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.

Page 32 of 253 · 20 per page

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  All of Wayne’s greatest hits involved valiant white men battling (and usually subduing) nonwhite populations—the Japanese, Native Americans, or Mexicans. Like Teddy Roosevelt, Wayne’s rugged masculinity was realized through violence, and it was a distinctly white male ideal. This was not lost on his fans. In 1977, on the occasion of Wayne’s seventieth birthday, an article in the conservative journal Human Events attempted to explain Wayne’s allure, and the racialized portrait of Wayne is revealing: Wayne was a “basic American breed,” a “tall Celt” of “pioneer Scots, Irish and English stock.” In films like The Searchers , Wayne plays unapologetically racist characters; in others, the racial politics are more subtle. His own views on race were conventional among conservatives, but still appalling. In a 1971 interview in Playboy , Wayne was particularly harsh in his assessment of “the blacks”—“or colored, or whatever they want to call themselves: they certainly aren’t Caucasian”: With a lot of blacks, there’s quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightly so. But we can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people. As far as African American representation in his own films, Wayne asserted that he’d given “the blacks their proper position”—he had “a black slave in The Alamo ,” and he had “a correct number of blacks in The Green Berets .” His views on Native Americans were no more enlightened: “I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from [the Native Americans]. . . . Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival.” People needed land “and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”47 Nor did Wayne feel a need to apologize for America’s actions overseas. He downplayed “the so-called My Lai massacre” and instead highlighted atrocities committed against “our people” by the Vietcong. With all the terrible things happening all over the world, he saw no reason “one little incident in the United States Army” should cause such uproar. And he took great pride in the inspiration servicemen drew from his portrayal of Sergeant Stryker in Sands of Iwo Jima . General MacArthur himself told Wayne that he represented “the American Serviceman better than the American Serviceman himself.”48 Onscreen and off, Wayne epitomized an old-fashioned, retrograde masculinity, and one increasingly understood in politicized terms. A staunch proponent of “law and order,” Wayne had no time for “cowards who spit in the faces of the police,” for “judicial sob sisters,” for people who advocated for criminals without thought for the innocent victim. He was similarly dismissive of student protestors. “There doesn’t seem to be respect for authority anymore,” he opined.

