Contempt

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 Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Then, when we got to the factory, the owner laughed in my face. He said he wouldn’t consider doing business with some fly-by-night company he’d never heard of—let alone from Oregon. On the second trip I met up with Johnson in Boston. I picked him up at Footwear News, where he’d been scouting potential suppliers, and together we drove to Exeter, New Hampshire, to see an ancient, shuttered factory. Built around the time of the American Revolution, the factory was a ruin. It had once housed the Exeter Boot and Shoe Company, but now it housed rats. As we pried open the doors and swatted away cobwebs the size of fishing nets, all sorts of creatures scurried past our feet and flew past our ears. Worse, there were gaping holes in the floor; one wrong step could mean a trip to the earth’s core. The owner led us up to the third floor, which was usable. He said he could rent us this floor, with an option to buy the whole place. He also said we’d need help getting the factory properly cleaned and staffed, and he gave us the name of a local guy who could help. Bill Giampietro. We met Giampietro the next day at an Exeter tavern. Within minutes I could see this was our man. A true shoe dog. He was fifty, thereabouts, but his hair had no gray. It seemed painted with black polish. He had a thick Boston accent, and besides shoes the only subject he ever broached was his beloved wife and kids. He was first-generation American—his parents came from Italy, where his father (of course) had been a cobbler. He had the serene expression and callused hands of a craftsman, and he proudly wore the standard uniform: stained pants, stained denim shirt, rolled up to the stained elbows. He said he’d never done anything in his life but cobble, and never wanted to. “Ask anyone,” he said, “they’ll tell you.” Everyone in New England called him Geppetto, he added, because everyone thought (and still thinks) Pinocchio’s father was a cobbler. (He was actually a carpenter.) We each ordered a steak and a beer, and then I removed a pair of Cortezes from my briefcase. “Can you equip the Exeter factory to turn out these babies?” I asked. He took the shoes, examined them, pulled them apart, yanked out their tongues. He peered into them like a doctor. “No fucking problem,” he said, dropping them on the table. The cost? He did the math in his head. Renting and fixing up the Exeter factory, plus workers, materials, sundries—he guessed $250,000. Let’s do it, I said. Later, while Johnson and I were on a run, he asked me how we were going to pay a quarter of a million dollars for a factory when we could barely pay for Giampietro’s steak. I told him calmly—in fact with the calm of a madman—that I was going to have Nissho pay for it.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Would it not be that which taught much morality and very little dogma? That which tended to make men just without making them absurd? That which did not order one to believe in things that are impossible, contradictory, injurious to divinity, and pernicious to mankind, and which dared not menace with eternal punishment anyone possessing common sense? Would it not be that which did not uphold its belief with executioners, and did not inundate the earth with blood on account of unintelligible sophism? Which taught only the worship of one god, justice, tolerance, and humanity?9 Scarred by the theological wrangling and violence of the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, European Deism was marked by anticlericalism but was by no means averse to religion itself. Deists needed God. As Voltaire famously remarked, if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. The Enlightenment was the culmination of a vision that had been long in the making. It built on Galileo’s mechanistic science, Descartes’ quest for autonomous certainty, and Newton’s cosmic laws, and by the eighteenth century, the philosophes believed that they had acquired a uniform way of assessing the whole of reality. Reason was the only path to truth. The philosophes were convinced that religion, society, history, and the workings of the human mind could all be explained by the regular natural processes discovered by science. But their rational ideology was entirely dependent upon the existence of God. Atheism as we know it today was still intellectually inconceivable. Voltaire regarded it as a “monstrous evil,” but was confident that because scientists had found definitive proofs for God’s existence, there were “fewer atheists today than there have ever been.”10 For Jefferson, it was impossible that any normally constructed mind could contemplate the design manifest in every atom of the universe and deny the necessity of a supervising power.11 “If Men so much admire Philosophers, because they discover a small Part of the Wisdom that made all things,” Cotton Mather argued, “they must be stark blind, who do not admire that Wisdom itself.”12 Science could not explain its findings without God; God was a scientific as well as a theological necessity. Disbelief in God seemed as perverse as refusing to believe in gravity. Giving up God would mean abandoning the only truly persuasive scientific explanation of the world.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  1979 He occupied a teeny office at the Treasury Department, a space about the size of my mother’s linen closet. There was barely room for his government-issued gunmetal-gray desk, let alone the matching chair for infrequent visitors. He pointed to this chair. Sit, he said. I sat. I looked around in disbelief. This was the home base of the man who kept sending us those bills for $25 million? I looked now at him, this beady-eyed bureaucrat. What creature did he remind me of? Not a worm. No, he was bigger than that. Not a snake. He was less simple than that. Then I had it. Johnson’s pet octopus. I recalled Stretch dragging the helpless crab back to its lair. Yes, this bureaucrat was a kraken. A micro-kraken. A bureau-kraken. Smothering these thoughts, burying all my hostility and fear, I screwed a fake smile onto my face and tried in a friendly tone to explain that this whole thing was a gigantic misunderstanding. Even the bureau-kraken’s colleagues within the Treasury Department sided with our position. I handed him a document. “You have right here,” I said, “a memo stating that the American Selling Price does not apply to Nike shoes. The memo comes from Treasury.” “Hmm,” the bureau-kraken said. He looked it over, pushed it back at me. “That’s not binding on Customs.” Not binding? I gritted my teeth. “But this whole case,” I said, “is nothing but the result of a dirty trick played by our competitors. We’re being penalized for our success.” “We don’t see it that way.” “By we... who do you mean?” “The U.S. government.” I found it hard to believe this... man... was speaking for the U.S. government, but I didn’t say that. “I find it hard to believe that the U.S. government would want to stifle free enterprise,” I said. “That the U.S. government would want to be a party to this kind of deceit and trickery. That the U.S. government, my government, would want to bully a little company in Oregon. Sir, with all respect, I’ve been all over the world, I’ve seen corrupt governments in undeveloped countries act this way. I’ve seen thugs push around businesses, with arrogance, with impunity, and I can’t believe my own government would behave in such a fashion.” The bureau-kraken said nothing. A faint smirk flickered across his thin lips. It struck me all at once that he was grotesquely unhappy, as all functionaries are. When I started to speak again, his unhappiness manifested itself in a restless, manic energy. He jumped up and paced. Back and forth he danced behind his desk. Then he sat down. Then he did it again. It wasn’t the pacing of a thinker, but the agitation of a caged animal. Three mincing steps left, three halting limps right. Sitting again, he cut me off midsentence.