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 Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  I Sunk Cost and the Fear of Waste n 2008, California voters approved the issuance of $9 billion in bonds for building a high- speed rail system connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco. The system, capable of traveling up to 220 miles per hour, would also connect Californians all along the route in potentially transformative ways. The economic engines of the state are the coastal centers in the north (the Bay Area and Silicon Valley) and the south (Los Angeles and San Diego). The greater speed and mobility would allow the rest of the state in between to participate in the prosperity concentrated at the north and south coasts. It would also relieve the overdeveloped real estate markets in those northern and southern metropolitan areas by allowing people a reasonable commute from greater distances. When the bond issue passed, it was estimated that the route would be completed in 2020, at a cost of $33 billion, and that the rail system would be generating yearly operating revenue of $1.3 billion by 2020, with an operating surplus of $370 million, making the system self-supporting and increasingly profitable thereafter. The bonds that were issued covered only about a quarter of the expected cost to complete the project, but the rest would be made up in federal funds, additional state funds, and public-private partnerships. These projections and plans all came from the California High-Speed Rail Authority (or, as it refers to itself, “the Authority”). The Authority has been responsible from the beginning for planning, designing, building, and operating the system. They are the decision-maker, along with oversight from the governor and the state legislature. The Authority creates a new business plan and updates projections every two years. As the costs and completion dates have continued to climb in these updates, it has also become increasingly clear that the plans and projections— neither the original ones nor the later revisions—have not had any connection with reality.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  Calling just about any New Testament (NT) text “anti-Jewish” is not accurate, if for no other reason than that most of them were written by those who would have identified themselves as being Jewish. This is certainly true for Matthew. Nevertheless, Matthew, while not being anti-Jewish, is explicitly anti-Pharisaic, and it was not too long after its composition when this distinction was lost. There is a connection between the animus that Matthew displayed toward his Pharisaic opponents and the later hostility that existed between Church and Synagogue. Several passages in the NT are problematic from the perspective of Jewish–Christian relations. John’s gospel has “the Jews” (οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι) and the infamous 8:44 (“You are of your father the devil”), and Matthew has chapter 23 and 27:25 (“And all the people answered, ‘His blood be on us and on our children!’ ”). These problematic texts have obvious anti-Jewish implications for many modern readers and it is the obviousness of the problem that in some ways makes them less of a problem (inasmuch as they are at least easier to identity). The Sermon on the Mount is not usual y seen as a text with anti-Jewish implications, and to argue that such implications are present might come as a surprise, especial y since it has long been celebrated as the apex of Christian ethics. It is the lack of obviousness that makes it dangerous, as that which is beautiful and harmful is more threatening than that which is ugly and harmful. The Sermon on the Mount is a Trojan horse, which hides that which is dangerous within that which is attractive. When that which is attractive is embraced, that which is dangerous slips in as well without even being recognized. The Sermon on the Mount is built upon an ethical flaw. It establishes its terms through the negative othering of the Pharisees. Matthew’s stereotype of the Pharisee sets the boundary for Christian identity, and despite its demand to love enemies (5:44), this text requires a vilification of the other that can hardly be called love. The fact 128 128 Paul and Matthew among Jews and Gentiles that Christian identity is built upon and requires this negative representation of the other has troubling implications. If Christians wish to use this text for “spiritual” or “ethical” application, they cannot do so without adopting at least some of the terms of the text. Specifical y, the hypocritical Pharisee must be retained if these texts are to have their “meaning-effect.” To rehabilitate the Matthean Pharisees by changing the characterization of the Pharisees (if that is even possible) would be to undermine the structure of the Sermon on the Mount and would be for all practical purposes a repudiation of the Sermon.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Besides. It is an ill-disposed mind that is incited by the commission of crime to lend his assistance to another. But this is done in these arts: for we read of innocent children being slain by those who practise them. Therefore the persons by whose assistance such things are done have an evil mind. Again. The proper good of the intellect is truth. Since therefore it belongs to good to lead others to good, it belongs to any well-disposed intellect to lead others to truth. In the works of the magicians, however, many things are done by which men are mocked and deceived. The intellect whose help they use, therefore, is not morally well disposed. Further. A well-disposed intellect is allured by truth in which it takes delight, but not by lies. The magicians, however, in their invocations make use of various lies, whereby they allure those whose help they employ; for they threaten certain impossible things, as for instance that, unless the one who is called upon gives help, he who invokes him will shatter the heavens or displace the stars, as Porphyry narrates in his Letter to Anebontes. Those intellectual substances, therefore, with whose help the works of the magicians are performed do not seem to be intellectually well disposed. Moreover. That a superior should be subject as an inferior to one that commands him; or that an inferior should allow himself to be invoked as a superior, would seem to indicate a person of an ill-disposed mind. Now, magicians call upon those whose assistance they employ, as though these were their superiors: and as soon as they appear they command them as inferiors. In no way therefore are they seemingly of a well-disposed mind. Hereby we refute the error of pagans who ascribed these works to the gods. CHAPTER CVII THAT THE INTELLECTUAL SUBSTANCE WHOSE ASSISTANCE IS EMPLOYED IN THE MAGIC ARTS IS NOT EVIL IN ITS NATUREIT is impossible that there be natural malice in the intellectual substances whose assistance is employed in the practice of the magic arts. For if a thing tends to something by its nature, it tends thereto not accidentally but per se: as a heavy body tends downwards. Now if these intellectual substances are evil essentially, they tend to evil naturally: and, consequently, not accidentally but per se. But this is impossible: for We have proved that all things tend per se to good, and nothing tends to evil except accidentally. Therefore these intellectual substances are not naturally evil.