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

  Blessed who did not make me a boor.’ [18] * The skewing of Classical society towards male privilege naturally expressed itself in conventions of sexual behaviour. The prime criterion was who should take the initiative in sex. To penetrate was a right and privilege, indicating superior social status. It was enjoyed by adult free-born males: citizens, householders. Those penetrated might be women, teenage boys, or slaves of either gender. Conventionally there were controls on abusing male sexual privilege. Since a basic criterion of full maleness was self-mastery, that distinguished a man from all those available for his active sexual initiative and laid responsibilities on him. The struggle to control the passions and avoid excess included the fight against temptation to excessive penetrative sexual pleasure: this was a fight as ‘manful’ as any exploit on the battlefield. [19] All this was a matter not so much of morality as of honour. The self-aware Greek or Roman householder must preserve himself from the multiple threats to his bundle of masculinities – a constant neurosis, needing vindication against the competitive scrutiny of other men. One symptom of this, remote from modern social taboos, was a deep horror of dishonourable indulgence in fellatio or cunnilingus, which was particularly pronounced in Roman society. These practices represented the ultimate denial of the male prerogative of penetration. The Roman satirist Martial even claimed that some who indulged in such perversion tried to disguise it by masquerading under the lesser stigma of being passive males in intercourse. [20] That indicates the general nervousness that clung to Classical society’s permissible expression of same-sex relations: a major issue for the future of Christianity. Research over an extraordinarily wide range of periods has converged on identifying a particular cultural form of same-sex behaviour in societies around the Mediterranean and the Middle East: a structurally unequal sexual partnership between older and younger males. Examples of this sexual system have been detected from the Bronze Age down to the nineteenth century CE , going forward from the Classical era to encompass both Christian and Islamic societies. [21] Although strikingly persistent, the custom has met with very different degrees of social acceptance or rejection. Historically most Christian regimes have reacted with denial or repression; at the opposite end of the spectrum lies its acceptance and institutionalization in ancient Greece and Rome. In the developed democracy of Classical Greece, the educational value of an intense and often sexual relationship between a young man and an older and wiser citizen was as much part of the preparation for active political life as was the cultivation of drama and philosophy. Teenage boys were not yet fully males, as Aristotle observed in passing when he asserted (wrongly) that their sperm remains sterile till the age of twenty-one, after which time fully functioning men go on increasing in vigour, in sperm as in much else. [22] There was no biological justification for Aristotle’s statement; it was about the politics of democracy.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  But if you’re not performing, we’re going to put you on a plan.” Being put on a plan is the first step toward getting fired. Most people who get put on a plan don’t recover. It’s really a way to give you a few weeks to find another job. It seems to me that the problem is not that HubSpot’s salespeople aren’t working hard enough. The problem is that (a) HubSpot’s software isn’t that good and that (b) the way we sell it is inefficient. Despite all its rhetoric about reinventing how products are sold, HubSpot itself relies on an old-fashioned business model based on brute-force lead-generation tactics. We’re working too hard and getting too little back for it. Generating tens of thousands of new leads every month is ridiculous in and of itself; by definition most of those leads are shitty and worthless. The sales department tries to winnow out the best 20 percent and focus on those, but that still means the sales department is trying to chase ten thousand leads every month. “Boiling the ocean” is the business cliché for the way HubSpot hunts for new customers, and it’s only one problem. Another is that our software isn’t very intuitive, and people can’t figure out how to use the programs on their own. So we have to assign consultants to teach new customers how to use the product. This is all incredibly labor-intensive, and that effort is reflected in the amount we spend to acquire each new customer. This metric is called customer acquisition cost, or CAC, and HubSpot’s is soaring. The numbers are going in the wrong direction. The irony of this is that we tout our software as a modern miracle that lets companies attract new customers and grow faster, while spending less. Our sales pitch is basically Jack and the Beanstalk: Buy our magic software, and your business grows to the sky. You’ll get more customers, and save money. That’s what we tell people. But we use our software. Our business is built on top of our software. We “eat our own dog food,” as they say in the tech industry—or, as Cranium likes to put it, “We drink our own Champagne.” If our software really does what we claim, why are we working so hard to find new customers? Why do we need an army of sales reps and an army of marketers and an army of consultants? For that matter, why, after seven years in business, does HubSpot still not make a profit? Why does it cost us more to make, sell, and deliver our software than customers will pay to use it? Isn’t HubSpot itself the ultimate test case of how well its own software works, and doesn’t our own financial performance raise questions about the efficacy of our software? Halligan tells us that he plans to boost spending on research and development.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Was there nothing to be proud of in the last twenty-five years of American history? For her part, Cindy McCain was quick to assert that she had always been proud of her country.2 For Barack Obama, it was a controversy involving his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, that threatened to derail his campaign. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, Wright had reminded Americans that their country had displaced Native Americans by way of “terror,” had bombed Grenada, Panama, Libya, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and had supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and in South Africa. Quoting Malcolm X, he warned that “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” A 2003 sermon also came to light in which Wright uttered the memorable phrase “God damn America”—a phrase he qualified by adding, “as long as she keeps trying to act like she is God and she is supreme!” That sermon was a tirade against militarization, against those “blinded by a culture of war.” War, the military, colonization, occupation, regime change—none of these things would bring peace, Wright insisted. They would only bring more violence. Wright critiqued the “few Muslims” who called for jihad, but he also criticized Christians calling for “crusade,” Christians who condoned the killing of civilians, collateral damage, “shock and awe” tactics, preemptive strikes, and the unilateral takeover of another nation while secure in the notion that the ends justified the means, that God would bless their efforts. Wright, too, condemned the nation’s legacy of racism, the lie that all men were created equal when it only really applied to white men. And he called out more recent lies, like those orchestrated by Oliver North, and the false pretenses used to justify the Iraq War: “This government lied in its founding documents and the government is still lying today.” To white evangelicals steeped in Christian nationalism, this was blasphemy.3 To quell the controversy, Obama gave one of the most powerful speeches of his political career. He professed his “unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people” even as he acknowledged the Constitution’s unfinished work, the need to extend liberty and justice to all people. He criticized his pastor’s “incendiary language” that denigrated “both the greatness and the goodness of our nation,” and he denounced “the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.” Yet he insisted that there was more to Wright than such rhetoric suggested; his church contained “in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America,” and he could no more disown Reverend Wright than he could disown the black community, or his white grandmother. “These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.” Obama’s avowal of love for country was enough for many Americans, but not for most evangelicals.4 Within the evangelical community, Dobson emerged as Obama’s fiercest critic.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Because these notions were instinctive, self-evident, and accessible to the meanest intelligence, the rituals and guidance of a church were entirely unnecessary. 111 These “truths” would, however, seem strange indeed to Buddhists, Hindus, Confucians, or Daoists, and many Jews, Christians, and Muslims would also find them bleakly unrepresentative of their faith. Herbert was convinced that “all men will be unanimously eager for this austere worship of God,” and since everybody would agree on “these natural tokens of faith,” it was the key to peace; “insolent spirits” who refused to accept them must be punished by the secular magistracy. 112 Emphasis on the “natural,” “normal,” and “innate” character of these core ideas implied that those who did not discover them in their minds were in some way unnatural and abnormal: a dark current was emerging in early modern thought. This extreme privatization of faith, therefore, had the potential to become as divisive, coercive, and intolerant as the so-called religious passions it was trying to abolish. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) also saw state control of the church as essential to peace and wanted a strong monarch to take over the church and enforce religious unity. A committed royalist, he wrote his classic Leviathan (1651) in exile in Paris after the English Civil War. The disruptive forces of religion, Hobbes argued, must be curbed as effectively as God had subdued Leviathan, the biblical chaos-monster, to create an ordered universe. Hobbes was adamant that pointless squabbling about irrational dogmas had been entirely responsible for the Wars of Religion. Not everybody shared this view, however. In Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), the English political theorist James Harrington discussed the economic and legal issues that had contributed to these conflicts, but Hobbes would have none of it. The preachers alone, he insisted, had been “the cause of all our late mischief” by leading the people astray with “disreputable doctrines.” The Presbyterian divines, he believed, had been particularly culpable in stirring up unruly passions before the English Civil War and were “therefore guilty of all that fell.” 113 Hobbes’s solution was to create an absolute state that would crush the tendency of human beings to cling obstinately to their own beliefs, which doomed them to perpetual warfare. Instead, they must learn to recognize the frailty of our grasp on truth, enter into a contractual relationship with one another, elect an absolute monarch, and accept his ideas as their own. 114 This ruler would control the clergy in such a way as to prevent even the possibility of sectarian conflict.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Caner saw himself as part of “a new generation of new evangelists who are provocative, cultural and yet conservative”—a generation who would “sit in the back of the bus no more.” He gained a reputation for his “sometimes politically incorrect style.” Speaking before predominantly white evangelical audiences, Caner was known to mock black Christians and make fun of Mexicans—they were good for roofing and lawn care. Under Caner’s dynamic leadership, seminary enrollment tripled. The Caner brand of Islamophobia continued to sell, and the brothers became among the most sought-after speakers on the evangelical circuit. Televangelist John Ankerberg promoted Caner’s teachings across his media empire, reaching an estimated 147 million viewers along with millions more through his global radio and online presence. Booked years out at evangelical churches and schools, the Caners were also invited to speak to law enforcement and active-duty military.7 The more Caner spoke, the more he embellished his story, spinning yarns of growing up in Turkey and being trained as a jihadist intent on destroying Christian civilization. Eventually Caner’s tales started to catch up with him. Muslim and Christian bloggers began to dispute many of his claims. He hadn’t grown up in Turkey, but rather had been born in Sweden and at age three moved to Ohio. After his parents’ divorce he was raised by his Swedish Lutheran mother. He’d never been involved in Islamic jihad, he hadn’t bravely debated dozens of Muslims, and his thick Middle Eastern accent was a sham. Moreover, he got basic facts wrong about Islam. In the spring of 2010, Liberty University investigated allegations against Caner but declined to take action; Liberty’s board concluded that he’d “done nothing theologically inappropriate.” Not about to let facts get in the way of a greater truth, Focus on the Family decided to rerun a 2001 interview with Caner in which he had put forward many of the now-disputed claims. Critics, however, refused to back down, and in the summer of 2010 Liberty bowed to pressure and demoted Caner, though he would stay on as professor. Even then, they attributed the move to “discrepancies related to matters such as dates, names and places of residence,” hardly the full-throated censure critics were demanding.8 The Caner brothers weren’t the only “self-proclaimed former Islamic terrorists” making the rounds on the evangelical speaking circuit in the wake of 9/11. Together, Walid Shoebat, Zachariah Anani, and Kamal Saleem formed their own “traveling anti-Muslim sideshow.” Shoebat, a Palestinian American evangelical convert, claimed to have been a member of the PLO and to have bombed an Israeli bank. Anani, a Lebanese-born Canadian, claimed to have joined a militia at the age of thirteen, “trained to become a black belt and an expert with daggers and knives,” and to have killed hundreds of people before meeting a Southern Baptist missionary and getting saved.

