Contentment

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 Action (2014)

  Whether you love or hate porno (or both, or neither), it’s up to you to dictate how you consume it. I’m not talking about abstaining from jacking off more than once a fortnight, unless a southerly tide spells your name in seashells, the moon is a waning crescent, and no one else is home, or whatever arbitrary time constraint has been culturally, internally, or interpersonally assigned to you as “right.” What makes for healthy porn consumption is the answer to this question (which is contingent upon each individual person’s comfort): Is taking in pornography fucking up your life in any tangible way you’re actively aware of? Pornography addiction is a real condition, but unless you find yourself helpless against prioritizing porn to the detriment of unrelated areas of your life, like being unable to have sex with a partner without it if that hurts their feelings, it’s unlikely that you have it. If you’re unsure, ask a psychologist. I love porn when it helps me alleviate sexual frustration or engage with a fantasy that I am either uncomfortable with or unable to share with any of the sexual partners I’ve got going at the moment. If I rely on it for my main interactions with sex and masturbation, I find myself looking for new extremes in terms of how out there it can be, which impedes my sex life because I feel dull for having uncomplicated sex, which I also usually love. Porn can be a resource, but it shouldn’t be your only sexual point of reference. I was also, for a long period, unnerved by pornography because I thought I was competing with it. It was like I was looking at a still life of some apples and being all, “DANG, guess I’m never eating real fruit again, now that I’ve seen that painted produce can do THAT; guess I don’t have the right… seeds…” What I was forgetting: Porn does not have hands, a mouth, and so forth—most notably, it lacks actual consciousness, so it’s ridiculous to envy it. I’d rather pay attention to how I can make the sex I have, be that by myself or with someone else, feel unique and right without the specter of some remembered camgirl looming over it. There’s no need to feel as though I have to live up to porn when I think about what draws me to it in the most basic senses. I watch porn whose actors frequently look nothing like my partners because I am happy with what my partners are all about and would like to see thoroughly contrapuntal acts and bodies that aren’t already a part of my sex life. I also watch it, generally, because it gives me inspiration for things I can do with the people I have sex with.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  two new kingdoms over established Churches which were something of a puzzle. Were they part of the Reformed world? James was himself a devout Reformed Protestant who had done his best to cope with (and curb) a Reformed Church of Scotland convinced that it had the God-given right to tell him what to do. He had been inclined to disparage the Church of England, aiming to please his Scottish clergy, and perhaps at that stage genuinely disapproving of an institution which he had never personally experienced; in 1590 he sneered that the English communion service of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer was ‘an evil said masse in English, wanting nothing but the liftings’ (that is, the Catholic and Lutheran elevation of the consecrated host). He may also, in another sneer from 1598, have invented the word ‘Anglican’.70 19. Europe after the Peace of Westphalia Experience of the real thing changed his mind: as James I of England, he found himself enthusiastic for the Church of England. Its confessional statement, the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563, placed it firmly in the Reformed camp in terms of doctrine, but its liturgy, devised mainly by Cranmer half a century before, was more elaborate than any other in the Reformed world. For reasons locked up in the mind of the late Queen Elizabeth, it had retained not only bishops (Scotland had bishops too, after a fashion), but fully functioning cathedrals, with a positively medieval apparatus of worship: deans, canons, paid choirs and

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  century.15 The Portuguese monarchy, always on the lookout for ways of stretching its straitened resources, could see the usefulness of this talented and mobile community, and it was inclined to look the other way if some seemed less than whole-hearted in their Christianity – much to the displeasure of its own Inquisition.As the Reformation developed, Jews viewed it with sarcastic interest, not unreasonably seeing these bitter intra-Christian disputes as evidence of God’s anger with the persecutors of the Jewish people.16 They soon found that their fortunes were as varied in Protestant as in Catholic lands, but their long experience of surviving amid Christian prejudice soon alerted them to where the danger was least. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, traditionally multicultural and from 1573 committed to a considerable degree of religious toleration (see pp. 643–4), there was a great flourishing of Jewish society, whose language Yiddish, effectively a dialect of German, marked its closeness to the German elites of eastern European urban communities. In central Europe, Prague proved a cultural melting pot for various strands of European Jewry of Iberian, eastern and Ottoman origins – thanks more to the Habsburgs than to their Bohemian subjects, whose celebrated enthusiasm for religious liberty did not extend that far.17 Above all, there was the port city of Amsterdam in the Reformed Protestant United Provinces of the Netherlands. As Amsterdam rose to commercial greatness after the War of Independence from the Spaniards, it became a major haven for Judaism, especially the Sephardic community looking for a new secure home to replace the lost glories of Iberia. The tolerance maintained by the ‘regents’ of the Netherlands in general and Amsterdam in particular (against the wishes of most of their Reformed clergy) allowed some remarkable cross- fertilization. In Amsterdam, most cosmopolitan of urban settings, stately synagogues were by the late seventeenth century a tourist attraction and an object of astonishment all over Europe – they looked remarkably like the most splendid of the Protestant churches being rebuilt at the same time by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London. Around them developed a Jewish culture which acted as a solvent on the certainties which the Reformation and Counter-Reformation sought to establish. The events of the 1490s in Spain and Portugal left a deep mark on sixteenth- century Christian upheavals. We have seen the result: a peculiarly intolerant official form of Iberian Christianity obsessed with conformity to a Catholic norm, alongside a different type of Christian religious expression with a rich and varied future. The excitements released by the destruction of Muslim and Jewish civilization in Spain fed into Spanish Christian mysticism: not only elements like