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  321Lecture 32—Liberation Theologies in Latin America LATIN AMERICA AND THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT õProtestant conservatives agreed with the future pope there. They saw liberation theology as dangerous too, for many of the same reasons. Moreover, many Latin American evangelicals had strong links to the American Christian right. Another way of putting it might be: The American Christian right liked to meddle in Latin American affairs almost as much as the U.S. government did. õAmerican televangelists and radio ministries have had a huge impact in Latin America. For example, Pat Robertson used his TV channel to promote the Contras, the CIA-backed force fighting the communist Sandinistas, who took power in Nicaragua in 1979. õLatin American Protestants didn’t just fall into line behind American busybodies. And the more Latin American evangelicals learned about their North American colleagues, the more many of them realized that there were real theological differences between them. õThey generally shared a traditional view of gender roles and a commitment to anti-communism. But like many Christians in the developing world, more progressive Latin American evangelicals did not share the attitude of many Northern evangelicals that a commitment to social justice, to reforming the structural sin in society and calling on the government to help do so, makes one uncommitted to preaching the gospel. õAt an international conference of evangelicals in 1974 at Lausanne, Switzerland, evangelical leaders René Padilla (from Ecuador) and Samuel Escobar (from Peru) insisted that the conference’s official statement had to stress the church’s social responsibility. õThe prominent Argentinian evangelist Luis Palau, for his part, criticized Lausanne for being too cooperative with liberals. He preached that real social change can only come with winning more hearts for Christ, not through large-scale social reform. 322The History of Christianity II SUGGESTED READING Gonzalez and Gonzales, Christianity in Latin America. Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation. Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER äWhy were Protestant immigrants both a boon and a threat to the Catholic regimes of Latin America? äHow did Protestant and Catholic missionaries and priests respond to the challenges of evangelization among rural communities and the poor? äWhy did conservative evangelicals in the United States spend so much time and money meddling in Latin American affairs? 323 LECTURE 33 PROPHETIC RELIGION IN MODERN AFRICA T he Nigerian minister Daniel Olukoya is the head of a religious empire called Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries, which has its headquarters outside of the enormous city of Lagos. This ministry has other branches all over Nigeria and in the United States, Europe, and other African countries. Olukoya preaches a particularly potent version of the prosperity gospel. This is a form of Christianity that emphasizes an idea that appears throughout the Bible—the notion that God rewards true believers with worldly blessings and punishes those who don’t keep the faith.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  traditions—how they viewed themselves and how others viewed them—was all to be played for. A Roman or Judaean male who felt perturbed by this variety, or the slovenly attitudes of the vulgus ( hoi polloi, ‘ammei ha-aretz) toward ancestral norms, could always join a group with higher admission requirements: a philosophical school (Stoics, Pharisees, Essenes), priestly college, purity club, particular synagogue, or literary coterie. Formal or informal initiation into such groups was real, sometimes an ordeal. Certainly, one could speak of getting in and staying in such groups. Once admitted among fellow purists, members could safely share their peeves concerning the larger society’s descent into the abyss. The larger society could have no such singlemindedness, however. Procreation has no standards. Before glancing over Paul’s letters in pursuit of our real-life historical question of how he presented himself to his groups in relation to Judaean ancestral tradition, it is worth trying to get a sense of the diversity that ancient categories permitted in relation to ancestral tradition, outside of in–out purity groups. Loyalty to one’s ethnos and polis were axiomatic values, as we have seen (cf. Herodotus 3.38). But every literate person knew that new affiliations and changing identities were always possible, whether individual or collective, voluntarily or under compulsion. This kind of thing was not framed as moving in or out of a religion, or in the case of Judaea as getting in or out of Judaism. How was it framed? I have mentioned Laconism, or Spartanizing, a famous example of cultural admiration and borrowing. The term referred in the first instance to those who allied with Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. But Sparta’s fiercely disciplined way of life would remain highly attractive to modern societies from imperial Britain to Soviet Russia. Ancient admirers included philosophers, who liked its constitution from afar, and the young men who visited Laconia to see it in action—and faced periodic expulsion for the sake of maintaining cultural purity. In the opposite direction, Thucydides and the Spartans accused the Spartan king Pausanias of holding his ancestral laws in contempt, while favoring those of the Persians (1.132.1–2), a charge he did not accept but turned back on them.40 There were no objective measures of such things. Individuals acted as they saw fit, and sometimes incurred the wrath of opponents for compromising the ancestral traditions. There are surely parallels in modern politics. Herodotus charged the Persian king Cambyses with forsaking his laws and everyone else’s (3.36–38). The Scythians were a fund of fascination on this score. The reported curiosity of some of their leaders about foreign wisdom led other Scythians to violence. Anacharsis, Toxaris, and Scyles did not cease to be Scythians, or even royals (much less leave a “Scythism”), when they returned home as Athenian citizens or devotees of the Great Mother Cybele. Rather, they were deemed sufficiently defective Scythians to be killed for abandoning their ancestral traditions, or foreignizing as 2 Maccabees might have put it. 41