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  Renay, dismissing Jerome's plea for her to return home, refuses to reunite with him and chooses freely and deliberately to remain with Terry instead. Renay's conscious decision to maintain her interracial same-gender loving union with Terry defamiliarizes black nationalist and American societal fixations on intraracial bonding, racial "purity," and heterosexuality. Of equal if not greater import, it subverts nationalists' and the larger black community's essentialist characterizations of homosexuality or same-sex desire as nonblack or a "white thing": as a site of contamination and disrepair-similar to, yet "worse" than, "incest" or "an incurable disease"-and, equally problematic, as a sign of white "decadence."46 What such sentiments, as inscribed in the novel, do mark is the complicated and vexed relationship between race and sexuality in black lesbian (and gay) experiences. They also contest the black community's sensibilities regarding homosexuality and same-sex desire, as well as destabilize heteronormative history and nationalist polemics that construct black lesbian and gay bodies as having been essentially and "purely" heterosexual until contaminated by encounters with white supremacy.47 The novel also strikingly animates American scientific sentiments regarding homosexuality as a mental disease, a national "dis-ease" that was listed as a mental sickness by the American Psychiatric Association until as late as the mid-1970s; and it was removed from the list around the time of novel's publication in 1974. Loving Her thus intervenes, entering into the sociosexual and psychosexual landscape, by desensitizing and destigmatizing homosexuality and the diversity of sexual expression. Shockley even decriminalizes it, locating criminality and decadence not in the same-sex love act but, rather, in the violent public responses to it. When Renay, despite her reservations, goes on a double date with her best friend, Fran, and Fran's friend Lazarius, a black nationalist, they encounter a "slim twig of a young black man, wearing a blonde Beatle wig and dressed in tight red pants and [a] matching shirt" with "light powder and eyes shadowed with purple mascara" (153). When he bumps into their table and apologizes "in a high effeminate voice," both Fran and Lazarius respond in highly disparaging heterosexist, homophobic manners: Fran, for example, mutters a (sexually) derogatory term, while Lazarius asserts contemptuously that, "Somebody ought to take him out in the alley and beat the shit out of him" (153). Both remarks not only expose deep-seated homophobia and intolerance for sexual difference, but also excoriate those individuals, like Lazarius, who view violence as a "corrective" for so-called black sexual deviancy.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  ©2004 The Teaching Company. 61 immoral religious ceremonies that included incestuous orgies and cannibalism. 1. These charges were already seen in the account of the martyrs of Lyons and Vienne. 2. They can be seen even more clearly in the charges leveled against Christians by a mid-second–century philosopher named Fronto, the tutor of Marcus Aurelius, who details the Christians’ nefarious practices in graphic detail. 3. The charges may seem odd to people today, but they make sense given what we know about early Christians, who met in secret (outsiders weren’t allowed in) and often at night (because most of them were lower class and had to work all day every day); who called one another “brother” and “sister” and exchanged kisses as greetings (incest?!); and who then ate and drank the body and blood of the Son of God (cannibalism?!). IV. There were numerous motivating factors behind the persecution of the early Christians. Principally, the persecutions were driven by the sense that Christians had offended the gods and were an immoral presence in society. Occasionally, the mob reaction against Christians was taken to the authorities, who acted in what they saw as the best interest of their people and tried to make Christians recant their beliefs or pay the horrific consequences. Essential Reading: Bart Ehrman, After the New Testament, chapter 3. Everett Ferguson, Church and State in the Early Church (especially the articles by de Ste. Crois and Sherwin-White). Robert Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them. Supplementary Reading: W. H. C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church. H. Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs. ©2004 The Teaching Company. 62 Questions to Consider: 1. In considering the accounts of early Christian persecutions, why do you suppose the state officials usually seemed less eager than the mobs to subject the Christians to torture and death? 2. Consider the charges leveled against Christians. Can you think of other instances throughout history, or even today, in which “opponents” of a group have been tarnished with claims of crass and flagrant immorality? What is one to make of such claims? ©2004 The Teaching Company. 63 Lecture Thirteen Christian Reactions to Persecution Scope: In this lecture, we try to understand how Christians reacted to their persecution at the hands of pagan mobs and local authorities. We will see that many Christians recanted their faith in the face of persecution, but many others stayed faithful to what they believed to be the truth. We will use the moving tale of the passion of Perpetua and Felicitas and the letters of Ignatius of Antioch to guide our reflections. From these texts, we will see that many Christians were willing to face torture and death because they believed that doing so would ensure them an afterlife of eternal bliss, whereas those who refused to accept the faith would face eternal torment. Moreover, some Christians believed that in suffering martyrdom, they were imitating the example set for them by Christ, their Lord.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  D. This is an account of Jesus’s trial, death, and Resurrection, with many similarities to the accounts of the New Testament (especially Matthew), but many key differences, as well. 1. The account is more heavily anti-Judaic than that in the New Testament Gospels. For example, it stresses the Jews’ sense of guilt at what they did. 2. It is best known, however, for its vivid portrayal of the Resurrection event itself, in which Jesus emerges from the tomb tall as a skyscraper and the cross emerges from the tomb behind him. 3. There are also passages that may well have been meant to be taken docetically (for example, vv. 10, 24). E. This book was seen, then, as a heretical gospel and its use was banned. V. Even more obviously “unorthodox” is a gospel called the Secret Book of John, discovered, along with the Gospel of Thomas, in the Gnostic writings known as the Nag Hammadi library. Vi. 258 A. This is an account written from a Gnostic point of view of how the divine realm and the material world came into being, as revealed to John, the son of Zebedee, Jesus’s close disciple. The material world here is not said to be the good creation of the one true God. The God who created this world—who is the God of the Bible—is portrayed as an inferior, ignorant deity, far below the one true God. This inferior God created this world (and made humans) as a place of imprisonment for the element of the divine that he wanted to entrap here. Christ is understood as a divine emissary sent from the heavenly realm to free the divine sparks entrapped in this material world. This aspersion of the Creation and of the God who made it fits well into a Gnostic perspective but is completely at odds with the views held by the Christians whose views ultimately became dominant in early Christianity. Even these proto-orthodox Christians forged documents in support of their perspectives, however, as can be seen in a pseudepigraphical letter written in Paul’s name to counter such Gnostic ideas. The letter is called 3 Corinthians. A. B. The letter is preserved in a longer book called the Acts of Paul, a legendary account of Paul’s exploits in the missionary field. According to the Acts of Paul, the Corinthian church wrote a letter to the apostle complaining that false teachers in their midst were casting aspersions on the Jewish Scriptures and saying that the Creation was not good, that Christ was not really a human, and that the flesh would not be raised. “Paul” responds to these claims one by one, arguing that there is only one God, the creator of all; that Jesus, his Son, really became flesh; and that all people will be raised in the flesh. This, in other words, is a proto-orthodox forgery designed to counter the forged claims of other Christian groups.

