Despair

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 What Belongs to You (2016)

  Razbiram , I said, and again he snapped back at me Nishto ne razbirash , you don’t understand anything. But then his voice softened, as it had before, I understand you, he said, but you don’t understand me, and he looked at me again with such sadness that I did eat, finally taking the gift he had offered, though I could barely swallow, my gorge rose at the sweetness of it. Good, he said in English, good, and then he set the banana down half-eaten, carefully folding the skin back over the flesh. He picked up the yogurt then, a cheap flavored brand, and after carefully peeling back the aluminum cover halfway (centimeter by centimeter, again as if measuring the force it took) he brought the cup to his lips and took two large mouthfuls, not spooning it out but drinking it. He turned to the milk again, and holding it in one hand and the yogurt in the other, he began to pour the milk into the cup, slowly, as if he were determined to maintain the thinnest possible ribbon of liquid, a process made difficult by the fact that his hands were trembling, both of them, as they always did when he was drunk. Mite , I said, using my own name for him, his nighest name, I thought, or as nigh as I could come, shortened as if for a child, Mite , is there nothing they can do, is there no treatment? Without looking away from his task, as though any break in concentration would disrupt the delicate process, he brought his head up and then down, a decisive gesture, Ne , he said, nishto . I wondered why this was so, whether because of his condition or because of the expense of whatever was needed to treat it, even here where such things are so much cheaper, and I let myself imagine taking it on, the impossible task of saving him, for a single breath I imagined it, and then I let it go. He set down the milk and yogurt, and having peeled the foil top the rest of the way off he began stirring the mixture with a spoon. He was making some variant of airan , I realized, the watered yogurt that everyone loves in Bulgaria. Mite , I said again, I will help you, I will give you money to go back to Varna. Ne iskam pari , he said, I don’t want money, and he took my hand in his again, squeezing it, though not with the same force as before.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  The crime was discovered when Trina became pregnant. As is often the case, the correctional officer was fired but not criminally prosecuted. Trina remained imprisoned and gave birth to a son. Like hundreds of women who give birth while in prison, Trina was completely unprepared for the stress of childbirth. She delivered her baby while handcuffed to a bed. It wasn’t until 2008 that most states abandoned the practice of shackling or handcuffing incarcerated women during delivery. Trina’s baby boy was taken away from her and placed in foster care. After this series of events—the fire, the imprisonment, the rape, the traumatic birth, and then the seizure of her son—Trina’s mental health deteriorated further. Over the years, she became less functional and more mentally disabled. Her body began to spasm and quiver uncontrollably, until she required a cane and then a wheelchair. By the time she had turned thirty, prison doctors diagnosed her with multiple sclerosis, intellectual disability, and mental illness related to trauma. Trina had filed a civil suit against the officer who raped her, and the jury awarded her a judgment of $62,000. The guard appealed, and the Court reversed the verdict because the correctional officer had not been permitted to tell the jury that Trina was in prison for murder. Consequently, Trina never received any financial aid or services from the state to compensate her for being violently raped by one of its “correctional” officers. In 2014, Trina turned fifty-two. She has been in prison for thirty-eight years. She is one of nearly five hundred people in Pennsylvania who have been condemned to mandatory life imprisonment without parole for crimes they were accused of committing when they were between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. It is the largest population of child offenders condemned to die in prison in any single jurisdiction in the world. — In 1990, Ian Manuel and two older boys attempted to rob a couple who were out for dinner in Tampa, Florida. Ian was thirteen years old. When Debbie Baigre resisted, Ian shot her with a handgun given to him by the older boys. The bullet went through Baigre’s cheek, shattering several teeth and severely damaging her jaw. All three boys were arrested and charged with armed robbery and attempted homicide.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Most incarcerated women—nearly two-thirds—are in prison for nonviolent, low-level drug crimes or property crimes. Drug laws in particular have had a huge impact on the number of women sent to prison. “Three strikes” laws have also played a considerable role. I started challenging conditions of confinement at Tutwiler in the mid-1980s as a young attorney with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee. At the time, I was shocked to find women in prison for such minor offenses. One of the first incarcerated women I ever met was a young mother who was serving a long prison sentence for writing checks to buy her three young children Christmas gifts without sufficient funds in her account. Like a character in a Victor Hugo novel, she tearfully explained her heartbreaking tale to me. I couldn’t accept the truth of what she was saying until I checked her file and discovered that she had, in fact, been convicted and sentenced to over ten years in prison for writing five checks, including three to Toys“R”Us. None of the checks was for more than $150. She was not unique. Thousands of women have been sentenced to lengthy terms in prison for writing bad checks or for minor property crimes that trigger mandatory minimum sentences. The collateral consequences of incarcerating women are significant. Approximately 75 to 80 percent of incarcerated women are mothers with minor children. Nearly 65 percent had minor children living with them at the time of their arrest—children who have become more vulnerable and at-risk as a result of their mother’s incarceration and will remain so for the rest of their lives, even after their mothers come home. In 1996, Congress passed welfare reform legislation that gratuitously included a provision that authorized states to ban people with drug convictions