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  190The History of Christianity II õYet Catholicism was the only officially permitted religion of Cuba. It was the white people’s religion, and if you were not white, adopting at least the outward practices of Catholicism was crucial to survival. õIn Havana, the church sponsored fraternal societies called cabildos that were based on ethnicity. These became refuges for black free people and enslaved people alike, where they could escape white racism and mix African worship traditions with devotion to their patron saint. They could do traditional African dances before an altar of the Virgin Mary, and parade on a feast day with African drums. õTo clarify: To white Spanish onlookers she might have looked like the Virgin Mary, but for these believers she was also Yemaya, the deity of maternity and the ocean. õThe cabildos were the birthplaces of the fusion of folk Catholicism and African polytheism known as Santeria. In this faith, worshippers venerate African gods called orishas or santos and reimagined as Catholic saints. 191Lecture 19—Slave Religion in the Americas õMost of these gods come from the beliefs of the Yoruba people, a West African ethnic group that many Cuban slaves counted as their ancestors. The highest Yoruba God is the creator god Olorun, a supreme being who is a lot like God the Father or Jehovah in Christianity. õFor the Yoruba, he is the paragon of ashe, a spiritual energy that permeates the universe. A person can’t reach Olorun directly, but a person can seek help and manipulate this spiritual power by pleasing the lesser gods, the orishas, with sacrifices and offerings. õCuban worshippers kept sacred stones in a large soup tureen. These stones were meant to represent the deities; worshipers “fed” the deities’ stones with blood from sacrificed animals. This is one way they built a community and a spiritual world to replace the culture and communal structures that slavery had destroyed. SUGGESTED READING Breen, The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood. Raboteau, Slave Religion. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER äWhy did Christianity become both an ideology of oppression and a message of liberation on slave plantations? äWhat accounts for the appeal of religious leaders like Nat Turner and Rebecca? äWhat are the challenges in trying to recover the religious ideas and practices of enslaved people in the 18 th and 19 th centuries? 192

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  60 I am primarily focusing on 5:17–48, but this same logic that uses the Pharisees as a foil against which Jesus’ higher (fulfilled) righteousness stands in relief occurs often in the Sermon on the Mount. The “hypocrites,” obviously meaning the Pharisees, are explicitly mentioned in 6:1–6, 16–18, and might be seen implicitly elsewhere as well. E.g.: Are they the ones who “store up treasures for themselves?” (6:19). Matthew’s Trojan Horse127 127 Even if 5:21–48 could survive this deconstruction, its inner logic would be so ruptured that what would remain would be quite different from what we started with. If the distinction between positive inner righteousness and negative outer expression (as found in 5:21–22, 27–28), and between positive original intent and negative later additions (5:31–32, 19:8, and arguably also 5:33–37 and 38–42) were lost, the meaning potential of these statements would also be lost. Such is the danger with binary logic: one cannot have an inner if one has no outer, just as one cannot have original intent if there are no later additions. The significance of this is simply that Matthew needs his literary Pharisee stereotype. The higher righteousness of Jesus requires that the Pharisees maintain their status as empty hypocrites. Any change in this status would challenge the whole value system that is built upon this very distinction. If “they” cease being “them,” “we” also cease to be “us.” Conclusion: Is the Sermon on the Mount Ethically Flawed? Calling just about any New Testament (NT) text “anti-Jewish” is not accurate, if for no other reason than that most of them were written by those who would have identified themselves as being Jewish. This is certainly true for Matthew. Nevertheless, Matthew, while not being anti-Jewish, is explicitly anti-Pharisaic, and it was not too long after its composition when this distinction was lost. There is a connection between the animus that Matthew displayed toward his Pharisaic opponents and the later hostility that existed between Church and Synagogue. Several passages in the NT are problematic from the perspective of Jewish–Christian relations. John’s gospel has “the Jews” (οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι) and the infamous 8:44 (“You are of your father the devil”), and Matthew has chapter 23 and 27:25 (“And all the people answered, ‘His blood be on us and on our children!’ ”). These problematic texts have obvious anti-Jewish implications for many modern readers and it is the obviousness of the problem that in some ways makes them less of a problem (inasmuch as they are at least easier to identity). The Sermon on the Mount is not usually seen as a text with anti-Jewish implications, and to argue that such implications are present might come as a surprise, especially since it has long been celebrated as the apex of Christian ethics. It is the lack of obviousness that makes it dangerous, as that which is beautiful and harmful is more threatening than that which is ugly and harmful. The Sermon on the Mount is a Trojan horse, which hides that which is dangerous within that which is attractive. When that which is attractive is embraced, that which is dangerous slips in as well without even being recognized. The Sermon on the Mount is built upon an ethical flaw. It establishes its terms through the negative othering of the Pharisees. Matthew’s stereotype of the Pharisee sets the boundary for Christian identity, and despite its demand to love enemies (5:44), this text requires a vilification of the other that can hardly be called love. The fact