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

  Independent of the Cathari and yet sharing some of their views and uniting with them in protest against the abuses of the established Church, were Peter de Bruys, Henry of Lausanne, and other leaders. Peter and Henry exercised their influence in Southern France. Tanchelm and Eudo preached in Flanders and Brittany. At least three of them died in prison or otherwise suffered death by violence. Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter the Venerable, Otto of Freising, and other contemporary Catholic writers are very severe upon them and speak contemptuously of their followers as drawn from the ignorant classes. Tanchelm, a layman, preached in the diocese of Cologne and westwards to Antwerp and Utrecht. There was at the time only a single priest in Antwerp, and he living in concubinage. Tanchelm pronounced the sacraments of no avail when performed by a priest of immoral life and is said to have turned "very many from the faith and the sacraments."1017 He surrounded himself with an armed retinue and went through the country carrying a sword and preceded by a flag. Success turned his head. According to his contemporary, Abaelard, he gave himself out to be the Son of God.1018 He went through the public ceremony of marrying the Virgin Mary, with her portrait before him. The people are said by Norbert’s biographer to have drunk the water Tanchelm washed in. He was imprisoned by the archbishop of Cologne, made his escape, and was killed by a priest, 1115. His preaching provoked the settlement of twelve Premonstrants in Antwerp, and Norbert himself preached in the Netherlands, 1124. The movement in Brittany was led by Eudo de l’Etoile, who also pretended to be the Son of God. He was one of the sect of the Apostolicals, a name given to heretical groups in France and Belgium whose members refused flesh and repudiated marriage and other sacraments.1019 Eudo died in prison about 1148. The movement led by Peter de Bruys and Henry of Lausanne was far more substantial. Both leaders were men of sound sense and ability. Of the personal fortunes of Peter, nothing more is known than that he was a priest, appeared as a reformer about 1105 in Southern France, and was burnt to death, 1126. Peter the Venerable has given us a tolerably satisfactory account of his teachings and their effect.1020

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

  The class rooms in canon and civil jurisprudence at Bologna became synonymous with traditional opinions. There was no encouragement of originality. With the interpretation of the text-books, which had been handed down, the work of the professor was at an end. This conservatism Dante may have had in mind when he made the complaint that in Bologna only the Decretals were studied. And Roger Bacon exclaimed that "the study of jurisprudence has for forty years destroyed the study of wisdom [that is philosophy, the sciences, and theology], yes, the church itself and all departments."1280 When the Renaissance came, it did not start with Bologna or any of the other Italian universities but in the courts of princes and popes and especially in the city of Florence. The universities produced no Savonarola and encouraged no religious or doctrinal reform. Note. – An account of the brilliant celebration of the eighth centenary of Bologna, 1888, is given by Philip Schaff: The University, etc., in Lit. and Poetry, pp. 265–278. On that occasion Dr. Schaff represented the University of New York. The exercises were honored by the presence of Humbert and the queen of Italy. The ill-fated Frederick III. of Germany sent from his sick-room a letter of congratulation, as in some sense the heir of Frederick Barbarossa. The clergy were conspicuous by their absence from the celebration, although among the visitors was Father Gavazzi, the ex-Barnabite friar, who in 1848 fired the hearts of his fellow-citizens, the Bolognese, for the cause of Italian liberty and unity and afterwards became the eloquent advocate of a new evangelical movement for his native land, abroad as well as at home. A contrast was presented at the five hundredth anniversary of the University of Heidelberg, 1886, which Dr. Schaff also attended, and which was inaugurated by a solemn religious service and sermon. § 92. The University of Paris. Literature: The works of Bulaeus, Denifle, Rashdall, etc., as given in § 90. Vol. I. of the Chartularium gives the official documents bearing on the history of the Univ. from 1200–1286 with an Introd. by Denifle.—Crevier: Hist. de l’Univ. de Paris, 7 vols. Paris, 1761, based on Bulaeus.—P. Feret: La Faculté de Theol. de Paris et ses docteurs les plus celèbres au moyen âge, 5 vols. Paris, 1894 sqq.—A. Luchaire: L’univ. de Paris sous Phil. Auguste, Paris, 1899.—C. Gross: The Polit. Infl. of the Univ. of Paris in the M. A., in Am. Hist. Rev., 1901, pp. 440–446.—H. Felder: Gesch. der wissenschaftl. Studien im Franziskanerorden bis c. 1250, Freib., 1904.—F. X. Seppelt: D. Kampf d. Bettelorden an d. Univ. zu Paris in d. Mitte d. 13ten Jahrh., Breslau, 1905.—Rashdall: Universities, I. 270–557, and the table of Lit. there given.