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Later that evening we built a fire in the fireplace, and I knocked over the bottle of brandy or Martha did, because she was always doing things like that and then apologizing profusely. So we all made a lark of it and fantasized about digging through the softwood boards to see if we could find clean wood for apricot-brandy-flavored toothpicks. But that’s the only day I can recall between moving in and the first of summer. Yet I went to school, and passed all my subjects that term. I also went uptown every Thursday night to meetings of the Harlem Writers Guild. The apartment was very small, and it is shocking to think of any more than one person living there, but of course a whole family had once lived in these three tiny rooms. The building faced a narrow courtyard separating its three stories from the main tenement, which was six stories high. In the front room was the fireplace, and the main door of the flat. The center room was even smaller, with no windows at all and just enough space for a double bed, a thin chest of drawers, and the door to the kitchen, which had a sink, stove, refrigerator, and bathtub. There was another door leading to the outside hall, but it was bolted shut. This kind of apartment was called a floor-through. There was no hot water at all in the building, which had six apartments in it, two on each floor. The toilets were in the outside halls, one to a story, every two apartments. Ralph, my next-door neighbor, and I put a padlock on ours to keep the Bowery bums from coming upstairs and using it. I scrubbed the apartment as best as I could, not quite believing the dirt that the former owner had allowed to accumulate. I got rid of what was possible, and resolved to ignore what I couldn’t erase. The kitchen was the worst, so I concentrated on making the two other rooms my own. I moved in my bookcase and my books and records, my guitar and my portable typewriter, and it seemed like I was acquiring an awful lot of things, including a little electric space-heater. The two big purchases were a boxspring and mattress on sale, with two plushy feather pillows. Sheets and pillow-cases I had from Brighton Beach. I also bought another woolen blanket on Orchard Street. It was a bright red and white Indian-design blanket, warm and fuzzy, and it seemed to heat up the cold, dark bedroom. I could seldom bring myself to use the kitchen, except to boil water. It was mostly a place to store the refrigerator, in which I kept whatever little food I did not bring home already fixed.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography 16 My apartment on Spring Street was not exactly an enchanted palace, but it was my first real apartment and it was all my own. Iris’s apartment on Rivington Street was a brief stopover after the trauma of declaring myself independent. The place in Brighton Beach was, after all, only a large furnished room with cooking privileges. But Spring Street was really my own, even though it was on a sublet from a friend of Jean’s who was in Paris for a year. He had left a very complicated hi-fi hookup, a wooden rocking horse, and unbelievable filth encrusting everything in the kitchen. Otherwise, there wasn’t much else except dirty linoleum in every room and ashes in a fireplace which was the only source of heat for the whole little three-room apartment. But the rent was only ten dollars a month. I moved in two weeks after the abortion. Since I was physically fine and healthy, it didn’t occur to me that I wasn’t totally free from any aftermath of that grueling affair. But the months between that birthday weekend in February and the first stirring smells of spring in the air, as I took a train to Bennington for a weekend, are very much a blur. I was visiting Jill, one of The Branded. I came home from school and my part-time job, to sometimes sit on the edge of my boxspring bed in the center room, still with my coat on, and would suddenly realize that it was the next morning, and I had not taken off my coat yet, much less put away the container of milk I had bought for the cat I had found to join me in my misery. The house was the only thing I had that belonged to me, and the cat I got from the neighborhood grocery store, and two Javanese temple birds in a little cage that Martha and Judy had brought me as a housewarming gift. They were still seniors in high school, and had appeared one Sunday afternoon with the birds and a bottle of apricot brandy and four strong young willing arms. After we hung some curtains on the tall narrow windows of the front room, which faced the back windows of the tenement in front, the three of us sat on my couch before the fireplace, contemplating ripping off the cracking plaster above the fireplace to expose the beautiful old red brick of the firewall just beneath. We sat, listening to the indignant caw of the temple lovebirds, and Rachmaninoff on the record player, and drinking apricot brandy in the chill.