• From City of Night (1963)

  He shrieked in pretended annoyance when someone passing by said to him: “Honey, I didnt recognize you in that cowgirl drag!” “Who wasnt in love with Lance?” Chick said. “And who was it that followed him into the dressing room that time and locked the door and—” “Vile gossip!” “We all saw you, and Lance pushed you away so hard you fell and threatened to sue the studio and they promised to put you at the front of the chorus line.” “Thats not true. I could have had Lance just like that—” Jamey snapped his fingers. “Dont listen to her, babe,” says Chick. “Shes just Nervous cause she’ll have to go home alone.” He turns now to Jamey: “That cowboy drag youre in was a definite mistake, honey—you look like an extra on the wrong set.... Anyway, let me continue—if this giddy bitch lets me—Lance was getting money from the old auntie, but Lance is Smart. He got the old man so fuckin hot after him that the old man was going out of her head. She bought Lance a car, everything he wanted, and, babe, this isnt gossip. It’s The Truth. Still, Lance wouldnt let her touch him. Then Lance made this deal: He’d move in with Esmeralda Drake—” “—the Third.” “—the Third. He’d move in with Esmeralda if Esmeralda would have the papers on the house made out in both Lance’s and Esmeralda’s names. The next day, Esmeralda was with her attorneys, and Lance moved in. Then Esmeralda tries to make out—and Lance says nothing doing, He promised to move in, and he did. But Touch him, no.... The old man was a case, I mean Ive never seen anyone so nervous. And she says to Lance he can have Anything. All right, says Lance, he wants the house in his name only. It was a magnificent house, babe: Lance still has it: all gorgeous modern furniture, original paintings (all the way from New York)—drapes like in the Movies—everything!... So the old man calls her attorneys again, she has the house put in Lance’s name—And Then Guess What?” Jamey gulps his drink in anticipation. “Youll never believe it!” “We were all there—Jamey was there—all the kids from the set. Lance gave this party, to celebrate his new house, and Esmeralda is there hobbling around on her cane, following Lance, smiling, nodding—thinking at last shes made it. Well! It was real late, and Lance goes to Esmeralda Drake the Third, and says to her—” “He really said this, we all heard it.” “—and says to her: ‘Get out of my house, I dont want to see you here again!’” “And the old man looked like a ghost—” “Yes, like he was going to die right there, and Lance saying: ‘I mean it, I mean it, get the hell out, youve bugged me long enough, get out.’ And he shoves Esmeralda Drake through the door right in front of our startled eyes....

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  Israel not simply because of killing a lamb, but this was foreshadowing Christ, who as a lamb was going to be sacrificed for the salvation of the world. Melito took the occasion of the sermon to bemoan the fact that this one, Christ, who had been predicted in the Scriptures, ended up becoming rejected by the Jewish people, even though their own Scriptures predicted him. The Jews, in fact, had rejected their own Messiah for Melito. More than that, since for Melito Jesus himself is God, by killing him, Jews have rejected God, and in fact, they have killed God. This is a very powerful sermon, rhetorically very effective. Let me read some of the key passages: This is the lamb that was slain [He is referring to the lamb slain in the Passover account in the book of Exodus]; this is the lamb that was silent. This is the one who was born of Mary, the beautiful ewe lamb, the one taken from the flock, was dragged to sacrifice, killed in the evening, buried at night. This one was murdered, and where was he murdered? In the very center of Jerusalem. Why? Well, because he healed the lame and cleansed their lepers. He guided their blind with light. He raised up their dead. For this reason, he suffered. He’s asking, “Why did Jews do this? Because he did such good things for them, they killed him?” Why, oh Israel, did you do this strange injustice? You dishonored the one who had honored you. You held in contempt the one who had held you in esteem. You denied the one who publicly acknowledged you. You renounced the one who proclaimed you his own. You killed the one who made you to live. Why did you do this, oh Israel? Well, these are very powerful rhetorical questions. He continues: Pay attention, oh families of the earth, and observe. An extraordinary murder has taken place in the center of Jerusalem, in the city devoted to God’s Law, in the city of the Hebrews, in the city of the Prophets, in the city thought of as just. And who has been murdered? And who is the murderer? I am ashamed to give the answer, but give it I must. The one who hung the earth in space is himself hanged. The one who fixed the heavens in place is himself impaled. The one who firmly fixed all things is himself firmly fixed to the tree. The Lord is insulted. God has been 129 murdered. The king of Israel has been destroyed by the right hand of Israel.