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

  To the pope’s question whether Gilbert believed that the highest essence, by virtue of which, as he asserted, each of the three persons of the Trinity was God, was itself God, Gilbert replied in the negative.1394 Gilbert won the assembly by his thorough acquaintance with the Fathers. The charge was declared unproven and Gilbert was enjoined to correct the questionable statements in the light of the fourth proposition brought in by Bernard. The accused continued to administer his see till his death. Otto of Freising concludes his account by saying, that either Bernard was deceived as to the nature of Gilbert’s teaching as David was deceived by Mephibosheth, 2 Sam. 9:19 sqq., or that Gilbert covered up his real meaning by an adroit use of words to escape the judgment of the Church. With reference to his habit of confusing wisdom with words Walter of St. Victor called Gilbert one of the four labyrinths of France. John of Salisbury, about 1115–1180, was the chief literary figure and scholar among the Englishmen of the twelfth century, and exhibits in his works the practical tendency of the later English philosophy.1395 He was born at Salisbury and of plebeian origin. He spent ten or twelve years in "divers studies" on the Continent, sat at the feet of Abaelard on Mt. Genevieve, 1136, and heard Gilbert of Poictiers, William of Conches, Robert Pullen, and other renowned teachers. A full account of the years spent in study is given in his Metalogicus. Returning to England, he stood in a confidential relation to archbishop Theobald. At a later time he espoused Becket’s cause and was present in the cathedral when the archbishop was murdered. He had urged the archbishop not to enter his church. In 1176 he was made bishop of Chartres. He says he crossed the Alps no less than ten times on ecclesiastical business. By his reminiscences and miscellanies, John contributed, as few men did, to our knowledge of the age in which he lived. He had the instincts of a Humanist, and, had he lived several centuries later, would probably have been in full sympathy with the Renaissance. His chief works are the Metalogicus, the Polycraticus, and the Historia pontificalis. The Polycraticus is a treatise on the principles of government and philosophy, written for the purpose of drawing attention away from the trifling disputes and occupations of the world to a consideration of the Church and the proper uses of life.1396 He fortified his positions by quotations from the Scriptures and classical writers, and shows that the Church is the true conservator of morality and the defender of justice in the State. He was one of the best-read men of his age in the classics.1397