• From Action (2014)

  [image file=image_1214.jpg] Sometimes, I don’t have any room for sex in my life, and my body and brain decide to give me some space back. This has happened to me on a few occasions when I was focused on special professional projects (usually, I do both with relish, but on exceedingly rare occasions, I do one or neither for a while), went on a kind of antidepressant that lessened my libido, and, at other times, I just didn’t care to fuck anybody for a minute. When I’ve lost the signal for sexual frequency, in terms of both my erotic brain-buzzings and the rapidity with which I broadcast them outward, I have learned that it’s best to not freak out and think, I hate sex now forever, I guess???!!! which would be fine but has never, historically, been the case. (Although wouldn’t it be kind of hilarious if this book came out and then I got me to a nunnery?) When I do that, I’m berating myself for something I have found is ultimately instead kind of a sexual boon, and always a mental one. I am talking about a labial lie-low, the denial of all things penile, an extended hormonal holiday—whatever your anatomy, you’ll be able to recognize it: the classic boning breather known (by me) as the Celibration. I have a Celibration when I’m approaching the limit of having “too much” sex. Overdoing it has nothing to do with some ratcheted-up naked-body-count. It stems from the perpetually reshuffling alignment of variables like my self-esteem (am I having sex to feel good about myself, even once? that’s too much sex); time (is my work lagging because I’m busy being a slag? sexcess); and scarcity of people I desire (every time I’ve had sex with a person from my hometown = critical-mass overload of sex, with the additionally injurious scents of hair gel and shame overlaying my over-laying). The bottom-line question: Do I straight-up not want to right now, “reason” or not? Then I’m on break. If the thought of sex bares itself in a way I don’t feel is good news for my overall life zone, it’s Celibration time. This has meant lots of things for me in the past: periods of full-blown sexual abstinence, meaning NO DATES, NO KISSING, NO MASTURBATION, EVEN, as well as conversations amounting to, “Oral only—I’m taking the L on taking the D,” with one of my long-term partners of yore. (We broke up for unrelated reasons long after my sex-break broke, before you ask, and he was cool about it—if he hadn’t been, we’d have split for highly related reasons, namely that I don’t ever want to be with someone who takes access to my body for granted.)

• From Action (2014)

  Before you lower your camera/phone/computer and put your pants back on: You’ve got other options. When I was first arranging myself into sultry-ish poses intended for the consumption of others, I never included my face, deciding instead to focus on body parts without clearly identifiable birthmarks on them (because I thought that people would recognize the Cindy Crawford blotch on my right ass cheek, having never seen it? I don’t know) and sent them from a dummy email address registered to “Simone de Beauvoir.” When I felt less skittish, I gradually showed more until I was totally cool with full-frontal (and back-al). These days, I don’t think I’d mind too terribly if “explicit” photos of me emerged for the consideration of the general viewing public, no matter if I weren’t artfully censored by burgers. To my knowledge, there’s no easy way to access my full-bore naked photos unless I want you to, though I think the number of people to whom I’ve sent explicit camera-phone selections nearly qualifies as “public,” so I’m not very stressed out about it. People have seen human bodies that are more beautiful than mine, yes? Yes. People are aware that we are not brains floating around in white dress shirts clamped closed with buttons at the throat and wrist, paired with three-ply khaki snow pants with reinforced iron crotches, yes? I strongly hope, yes. Some people are fearful that being sexualized, or sexualizing themselves, diminishes them in the eyes of others, especially professionally. I have had friends for whom this anxiety has been well-founded thanks to others’ actions, if not reasonable or empathetic logic: A teacher pal was once disbarred from an enviable title after an anonymous person sent the administration for which she worked old-fashioned editorials of her from one of those too-expensive Euro magazines you can get only at the bookstore. My friend protested her dismissal so cogently and persuasively that she was reinstated, with her students none the wiser, and I’m pretty sure that in five years it won’t even fuck with your chances of running for Congress, if it even does now. Your life is never “over” if photographic evidence of your involvement in adult practices is discovered. The only trick is not acquiescing to shame. Shame wrecks your pride both sexually and to a larger, life-minimizing size. If my friend had rolled over (in a different sense than what was depicted in her contentious photo, I mean), she would be out of that job, and, worse, she would have been disavowing something she believes—this is a hot thing to do, and who cares? Shame doesn’t make the situation go away. It makes you look pathetic, and you’re not, so why act like you believe otherwise? HOME FOOTAGE [image file=image_901.jpg] Let’s say you are well aware of the risks involved with DIY video smut. Your concern is not with security, but with quality: How do I shoot porno in the first place? Here are some options:

• From Action (2014)