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  123 identity. A border tells me where mine ends and yours starts. Borders “insist ... upon separation” while simultaneously “acknowledg[ing] connection.” 45 Thus, the border between Matthew’s community and the Pharisees ensured both the connectedness of these two groups as well as their differences. In order for Matthew to maintain his own constructed collective identity, the Pharisees also must maintain their collective identity. These two identities for Matthew are inseparably linked. His is what theirs is not, and therefore if theirs changed so would his. This would be true to a lesser degree (although still true) had Matthew not so sharply “othered” the Pharisees through his stereotypes. Borders can be more or less rigid depending upon the context. A less rigid, more porous border might have made Matthean identity less dependent upon the Pharisees. However, Matthew constructed a rigid boundary between his group and the Pharisees. Because of this, in his narrative they served not merely as an incidental border but as an essential one. In order for Matthew to be Matthew, the Pharisees had to be the Pharisees. Stereotypes create and strengthen borders by employing specific essentialist assumptions about the nature of the groups being represented: (1) they possess ontological status (discussed earlier); (2) membership is immutable; (3) knowledge of someone’s group membership has a great deal of inductive potential; (4) knowledge of someone’s membership in the group has a great deal of interpretive potential; (5) membership is exclusive. 46 Groups have an ontological status. This means that for Matthew the Pharisees were not merely a constructed communal collective held together by negotiated values and narratives, but that they were a real entity with a defining underlying essence. Hence, the various evils enumerated in the Sermon on the Mount (and elsewhere) were not just incidental features but rather features flowing from an ontologically given and unchangeable inner reality. The Pharisees were believed to be hypocrites not because of poor religious education, a lack of personal reflection, or some other societal cause; they were hypocrites by nature—it was an essential component of who they were. Group members “cannot cease to be a members”—membership is immutable. There is nothing in Matthew that indicates he had any hope that his Pharisaic rivals could change or convert, as a group or as individuals. Once a Pharisee, always a Pharisee. 47 The knowledge of someone’s group membership has a great deal of inductive potential—“knowing that someone belongs to the category tells us a lot about that person”; the knowledge of someone’s membership in the group has a great deal of interpretive potential as the already determined underlying essence provides a means by which other features can be understood. For Matthew to know someone was a Pharisee meant that all the descriptions and accusations contained in the Pharisee stereotype could be automatically applied. For Matthew, knowing that someone was 45 Friedman, Mappings, 3.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Reply to Objection 3: The miser hates something accidental to himself, but not for that reason does he hate himself: thus a sick man hates his sickness for the very reason that he loves himself. Or we may say that avarice makes man hateful to others, but not to himself. In fact, it is caused by inordinate self-love, in respect of which, man desires temporal goods for himself more than he should. Whether a man can hate the truth?Objection 1: It would seem that a man cannot hate the truth. For good, true, and being are convertible. But a man cannot hate good. Neither, therefore, can he hate the truth. Objection 2: Further, “All men have a natural desire for knowledge,” as stated in the beginning of the Metaphysics i, 1. But knowledge is only of truth. Therefore truth is naturally desired and loved. But that which is in a thing naturally, is always in it. Therefore no man can hate the truth. Objection 3: Further, the Philosopher says (Rhet. ii, 4) that “men love those who are straightforward.” But there can be no other motive for this save truth. Therefore man loves the truth naturally. Therefore he cannot hate it. On the contrary, The Apostle says (Gal. 4:16): “Am I become your enemy because I tell you the truth?” [*St. Thomas quotes the passage, probably from memory, as though it were an assertion: “I am become,” etc.] I answer that, Good, true and being are the same in reality, but differ as considered by reason. For good is considered in the light of something desirable, while being and true are not so considered: because good is “what all things seek.” Wherefore good, as such, cannot be the object of hatred, neither in general nor in particular. Being and truth in general cannot be the object of hatred: because disagreement is the cause of hatred, and agreement is the cause of love; while being and truth are common to all things. But nothing hinders some particular being or some particular truth being an object of hatred, in so far as it is considered as hurtful and repugnant; since hurtfulness and repugnance are not incompatible with the notion of being and truth, as they are with the notion of good.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Curly, a man with no hair. Jesus, a man with a beard. But there were also pictures of corpses. He meant to scare me off the subject with these pictures but instead they made me more interested. Finally Marian told me to stop bothering him. Marian and I disliked each other. Later we both found reasons for it, but our dislike was instinctive and mysterious. I tried to cover mine with a treacly stream of yes ma’ams and no ma’ams and offers of help. Marian wasn’t fooled. She knew I didn’t like her, and that I was not the young gentleman I pretended to be. She went out a lot, running errands, and she sometimes saw me on the street with my friends—bad company, from the looks of them. She knew I combed my hair differently after I left the house and rearranged my clothes. Once, driving past us, she yelled at me to pull up my pants. * * * MY FRIENDS WERE Terry Taylor and Terry Silver. All three of us lived with our mothers. Terry Taylor’s father was stationed in Korea. The war had been over for two years but he still hadn’t come home. Mrs. Taylor had filled the house with pictures of him, graduation portraits, snapshots in and out of uniform—always alone, leaning against trees, standing in front of houses. The living room was like a shrine; if you didn’t know better you would have thought that he had not survived Korea but had died some kind of hero’s death there, as Mrs. Taylor had perhaps anticipated. This sepulchral atmosphere owed a lot to the presence of Mrs. Taylor herself. She was a tall, stooped woman with deep-set