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

  He is equally unsatisfactory as a moralist and practical divine. He had no connected system of moral doctrine, and did not penetrate to the basis and kernel of the Christian life, but moved in the outer circle of asceticism and casuistry. Following the spirit of his time, he found the essence of religion in monastic flight from the world and contempt of the natural ordinances of God, especially of marriage; and, completely reversing sound principles, he advocated even ascetic filth as an external mark of inward purity.2139 Of marriage he had a very low conception, regarding it merely as a necessary evil for the increase of virgins. From the expression of Paul in 1 Cor. vii. 1: "It is good not to touch a woman," he draws the utterly unwarranted inference: "It is therefore bad to touch one; for the only opposite of good is bad;" and he interprets the woe of the Lord upon those that are with child and those that give suck (Matt. xxiv. 19), as a condemnation of pregnancy in general, and of the crying of little children, and of all the trouble and fruit of the married life. The disagreeable fact of the marriage of Peter he endeavors to weaken by the groundless assumption that the apostle forsook his wife when he forsook his net, and, besides, that "he must have washed away the stain of his married life by the blood of his martyrdom."2140 In a letter, otherwise very beautiful and rich, to the young Nepotian,2141 he gives this advice: "Let your lodgings be rarely or never visited by women. You must either ignore alike, or love alike, all the daughters and virgins of Christ. Nay, dwell not under the same roof with them, nor trust their former chastity; you cannot be holier than David, nor wiser than Solomon. Never forget that a woman drove the inhabitants of Paradise out of their possession. In sickness any brother, or your sister, or your mother, can minister to in the lack of such relatives, the church herself maintains many aged women, whom you can at the same time remunerate for their nursing with welcome alms. I know some who are well in the body indeed, but sick in mind. It is a dangerous service in any case, that is done to you by one whose face you often see. If in your official duty as a clergyman you must visit a widow or a maiden, never enter her house alone. Take with you only those whose company does you no shame; only some reader, or acolyth, or psalm-singer, whose ornament consists not in clothes, but in good morals, who does not crimp his hair with crisping pins, but shows chastity in his whole bearing. But privately or without witnesses, never put yourself in the presence of a woman."

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

  The leaders of the opposition to Rome and to Bonifacius among his predecessors and contemporaries were Adelbert and Clemens. We know them only from the letters of Boniface, which represent them in a very, unfavorable light. Adelbert, or Aldebert (Eldebert), was a Gaul by nation, and perhaps bishop of Soissons; at all events he labored on the French side of the Rhine, had received episcopal ordination, and enjoyed great popularity from his preaching, being regarded as an apostle, a patron, and a worker of miracles. According to Boniface, he was a second Simon Magus, or immoral impostor, who deceived the people by false miracles and relics, claimed equal rank with the apostles, set up crosses and oratories in the fields, consecrated buildings in his own name, led women astray, and boasted to have relics better than those of Rome, and brought to him by an angel from the ends of the earth. Clemens was a Scotchman (Irishman), and labored in East Franconia. He opposed ecclesiastical traditions and clerical celibacy, and had two sons. He held marriage with a brother’s widow to be valid, and had peculiar views of divine predestination and Christ’s descent into Hades. Aldebert and Clemens were condemned without a hearing, and excommunicated as heretics and seducers of the people, by a provincial Synod of Soissons, A.D. 744, and again in a Synod of Rome, 745, by Pope Zacharias, who confirmed the decision of Boniface. Aldebert was at last imprisoned in the monastery of Fulda, and killed by shepherds after escaping from prison. Clemens disappeared.115 § 25. Boniface, the Apostle of Germany. I. Bonifacius: Epistolae et Sermones, first ed. by Serrarius, Mogunt. 1605, then by Würdtwein, 1790, by Giles, 1842, and in Migne’s Patrol. Tom, 89, pp. 593–801 (together with Vitae, etc.). Jaffe: Monumenta Moguntina. Berol. 1866. II. Biographies of Bonifacius. The oldest by Willibald, his pupil and companion (in Pertz, Monum. II. 33, and in Migne, l.c. p. 603); by Othlo, a German Benedictine monk of the eleventh cent. (in Migne, p. 634); Letzner (1602); Löffler (1812); Seiters (1845); Cox (1853); J. P. Müller (1870); Hope (1872); Aug. Werner Bonifacius und die Romanisirung Von Mitteleuropa. Leipz., 1875; Pfahler(Regensb. 1880); Otto Fischer (Leipz. 1881); Ebrard: Bonif. der Zerstörer des columbanischen Kirchenthums auf dem Festlande (Gütersloh, 1882; against Fischer and very unjust to B.; see against it Zöpffel in the "Theol. Lit. Zeitg," 1882, No. 22). Cf. the respective sections in Neander, Gfrörer, Rettberg (II. 307 sqq.) On the Councils of Bonif see Hefele: Conciliengeschichte, III. 458.