  For pieces that I know I’ll be using with great regularity, like my “anchor” vibrator that lives on a hidden ledge on the side of my bed, I’m willing to invest more to guarantee that I’ve got something both long-lasting and exactly right for my specific needs. I spent slightly over $100 on the vibrator I’ve had for the past three years, and my feelings about it are such that they make me sound like a contented husband: She’s still just as beautiful as the day I met her. She still surprises me every day. I also spend extra if a partner and I are picking out a toy to use together, like a two-way vibrator or a silicone strap-on situation. Something More Comfortable Though their novelty factors are unparalleled, cheap lingerie and intimates from porn stores, outside of stockings and panties (especially the edible ones, which, by the by, make for a great on-the-go snack any ol’ time), are rarely good fits for anyone. I can’t tell you how many balls of tangled pink ribbon and scarlet lace haunt the farthest reaches of my bureau, unworn. You usually can’t try trashy lingerie on in adult emporiums, and because they’re usually offered in letter sizes but include cups on the bust and also cover your waist/hip areas, it’s rare to find one that actually looks like your body makes sense in it, and if a piece of clothing intended to help you feel sexy feels instead like an unflattering nuisance, you should definitely not buy it. Stay away unless you’re fine with spending money on something that might not fit. If you’re buying lingerie for someone else at a sleaze vendor, it’s even harder to guess their size. The exceptions: You can usually ballpark anything made out of fishnet or any other stretchy materials (so long as the garment in question doesn’t have molded bra cups), any one-panel front-covering-type piece that’s skirted and ties in the back like an apron as well as over the shoulders, and pasties are pretty intuitive.

• From Action (2014)

  I have a job that requires twelve-hour days of me, many of which I log at home while the rest of the world sleeps next to their sexual partners peacefully. I can guilelessly plead work obligations, a lot of the time. If you’re having sex with me, you very likely already have come to know how heartily I prioritize working—even more than sex, if you can believe it—and expect this outcome. In some situations, I’ve had to use suaver language to give people the slip. I do this mostly by being honest, but if this sounds convincing enough to work for you, I exhort you to swipe my technique. Try to save it for a bit longer than the precise moment after climax, though, for kindness’s sake: “I’m so glad you/I came over—hanging out with you rules and I like you a lot. [IMPORTANT NOTE: Say that very last part only if it’s true.] I have lots of work I’ve got to get done by first thing in the morning. I don’t want you to feel rushed or uncomfortable, so I think it’s probably best if we call it here, while I’m still mobile and halfway presentable.” If you want to see them again, end by saying when. It’s best to get your intentions re: the length of any visit cleared up prior to arrival, whether you’re the host or the guest. If I am visiting someone, I like to say, “Can I come over for a few hours before I have to go back to work/before my big day tomorrow?” or, if a person’s coming around mine, “Want to stop by for [INSERT JUST-UNDER-MAXIMUM AMOUNT OF HOURS I CAN ALLOT FOR SEXUAL MAYHEM HERE] before I’ve got to get ready for tomorrow/to go do [INSERT NON-SEXUAL-MAYHEM ACTIVITY HERE]?” That way, no one’s feelings are at risk of being surprise-attacked by my very attractively aloof and freakadocious schedule/need for privacy. If you prefer that someone spend the night, or that you monopolize their zone for the evening, say that outright! “Do you want to sleep here?” or, “Can I come over tonight and stay with you?” are just as sexy as less time-specific invitations—and less confusing. If your bedmate has the same poise that you do, they will say yes and then make good on that promise, or do like me and say, “I can’t stay over, but I can come by,” and then you are free to make whatever decision you need to based on that updated timeframe. SWEET EVERYTHINGS

• From Action (2014)