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  The real story is about two founders and a handful of investors who are about to extract more than $1 billion from the public markets, and how they pulled it off. It seems to me that HubSpot is not a software company so much as it is a financial instrument, a vehicle by which money can be moved from one set of hands to another. Halligan and Shah have assembled a low-cost workforce that can crank out hype and generate revenue. HubSpot doesn’t turn a profit, but that’s not necessary. All Halligan and Shah have to do is keep sales growing, and keep telling a good story, using words like delightion, disruption, and transformation, and stay in business long enough for their investors to cash out. Twelve The New Work: Employees as Widgets It turns out I’ve been naïve. I’ve spent twenty-five years writing about technology companies, and I thought I understood this industry. But at HubSpot I’m discovering that a lot of what I believed was wrong. I thought, for example, that tech companies began with great inventions—an amazing gadget, a brilliant piece of software. At Apple Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built a personal computer; at Microsoft Bill Gates and Paul Allen developed programming languages and then an operating system; Sergey Brin and Larry Page created the Google search engine. Engineering came first, and sales came later. That’s how I thought things worked. But HubSpot did the opposite. HubSpot’s first hires included a head of sales and a head of marketing. Halligan and Dharmesh filled these positions even though they had no product to sell and didn’t even know what product they were going to make. HubSpot started out as a sales operation in search of a product. Another thing I’m learning in my new job is that while people still refer to this business as “the tech industry,” in truth it is no longer really about technology at all. “You don’t get rewarded for creating great technology, not anymore,” says a friend of mine who has worked in tech since the 1980s, a former investment banker who now advises start-ups. “It’s all about the business model. The market pays you to have a company that scales quickly. It’s all about getting big fast. Don’t be profitable, just get big.” That’s what HubSpot is doing. Its technology isn’t very impressive, but look at that revenue growth! That’s why venture capitalists have sunk so much money into HubSpot, and why they believe HubSpot will have a successful IPO. That’s also why HubSpot hires so many young people. That’s what investors want to see: a bunch of young people, having a blast, talking about changing the world. It sells. Another reason to hire young people is that they’re cheap. HubSpot runs at a loss, but it is labor-intensive.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  13 When they defected from the Canaanite city-states, Israelites had developed an ideology that directly countered the systemic violence of agrarian society. Israel must not be “like the other nations.” Their hostility to “Canaanites” was, therefore, every bit as much political as it was religious. 14 The settlers seem to have devised laws to ensure that instead of being appropriated by an aristocracy, land remained in the possession of the extended family; that interest-free loans to needy Israelites were obligatory; that wages were paid promptly; that contract servitude was restricted; and that there was special provision for the socially vulnerable—orphans, widows, and foreigners. 15 Later, Jews, Christians, and Muslims would all make the biblical god a symbol of absolute transcendence, similar to Brahman or Nirvana. 16 In the Pentateuch, however, Yahweh is a war god, not unlike Indra or Marduk but with one important difference. Like Indra, Yahweh had once fought chaos dragons to order the universe, notably a sea monster called Leviathan, 17 but in the Pentateuch he fights earthly empires to establish a people rather than a cosmos. Moreover, Yahweh is the intransigent enemy of agrarian civilization. The story of the tower of Babel is a thinly veiled critique of Babylon. 18 Intoxicated by fantasies of world conquest, its rulers were determined that the whole of humanity live in a single state with a common language; they believed that their ziggurat could reach heaven itself. Incensed by this imperial hubris, Yahweh reduced the entire political edifice to “confusion” ( babel ). 19 Immediately after this incident, he ordered Abraham to leave Ur, at this date one of the most important Mesopotamian city-states. 20 Yahweh insisted that the three patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—exchange the stratified tyranny of urban living for the freedom and equality of the herdsman’s life. But the plan was flawed: again and again the land that Yahweh had selected for the patriarchs failed to sustain them. 21 This was the Hebrew dilemma: Yahweh insisted that his people abandon the agrarian state, but time and again they found that they could not live without it. 22 To escape starvation, Abraham had to take temporary refuge in Egypt. 23 His son Isaac had to abandon pastoral life and take up farming during a famine but became so successful that he was attacked by predatory neighboring kings. 24 Finally, when “famine had grown severe throughout the world,” Jacob was forced to send ten of his sons to Egypt to buy grain. To their astonishment, they met their long-lost brother Joseph in Pharaoh’s court. 25 As a boy, Joseph—Jacob’s favorite son—had dreams of agrarian tyranny that he foolishly described to his brothers: “We were binding sheaves in the countryside, and my sheaf, it seemed, stood upright; then I saw your sheaves gather round and bow to my sheaf.”

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

  There was therefore no difference in merit or status between baptized virgins, widows or married women; despite anyone’s misuse of the Parable of the Sower, one condition did not automatically yield a better harvest than the other. Jovinian compared decisions for marriage or for celibacy with another basic Christian custom, fasting: commendable though fasting might be, there was no difference in the eyes of God between abstaining from food and enjoying it with devout thanks for divine providence. [2] Where Jovinian was most theologically vulnerable was in rejecting a doctrine that with some justice he regarded as eccentric, the perpetual virginity of Mary, especially when it was made a springboard for viewing virginity as superior to marriage. As a result he made enemies of three clerical leaders – Jerome, Bishop Ambrose and Pope Siricius – who could unite in fury on this, despite considerable other disagreements and mutual animosities. Jerome had already bitterly attacked another writer, Helvidius, whose work like Jovinian’s is only preserved through Jerome’s reproduction of it, framed by abuse that cannot be dignified by calling it argument. Helvidius pointed in common-sense fashion to the New Testament’s evidence of Jesus’s brothers and sisters. They witnessed that Mary had at least not remained a virgin after the birth of Jesus, and so she had a normal married life; thus, she honoured all married life as part of God’s creation. In opposing Helvidius and Jovinian, Jerome forged an increasingly extreme polemic against sex within marriage, let alone outside it. [3] From Jerome’s treatises and many letters, even in some measure in phrases of his supreme achievement, the ‘Vulgate’ version of the Latin Bible, there emerges a tangle of personal loathings coupled with fascinations: notably about the nauseating physicality of marital sex and the general physicality of women (who are also among his closest correspondents). One attentive modern reading of his Vulgate admires the care and accuracy of his translation of ancient Semitic texts, with one exception: irregularities and mistranslations cluster round passages relating to women. [4] Jerome’s tirades against women marshal previous misogynist rants right back to pre-Christian antiquity, notably those of Aristotle’s philosopher-colleague in Athens Theophrastus, who was mostly known thereafter because Jerome quoted him. Jerome’s literary war-chest for denigrating women echoed down the centuries; in fourteenth- century England the poet Geoffrey Chaucer made fun of it in his Canterbury Tales, ventriloquizing his satire via the splendid fiction of the Wife of Bath, a much-married lady whom Jerome would have detested. [5] Jerome was also one of the chief conduits to a later age of that unpleasant remark imported from the Pythagoreans into Christianity, that a man who loves his wife excessively is an adulterer. Jerome particularly hated the prospect of widows entering a second marriage, especially women in his intimate circle – second marriage had always been a controversial matter in Christianity (above, Chapter 6).