from public benefits and welfare. The population most affected by this misguided law is formerly incarcerated women with children, most of whom were imprisoned for drug crimes. These women and their children can no longer live in public housing, receive food stamps, or access basic services. In the last twenty years, we’ve created a new class of “untouchables” in American society, made up of our most vulnerable mothers and their children. Marsha wandered through her first days at Tutwiler in a state of disbelief. She met other women like herself who had been imprisoned after having given birth to stillborn babies. Efernia McClendon, a young black teenager from Opelika, Alabama, got pregnant in high school and didn’t tell her parents. She delivered at just over five months and left the stillborn baby’s remains in a drainage ditch. When they were discovered, she was interrogated by police until she acknowledged that she couldn’t be 100 percent sure the infant hadn’t moved before death, even though the premature delivery made viability extremely unlikely. Threatened with the death penalty, she joined a growing community of women imprisoned for having unplanned pregnancies and bad judgment.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Ian’s appointed lawyer encouraged him to plead guilty, assuring him that he would be sentenced to fifteen years in prison. The lawyer didn’t realize that two of the charges against Ian were punishable with sentences of life imprisonment without parole. The judge accepted Ian’s plea and then sentenced him to life with no parole. Even though he was thirteen, the judge condemned Ian for living in the streets, for not having good parental supervision, and for his multiple prior arrests for shoplifting and minor property crimes. Ian was sent to an adult prison—the Apalachee Correctional Institution, one of the toughest prisons in Florida. The correctional staff at the prison processing center couldn’t find any uniforms that would fit a boy Ian’s size, so they cut six inches from the bottom of their smallest pants. Juveniles housed in adult prisons are five times more likely to be the victims of sexual assault, so the staff at Apalachee put Ian, who was small for his age, in solitary confinement. Solitary confinement at Apalachee means living in a concrete box the size of a walk-in closet. You get your meals through a slot, you do not see other inmates, and you never touch or get near another human being. If you “act out” by saying something insubordinate or refusing to comply with an order given to you by a correctional officer, you are forced to sleep on the concrete floor of your cell without a mattress. If you shout or scream, your time in solitary is extended; if you hurt yourself by refusing to eat or mutilating your body, your time in solitary is extended; if you complain to officers or say anything menacing or inappropriate, your time in solitary is extended. You get three showers a week and are allowed forty-five minutes in a small caged area for exercise a few times a week. Otherwise you are alone, hidden away in your concrete box, week after week, month after month. In solitary, Ian became a self-described “cutter”; he would take anything sharp on his food tray to cut his wrists and arms just to watch himself bleed. His mental health unraveled, and he attempted suicide several times. Each time he hurt himself or acted out, his time in isolation was extended. Ian spent eighteen years in uninterrupted solitary confinement.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  After my call with Herbert, I filed a flurry of stay motions in various courts. I knew the odds were low that we would block the execution. By the late 1980s, the U.S. Supreme Court had grown impatient with challenges to capital punishment. The Court had justified reauthorization of the death penalty in the mid-1970s on the promise that proceedings would be subject to heightened scrutiny and meticulous compliance with the law but then began to retreat from the existing review procedures. The Court’s rulings had become increasingly hostile to death row prisoners and less committed to the notion that “death is different,” requiring more careful review. The Court decided to bar claims from federal habeas corpus review if they weren’t initially presented to state courts. Federal courts were then forbidden to consider new evidence unless it was first presented to state courts. The Court began insisting that federal judges defer more to state court rulings, which tended to be more indulgent of errors and defects in capital proceedings. In the 1980s, the Court rejected a constitutional challenge to imposing the death penalty on juveniles; upheld the death penalty for disabled people suffering from “mental retardation”; and, in a widely condemned opinion, found no constitutional violation in the extreme racial disparities that could be seen throughout most death penalty jurisdictions. By the end of the decade, some justices had become openly critical of the review that death penalty cases received. Chief Justice William Rehnquist urged restrictions on death penalty appeals and the endless efforts of lawyers to stop executions. “Let’s get on with it,” he famously declared at a bar association event in 1988. Finality, not fairness, had become the new priority in death penalty jurisprudence. —

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  Love isn’t just a matter of looking at someone, I think now, but also of looking with them, of facing what they face, and sometimes I wonder whether there’s anyone I could stand with and watch what I wouldn’t watch with Mitko, whether with my mother, say, or with R.; it’s a terrible thing to doubt about oneself but I do doubt it. Even so, I lay beside him, I held him as he held my arm, embracing it against his chest. When he had calmed he began to speak, and his hands, which had been still as he wept, started to knead me again where they gripped me, taking up again their strange motion. Obichash li me , he asked, do you love me, but it wasn’t a question; I know you love me, he said, not waiting for me to speak. I know you love me but I can’t love you, I’m sorry, you are my friend, he said, priyatel , that word that could mean so much and so little, you are my friend but poveche ne moga , I can’t do anything more. Hush, Mitko, I said, it’s all right, don’t worry, I understand, but he wasn’t listening to me, he was speaking for himself, the circling of his thoughts impossible for me to follow. Gospod go obicham , he said, and