  Flicking through my sex-based mental archives (i.e., spank bank), when I finally made it back to my (intact) apartment that time around, I realized it had been a full two and a half years since I had gone without sex for longer than a week running, and I wondered how it might feel to be a single adult who was not seeking out all-new ways to come as one of her more robust priorities. This was a region uncharted in my life, at that point. I had always had boyfriends and girlfriends, or else was rejoicing that I didn’t and bopping around with others for whom that was also true. I decided to put my education to the test and explore the farthest-flung reaches of celibacy I could: I nobly abstained from sex for an entire two weeks. And it didn’t even kill me that hard. This first Celibration meant: no dates, no flirting, no contact, no Hitachi Magic Wand or other fantastic onanistics. I still went out alone or with non-beaus a lot, but I felt domesticated at first, like a dog tag–collared timber wolf glowering at the invisible electric fence in the front yard of a condominium, except hornier. I was my own captor—I wanted to gnaw my own arm off rather than hold out and suffer, but I also wanted to clock what happened when I quarantined the sometimes-rabid species of my own desire and watch how it behaved. I thought about sex a lot, but in the way that I think about going to the beach when it’s cold out: It’s going to get hot again, and I’ll be drunk on light beer for some of it. It never really goes away completely. I found that it agreed with me to live in a world of which sex was a faint, unobtrusive part, like the sound of cars that you can’t see passing outside an open bedroom window. Both are greatly beneficial to my productivity: I am able to maintain the soft-edged awareness that life’s transportational difference is just outside, but also that I don’t have to witness those adventures firsthand that very second if I’m content to sharpen the blades of my own restorative privacy by reading, or figuring out how to build a shelf for my microscope, or lugging a bottle of vodka into my bathroom and taping fake hair onto my head for three hours, aka “drunxtendoing,” or writing letters to my friends. The promise is still there, waiting to be kept whenever I’m ready to keep it. Not all favors are sexual. Sometimes they’re ones you’re content to do for yourself.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  The Mustang would be one of the first pieces in the family’s Heritage Flight Museum, opened in 1996 in Burlington, Washington. It would also be the plane Anders flew in the 1997 Reno Air Races. At age sixty-four, he finished third in the silver race. Along with Valerie and their children, Anders has helped run the foundation and the museum ever since. He still feels young; even in his mideighties, he’s surprised to look in the mirror and find an elderly man looking back. He takes daily walks with Valerie. And he still flies, but not the warbirds anymore. Mostly, he takes a light two-seater, much like a Super Cub, over Washington skies. It’s not a Mustang, or the F-89 he used to challenge Soviet bombers during the Cold War, but it’s a hell of a lot better than not flying at all. And he still cares about the environment. He knows that most people understand that Copernicus and Galileo were right, that the heavens do not revolve around Earth, but he wonders whether, down deep, any of us really believes it. By his estimation, human beings must think, in their reptilian brains, that Earth is flat and infinite; otherwise, they wouldn’t treat it as badly as they do. To that end, the Anders Foundation continues to fight to protect the environment on the only planet any of us has. Even after the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 8, Anders thinks often of the view he got of his home planet from a distance of a quarter million miles. To him, Earth seemed staggeringly small, little more than a pinpoint in an infinite universe. That feeling has never left him. When he was young, Anders sometimes wondered about his place in the universe, and whether he was special. After the Moon, he didn’t wonder about that anymore. After the Moon, he knew he wasn’t special, and it brought him a kind of peace. —In April 2018, the crew of Apollo 8 joined the author in Chicago at the Museum of Science and Industry to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of their mission. (Photos and video of the event can be seen at robertkurson.com/​rocketmen.) As of this printing all three of Apollo 8’s astronauts were still married to their wives. They are the only crew that flew in either the Gemini or Apollo programs whose marriages all survived. A few years ago, doctors diagnosed Susan Borman with Alzheimer’s disease, for which there is presently no cure. (It was symptoms of this illness that Lovell had noticed in recent get-togethers with the Bormans.) Gradually, she lost her cognitive abilities; by 2015, she sometimes didn’t recognize Frank or her sons, and needed a full-time care facility. From the moment she showed symptoms, Frank refused to leave her side, and has remained committed to her care ever since. Even at age ninety, he awakens at 5:30 A .M .

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  obedience to its abbot and under the same Rule as communities round it, yet fully independent of any other. That remains the characteristic of Benedictine monasteries to this day. The developed Rule’s single-minded emphasis on obedience, including the corporal punishment which is one of the abbot’s ultimate physical sanctions, may seem very alien to modern individualism, but the author is intent on creating a balance between the spiritual growth of each monk and the general peace and well-being of the community in which he lives. Discipline, in fact, proved to be one of the chief attractions of Benedictine monasteries, in an age enmired in terrifying lawlessness which longed for the lost order of Roman society. The Rule is comparatively brief: a skin of parchment would have sufficed to copy it out – its last clause points out that there is much more that might be said about being a monk. Because of its simplicity, it has proved very adaptable, forming the basis of much Western monastic life for both men and women to the present day in societies very different from the decaying Classical world of the sixth century. In particular, monks within the Benedictine tradition creatively adapted Benedict’s twin commands to ‘labour and pray’ so that labour might include scholarship. The shade of Jerome, who had taken so much trouble to shape that thought (see pp. 295–6), would be gratified, and otherwise the story of Western Europe would have been very different. It is to the expansion of this Western Christian society from the ruins of the Western Roman Empire that we now turn.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  creation and providentially repeatedly intervening in it, there was the concept of a God who had certainly created the world and set up its laws in structures understandable by human reason, but who after that allowed it to go its own way, precisely because reason was one of his chief gifts to humanity, and order a gift to his creation. This was the approach to divinity known as deism. Deist Christians have been much sneered at by later generations who like religion to be full of urgent propositions granted by revelation. It is worth reaching beyond such criticism to hear the voice of one English deist of the early eighteenth century, Joseph Addison. He was son of an Anglican cathedral dean, a poet, playwright and an undistinguished politician whose serenity was capable of rising above the disappointments of his life: for that considerable virtue he was widely loved. Taking inspiration from Psalm 19, Addison thus expressed his calm confidence in the benevolence of the Creator God: The spacious firmament on high, With all the blue ethereal sky, And spangled heavens, a shining frame Their great Original proclaim. Th’unwearied sun, from day to day, Does his Creator’s powers display, And publishes to every land The work of an Almighty Hand. Soon as the evening shades prevail The moon takes up the wondrous tale, And nightly to the listening earth Repeats the story of her birth; While all the stars that round her burn And all the planets in their turn, Confirm the tidings as they roll, And spread the truth from pole to pole. What though in solemn silence all Move round the dark terrestrial ball? What though no real voice nor sound Amid the radiant orbs be found? In reason’s ear they all rejoice, And utter forth a glorious voice, Forever singing as they shine,