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

  The Easter festival proper was preceded by a forty days’ season of repentance and fasting, called Quadragesima, at least as early as the year 325; for the council of Nice presupposes the existence of this season.732 This fast was an imitation of the forty days’ fasting of Jesus in the wilderness, which itself was put in typical connection with the forty days’ fasting of Moses733 and Elijah,734 and the forty years’ wandering of Israel through the desert. At first a free-will act, it gradually assumed the character of a fixed custom and ordinance of the church. Respecting the length of the season much difference prevailed, until Gregory I. (590–604) fixed the Wednesday of the sixth week before Easter, Ash Wednesday as it is called,735 as the beginning of it. On this day the priests and the people sprinkled themselves with dust and ashes, in token of their perishableness and their repentance, with the words: "Remember, O man, that dust thou art, and unto dust thou must return; repent, that thou mayest inherit eternal life." During Quadragesima criminal trials and criminal punishments, weddings, and sensual amusements were forbidden; solemn, earnest silence was imposed upon public and private life; and works of devotion, penances and charity were multiplied. Yet much hypocrisy was practised in the fasting; the rich compensating with exquisite dainties the absence of forbidden meats. Chrysostom and Augustine are found already lamenting this abuse. During the days preceding the beginning of Lent, the populace gave themselves up to unrestrained merriment, and this abuse afterward became legitimized in all Catholic countries, especially in Italy (flourishing most in Rome, Venice, and Cologne), in the Carnival.736 The six Sundays of Lent are called Quadragesima prima, secunda, and so on to sexta. They are also named after the initial words of the introit in the mass for the day: Invocabit (Ps. xci. 15), Reminiscere, (Ps. xxv. 6), Oculi (Ps. xxxiv. 15), Laetare (Is. lxvi. 10), Judica (Ps. xliii. 1), Palmarum (from Matt. xxi. 8). The three Sundays preceding Quadragesima are called respectively Estomihi (from Ps. xxxi. 2) or Quinquagesima (i.e., Dominica quinquagesimae diei, viz., before Easter), Sexagesima, and Septuagesima; which are, however, inaccurate designations. These three Sundays were regarded as preparatory to the Lenten season proper. In the larger cities it became customary to preach daily during the Quadragesimal fast; and the usage of daily Lenten sermons (Quadragesimales, or sermones Quadragesimales) has maintained itself in the Roman church to this day.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  But, Nietzsche believed, human beings could counter the danger of nihilism by making themselves divine. They must become the new absolute and take the place of God. The God they had projected outside themselves could be born within the human spirit as the Übermensch (“Superman”) who would provide the universe with ultimate meaning. To achieve this, we had to rebel against the Christian God who had marked the limit of human aspiration, estranged us from our bodies and passions, and enfeebled us with the ideal of compassion. As an incarnation of its will to power, the Ü bermensch would push the evolution of the species into a new phase so that humanity would finally become supreme. But what would happen when human beings did indeed imagine that they were the highest reality and a law unto themselves? What if the ideal of kenosis was replaced by the naked lust for empowerment, backed by the immense capacity of scientific technology? Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), founder of the science of psychoanalysis, illustrates the shift in mood that Nietzsche had diagnosed. 83 Although he grew up in a Jewish household that took religion very seriously—or, perhaps, because of his religious upbringing—God was indeed dead for Freud. He did not become an atheist as a result of his study of psychology; he was a psychoanalyst because he was an atheist. For Freud, the idea of God was simply untenable. In 1875, he had discovered the writings of Feuerbach, who had fallen into eclipse since the 1840s, and believed implicitly in the “warfare” myth: in this seemingly interminable conflict, religion must be eliminated. 84 Science alone could ensure the physical and mental health of humanity, and, in fact, its victory was inevitable. Human rationality was coming into its own, gradually breaking the fetters that had impeded its development. “The voice of the intellect is a soft one,” he wrote, and it would eventually succeed in quashing religion, but only in “a distant, distant future.” 85 It was dangerous to force people into atheism prematurely, as this could lead to unhealthy denial. Freud had studied medicine at the University of Vienna but always had a deep interest in religion and philosophy. His religious studies, however, were conducted in light of the death of God in his heart. There was no need to justify his atheism, because its truth was self-evident. The idea of God was “so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity, it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals would never be able to rise above this view of life.” 86 Observing the similarity between religious rites and the obsessive rituals of some of his patients, Freud concluded that religion was a neurosis that bordered on insanity.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Her voice was thick - with drunkenness, perhaps; but also, I think, with shock. I looked again at the wide and spilling box, that she was so vain and jealous of, and felt a worm of satisfaction wriggle within me. And I remembered, too, another room, a room I thought that I had carefully forgotten - a room where it was I who stood speechless at the door, while my sweetheart shivered and blushed beside her lover. And the sight of Diana, in my old place, made me smile. It was the smile, I think, which deranged her at last. ‘Maria,’ she said - for Maria was with her, too, along with Dickie and Evelyn: perhaps they had all come to the bedroom to retrieve a dirty book - ‘Maria, get Mrs Hooper. I want Nancy’s things brought here: she is leaving. And a dress for Blake. They are both going back to the gutter, where I got them from.’ Her voice was cold; as she took a step towards me, however, it grew warmer. ‘You little slut!’ she said. ‘You little trollop! You whore, you harlot, you strumpet, you bitch!’ But they were words that she had used on me a thousand times before, in lust or passion; and now, said in hate, they were curiously devoid of any sting. Beside me, however, Zena had begun to shake. As she did so, the dildo bobbed; and when Diana caught the motion she gave a roar: ‘Take that thing from your hips!’ At once, Zena fumbled with the straps; her fingers jumped so that she could barely grasp the buckles, and I stepped to help her. All the time we worked, Diana hurled abuses at her - she was a half-wit, a street-whore, a common little frigstress. The ladies at the door looked on, and laughed. One of them - it might have been Evelyn - nodded to the trunk, and called: ‘Use the strap on her, Diana!’ Diana curled her lip. ‘They will strap her well enough, at the reformatory,’ she said; ‘when she returns there.’ At that, Zena fell to her knees and began to cry. Diana gave a sneer, and drew her foot away so that the tears should not fall upon her sandal. Dickie - the necktie at her throat pulled loose, the lilac at her lapel squashed flat, and browning - said: ‘Can’t we see them fuck again? Diana, make them do it, for our pleasure!’ But Diana shook her head; and the gaze that she turned on me was as cold and as dead as the eye of a lantern, when the flame inside has been quite put out. She said: ‘They have fucked their last in my house.