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

  At the end of the tenth century, the English Benedictine monk Ælfric was still lovingly retelling by then venerable tales of Julian/Basilissa, Cecilia/Valerian and Chrysanthus/Daria in his major cycle of Lives of the saints in Latin and Anglo-Saxon; the English were also very fond of the seventh-century local heroine Æthelthryth (Etheldreda), who had sabotaged the marital expectations of two successive royal husbands by her flinty choice of chastity (below, Chapter 11). [38] From the twelfth century, Western Christians began to have second thoughts, as we will discover, but Eastern Christians remained much more

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

  from a long-vanished deviant group in the first Christian centuries, but for many years it has been taken as a clue linking twelfth- and thirteenth-century Cathars to various recurrent forms of dualist belief in the Greek East, represented by ‘Paulicians’, a presence in the Byzantine Empire since the eighth century and, later, ‘Bogomils’ in the Balkans. So one way of accounting for a ‘Cathar’ presence in the Gregorian Church was to see a westward infiltration of dualist heresy encouraged by the upheavals of the Crusades. Certainly, contemporaries made this connection with the East: the English word ‘bugger’ and its French cognate are derived from ‘Bulgarian’, and reflect the usual canard of mainstream Christians against their opponents as far back as the New Testament that heresy, by its essentially unnatural character, leads to deviant sexuality. [7] The Catholic Church identified Catharism in different settings in France and Italy. Cathar condemnations of the material world included the newly defined clerical hierarchy, with its all-too-material power and wealth. Over time, Cathars developed their own celibate hierarchy of ‘the Perfect’ – mostly male, and exclusively so at higher levels of authority and activity; female Perfectae were more like the nuns of Catholic Christianity. [8] The Church’s defence against Cathar heresy turned to aggression and, from the late twelfth century, to a new Crusading enterprise – an ‘Albigensian Crusade’ (the city of Albi in south-west France was a Cathar centre, with its own Cathar leadership). This was not the Western Church’s finest hour; the Crusade became a two- decade war of conquest in southern France on behalf of the French king and northern European nobility. Mass burnings at the stake were a regular feature of the Crusaders’ retribution against their enemies, who were by no means all identified as Cathars. This warfare was also the first significant laboratory for ‘inquisitions’: from the end of the twelfth century, a new institution of ecclesiastical enquiry and discipline authorized by the Catholic Church. Inquisitions with various regional jurisdictions remained a constant part of the Church’s structure of regulation throughout European society into the eighteenth century. Their residual formal presence still endures in Roman Catholic bureaucracy under another name, as the Vatican’s ‘Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’. The new Orders of friars, now the Western Church’s leading intellectuals, were prominent among inquisitors, particularly the Dominicans. [9] Rich evidence on ‘Catharism’ survives, as inquisitions built up detailed records of their examinations of suspects. From the early fourteenth century comes an exceptional example: investigations by an inquisitor who later became Pope Benedict XII into a community in the Pyrenees called Montaillou. These are so informative that they have become the basis for a classic modern microstudy of medieval society.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  You get Whitney Wolfe, the female co-founder of Tinder, suing the company for sexual harassment, claiming she endured months of harassment in a frat-house culture where she was subjected to racist, sexist, homophobic, misogynistic and insulting texts, including one calling Wolfe a “whore.” (The lawsuit was settled.) You end up with GitHub, a tiny start-up, raising $100 million and using the money to create a replica of the Oval Office, and Tom Preston-Werner, the president of GitHub, resigning after a female employee complains about sexual harassment and retaliation. You get Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel, age twenty- three, raising $850 million and needing to explain emails he sent in college urging his frat brothers to “have some girl put your large kappa sigma dick down her throat.” Along with personal misbehavior there have been allegations of misbehavior at the corporate level. Facebook was accused of invading people’s privacy and made a settlement (admitting no wrongdoing) with the FTC. Path was caught using people’s personal information without their permission, and apologized. Zynga forced some employees to give back stock options just before the IPO. Apple has been criticized for using complex accounting structures to avoid paying taxes in the United States, for exploiting underpaid workers in China, and for colluding with Google to prevent poaching employees; in the collusion case the two companies settled with workers who were suing for lost wages. An Uber executive reportedly threatened to spy on journalists. Groupon’s initial IPO paperwork used misleading financial metrics that the Wall Street Journal called “financial voodoo,” and which the SEC forced them to change. In 2012 Groupon had to restate its financial results after under-reporting its losses, attributing the mistake to “material weakness in its controls.” The two co-founders of Secret, a mobile app maker, raised a $25 million round of funding, put $6 million into their pockets, then nine months later shut down the company. “It’s like a bank heist,” one of their pissed-off investors said. (The investor later walked back that comment, saying it was a “poor choice of words.”) Start-ups seem to believe it is okay for them to bend rules. Some, like Uber and Airbnb, have built their businesses by defying regulations. Then again, if laws are stupid, why follow them? In the World According to Start-ups, when tech companies cut corners it is for the greater good. These start-up founders are not like Gordon Gekko or Bernie Madoff, driven by greed and avarice; they are Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., engaging in civil disobedience. There’s also a sense among start-ups that it’s okay for them to break the rules because they’re underdogs competing against huge opponents; they’re David, firing his slingshot at Goliath. Another argument is that the big guys break just as many rules as the little guys. Everybody cheats, and only suckers drive inside the lines.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  If she seemed superfluous, it was only because what she was saying had become the lingua franca among American conservatives.25 Chapter 4 [image file=Image00000.jpg] DISCIPLINE AND COMMANDP OSTWAR EVANGELICALISM CONSISTED OF A collection of diverse traditions and overlapping markets. Celebrities like Billy Graham, Marabel Morgan, and Anita Bryant represented the more outwardly focused, culturally engaged brand of modern evangelicalism, but within the larger movement there existed a more reclusive fundamentalist strand that remained largely invisible to the broader public. On questions of masculine authority, however, the two strands would find significant common ground. In the 1970s, this convergence was illustrated by two figures. One would become a widely recognized evangelical leader who would wield significant power at the national level for nearly half a century. The other would remain unknown outside of evangelicalism. Together, they would facilitate the alliance of separatist and “respectable” evangelicals around the assertion of patriarchal power, an alliance that would form the basis of a common cultural and political identity. BILL GOTHARD IS A NAME unfamiliar to those outside of conservative evangelical circles, and within those circles his name is likely to provoke conflicting reactions, including not a few straight-up denunciations. Gothard got his start in 1961 by founding Campus Teams, an organization that aimed to address the problems of “wayward youth.” Inspired by research he had conducted for his master’s thesis in Christian education at Wheaton College, Gothard sought to apply Christian principles to solving conflicts between parents and teens. He later changed the name of the organization to the Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts to reflect this focus. (He would later change the name again to the more general Institute in Basic Life Principles, or IBLP.) The advice Gothard offered to Christian parents navigating the difficult adolescent years, a task made even more challenging by the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, centered on the proper administration of divinely ordained authority. In this way, Gothard’s philosophy built on the Christian Reconstructionist teachings of Rousas John Rushdoony. A somewhat shadowy but influential figure in conservative evangelicalism, Rushdoony gained prominence in the 1960s and 1970s by advocating a strict adherence to the authority of “biblical law.” By any measure, Rushdoony was an extremist. He believed that America was founded as a Christian nation, but also that Enlightenment notions of equality were dangerous and wrong and that democracy was antithetical to God-ordained governing structures. The Civil War wasn’t a battle over slavery, he insisted, but rather a religious war in which the South was defending Christian civilization. In his view, slavery had been voluntary, and beneficial to slaves. He opposed interracial marriage, looked unfavorably on the education of African Americans and women, and disapproved of women’s suffrage and of women speaking in public. Some of his writings bordered on anti-Semitism. Rushdoony believed that the disorder of modern society could be remedied with the institution of Old Testament law, and at the heart of this project was the assertion of hierarchical authority.