for a moment I thought I must have misunderstood him, he had never spoken of such things before. But he said it again, I love God, no men ne me obicha , but God doesn’t love me, God loves the strong and I’m not strong, and again he was weeping, speaking at that strange heightened pitch the voice strikes under strain; he loves the strong, he said again and again, repeating it like a chant or a prayer. What are you saying, I said to him, gluposti , nonsense, and again I told him to hush, speaking to him as if he were a child, I didn’t know how else to speak to him. God loves the strong, he said again, and I’m not strong. Iskam maika si , he said then, I want my mother, and again the tears came freely, he had taken my hand and was squeezing it hard. Do you love God, he asked me when he could speak again, do you go to church, and now I didn’t try to speak, not knowing how to answer, unable to bring myself to say what I knew would quiet him, though it felt unkind I couldn’t make myself say the words.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Paul to suffer fi>r the Gospel, whether or not it was natural for the Germans to send upwards of six million people to an extremely twen tieth-centur y death. It does not seem to me that nature helps us very much when we need illum ination in human affairs. I am cer tainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than a natural state. How to be natural docs not seem to me to be a problem quite the contrary. The great problem is how to be-in the best sense of that kaleidoscopic word-a man. This problem was at the heart of all Gide's anguish, and it proved itself, like most real problems, to be insoluble. He died, as it were, with the teeth of this problem still buried in his th roat. What one learns from Madeleine is what it cost him, in terms of unceasing agony, to live with this problem at all. Of what it cost her, his wite, it is scarcely possible to conjecture. But she was not so much a victim of Gide's sexual natur e-homosexuals do not choose women for their victims, THE MALE PRISON 233 nor is the difficulty of becoming a victim so great for a woman that she is compelled to turn to homosexuals for this -as she was a victim of his overwhelming guilt, which connected, it would seem, and most unl uckily, with her own guilt and shame. If this meant, as Gide says, that "the spiritual force of my love [for Madeleine] inhibited all carnal desire," it also meant that some corr esponding inhibition in her prevented her from seeking carnal satisfaction elsewhere. And if there is scarcely any suggestion throughout this appalling letter that Gide ever really under stood that he had married a woman or that he had any apprehension of what a woman was, neither is there any suggestion that she ever, in any way, insisted on or was able to believe in her womanhood and its right to flower.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  When I got back to the flat I was half expecting Phil to be there, and remembered as I slouched sulkily and randily around the kitchen taking a glass of Scotch in great hot nips that he had arranged a couple of nights ‘off’ to see some South African friends, and, tomorrow, to go to a leaving party at the ‘Embassy’. In the sitting-room, remote control in hand, I tripped from channel to channel on the TV, trying to find something attractive in the personnel of various sitcoms and panel games. Abandoning that forlorn pursuit, I put on the beginning of Act Three of Siegfried and conducted it wildly, with great tuggings at the cellos and stabbings at the horns, but without, after five minutes or so, having made myself feel the faintest interest in it. It was in a reluctant mood that I finally settled down at my writing-desk to read Charles’s precious document. When I untied it I found it to be, unlike anything else of his I had seen, an elegant fair copy, from which a compositor could easily have set type. Although it would have been allowed, I did not keep a journal over those six months. From the start I saw that what I wanted to say, although ‘hereafter, in a better world than this’ it might find other readers and do its good, would have brought nothing but scorn and salacity at the time. And later, long after the start, when I thought writing might earn some slight remission of my solitude and pent-up thoughts, I shunned it, mistrusted it like one of those friends to whom one is drawn and drawn again and yet each time comes away cheapened, wasted or over-indulged. My journal has always, since my childhood, been my close, silent and retentive friend, so close that when I lied to it I suffered inwardly from its mute reproach. Now, though, it seemed to hold out the invitation to something shameful—self-pity, and, worse, the exposure of my narrow, treadmill circuit of memories and longings. There was too my catastrophic change of station. I had fallen, and though my fall was brought about by a conspiracy, by a calculated spasm of malevolence, its effect on me at first was like that of some terrible physical accident, after which no ordinary thoughtless action could be the same again. The fall had its beginning in that very fast, dazed and escorted plunge from the dock after the sentence had been given, down and down the stone stairs from the courtroom to the cells. I had the illusion—so active is the faculty of metaphor at moments of crisis—of being flung, chained, into water: of a need to hold my breath. In a sense I kept on holding it for half a year.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It is a black man's newspaper straining for recognition and a foothold in the white man's world . Mat ters are not helped in the least by the fact that the white man's world, intellectually, morally, and spiritually, has the mean ingless ring of a hollow drum and the odor of slow death. Within the body of the Negro press all the wars and f.1lse hoods, all the decay and dislocation and struggle of our so ciety are seen in relief. The Negro press, like the Negro, becomes the scapegoat for our ills. There is no difference, after all, between the Am sterdam's handling of a murder on Lenox Avenue and the Dail y News1 coverage of a murder on Beckman Hill; nor is there any difference between the chauvinism of the two pa pers, except that the News is smug and the Amsterdam is des perate. Negroes live violent lives, unavoidably; a Negro press without violence is therefore not possible; and, further, in every act of violence, particula rly violence against white men, Negroes feel a certain thrill of