eyes. She sat in her living room all day long and chain-smoked cigarettes and stared out the picture window with an air of unutterable sadness, as if she knew things beyond mortal bearing. Sometimes she would call Taylor over and wrap her long arms around him, then close her eyes and hoarsely whisper, “Terence! Terence!” Eyes still closed, she would turn her head and resolutely push him away. Silver and I immediately saw the potential of this scene and we replayed it often, so often that we could bring tears to Taylor’s eyes just by saying “Terence! Terence!” Taylor was a dreamy thin-skinned boy who cried easily, a weakness from which he tried to distract us by committing acts of ferocious vandalism. He’d once been to juvenile court for breaking windows. Mrs. Taylor also had two daughters, both older than Terry and full of scorn for us and all our works. “Oh, God ,” they’d say when they saw us. “Look what the cat dragged in.” Silver and I suffered their insults meekly, but Taylor always had an answer. “Does your face hurt?” he would say. “I just wondered, it’s killing me.” “Is that sweater made of camel’s hair? I just wondered, I thought I saw two humps.” But they always had the last word.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  I didn’t worry about him. He was too short. He was a mechanic. His clothes were wrong. I didn’t know why they were wrong, but they were. We hadn’t come all the way out here to end up with him. He didn’t even live in Seattle; he lived in a place called Chinook, a tiny village three hours north of Seattle, up in the Cascade Mountains. Besides, he’d already been married. He had three kids of his own living with him, all teenagers. I knew my mother would never let herself get tangled up in a mess like that. And even though Dwight kept driving down from the mountains to see my mother, every other weekend at first, then every weekend, he seemed to sense the futility of his case. His attentions to my mother were puppyish, fawning, as if he knew that the odds of getting his hands on her were pathetically slim and that even being in her presence was a piece of luck that depended on his displaying at every moment deference, bounce, optimism, and all manner of good cheer. He tried too hard. No eye is quicker to detect that kind of effort than the eye of a competitor who also happens to be a child. I seized on and stored away every nuance of Dwight’s abjection, his habit of licking his lips, the way his eyes darted from face to face to search out warning signs of disagreement or boredom, his uncertain smile, the phony timbre of his laughter at jokes he didn’t really get. Nobody could just go to the kitchen and make a drink, Dwight had to jump up and do it himself. Nobody could open a door or put on a coat without his help. They couldn’t even smoke their own cigarettes, they had to take one of Dwight’s and submit to a prolonged drama of ignition: the unsheathing of his monogrammed Zippo from its velvet case; the snapping open of the top against his pant leg; the presentation of the tall flame with its crown of oily smoke—then the whole ritual in reverse. I was a good mimic, or at least a cruel one, and Dwight was an easy target. I went to work as soon as he left the house. My mother and Kathy tried not to laugh but they did, and so did Marian, though she never really abandoned herself to it. “Dwight’s not that bad,” she would say to my mother, and my mother would nod. “He’s very nice,” Marian would add, and my mother would nod again and say, “Jack, that’s enough.” We spent Thanksgiving in Chinook with Dwight and his kids. Snow had fallen a few nights earlier. It had melted in the valley but still covered the trees on the upper slopes, which were purple with shadow when we arrived. Though it was still late afternoon the sun had already set behind the mountains.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  He also acted as unofficial recruiter for the army. He had served during World War II in “the European Theater,” as he liked to say, and had actually killed men. He sometimes brought in different items he had taken from their bodies, not only medals and bayonets, which you could buy in any pawnshop, but also letters in German and wallets with pictures of families inside. Whenever we wanted to distract Mr. Mitchell from collecting essays we hadn’t written, we would ask about the circumstances of his kills. Mr. Mitchell would crouch behind his desk, peer over the top, then roll into the middle of the room and spring to his feet yelling da-da-da-da-da . But he praised the courage and discipline of the Germans, and said that in his opinion we had fought on the wrong side. We should have gone into Moscow, not Berlin. As far as the concentration camps were concerned, we had to remember that nearly all the Jewish scientists had perished there. If they had lived, they would have helped Hitler develop his atomic bomb before we developed ours, and we would all be speaking German today. Mr. Mitchell relied heavily on audiovisual aids in teaching his classes. We saw the same movies many times, combat documentaries and FBI-produced cautionary tales about high-school kids tricked into joining communist cells in Anytown, U.S.A. On our final examination Mr. Mitchell asked, “What is your favorite amendment?” We were ready for this question, and all of us gave the correct answer—“The Right to Bear Arms”—except for a girl who answered “Freedom of Speech.” For this impertinence she failed not only the question but the whole test. When she argued that she could not logically be marked wrong on this question, Mr. Mitchell blew up and ordered her out of the classroom. She complained to the principal but nothing came of it. Most of the kids in the class thought she was being a smarty-pants, and so did I. Mr. Mitchell also taught PE. He had introduced boxing to the school, and every year he organized a smoker where hundreds of people paid good money to watch us boys beat the bejesus out of each other. Miss Houlihan taught speech. She had adopted some years back a theory of elocution that had to do with “reaching down” for words rather than merely saying them, as if they were already perfectly formed in our stomachs and waiting to be brought up like trout from a stock pond. Instead of using our lips we were supposed to simply let the words “escape.” This was hard to get the hang of. Miss Houlihan believed in getting the first thing right before moving on to the next, so we spent most of the year grunting “Hiawatha” in a choral arrangement she herself had devised. She liked it so much that in the spring she took us to a speech tournament in Mount Vernon.