• From Educated (2018)

  With the dress on, I turn to the mirror and sand away the crusty dirt around my neckline, thinking how lucky Mother is to have escaped a world in which there was an important difference between white and cream, and where such questions might consume a perfectly good morning, a morning that might otherwise be spent plundering Dad’s junkyard with Luke’s goat. —MY FATHER, GENE, WAS one of those young men who somehow manage to seem both solemn and mischievous. His physical appearance was striking—ebony hair, a strict, angular face, nose like an arrow pointing toward fierce, deep-set eyes. His lips were often pressed together in a jocular grin, as if all the world were his to laugh at. Although I passed my childhood on the same mountain that my father had passed his, slopping pigs in the same iron trough, I know very little about his boyhood. He never talked about it, so all I have to go on are hints from my mother, who told me that, in his younger years, Grandpa-down-the-hill had been violent, with a hair-trigger temper. Mother’s use of the words “had been” always struck me as funny. We all knew better than to cross Grandpa. He had a short fuse, that was just fact and anybody in the valley could have told you as much. He was weatherworn inside and out, as taut and rugged as the horses he ran wild on the mountain. Dad’s mother worked for the Farm Bureau in town. As an adult, Dad would develop fierce opinions about women working, radical even for our rural Mormon community. “A woman’s place is in the home,” he would say every time he saw a married woman working in town. Now I’m older, I sometimes wonder if Dad’s fervor had more to do with his own mother than with doctrine. I wonder if he just wished that she had been home, so he wouldn’t have been left for all those long hours with Grandpa’s temper. Running the farm consumed Dad’s childhood. I doubt he expected to go to college. Still, the way Mother tells it, back then Dad was bursting with energy, laughter and panache. He drove a baby-blue Volkswagen Beetle, wore outlandish suits cut from colorful fabrics, and showcased a thick, fashionable mustache. They met in town. Faye was waitressing at the bowling alley one Friday night when Gene wandered in with a pack of his friends. She’d never seen him before, so she knew immediately that he wasn’t from town and must have come from the mountains surrounding the valley. Farm life had made Gene different from other young men: he was serious for his age, more physically impressive and independent-minded. There’s a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain, a perception of privacy and isolation, even of dominion. In that vast space you can sail unaccompanied for hours, afloat on pine and brush and rock.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  8 Inspired by Newton’s vision of a universe ruled by immutable laws, they were offended by a God who intervened erratically in nature, working miracles and revealing “mysteries” that were not accessible to our reasoning powers. Voltaire defined Deism in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764). Like Newton, he thought that true religion should be “easy,” its truths clearly discernible, and, above all, it should be tolerant. Would it not be that which taught much morality and very little dogma? That which tended to make men just without making them absurd? That which did not order one to believe in things that are impossible, contradictory, injurious to divinity, and pernicious to mankind, and which dared not menace with eternal punishment anyone possessing common sense? Would it not be that which did not uphold its belief with executioners, and did not inundate the earth with blood on account of unintelligible sophism? Which taught only the worship of one god, justice, tolerance, and humanity? 9 Scarred by the theological wrangling and violence of the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, European Deism was marked by anticlericalism but was by no means averse to religion itself. Deists needed God. As Voltaire famously remarked, if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. The Enlightenment was the culmination of a vision that had been long in the making. It built on Galileo’s mechanistic science, Descartes’ quest for autonomous certainty, and Newton’s cosmic laws, and by the eighteenth century, the philosophes believed that they had acquired a uniform way of assessing the whole of reality. Reason was the only path to truth. The philosophes were convinced that religion, society, history, and the workings of the human mind could all be explained by the regular natural processes discovered by science. But their rational ideology was entirely dependent upon the existence of God. Atheism as we know it today was still intellectually inconceivable. Voltaire regarded it as a “monstrous evil,” but was confident that because scientists had found definitive proofs for God’s existence, there were “fewer atheists today than there have ever been.” 10 For Jefferson, it was impossible that any normally constructed mind could contemplate the design manifest in every atom of the universe and deny the necessity of a supervising power. 11 “If Men so much admire Philosophers, because they discover a small Part of the Wisdom that made all things,” Cotton Mather argued, “they must be stark blind, who do not admire that Wisdom itself.” 12 Science could not explain its findings without God; God was a scientific as well as a theological necessity. Disbelief in God seemed as perverse as refusing to believe in gravity. Giving up God would mean abandoning the only truly persuasive scientific explanation of the world. This emphasis on proof was gradually changing the conception of belief.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  I took him around the office, introduced him to everyone, and he showed a remarkable talent for saying the absolute wrong thing. He met Hayes, who was 330 pounds, and Strasser, who was 320, and Jim Manns, our new CFO, who was a Mounds bar away from 350. Chang made a crack about our “half ton of upper management.” So much heft, he said, at an athletic company? No one laughed. “Maybe it’s your delivery,” I told him, hurrying him along. We went down the hall and bumped into Woodell, whom I’d recently called back from the East Coast. Chang reached down, shook Woodell’s hand. “Skiing accident?” he said. “What?” Woodell said. “When you getting out of that chair?” Chang asked. “Never, you dumb shit.” I sighed. “Well,” I told Chang, “there’s nowhere to go from here but up.” 1980We all gathered in the conference room and Chang gave us his bio. He was born in Shanghai, and raised in opulence. His grandfather was the third-largest soy sauce manufacturer in northern China, and his father had been the third-highest-ranking member of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. When Chang was a teenager, however, the revolution came. The Changs fled to the United States, to Los Angeles, where Chang attended Hollywood High. He often thought he’d go back, and his parents did also. They kept in close touch with friends and family in China, and his mother remained extremely close with Soong Ching-ling, the godmother of the revolution. In the meantime Chang attended Princeton, and studied architecture, and moved to New York. He landed a job at a good architectural firm, where he worked on the Levittown project. Then he set up his own firm. He was making decent money, doing good work, but bored stiff. He wasn’t having any fun, and he didn’t feel he was accomplishing anything real. One day a Princeton friend complained about being unable to get a visa for Shanghai. Chang helped his friend get the visa, and helped him set up appointments with business contacts, and found that he enjoyed it. Being an emissary, a go-between, was a better use of his time and talents. Even with his help, Chang cautioned, getting into China was extremely difficult. The process was laborious. “You can’t just apply for permission to visit China,” he said. “You have to formally request that the Chinese government invite you. Bureaucracy doesn’t begin to describe it.” I closed my eyes and pictured, somewhere on the other side of the world, a Chinese version of the bureau-kraken. I also thought of the ex-GIs who’d explained Japanese business practices to me when I was twenty-four. I’d followed their advice, to the letter, and never regretted it. So, under Chang’s direction, we put together a written presentation. It was long. It was almost as long as Werschkul on American Selling Price, Volume I. We, too, had it bound. Often we asked each other: Is anyone actually going to read this thing?