identification, a wish to have done it themselves, a feeling that old scores are being settled at last. It is no accident that Joe Louis is the most idolized man in Harlem. He has succeeded on a level that white Amer ica indicates is the only level for which it has any respect. We (Americans in general, that is) like to point to Negroes and to most of their activities with a kind of tolerant scorn; but it is ourselves we are watching, ourselves we arc damning, or-co ndescendingly- bending to save. I have written at perhaps excessive length about the Negro press, principally because its many critics have always seemed to me to make the irrational demand that the nation's most oppressed minority behave itself at all times with a skill and foresight no one ever expected of the late Joseph Patterson or ever expected of He arst; and I have tried to give some idea of its tone because it seems to me that it is here that the innate NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON dc�peration is betrayed. As for the question of Negro adver tising, which has caused so much comment, it seems to me quite logical that any minority identified by the color of its skin and the texture of its hair would eventually grow self conscious about these attributes and avoid advertising lotions that made the hair kinkier and soaps that darkened the sk in. The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible .

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  If that is so, then it is time to replace Him-replace Him with what? And this void, this de spair, this torment is felt everywhere in the \Vest, from the streets of Stockholm to the churches of New Orleans and the sidewalks of Harlem. God is black. All black men belong to Islam; they have been chose n. And Islam shall rule the world. The dream, the sen timent is old; only the color is new. And it is this dream, this sweet possibility, that thousands of oppressed black men and women in this country now carry away with them after the Muslim minister has spoken, through the dark, noisome 320 THE FIR E NE XT TIME ghetto streets, into the hovels where so many have perished. The white God has not delivered them; perhaps the Black God will. While I was in Chicago last summer, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad invited me to have dinner at his home. This is a stately mansion on Chicago's South Side, and it is the head qu arters of the Nation of Islam movement. I had not gone to Chicago to meet Elijah Muhammad-he was not in my thoughts at all-but the moment I received the invitation, it occu rred to me that I ought to have expected it. In a way, I owe the invitation to the incredible, abysmal, and really cow ardly obtuseness of white liberals. Whether in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim movement came about, and how it has achieved such force, was met with a blankness that revealed the little con nection that the liberals' attitudes have with their perceptions or their lives, or even their knowledge-revealed, in fact, that they could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man. When Malcolm X, who is considered the movement's second-in-command, and heir ap parent, points out that the cry of "violence" was not raised, for example, when the Israelis fought to regain Israel, and, indeed, is raised only when black men indicate that they will fight for their rights, he is speaking the truth. The conque sts of England, ever y single one of them bloody, are part of what Americans have in mind when they speak of England's glory. In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous except when it comes to blacks, and the only way to defeat Malcolm's point is to concede it and then ask oneself why this is so.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  He tried to date her and even told her he wanted to marry her. At first she resisted because she knew that Herbert was still suffering the effects of his time in combat, but ultimately she gave in. They had a brief intimate relationship, and Herbert had never been happier. He became intensely protective of his girlfriend. But she began to see his desperate and relentless focus on her as something closer to obsessive need than love. She tried to end the relationship. After months of unsuccessfully trying to create distance from Herbert, she finally insisted that he stay away. Instead, Herbert moved even closer to her home in Dothan, which elevated her anxieties. It got to the point where she refused to allow him to see her, talk to her, or get anywhere near her. Herbert was convinced that she was just confused and would eventually come back to him. He was deluded by obsession; his logic and reasoning became corrupted, irrational, and increasingly dangerous. Herbert was not unintelligent—in fact, he was quite smart, with a particular aptitude for electronics and mechanics. And he had a big heart. But he was still recovering from the trauma of the war as well as some serious traumas that preceded his military experience. His mother had died when he was just three years old, and he had struggled with drugs and alcohol before he decided to enlist. The horrors of war had added a new level of distress to an already damaged psyche. He came up with an idea to win back his girlfriend. He decided that if she felt threatened, she would come to him for protection. He concocted a tragically misguided plan: He would construct a small bomb and place it on her front porch. He would detonate the bomb and then run to her aid to save her and then they would live happily ever after. It was the kind of reckless use of explosives that wouldn’t have been sensible in a combat zone, much less in a poor black neighborhood in Dothan, Alabama. One morning, Herbert completed his assembly of the bomb and placed it on his former girlfriend’s porch. The woman’s niece and another little girl came out instead and saw the peculiar package. The ten-year-old niece was drawn to the odd bag with a clock on it and picked up the device. She shook the clock to see if it would tick, which triggered a violent explosion. The child was killed instantly, and her twelve-year-old friend, who was standing next to her, was traumatized. Herbert knew both children. In this community, children were always roaming the streets looking for something to do. Herbert loved kids and would invite them into his yard, pay them to do errands, and talk to them. He started making cereal and cooking for the kids who would wander by. The two girls had come by his house for breakfast.