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  identity and Church government which his immense personal prestige had postponed. The resulting quarrels were often bitter, and although British Methodism continued growing in numbers and influence, it was characterized for almost a century by constant internal schisms away from the original ‘Wesleyan Connexion’ — in fact, worldwide, Methodism has been extraordinarily fertile in creating new religious identities, as we will discover. Methodists still all sang Charles Wesley’s hymns and shared a common ethos, practising a ‘religion of the heart’ which treasured Wesley’s optimistic affirmation of the possibility of Christian perfection. Here once more was a typical Wesley contradiction. While John Wesley loved Luther’s exposition of Christ’s sacrifice for sin in his Passion and the need for the gift of free grace for salvation, his High Churchmanship led him to reject predestination and to affirm humanity’s universal potential for acceptance by God. He wanted to challenge his converts to do their best in an active Christian life, and he commended the challenge to Reformed views of salvation offered by the sixteenth-century renegade Dutch Reformed minister Jacobus Arminius (see p. 649). He even called the house journal of his Methodists the Arminian Magazine to ram home the point; and it was a point with which most Church of England clergy would then have agreed. Wesley’s distinctive soteriology was to have great long-term resonances. By no means all the leading figures of the Evangelical Revival were swept into Wesley’s Connexion or its offshoots. His early associate George Whitefield deeply disagreed with Wesley’s rejection of Calvinist predestination, and he founded his own association of Calvinist congregations. Whitefield lacked Wesley’s organizational talent; his genius lay in oratory (see Plate 37). His cenotaph in Old South Presbyterian Church, in Newburyport, Massachusetts, says with an idiom which may mislead modern ears but is intended as a compliment to a preacher of the post-Apostolic age, ‘no other uninspired man ever preached to so large assemblies’. Many Evangelical clergy nevertheless managed to avoid the separation from the Church of England forced on the followers of Whitefield and Wesley. While Wesley famously wrote ‘I look upon all the world as my parish’, they were prepared to work within the existing parish structure of the Church of England.66 Through their energies, certain areas and parishes became strongholds of Evangelical practice. As a result, by the end of the eighteenth century, there was a recognizable Evangelical party among English clergy and gentry — still divided by those inclined to Calvinism and those like Wesley inclined to Arminianism. Such Evangelicals and their Methodist and Dissenting allies or rivals began a long process of remoulding British social attitudes away from the extrovert

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  This belongs to the American people.” “We’re here to do a job,” Borman said. “That’s part of the job,” Kraft answered. Borman saw no yielding in Kraft’s eyes. The cameras would stay. Borman still objected that the work plan was too crowded, and Kraft didn’t deny it. There was a lot to do, maybe too much, but six days on a moonshot was an eyeblink, given the risks and expenditures required to get there, so they damn well had to get the most out of it. Anything less and none of them would be doing his job. That made sense to Borman. And with that, the plan was complete. The men checked their watches. It was five P.M. In just four hours, they’d designed a mission that would send the first human beings away from their home planet, have them orbit the Moon, then return home. In a year that was shaping up to be among the most fractious in the nation’s history, in which its citizens were rippling with anger and its institutions were no longer trusted, something sublime had occurred in this office. Shaking hands, Kraft and Borman had the same thought: This was a great afternoon. This was America at her best. The two men left the building together. As Borman walked past the other astronauts’ Corvettes and climbed into his 1955 Ford pickup, Kraft could only admire him. Even during this technical meeting, Borman had been true to form: direct, principled, and bullshit-free, unwilling to look past minor details or compromise around edges. To many, including Kraft, he seemed the ideal astronaut to command the riskiest flight NASA might ever undertake. To those who knew him best, it seemed Borman had arrived at a crossroads, not just in his career but in his life. Chapter Five [image file=Image00007.jpg] FRANK BORMANFrank Frederick Borman first left Earth at age five, in 1933, when his father took him on a trip from their home in Gary, Indiana, to an airfield in Ohio. There, a barnstorming pilot wedged father and son into the front seat of a Waco biplane and flew them over the countryside. Five-year-old Frank could hardly process the freedom of it all—the open cockpit, the wind in his face, nothing between him and the rest of the world as the machine growled and swooped through an endless sky. The pilot asked for five dollars when the airplane finally settled back on Earth, a fortune during the Great Depression, and the greatest bargain Frank could imagine. Not long after, Frank’s family moved to Tucson, Arizona. His father, Edwin Borman, leased a Mobil service station and tried to make a go of it. The Bormans didn’t have much—just a rented two-bedroom home and a 1929 Dodge with creaky wooden spokes. As the Depression moved into the 1930s, Edwin’s business suffered and he lost his gas station lease.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  No longer bound to Miami, the Bormans moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where their son Fred owned a car dealership. While there, Frank and Susan enjoyed one of the easiest and happiest stretches of their marriage. Frank served on corporate boards, invested in the car dealership with Fred, and stayed close to their other son, Ed, who’d become a helicopter test pilot. Frank did a lot of flying of small aircraft, still a foundational pleasure. Susan designed and rebuilt a home in the desert. After more than a decade in New Mexico, Frank and Susan moved to Montana, following their son Fred, who’d purchased a cattle ranch. Frank continued to fly in Montana’s big skies and attended air shows across the country with Susan. To this day, he thinks about a time in 1951 when, as an Air Force pilot, he ruptured an eardrum and was grounded permanently by order of the flight surgeon. Lying heartbroken in bed in the Philippines, he told Susan he’d leave the military and get a job as an aeronautical engineer. Susan had every reason to rejoice: She was a 21- year-old new mother with another baby on the way; Frank could earn a decent wage as a civilian; and the family could finally have a normal life, not one in which fighter pilots often died. Instead, Susan told her husband, “You will not do that. Flying means too much to you. You’ll go see Major McGee and show him you can fly.” Frank hardly knew what to say. But at Susan’s urging, he asked Charles McGee, one of the original Tuskegee Airmen, to give him a shot. McGee didn’t hesitate, putting Frank in an airplane and checking him out. When the flight surgeon found out that the legendary McGee had given his blessing, Frank was back in the cockpit. It’s a story Borman seldom tells to others, but decades later he still can’t get over what Susan did to save his career, and him. People still recognize Frank in Montana sometimes. Some ask if he still looks up into the sky at the Moon and thinks about having gone there. He smiles, but tells the truth: “I suppose I do, but not often.” — Shortly after Apollo 13’s safe return in 1970, political heavyweights in Wisconsin approached Jim Lovell about running as a Republican for United States Senate in his home state. He demurred, but that didn’t stop