• From Educated (2018)

  The skin on his lower face had regrown, but it was thin and waxy, as if someone had taken sandpaper and rubbed it to the point of transparency. His ears were thick with scars. He had thin lips and his mouth drooped, giving him the haggard appearance of a much older man. But it was his right hand, more than his face, that drew stares: each finger was frozen in its own pose, some curled, some bowed, twisting together into a gnarled claw. He could hold a spoon by wedging it between his index finger, which bowed upward, and his ring finger, which curved downward, but he ate with difficulty. Still, I wondered whether skin grafts could have achieved what Mother had with her comfrey and lobelia salve. It was a miracle, everyone said, so that was the new name they gave Mother’s recipe: after Dad’s burn it was known as Miracle Salve. At dinner my first night on the peak, Dad described the explosion as a tender mercy from the Lord. “It was a blessing,” he said. “A miracle. God spared my life and extended to me a great calling. To testify of His power. To show people there’s another way besides the Medical Establishment.” I watched as he tried and failed to wedge his knife tightly enough to cut his roast. “I was never in any danger,” he said. “I’ll prove it to you. As soon as I can walk across the yard without near passing out, I’ll get a torch and cut off another tank.” The next morning when I came out for breakfast, there was a crowd of women gathered around my father. They listened with hushed voices and glistening eyes as Dad told of the heavenly visitations he’d received while hovering between life and death. He had been ministered to by angels, he said, like the prophets of old. There was something in the way the women looked at him. Something like adoration. I watched the women throughout the morning and became aware of the change my father’s miracle had wrought in them. Before, the women who worked for my mother had always approached her casually, with matter-of-fact questions about their work. Now their speech was soft, admiring. Dramas broke out between them as they vied for my mother’s esteem, and for my father’s. The change could be summed up simply: before, they had been employees; now they were followers. The story of Dad’s burn had become something of a founding myth: it was told over and over, to newcomers but also to the old. In fact, it was rare to spend an afternoon in the house without hearing some kind of recitation of the miracle, and occasionally these recitations were less than accurate. I heard Mother tell a room of devoted faces that sixty-five percent of Dad’s upper body had been burned to the third degree. That was not what I remembered.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  He even recommends a protein formula for feeding non-breast fed babies —a mixture of boiled barley and corn syrup—stating that he ‘picked it up in Roman days.’ ” Although Hubbard has “an insensate hostility” to psychiatrists and people in the field of mental health, the report noted, he is himself “mentally abnormal,” evincing a “persecution complex” and “an imposing aggregation of symptoms which, in psychiatric circles, are strongly indicative of a condition of paranoid schizophrenia with delusions of grandeur—symptoms common to dictators.” The report led to a ban of Scientology in two Australian states, 3 and prompted similar inquiries in New Zealand, Britain, and South Africa. Hubbard believed that the US Food and Drug Administration, along with the FBI and CIA, were feeding slanderous information about the church to various governments. In the midst of all this upheaval, in February 1966 Hubbard finally declared another “first Clear.” This time it was John McMaster, a dapper, blond South African, in his mid-thirties, who was the director of the Hubbard Guidance Center at the church’s Saint Hill headquarters. Charming, ascetic, and well-spoken, McMaster had dropped out of medical school to become an auditor. He immediately proved to be a far more urbane representative of Scientology than Hubbard. His wry manner made him a welcome guest on talk shows and on the lecture circuit, where he portrayed Scientology as a cool and nonthreatening route to self-realization. Suddenly the idea of going Clear began to catch on. McMaster adopted a clerical outfit that befitted his designation as the church’s unofficial ambassador to the United Nations. At one point, Hubbard designated him Scientology’s first “pope.” It was a matter of puzzlement to Hubbard’s closest associates, given Hubbard’s disparagement of homosexuals in his books, that he would enlist a person to serve as the church’s representative who was obviously gay. “He was very pronounced in his affect,” one of Hubbard’s medical officers remembered. But Hubbard’s relationship to homosexuality was apparently more complicated in life than in theory. CONVINCED THAT the British, American, and Soviet governments were interested in gaining control of Scientology’s secrets in order to use them for evil intentions, Hubbard began looking for a safe harbor—ideally, a country that he could rule over. England had taken steps to “curb the growth” of Scientology, and Hubbard took the hint. He also suffered from the damp weather. “I had been ill with pneumonia for the third time in England and on the suggestion of my doctor was seeking a warmer climate for a short while in order to recover,” he said, in an unprompted explanation to the CIA.