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

  11. To be incapable of being changed by a corporeal thing after the manner of an alteration, is proper to the soul by reason of its very essence. However, the soul does not suffer in this way through the divine power, but as we have explained above (the body of this article). 12. Fire does not possess the power of acting upon the soul inasmuch as it acts in virtue of its proper power, as those things do which act naturally; it acts only in an instrumental way. Therefore it does not follow that its nature is changed. 13. The soul is not acted upon by corporeal fire in any of these ways, but as we have explained. 14. Although corporeal fire does not make the soul hot, nevertheless it has another operation or relationship to the soul; which relationship bodies are naturally disposed to have toward spirits in order that bodies may be united to them in some way. 15. The soul is not united as a form to the fire which punishes it, because the soul does not give life to fire, as Augustine says; “I but it is united to fire in the way in which spirits are united to corporeal places by contact of power, although they are not the movers of these. 16. The soul is afflicted by corporeal fire inasmuch as the soul apprehends that fire is harmful to it as binding and confining it, as we have already pointed out. Moreover, this apprehension can torment the soul even when it is not actually confined by fire, simply because it sees that it is capable of being so confined; and for this reason the demons are said to bring’hell-fire with them wherever they go. 17. Although the soul is not prevented from performing its intellectual operation by being detained in this way; yet it is deprived of a certain natural liberty whereby it is wholly freed from being physically confined to a corporeal place. 18. The punishment of hell-fire (gehenna) belongs not only to the soul but also to the body. For this reason this fire above all is said to be the punishment of hell, because fire is particularly capable of tormenting bodies. However, there will also be other torments, according to this: “Fire and brimstone and the storms of winds shall be the portion of their cup” (Ps. 10:7). It is also appropriate to that inordinate love which is the principle of sin, so that as the empyrean heaven rewards the fire of charity, so does the fire of hell reward inordinate desire.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  When I first went to death row in December 1983, America was in the early stages of a radical transformation that would turn us into an unprecedentedly harsh and punitive nation and result in mass imprisonment that has no historical parallel. Today we have the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The prison population has increased from 300,000 people in the early 1970s to 2.3 million people today. There are nearly six million people on probation or on parole. One in every fifteen people born in the United States in 2001 is expected to go to jail or prison; one in every three black male babies born in this century is expected to be incarcerated. We have shot, hanged, gassed, electrocuted, and lethally injected hundreds of people to carry out legally sanctioned executions. Thousands more await their execution on death row. Some states have no minimum age for prosecuting children as adults; we’ve sent a quarter million kids to adult jails and prisons to serve long prison terms, some under the age of twelve. For years, we’ve been the only country in the world that condemns children to life imprisonment without parole; nearly three thousand juveniles have been sentenced to die in prison. Hundreds of thousands of nonviolent offenders have been forced to spend decades in prison. We’ve created laws that make writing a bad check or committing a petty theft or minor property crime an offense that can result in life imprisonment. We have declared a costly war on people with substance abuse problems. There are more than a half-million people in state or federal prisons for drug offenses today, up from just 41,000 in 1980. We have abolished parole in many states. We have invented slogans like “Three strikes and you’re out” to communicate our toughness. We’ve given up on rehabilitation, education, and services for the imprisoned because providing assistance to the incarcerated is apparently too kind and compassionate. We’ve institutionalized policies that reduce people to their worst acts and permanently label them “criminal,” “murderer,” “rapist,” “thief,” “drug dealer,” “sex offender,” “felon”—identities they cannot change regardless of the circumstances of their crimes or any improvements they might make in their lives. The collateral consequences of mass incarceration have been equally profound. We ban poor women and, inevitably, their children from receiving food stamps and public housing if they have prior drug convictions. We have created a new caste system that forces thousands of people into homelessness, bans them from living with their families and in their communities, and renders them virtually unemployable. Some states permanently strip people with criminal convictions of the right to vote; as a result, in several Southern states disenfranchisement among African American men has reached levels unseen since before the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

