, or baiting. I mean, people really get upset over almost everything! And each time that happens, I have to ask myself, “Should I ignore him or let him have it?” (Yes, “him.” Ninety-nine percent of the time it’s some dude who really needs to find another way to prove his manhood.) I’d really like some clear divine direction here on how to handle these trolls, but the book of Proverbs, which is supposed to tell us what wisdom looks like, has these two passages side by side that give us two conflicting instructions: “Definitely do not answer this fool. Oh, wait. No. Definitely do answer him.” Is this multiple choice? Do I just pick one? I just want a snappy phrase that tells me what to do when this happens—like “Stranger, danger,” “Stop, drop, and roll,” or “In the event of a loss of cabin pressure, place the oxygen mask firmly over your nose and mouth, secure the elastic band behind your head, and breathe normally.” Am I asking too much? Apparently. What makes the ambiguity all the more striking is the topic—fools. This isn’t some minor issue, like whether it’s finally time to get double-pane windows (you probably should; they will save you hundreds in heating costs and over time will more than pay for themselves). “Fool” in Proverbs is the catchall term for someone you definitely do not want to be: a hater of knowledge, a slanderer, one who leads others down the path to destruction, someone who lacks discernment and is complacent, stubborn, ignorant, prideful, greedy, and a whole slew of other despicable character traits. Today we might call someone like this a total jerk (feel free to supply a more colorful term). Biblically speaking, though, a fool is roughly synonymous with someone who is “ungodly” or “unrighteous”—someone whose actions are out of sync with God’s ways and out of harmony with others’. Fools lead you away from God, and so we might expect here of all places, where the topic under consideration is “fools,” to get some clear direction about what to do when we come face-to-face with such a disruptive, ungodly person. But no. Instead we are told (1) not to engage a fool because by doing so you will come down to his level and (2) to engage the fool to shut him up. And so here is my point. These two clearly contradictory proverbs aren’t a problem that needs fixing. The biblical writers weren’t idiots. Placing these two opposite sayings side by side gives us a snapshot of how wisdom works.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  social redemption. Thus the Church is halting between two voices that call it. On the one side is the voice of the living Christ amid living men to-day; on the other side is the voice of past ages embodied in theology. Who will say that the authority of this voice has never confused our Christian judgment and paralysed our determination to establish God’s kingdom on earth? Those who have gone through the struggle for a clear faith in the social gospel would probably agree that the doctrinal theology in which they were brought up, was one of the most baffling hindrances in their spiritual crisis, and that all their mental energies were taxed to overcome the weight of its traditions. They were fortunate if they promptly discovered some recent theological book which showed them at least the possibility of conceiving Christian doctrine in social terms, and made them conscious of a fellowship of faith in their climb toward the light. The situation would be much worse if Christian thought were nourished on doctrine only. Fortunately our hymns and prayers have a richer consciousness of solidarity than individualistic theology. But even to-day many ministers have a kind of dumb-bell system of thought, with the social gospel at one end and individual salvation at the other end, and an attenuated connection between them. The strength of our faith is in its unity. Religion wants wholeness of life. We need a rounded system of doctrine large enough to take in all our spiritual interests. In short, we need a theology large enough to contain the social gospel, and alive and productive enough not to hamper it.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “You’re making my blood run cold, Artemis!” Ernest exclaimed. “That was my dream. Dreams are a private domain, each person’s most private, sovereign sanctuary. How could you know my dream?” Artemis sat silent, head bowed. “And so many other questions, Artemis. The depth of my feelings that evening—that magical glow, that irresistible desire. Not to take anything away from you and your charm, but that desire was of an unnatural intensity. Could it have been chemical? Maybe the chanterelles?” Artemis bowed her head lower. “And then when we were in bed, I touched your cheek. Why were you weeping? I felt wonderful; I thought it was mutual. Why the tears? Why pain for you?” “I wasn’t crying for me, Ernest, but for you. And not because of what had happened between us—that was wonderful for me too. No, I wept because of what was about to happen to you.” “About to happen? Am I going mad? This is getting worse and worse. Artemis, tell me the truth!” “I don’t think the truth will satisfy you, Ernest.” “Try me. Trust me.” Artemis stood up, left the room briefly, and returned with a vellum folder from which she extracted a sheaf of paper, yellowed and old. “The truth? The truth is here,” she said, holding it out, “in this letter my grandmother wrote a long time ago to my mother, Magda. It’s dated June 13, 1931. Shall I read it to you, Ernest?” He nodded. And, by the light of three candles as the redolent food waited in its containers, Ernest listened to Artemis’s grandmother’s story, the story behind his dream. To Magda, my dear daughter, on her seventeenth birthday, in the hope that this message is neither too late nor too early. It is time for you to know the answers to the important questions in your life. Where have we come from? Why have you been uprooted so many times? Who and where is your father? Why have I sent you away and not kept you with me? The family history, which I write here, is something you must know and must pass on to your daughters.