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  and humble people struggling to make sense of a new industrial society in Georgian Britain. It shapes the sublime abstractions of the organ music of Johann Sebastian Bach. During the drab and mendacious tyranny of the German Democratic Republic, a Bach organ recital could pack out a church with people seeking something which spoke to them of objectivity, integrity and serene authenticity. All manifestations of Christian consciousness need to be taken seriously: from a craving to understand the ultimate purpose of God, which has produced terrifying visions of the Last Days, to the instinct to comfortable sociability, which has led to cricket on the Anglican vicarage lawn (see Plates 12 and 52). This is emphatically a personal view of the sweep of Christian history, so I make no apology for stating my own position in the story: the reader of a book which pontificates on religion has a right to know. I come from a background in which the Church was a three-generation family business, and from a childhood spent in the rectory of an Anglican country parish, a world not unlike that of the Rev. Samuel Crossman, of which I have the happiest memories. I was brought up in the presence of the Bible, and I remember with affection what it was like to hold a dogmatic position on the statements of Christian belief. I would now describe myself as a candid friend of Christianity. I still appreciate the seriousness which a religious mentality brings to the mystery and misery of human existence, and I appreciate the solemnity of religious liturgy as a way of confronting these problems. I live with the puzzle of wondering how something so apparently crazy can be so captivating to millions of other members of my species. It is in part to answer that question for myself that I seek out the history of this world faith, alongside those of humankind’s countless other expressions of religious belief and practice. Maybe some familiar with theological jargon will with charity regard this as an apophatic form of the Christian faith. I make no pronouncement as to whether Christianity, or indeed any religious belief, is ‘true’. This is a necessary self-denying ordinance. Is Shakespeare’s Hamlet ‘true’? It never happened, but it seems to me to be much more ‘true’, full of meaning and significance for human beings, than the reality of the breakfast I ate this morning, which was certainly ‘true’ in a banal sense. Christianity’s claim to truth is absolutely central to it over much of the past two thousand years, and much of this history is dedicated to tracing the varieties of this claim and the competition between them. But historians do not possess a prerogative to pronounce on the truth of the existence of God itself, any more than do (for example) biologists. There is, however, an important aspect of Christianity on which it is the occupation of historians to speak: the story of Christianity is undeniably true, in that it is part of human history. Historical truth can be just as

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  For the next several days, Lovell and Borman flew their spacecraft, conducted medical experiments, and, perhaps most astonishing for two men confined to such a tiny capsule, didn’t drive each other crazy. Toward the end of its two-week flight, Gemini 7 experienced problems. The craft’s fuel cells began failing and its thrusters faltered. Two days remained in the mission, and Borman’s instinct was to terminate early. But Lovell—privately, without broadcasting a word for the public to hear—urged him to hang in and not worry, that the ship would make it. Along with Chris Kraft’s reassurance, Lovell’s encouragement persuaded Borman to hold on, and the flight finished near perfectly. By the time the astronauts were aboard the aircraft carrier USS Wasp, they’d set several world records for space flight, including longest duration. Standing on deck, the scruffy Lovell said of the two cramped weeks spent with Borman, “We’d like to announce our engagement.” Back home, Marilyn told reporters, “Jim could come home beard and all, and I would welcome him with open arms.” A month later, in January 1966, Marilyn gave birth to the couple’s fourth child, Jeffrey. Less than a year later, on November 11, 1966, Lovell was back on the launchpad as commander of Gemini 12. It was to be the final mission of Project Gemini. Strapped in beside him was Buzz Aldrin, who’d been selected as part of NASA’s third group of astronauts in 1963. Together, the men would spend four days in orbit around Earth. In some ways, the pressure on Lovell for this flight was even greater than it had been during Gemini 7. Gemini 12 had to succeed in order for NASA—and the country—to feel confident about launching Apollo, the program that would take America to the Moon. The mission went smoothly, and after a journey of 1.6 million miles, Gemini 12 splashed down in the western Atlantic. As Lovell was hoisted from the ocean by helicopter, he held a distinction that even he couldn’t have imagined twenty years earlier, when he was writing letters to rocket societies and wishing he could afford college. Jim Lovell had now spent more time in space—eighteen days—than any other man in history. Chapter Eight