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

  PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. Or otherwise; When we work with the labour of our hands, for example, cultivating our field or our vineyard, or any manufacture of wood or iron, we seem to be occupied with our farm; any other mode of getting money unattended with manual labour is here called merchandize. O most miserable world! and miserable ye that follow it! The pursuits of this world have ever shut men out of life. GREGORY. Whosoever then intent upon earthly business, or devoted to the actions of this world, feigns to be meditating upon the mystery of the Lord’s Passion, and to be living accordingly, is he that refuses to come to the King’s wedding on pretext of going to his farm or his merchandize. Nay often, which is worse, some who are called not only reject the grace, but become persecutors, And the remnant took his servants, and entreated them despitefully, and slew them. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. Or, by the business of a farm, He denotes the Jewish populace, whom the delights of this world separated from-Christ; by the excuse of merchandize, the Priests and other ministers of the Temple, who, coming to the service of the Law and the Temple through greediness of gain, have been shut out of the faith by covetousness. Of these He said not, ‘They were filled with envy,’ but They made light of it. For they who through hate and spite crucified Christ, are they who were filled with envy; but they who being entangled in business did not believe on Him, are not said to have been filled with envy, but to have made light of it. The Lord is silent respecting His own death, because He had spoken of it in the foregoing parable, but He shews forth the death of His disciples, whom after His ascension the Jews put to death, stoning Stephen and executing James the son of Alphæus, for which things Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. And it is to be observed, that anger is attributed to God figuratively and not properly; He is then said to be angry when He punishes. JEROME. When He was doing works of mercy, and bidding to His marriage-feast, He was called a man; (homini regi) now when He comes to vengeance, the man is dropped, and He is called only a King. ORIGEN. Let those who sin against the God of the Law, and the Prophets, and the whole creation, declare whether He who is here called man, and is said to be angry, is indeed the Father Himself. If they allow this, they will be forced to own that many things are said of Him applicable to the passible nature of man; not for that He has passions, but because He is represented to us after the manner of passible human nature. In this way we take God’s anger, repentance, and the other things of the like sort in the Prophets.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Manette, seen the sense of being oppressed, burstin g forth like a fire.) Dickens has not seen it at all. The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: lif e is their only weapon against lif e, lif e is all that they have. This is why the dispossessed and starving will never be convinced (though some may be coerced) by the popula tion- control programs of the civilized. I have watched the dis possessed and starving laboring in the fields which others own, with their transistor radios at their ear, all day long: so they learn, for example, along with equally weighty matters, that the Pope, one of the heads of the civilized world, torbids to the civilized that abortion which is being, literally, torced on them, the wretched. The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible tor their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wher ever they decide that their "vital interests" are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the "sanctity" of human lif e, or the "conscience" of the civilized world . There is a "sanctity" involved with bringing a child into this +90 THE DEVIL FIND S WORK world: it is better than bombing one out of it. Dreadful in deed it is to see a starving child, but the answer to that is not to prevent the child's arrival but to restructure the world so that the child can live in it: so that the "vital interest" of the world becomes nothing less than the lif e of the child. How ever-! could not have said any of this then, nor is so absurd a notion about to engulf the world now. But we were all starving children, after all, and none of our fathers, even at their most embittered and enraged, had ever suggested that we "die out." It was not we who were supposed to die out: this was, of all notions, the most forbidden, and we learned this from the cradle. Every trial, every beating, every drop of blood, every tear, were meant to be used by us fi>r a day that was coming-fi>r a day that was certainly coming, absolutely certainly, certainly coming: not fi>r us, perhaps, but for our children. The chil dren of the despised and rejected are men aced from the moment they stir in the womb, and are there fore sacred in a way that the children of the saved are not.