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  The hormone made boys “competitive, aggressive, assertive, and lovers of cars, trucks, guns, and balls.” A “masculine will to power” was evident in little boys who dressed up as superheroes, cowboys, and Tarzan. It was why boys fought, climbed, wrestled, and strutted around. Feminists and liberals seemed to think that testosterone was “one of God’s great mistakes.” They preferred to make boys more like girls, and men more like women—“feminized, emasculated, and wimpified.” But “reprogramming” men and boys interfered with God’s careful design.8 Men’s competitive nature was evidenced in their proclivity for risk and adventure, as well as in their greater political and economic achievements—these despite feminist affirmative action campaigns—and the wars they had prosecuted throughout history. From his office at Focus on the Family, Dobson could peer across the valley at the United States Air Force Academy. Watching cadets train to be pilots and officers, he pondered how men’s competitive nature explained “the bloody military campaigns that have raged through the ages,” yet how “this masculine thirst for conquest” had also produced “daring and adventuresome feats that benefited humanity.” General MacArthur, “one of the greatest military leaders of all time,” was one of Dobson’s heroes.9 In his book about boys, Dobson found occasion to denounce Hillary Clinton, “bra burners,” political correctness, and the “small but noisy band of feminists” who attacked “the very essence of masculinity.” He praised Phyllis Schlafly and recommended homeschooling as “a means of coping with a hostile culture.” He advised girls not to call boys on the telephone (to do so would usurp the role of initiator) and encouraged fathers to engage in rough-and-tumble games with their sons. He lamented that films presenting moral strength and heroism had given way to “man-hating diatribes” like Thelma & Louise and 9 to 5 , and that “lovely, feminine ladies” on the small screen had been replaced by “aggressive and masculine women” like those in Charlie’s Angels . Mel Gibson’s The Patriot , a tale in which Gibson starred as a Revolutionary militia leader who ruthlessly avenged his son’s death, proved the exception to the rule.10 Dobson’s Bringing Up Boys found a receptive audience. Its sales would eventually top two million copies. By that time Dobson had amassed a considerable following; his radio program was reportedly carried on over 4200 stations around the world and heard daily by over 200 million people. Charles Colson boasted that “All people, Christian and non-Christian alike” should read the book: “It just could save America.”11 Less than five months after Dobson’s book appeared, Douglas Wilson published Future Men: Raising Boys to Fight Giants . The son of an evangelist who settled in Moscow, Idaho, Wilson had helped found “a Baptist-leaning, ‘hippie, Jesus People church.’” He had little formal theological training, and his church was, in his words, a “Baptist-Presbyterian ‘mutt.’” After encountering the teachings of Rushdoony, he inculcated Reconstructionist-inspired values within his faith community.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  They are like a real-life version of the comedy done by Ricky Gervais in the British version of The Office, where the goal is not so much to make you laugh as to make you feel uncomfortable. You wish it would stop, but you can’t look away. Wingman is Cranium’s right-hand man, his trusty sidekick, the Robin to his Batman. Wingman’s experience before coming to HubSpot consists of a few years doing low-level jobs in PR agencies. In 2010, while working at one of those jobs, he co-authored a book called The B2B Social Media Book: Become a Marketing Superstar. The implication was that Wingman, then age twenty-six, had achieved marketing superstardom himself and wanted to help others emulate his success. He now bills himself as a “marketing author and speaker.” Like Cranium, Wingman believes HubSpot is an extraordinary place. One month when the blog team almost but not quite hits its latest insane lead- generation goal, Wingman sends around this email: “You all are amazing. I know the work you do is extremely hard, but we are on the verge of doing something legendary. Take a step back and look at what you are building [sic] is a rare thing.” Twice during my time at HubSpot I try to bring in job candidates. Both are in their fifties. One was the founding editor of one of the biggest business news websites in the world and then became a vice president of global digital marketing for a multinational computer firm that did tens of billions of dollars in annual sales. The other is a woman who has spent eighteen years at Time Inc., working on both the editorial and the business sides of the organization. She managed hundreds of people and was responsible for a multimillion-dollar budget. The woman from Time takes the train up from New York to Boston and spends a day being interviewed by various people on the content team, including one woman who is less than a year out of college. The content factory workers come back saying they are not impressed. The veteran marketing guy meets Wingman for lunch and follows up by sending a detailed plan for how HubSpot can expand its business. Wingman never even acknowledges the email. The marketing guy gets hired as VP of marketing at a different software company. The Time Inc. woman becomes a producer for a major cable news network. So it goes. Cranium and Wingman have surrounded themselves with people who are younger than they are and have even less experience, but who are loyal. Jordan and Holly are two of Cranium’s favorites and were among his first hires. They are Level 8 Operating Thetans, and can do whatever they want. Jordan is twenty-eight years old, was hired in 2007, straight out of college, and now manages a dozen direct reports. Holly was hired in 2008, also directly from college, and has a small team under her.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Of all people who had ever lived, no one had enjoyed more privilege than the American woman. Beyond that, no legislation could erase the fact that men and women were different: women had babies and men didn’t. Those who didn’t like this fact should take up their complaint with God himself. In light of this God-given difference, “Judeo-Christian” society had developed laws and customs requiring men to carry out their duties to protect and provide for women. Women’s rights, then—their rights to have babies and to be protected—were achieved through the family structure and ensured through men’s chivalry. Tragically, “‘equal rights’ fanatics” threatened to undo all this. All of a sudden, “aggressive females” were everywhere “yapping” about how mistreated they were, equating marriage to slavery, suggesting that housework was “menial and degrading, and—perish the thought—that women are discriminated against.” This was “the fraud of the century.”13 Don’t be fooled, Schlafly warned her readers. Employment opportunities, equal pay for equal work—all of this was “only a sweet syrup which covers the deadly poison masquerading as ‘women’s lib.’” Women’s libbers were radicals waging war on marriage, children, and the family—they promoted free sex, “Federal ‘day-care centers’ for babies instead of homes,” and “abortions instead of families.” What feminists failed to understand, she argued, was that women liked to be housewives and homemakers. Besides, women’s employment in offices and on assembly lines was hardly something to strive for: “Most women would rather cuddle a baby than a typewriter or a factory machine.” Her message resonated not only with religious women but also with many working-class women for whom the labor market offered unfulfilling work and low pay.14 Though late to the ERA, Schlafly was already concerned about abortion in 1972, the year before Roe v. Wade , in part because she was Catholic. Catholics had a long history of condemning abortion, even when women’s lives were at stake. Some fundamentalist pastors agreed, though they weren’t eager to cooperate with Catholics on the issue. But most evangelicals were far less certain. The Bible didn’t offer specific advice on the topic. Many evangelicals disapproved of “abortion-on-demand,” but not in the case of rape or incest, where fetal abnormalities were present, or when a woman’s life was at risk. In 1968, Christianity Today considered the question of therapeutic abortion—was it a blessing, or murder? They gave no definitive answer. As late as 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution urging states to expand access to abortion. But with the liberalization of abortion laws, and as abortion proponents began to frame the issue in terms of women controlling their reproduction, evangelicals started to reconsider their position. In 1973, Roe v. Wade —and the rising popularity of abortion in its wake—helped force the issue, but even then, evangelical mobilization was not immediate.