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  ‘The hand that made us is divine.’37 It was tempting even for clergy in established Churches to sit easily to confessional statements which they had inherited from the deplorably violent age of the Reformation, and see the reasonableness of deism as both congenial and morally superior to what had gone before. It was the same mood which after 1660 had produced the ‘Latitudinarian’ outlook in the Church of England (see pp. 653–4). Ranged against the rationalists or deists were the anxious voices of other members of the same intellectual elite, who were promoting the view of an intensely personal, interventionist God in the various Protestant Evangelical Awakenings, from Pietism in Germany to Jonathan Edwards on the eastern American seaboard. We cannot understand the rise of Evangelicalism without seeing it against the background of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Christian and post-Christian rationalism – but also in the context of other profound changes in European society of which the Evangelicals were uncomfortably aware. SOCIAL WATERSHEDS IN THE NETHELANDS AND ENGLAND (1650–1750) If Judaism and Reformed Protestantism were one fundamental pairing behind the creation of a new spirit in Christian religion and metaphysics, the other came through those sometimes uncomfortably yoked Protestant states, the Netherlands and England. The chief settings in which the millenarian, messianic or apocalyptic excitements of Reformed Protestantism and Judaism united, they pioneered the future in another and very different respect: towards the end of the seventeenth century, both societies began a long process of moving Christian doctrine and practice from the central place in European everyday life which it had enjoyed for more than a millennium, and placing it among a range of personal choices. The background to this was a conjunction of political, social and economic peculiarities in the two countries flanking the North Sea. Quite apart from their crabwise and often reluctant embrace of religious toleration for a wide variety of religious dissidence, both countries achieved a wider distribution of prosperity than any other part of seventeenth-century Europe. By improving their farming techniques and breeding new money through an exceptional range of manufactures and commercial enterprises, they were the first regions to escape famine, the constant danger of mass starvation following harvest failure.38 This had momentous consequences. An increasingly general distribution of

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  In the end, only one Australasian or Pacific territory, Tonga, escaped direct European or American rule, through an astute alliance with Britain by a newly established monarchy, basing its legitimacy on a unique construction which might have gladdened the heart of that High Tory John Wesley: a Methodist established Church. Christian groundwork was laid by LMS-inspired Tahitians in the 1820s, but a decade later Methodist initiatives began. Taufa’ahau, an ambitious and talented member of the Tupou family in the Tongan Ha’apai group of islands, allied with John Thomas, a Methodist minister once a blacksmith in Worcester; Taufa’ahau encouraged Thomas’s mission and drew on the abilities of a Tongan aristocrat now a Methodist missionary, Pita (Peter) Vi. Between them they launched a vigorous campaign against traditional Tongan cults, which ran parallel with Taufa’ahau’s growing power throughout the Tongan archipelago. In 1845 Thomas had the satisfaction of adapting English coronation rites for Taufa’ahau’s enthronement as King George I, founding a royal dynasty which endures to this day. Thirty years later there followed a written monarchical constitution for Tonga, shaped by an Australian Methodist minister, Shirley Baker, whose aspirations outran his self-restraint and brought a bizarre and sour twist to Tongan politics. Now Prime Minister of Tonga, Baker escaped the discipline of an increasingly alarmed Australasian Wesleyan Conference by resigning his ministry, and he encouraged the King to form an independent Tongan Methodist Church. Schism with Conference loyalists resulted, and between 1885 and 1887 there followed a brutal persecution of Methodists by Methodists, until the British High Commissioner intervened. By the end of George I’s long reign in 1893, Baker had become a marginal figure, and the royal Church of the Tupou dynasty had returned to a less bloodthirsty Methodism. Queen Sālote, majestic and generously proportioned heir to the light-touch British Protectorate established in 1900, was a much-appreciated visitor to England at her fellow monarch Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953.38 AFRICA: AN ISLAMIC OR A PROTESTANT CENTURY? Nowhere else in the world was the relationship of Christianity to colonial expansion so straightforward as in the Pacific, partly because elsewhere Europeans encountered cultures based on faiths also claiming a universal message or with the potential to do so: Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism. Of these, Islam had the widest reach, and contacts were consequently the most varied. We have already noted how a far more confrontational attitude to