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

  More recently, however, the old heresies concerning virginity and poverty have been revived by men who, while pretending to defend the truth, have gone from bad to worse, and who, not content with teaching, like Jovinian that a condition of wealth is as meritorious as voluntary poverty, or with preferring riches to poverty, as did Vigilantius, hold that poverty is to be absolutely condemned; and that it is not lawful for a man to leave all things for Christ, unless he enter an Order which possesses some common property, or can support itself by means of manual labour. They further assert that the poverty commended by the Scriptures is not that actual poverty whereby a man strips himself of all temporal possessions, but that habitual poverty which causes him to despise those earthly goods which he actually owns. We will now proceed to refute this mistaken opinion. (1st) We will prove that for evangelical perfection, not only habitual poverty is required, but, likewise that actual poverty which consists in the renunciation of material possessions. (2nd) We shall show that perfection is attained, even by those who own no common property. (3rd) We shall make it evident that manual labour is not essential to perfection, even where men possess nothing. (4th) We shall refute the arguments whereby our adversaries seek to maintain their errors. 1. In order to prove that evangelical poverty requires, not only habitual, but likewise actual poverty, we will remind our readers of the words: “If you would be perfect, go, sell all” etc. (Matt xix. 21). Now he who sells all that he has and distributes it to the poor practises not merely habitual, but likewise actual poverty. Hence actual poverty is needed for evangelical perfection. Again, evangelical perfection consists in the imitation of Christ, who was poor not only in desire, but in fact. The Gloss, on the words, “Go to the sea” (Matt. xvii.) says, “So great was the poverty of the Lord that he had not wherewith to pay the tribute money.” Again, on the words, “the foxes have holes” etc. (Luke ix.), the Gloss says: “our Lord meant to say that His poverty was so extreme that He had no shelter, and no roof to call His own.” We might adduce many other proofs that actual poverty pertains to evangelical perfection. The Apostles were mirrors of evangelical perfection. They practised actual poverty, renouncing all that they possessed. “Behold” (said St. Peter) “we have left all things” (Matt. xix. 27). Hence St. Jerome writes to Hebidia: “ Would you be perfect and attain to the highest dignity? Do as the Apostles did. Sell all that you have and give to the poor, and follow our Saviour. Alone, and stripped of all things, follow only the Cross in its bare poverty.” Hence actual poverty forms part of evangelical perfection.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Herbert, watching the house from across the street, was devastated. He had planned to run to his girlfriend’s aid when the bomb exploded to reinforce his readiness to protect her and to keep her safe. When the child picked up the bomb and it detonated, Herbert ran across the street and found himself in a circle of grieving neighbors. It didn’t take long for police to make an arrest. They found pipes and other bomb-making materials in Herbert’s car and front yard. Because the victims were black and poor, this wasn’t the kind of case that would usually be prosecuted as a capital crime, but Herbert wasn’t local. His identity as an outsider, a Northerner, and the nature of the crime seemed to generate heightened contempt from law enforcement officials. Placing a bomb anywhere in Dothan, even in a poor section of town, posed a different kind of threat than “typical” domestic violence. The prosecutor argued that Herbert was not just tragically misguided and reckless; he was evil. The State sought the death penalty. After striking all of the black prospective jurors in a county that is 28 percent black, the prosecutor told the all-white jury in his closing argument that a conviction was appropriate because Herbert was “associated with Black Muslims from New York City” and deserved no mercy. Alabama’s capital statute requires that any murder eligible for the death penalty be intentional, but it was clear that Herbert had no intent to kill the child. The State decided to invoke an unprecedented theory of “transferred intent” to make the crime eligible for the death penalty. But Herbert had no intention to kill anyone. Herbert was advised to deny any culpability but ultimately argued that this was reckless murder, not capital murder, which could be punished with life imprisonment but not the death penalty. During the trial, the appointed defense lawyer presented no evidence about Herbert’s background, his military service, his trauma from the war, his relationship with the victim, his obsession with the girlfriend—nothing. Alabama’s statute at the time limited what court-appointed lawyers could be paid for their out-of-court preparation time to $1,000, so the lawyer spent almost no time on the case. The trial lasted just over a day, and the judge quickly condemned Herbert to death. Following the imposition of the death sentence, Herbert’s appointed lawyer, who was later disbarred for poor performance in other cases, told Herbert that he didn’t see any reason to appeal the conviction or sentence because the trial had been as fair as he could expect. Herbert reminded him that he’d been sentenced to death. He wanted to appeal no matter how unlikely the prospects, but his lawyer filed no brief. Herbert was confined on death row for eleven years, until it was his time to face “Yellow Mama.” A volunteer lawyer had challenged the intent questions in a desperate appeal but was unsuccessful. Herbert’s execution was now set for August 18, just three weeks away.