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  Here, the French Reformer sets the parameters for subsequent English Protestant exegesis: the exact identity of the young man is of no concern to the exegete; it is enough to know that he was a disciple, possibly aiming at “some duty of devotion.” But what is critical for Calvin is knowing why the evangelist has included this account. For him the answer is clear: the attempted arrest of the young man drives home the fact that the men who had arrested Christ were men of “shameless and unrestrained … savage violence.” 8 Theophylact, Enarrati. Mar. 14 (PG 123.657B–D). The suggestion that the young man was an inhabitant of the house in which the last supper was held survived well into the twentieth century as did the theory that the young man is none other than John Mark (Neirynck, “Fuite,” 228 n. 242). See Gundry, Mark, 882. 9 For Bede, see Mar. exp. (PL 92.279C). For the seventh-century commentary, see Collins, Mark, 688–9. 10 See Neirynck, “Fuite,” 228 nn. 242–3, who cites Thomas Cajetan, Juan Maldonado, Franciscus Lucas Brugensis, Hugo Grotius, and Cornelius Jansen. 11 John Calvin, A Harmony of the Gospels: Matthew, Mark and Luke, Volume III and The Epistles of James and Jude, Calvin’s Commentaries 3 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1972), 162–3 (commentary on Mark 14:51). 160 160 Paul and Matthew among Jews and Gentiles Elements of Calvin’s interpretation clearly shaped later Protestant exegesis. The note opposite Mark 14:51 in the 1599 edition of The Geneva Bible, for example, emphasized that the attempted seizure of the young man was included by Mark that “we may understand with how great licenciousnesse [sic] these vil aines [sic] violently set upon him.” 12 John Mayer—an early seventh-century graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, that was specifical y founded as a Puritan seedbed—included the Markan text and reproduced the various patristic comments on it (those by Theophylact, Gregory the Great, Bede, and Pseudo-Jerome) as well as that of Calvin cited here.13 The Geneva Bible and Mayer’s intriguing work thus helped to ensure that the heart of Calvin’s comments entered mainstream English Protestant exegesis.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  There was nothing solemn about the priest now. Once he had opened the bottle he made a direct line for D., the youngest American, who from the first had been the object of greatest interest for the Bulgarian men. This was especially true of the priest, whose attentions had gone quickly from charming to comic and then, as they persisted, become disquieting. For most beautiful first, he said, pouring wine into her cup, his English almost nonexistent, and she smiled and looked away, cringing a little. He came around to each of us then, gallant as he filled our cups, though he refused to meet my gaze, as he had all day, my attempts to speak with him defeated by the odd way he spoke Bulgarian, very fast and with a tripping enunciation that made him impossible for me to understand. It was the accent of his region, one of the other Bulgarians said to me, selski aksent, a village accent. But it wasn’t his accent that made him distant with me, I thought, though maybe it was uncharitable of me to assume he shared the views of his colleagues, or some of his colleagues, like the priest who had called, the previous summer, for all decent people to line the route of the Pride parade and throw stones at the queers.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  With the palm of his left hand he kept the beat of the song against the steering wheel. His right arm rested on the back of the empty seat beside him, which would not remain empty for long. He was on his way to pick someone up. We held no conference. One look was enough to see that he was everything we were not, his life a progress of satisfactions we had no hope of attaining in any future we could seriously propose for ourselves. The first egg hit the street beside him. The second egg hit the front fender. The third egg hit the trunk and splattered his shoulders and neck and hair. We looked down just long enough to tally the damage before pulling our heads back. A moment passed. Then a howl rose skyward. No words—just one solitary soul cry of disbelief. We could still hear the music coming from his radio. The light must have changed, because a horn honked, and honked again, and someone yelled something, and another voice answered harshly, and the song was suddenly lost in the noise of engines. We rolled back and forth on the roof for a while. Just as we were getting ready to go back down to Silver’s apartment, the Thunderbird screeched around the corner up the block. We could hear the driver cursing. The car moved slowly toward the light, combusting loudly. As it passed below we peered over the parapet again. The driver was scanning the sidewalks with stiff angry jerks of his head. He seemed to have no idea where the eggs had come from. We let fly again. One hit the hood with a loud boom, another landed in the seat beside him, the last exploded on the dashboard. Covered with egg and eggshell, he rose in his seat and bellowed. There was more honking at the light. Again he tore away and again he came back, still bellowing. Six eggs were left in the carton. Each of us took two. Silver knelt by the edge, risking a few hurried glances into the street while holding his arm out behind him to keep us in check until the moment was right. Then he beckoned furiously and we reared up beside him and got rid of our eggs and dropped back out of sight before they hit. The driver was looking up at the building across the street; he never laid eyes on us. We heard the eggs smack the pavement, boom against the car. This time there was no cry of protest. The silence made me uncomfortable and in my discomfort I grinned at Silver, but Silver did not grin back. His face was purple and twitching with anger as if he had been the one set upon and outraged. He was beside himself.