• From Educated (2018)

  “Until he calms down,” Shawn answered. Five miles later, they let him pass. The trip lasted about a week, then we told Tony to find us a load to Idaho. “Well, Siddle Lister,” Shawn said when we pulled into the junkyard, “back three work.” —THE WORM CREEK OPERA HOUSE announced a new play: Carousel . Shawn drove me to the audition, then surprised me by auditioning himself. Charles was also there, talking to a girl named Sadie, who was seventeen. She nodded at what Charles was saying, but her eyes were fixed on Shawn. At the first rehearsal she came and sat next to him, laying her hand on his arm, laughing and tossing her hair. She was very pretty, with soft, full lips and large dark eyes, but when I asked Shawn if he liked her, he said he didn’t. “She’s got fish eyes,” he said. “Fish eyes?” “Yup, fish eyes. They’re dead stupid, fish. They’re beautiful, but their heads’re as empty as a tire.” Sadie started dropping by the junkyard around quitting time, usually with a milkshake for Shawn, or cookies or cake. Shawn hardly even spoke to her, just grabbed whatever she’d brought him and kept walking toward the corral. She would follow and try to talk to him while he fussed over his horses, until one evening she asked if he would teach her to ride. I tried to explain that our horses weren’t broke all the way, but she was determined, so Shawn put her on Apollo and the three of us headed up the mountain. Shawn ignored her and Apollo. He offered none of the help he’d given me, teaching me how to stand in the stirrups while going down steep ravines or how to squeeze my thighs when the horse leapt over a branch. Sadie trembled for the entire ride, but she pretended to be enjoying herself, restoring her lipsticked smile every time he glanced in her direction. At the next rehearsal, Charles asked Sadie about a scene, and Shawn saw them talking. Sadie came over a few minutes later but Shawn wouldn’t speak to her. He turned his back and she left crying. “What’s that about?” I said. “Nothing,” he said. By the next rehearsal, a few days later, Shawn seemed to have forgotten it. Sadie approached him warily, but he smiled at her, and a few minutes later they were talking and laughing. Shawn asked her to cross the street and buy him a Snickers at the dime store. She seemed pleased that he would ask and hurried out the door, but when she returned a few minutes later and gave him the bar, he said, “What is this shit? I asked for a Milky Way.” “You didn’t,” she said. “You said Snickers.” “I want a Milky Way.” Sadie left again and fetched the Milky Way. She handed it to him with a nervous laugh, and Shawn said, “Where’s my Snickers?

• From Educated (2018)

  What, you forgot again?” “You didn’t want it!” she said, her eyes shining like glass. “I gave it to Charles!” “Go get it.” “I’ll buy you another.” “No,” Shawn said, his eyes cold. His baby teeth, which usually gave him an impish, playful appearance, now made him seem unpredictable, volatile. “I want that one. Get it, or don’t come back.” A tear slid down Sadie’s cheek, smearing her mascara. She paused for a moment to wipe it away and pull up her smile. Then she walked over to Charles and, laughing as if it were nothing, asked if she could have the Snickers. He reached into his pocket and pulled it out, then watched her walk back to Shawn. Sadie placed the Snickers in his palm like a peace offering and waited, staring at the carpet. Shawn pulled her onto his lap and ate the bar in three bites. “You have lovely eyes,” he said. “Just like a fish.” —SADIE’S PARENTS WERE DIVORCING and the town was awash in rumors about her father. When Mother heard the rumors, she said now it made sense why Shawn had taken an interest in Sadie. “He’s always protected angels with broken wings,” she said. Shawn found out Sadie’s class schedule and memorized it. He made a point of driving to the high school several times a day, particularly at those times when he knew she’d be moving between buildings. He’d pull over on the highway and watch her from a distance, too far for her to come over, but not so far that she wouldn’t see him. It was something we did together, he and I, nearly every time we went to town, and sometimes when we didn’t need to go to town at all. Until one day, when Sadie appeared on the steps of the high school with Charles. They were laughing together; Sadie hadn’t noticed Shawn’s truck. I watched his face harden, then relax. He smiled at me. “I have the perfect punishment,” he said. “I simply won’t see her. All I have to do is not see her, and she will suffer.” He was right. When he didn’t return her calls, Sadie became desperate. She told the boys at school not to walk with her, for fear Shawn would see, and when Shawn said he disliked one of her friends, she stopped seeing them. Sadie came to our house every day after school, and I watched the Snickers incident play out over and over, in different forms, with different objects. Shawn would ask for a glass of water. When Sadie brought it, he’d want ice. When she brought that he’d ask for milk, then water again, ice, no ice, then juice. This could go on for thirty minutes before, in a final test, he would ask for something we didn’t have. Then Sadie would drive to town to buy it—vanilla ice cream, fries, a burrito—only to have him demand something else the moment she got back.