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

  Augustine, however (De Verb. Dom., Serm. lxxi), says that blasphemy or the sin against the Holy Ghost, is final impenitence when, namely, a man perseveres in mortal sin until death, and that it is not confined to utterance by word of mouth, but extends to words in thought and deed, not to one word only, but to many. Now this word, in this sense, is said to be uttered against the Holy Ghost, because it is contrary to the remission of sins, which is the work of the Holy Ghost, Who is the charity both of the Father and of the Son. Nor did Our Lord say this to the Jews, as though they had sinned against the Holy Ghost, since they were not yet guilty of final impenitence, but He warned them, lest by similar utterances they should come to sin against the Holy Ghost: and it is in this sense that we are to understand Mark 3:29,30, where after Our Lord had said: “But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost,” etc. the Evangelist adds, “because they said: He hath an unclean spirit.” But others understand it differently, and say that the sin of blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, is a sin committed against that good which is appropriated to the Holy Ghost: because goodness is appropriated to the Holy Ghost, just a power is appropriated to the Father, and wisdom to the Son. Hence they say that when a man sins through weakness, it is a sin “against the Father”; that when he sins through ignorance, it is a sin “against the Son”; and that when he sins through certain malice, i.e. through the very choosing of evil, as explained above ([2418]FS, Q[78], AA[1] ,3), it is a sin “against the Holy Ghost.” Now this may happen in two ways. First by reason of the very inclination of a vicious habit which we call malice, and, in this way, to sin through malice is not the same as to sin against the Holy Ghost. In another way it happens that by reason of contempt, that which might have prevented the choosing of evil, is rejected or removed; thus hope is removed by despair, and fear by presumption, and so on, as we shall explain further on (QQ[20],21). Now all these things which prevent the choosing of sin are effects of the Holy Ghost in us; so that, in this sense, to sin through malice is to sin against the Holy Ghost. Reply to Objection 1: Just as the confession of faith consists in a protestation not only of words but also of deeds, so blasphemy against the Holy Ghost can be uttered in word, thought and deed.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The results of this blasp hemy resound in this country, on every private and public level, until this hour. When the man grabbed my cock, I didn't think of him as a f.1ggot, which, indeed, if having a wife and children, house, cars, and a re spectable and powerful standing in the community, mean any thing, he wasn't: I watched his eyes, thinking, with great sorrow, The unexamined life is not JVorth living. The despair among the loveless is that they must narcoticize themselves before they can touch any human being at all. They, then, fatally, touch the wrong person, not merely because they have gone blind, or have lost the sense of touch, but because they no longer have any way of knowing that any loveless touch is a violation, whether one is touching a woman or a man. vVhen the loveless come to power, or when sexual despair comes to power, the sexuality of the object is either a threat or a fantasy. That most men will choose women to debase is not a matter of rejoicing either for the chosen women or anybody else; brutal truth, furthermore, forces the observation, particularly if one is a black man, that this choice is by no means certain. 392 NO NAME IN THE STR EE T That men have an enormous need to debase other men-and only because they are men-is a truth which history forbids us to labor. And it is absolutely certain that white men, who invented the nigger's big black prick, arc still at the mercy of this nightmare, and arc still, for the most part, doomed, in one way or another, to attempt to make this prick their own: so much for the progress which the Christian world has made from that jungle in which it is their clear intention to keep black men treed forever. Every black man walking in this country pays a tremendous price for walking: for men are not women, and a man's bal ance depends on the weight he carries between his legs. All men, however they may face or fail to face it, however they may handle, or be handled by it, know something about each other, which is simply that a man without balls is not a man; that the word genesis describes the male, involves the phallus, and refers to the seed which gives lif e. When one man can no longer honor this in another man-and this remains true even if that man is his lover-he has abdicated from a man's estate, and, hard upon the heels of that abdication, chaos arrives. It was something like this that I began to see, watching black men in the South and watching white men watching them. For that marvelously mocking, salty authority with which black men walked was dictated by the tacit and shared reali zation of the price each had paid to be able to walk at all.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  He held my hand quietly for a while, still kneading it in his strange way, grinding the joints of my fingers against one another, so that I had to squeeze back to avoid pain. And then he started speaking, though not to me, exactly, or to anyone; he began to repeat a single phrase, which even though it was short I didn’t catch at first, both because his speech was slurred and because it was so odd, a statement of counterfact, Men me nyama , he said, the three words again and again, men me nyama, men me nyama , I’m gone, it means, or I’m not here, literally there’s no me, an odd construction I can’t quite make work in English. For a moment I thought he was singing a pop song from the previous summer, “Dim da me nyama,” which is impossible to translate but the idea is of disappearing in smoke, like a car spinning its tires before shooting off, maybe, or like the running bird in the cartoon. It was a rap song, and the chorus repeated the title again and again, rhythmically, almost like a chant, which was why I thought Mitko was singing it for a moment, his own words matched it so closely, men me nyama, men me nyama . I almost smiled at his drunkenness before I realized that he wasn’t singing at all, and that his eyes, which hadn’t stopped their weird motions, had welled with tears. What is it, I said then, what does that mean, I don’t understand, and at this Mitko stopped his chant, snapped it off as if he were biting it with his teeth, and almost angrily he said Nishto ne razbirash , you don’t understand anything. Okay, I said soothingly, I don’t understand, tell me, but even before I could soothe him his anger, if it was anger, had melted away, had become a more agitated pressing of my hands. Dnes sum tuk , he said, a utre men me nyama , today I’m here, tomorrow I’m gone, and then he took up his weird chant again.