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  98 Lecture 23: Molière’s Plays Invalid, a hypochondriac is ruining his family’s life (and his daughter’s love life) with his excessive concern for his health. He is the deviant who needs to be brought back into line. In The Miser, a man disrupts his family life with his excessive avarice. In Tartuffe, Molière deals with a much more controversial topic: a man who is excessively religious and uses his religion to tyrannize his family. Molière had to rewrite it three times to get it past the authorities and onto the stage. The central character in this play is Orgon, who turns to religion as a way of controlling his family and maintaining his importance. The play suggests that one can be too religious, which offended a great number of people. In each Molière comedy, there is one character who expresses the social norm. In this one it is Cléante, who describes the proper and socially acceptable way of being religious; this idea also offended many people. While Molière uses a basic plot, like Shakespeare, he is capable of amazing variations on the same essential structure. In The Misanthrope , a man named Alceste becomes irritated by the hypocrisy and social glibness of his circle. He wants people to be honest and to always tell each other the absolute truth in a way that would ultimately be lethal to society. In this play, as always in Molière’s work, the social order wins over the deviant individual. On the other hand, in this play Molière works a variation on a theme by allowing us more sympathy with the misanthrope, Alceste, than is usual, so that we feel ambivalent about his defeat at the play’s end. Molière also turns out to be somewhat cynical about the possibility of curing his deviants and eccentrics. Many of his plays require miracles, royal intervention, or some other suspension of ordinary laws of cause-and-effect in order to bring about the happy ending—because usually the deviant or eccentric is not brought back into alignment with society at all. If anyone learns anything from a Molière comedy, it has to be the audience, which can see its own À aws in his stage characters and go to work on them. He unerringly knows what works on stage so that a good production of Molière will be a memory that we’ll carry with us for a long, long time.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  I invite Amanda to consider that what excites Nat is precisely that the women in his fantasies are not real. It is the very absence of psychological complexity that fuels his arousal. For if these women were real—if they had feelings, needs, insecurities, opinions—an entire closetful of boots wouldn’t do it. In these fantasies, complex personalities are substantially narrowed down to get just what he wants from them. The women in his pornographic movies must be sufficiently empty (i.e., objectified) to absorb his imaginary projections and fulfill his needs. Nat conjures up images of the ravenous succubus. For Joni, it’s the cowboys, none too complex themselves. For Daryl it’s the lewd passerby on the beach. For Catherine it’s her husband in the role of a customer. Our fantasies are often peopled with these personifications of unbridled sexuality. With them we can experience simple enjoyment or irrepressible lust, unfettered by the entangling emotions of adult intimacy. These welcome strangers help us sidestep the ambiguities of desire and the contingencies of love. Though they live side by side with love, they’re not a substitute for the real thing. Heterosexual pornography, predominantly produced by and for men, concerns itself almost exclusively with what the sociologist Anthony Giddens calls “low emotion, high intensity sex.” In part, it meets the need of many men to compartmentalize their sexual and emotional lives, and to separate their secure relationships from their rash urges. But it also serves an additional purpose not immediately apparent. While opponents of porn focus primarily on the aggression and violence of male sexuality, Giddens makes the point that the male potency displayed in these stories is a manifest reassurance against male insecurities—sexual and other. The female characters in much pornography (themselves invulnerable) neutralize male vulnerability because they are always fully responsive and fully satisfied. The man never suffers from inadequacy, because the woman is in a state of ecstatic bliss that is entirely his doing. She confirms his virility. While Nat listened to my rudimentary deconstruction of pornography, I had the sense that he would just as soon have been anywhere else. He did not welcome the idea that Gang Bang 47 was really about male sexual insecurity. But he did identify with the need for an emotion-free zone where sex could be unencumbered and raw, and where all vulnerabilities, inadequacies, and dependencies—his and hers—might be temporarily suspended. Had the tapes not been out there, I might not have initiated this level of discussion about Nat’s viewing habits. For one thing, Nat and Amanda had not been with each other long; they were still anchoring their life together, negotiating many aspects of their relationship. I sensed that Amanda’s insecurities, prejudices, and aesthetic differences would make it difficult for her to hear about his private turn-ons in a way that didn’t threaten her.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Elizabeth quite charming, and he admired her intelligence. But over the years he began to dread and despise her. She was the main obstacle to his goal of reestablishing the dominance of Catholicism, and he would have to humble her. In his mind, she was not the legitimate Queen of England. He began sneaking Jesuit priests into England to spread the Catholic faith and secretly foment rebellion. He built up his navy and stealthily prepared for what was known as the Enterprise of England, a massive invasion that would overwhelm the island and restore it to Catholicism. The execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, was the final straw—it was time for the invasion. Philip felt supremely confident in the success of the Enterprise. Over the years, he had taken the measure of his great rival. She was crafty and clever, but she had one overwhelming disadvantage—she was a woman. As such, she was unsuited to lead a war. In fact, she seemed to be afraid of armed conflict, always negotiating and finding ways to avoid it. She had never paid much attention to her military. The English navy was relatively small, its ships not nearly as large and powerful as the great Spanish galleons. England’s army was quite pitiful compared with Spain’s. And Philip had the gold from the New World to help finance the effort. He planned for the invasion to take place in the summer of 1587, but that year Sir Francis Drake raided the Spanish coast and destroyed many of its ships in the harbor of Cádiz, while seizing great treasures of gold. Philip postponed the invasion to the following year, the costs slowly mounting for maintaining his army and building more galleons. Philip had overseen every detail of the invasion. He would launch an invincible armada of some 130 ships, manned by over thirty thousand men. They would easily destroy the English navy, link up with a large Spanish force in the Netherlands, cross the Channel, and sweep their way to London, where they would capture the Queen and put her on trial for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots; he would then put his own daughter on the throne of England. Finally, the armada was launched in May of 1588, and by July the Spanish fleet was maneuvering around the southwestern coast of England. The Spanish galleons had perfected a certain form of warfare: they were so large they would maneuver close to the enemy ships, grapple, and board them with a virtual army. But they had never done battle with the much smaller and faster English ships, with their long-range cannons, and in waters much rougher than the Mediterranean. They did not do well. On July 27, the armada anchored at Calais, just a few miles from where the Spanish army awaited them. In the middle of the night, the English sent five unmanned “fireships”—loaded with flaming wood and pitch—toward the anchored galleons. With the high winds that