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

  35 He is also one who, like Moses, will deliver his law to his people. This becomes clear in the ¿ rst major block of teaching, where Jesus goes up on a mount to deliver his teaching (like Moses going up to Mount Sinai to receive Jesus on the Sea of Galilee. Until his ¿ nal trip to Jerusalem, Jesus spent most of his time preaching in rural villages in Galilee. Dore Bible Illustrations, Courtesy of Dover Pictorial Archive Series. 36 Lecture 6: Matthew—Jesus the Jewish Messiah the Law from God?). He begins not by espousing an entirely new teaching, but by interpreting for his hearers the teachings of Moses in the so-called “antitheses” (statements in which he places his own teachings in opposition to the typical understanding of Moses). Here, he does not at all deny the validity of what Moses prescribed. He stresses its importance and pushes its meaning beyond the simple and the literal: Moses said not to kill, but you shouldn’t even become angry; Moses said not to commit adultery, but you shouldn’t even lust. Jesus wants his followers to follow not only the letter of the Law, but its very spirit. Some readers have assumed that he could not seriously expect people not to get angry or not to lust, but Matthew gives no indication that Jesus means otherwise. Jesus’ followers will follow the Law of Moses even better than the revered Jewish leaders do. This becomes clear in what is probably the key passage in the Sermon on the Mount: 5:17–20. Jesus himself ful¿ lled the Jewish Law completely, and only those who are even more righteous in keeping the Law than the scribes and Pharisees will enter the Kingdom. On the one hand, this may seem impossibly dif ¿ cult; on the other hand, for Matthew, it is a relatively simple matter. Jesus teaches that the entire Law can be summed up in two of its commandments: to love God above all else and to love one’s neighbor as oneself (22:35–40). The counterbalance to this stress on the Jewish-ness of Jesus comes in the forceful opposition to the Jewish leaders found in this Gospel (see chapter 23). This opposition is especially pronounced in his various confrontations with the upright Jewish leaders, the scribes and Pharisees, whom Jesus calls “white-washed sepulchres”—seemingly clean on the outside but ¿ lled with rot and corruption within. Jesus sees these leaders as complete hypocrites who don’t practice what they preach. They stress what is picayune and overlook what is central, “straining at gnats but swallowing For Matthew, it is a relatively simple matter. Jesus teaches that the entire Law can be summed up in two of its commandments: to love God above all else and to love one’s neighbor as oneself (22:35–40).