• From Fragments (7)

  2L galley at the order of the tyrant Hipparchus. After he too had been assassinated, Anacreon prob- ably went to Thessaly to the court of the Aleuadae, at any rate fragment 94 seems to imply residence there. The end of his life came in his native city Teos, if we may trust epigrams of Theocritus and Simonides which presuppose his tomb at that place. He was fully eighty-five years at the time of his death) which, the legend declares, came to him from choking on a dried grape — evidently an in- vention, since the same thing is also reported of Sophocles. In form and subject matter Anacreon was closely related to Alcaeus and Sappho. As they had used the Lesbian dialect for their Lesbian audience, so Anacreon wrote in the Ionic of his home for the amusement of the Ionic court of Samos. The principal burden of his song was love, the theme of Sappho, and wine, the chief subject of Alcaeus. Not, however, the passion of love, as the Lesbian poetess, nor was there any real impetuosity com- parable to that of Alcaeus in his drinking-songs. With Anacreon both were merely pastime — he worships the fleeting pleasure of the moment, and consequently there is a want of depth and sin- cerity in all of his work. When e. g. he claims that he is about to throw himself down from the 81 *^ Lyric Songs of the Greeks Leucadian cliff in the frenzy of his love (no. 8), It is evident that he does not wish to be taken^scri- ously. While at the court of Polycrates, he sang chiefly of the beauties of the court favorites, e. g, the luxurious-haired boy Smcrdies (no. 14), the bright-eyed Cleobulus (nos. 11-13), and the blond maiden Eurypyle (no. 59). Sometimes he was ex- pressing not his own admiration, but that of his patron, whose point of view he has also adopted when he blames Smerdies himself for cutting off his hair, though in reality it was the result of his falling into disfavor with Polycrates. The very atmosphere in which he lived thus prevented Ana- . creon from singing freely of his own impulses and ] passions. Moreover, the light and often frivolous character of his poetry was exactly what the light- minded courtiers could appreciate, so that Ana- creon is the court poet par excellence. Not depth of thought or feeling, but simplicity and grace and polish are his principal characteristics. Anacreon, the gay poet of love and wine, who continued to his old age to think of nothing but pleasure, with an occasional passing regret that this could not go on forever (no. 48), soon became a conventional figure, and gave his name to whole schools of poets of similar trend (cf. e. g. the An- acreontea, p. iii, and modern Anacreontic poetry). 82 Anacreon

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  This venture was successful because it usually left the indigenous population susceptible to conquest by wreaking havoc on its self-understanding and worldview. For example, in the missionary zeal to eliminate idols, evangelists engaged in a crusade to topple powerful religious symbols. This was the case with the practice of Chinese ancestor worship, which was understood by the missionaries as idolatrous. Missionaries interpreted 1 Corinthians 8:4–6 to prohibit the offering of food to ancestors, a common practice among Chinese communities, as well as other Asian communities. Seeing the societal practice of making offerings to ancestors as a form of idolatry, they ignored the social context that gave rise to this tradition among the Chinese. According to Confucius, the greatest virtue is filial piety, the first principle of heaven, the ultimate standard by which people are to conduct their lives. In a time of societal breakdown, marked by intellectual dogma, moral uncertainties, and political instability, Confucius turned to hsiao (“filial piety”) as a way of restoring harmony and promoting family values. Hsiao encourages family reunions at ancestral shrines and support to bereaved family members both financially and emotionally. In effect, hsiao is a deep-rooted expression of devotion that reaffirms the basic understandings of family duty, obligation, values, and responsibility. Most who participate in hsiao are not seeking blessings, protection, or guidance from the deceased through some form of supernatural power; rather, they are connecting earthly care for family elders with their spiritual well-being. A distinction is made between worshiping ancestors as deities and a ritual that links the living presence of the dead with the consciousness of the bereaved. For Western Christians to declare this social practice idolatrous and prohibit it upon conversion to Christianity is tantamount to advising the Chinese not to love their elder parents or demonstrate that love by caring for them. In short, not to be Chinese!10 Jews “The Jews killed our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and for this, they must be punished.” This understanding of present-day Judaism is based on a misreading of Matthew 27:25. According to the text, Pilate, a Gentile, was willing to let Jesus go, but the Jewish crowd insisted that Jesus be crucified. When Pilate claimed that he would be innocent of Jesus’ blood, the crowd responded, “The blood [of Jesus] will be on us and on our children.” The passage has historically been interpreted by the Christian church as the self-imposed curse of Jews for their supposed role in the crucifixion of Jesus. Gentiles are held blameless through the act of Pontius Pilate “washing his hands” of the blood of Jesus. Besides, for many Christians, Jews stubbornly rejected numerous passages in the Hebrew Bible that foretold the coming of the Messiah. In the minds of a dominant culture, where Christians are God's chosen people, something suspicious exists in the “perverse” act of a people clinging to an ancient religion “proven false” by the coming of Christ.