Disappointment

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 Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  The only qualification I admit is that the country we desire to annex or take under our protection should be calculated to confer a tangible advantage upon the British Empire.” 2 National ambitions are not always avowed as honestly as this, as we shall see later, but that is a fair statement of the actual facts, which need hardly to be elaborated for any student of history. What is the basis and reason for the selfishness of nations? If we begin with what is least important or least distinctive of national attitudes, it must be noted that nations do not have direct contact with other national communities, with which they must form some kind of international community. They know the problems of other peoples only indirectly and at second hand. Since both sympathy and justice depend to a large degree upon the perception of need, which makes sympathy flow, and upon the understanding of competing interests, which must be resolved, it is obvious that human communities have greater difficulty than individuals in achieving ethical relationships. While rapid means of communication have increased the breadth of knowledge about world affairs among citizens of various nations, and the general advance of education has ostensibly promoted the capacity to think rationally and justly upon the inevitable conflicts of interest between nations, there is nevertheless little hope of arriving at a perceptible increase of international morality through the growth of intelligence and the perfection of means of communication. The development of international commerce, the increased economic interdependence among the nations, and the whole apparatus of a technological civilisation, increase the problems and issues between nations much more rapidly than the intelligence to solve them can be created. The silk trade between America and Japan did not give American citizens an appreciation of the real feelings of the Japanese toward the American Exclusion Act. Co-operation between America and the Allies during the war did not help American citizens to recognise, and deal sympathetically with, the issues of inter-allied debts and reparations; nor were the Allies able to do justice to either themselves or their fallen foe in settling the problem of reparations. Such is the social ignorance of peoples, that, far from doing justice to a foe or neighbor, they are as yet unable to conserve their own interests wisely. Since their ultimate interests are always protected best, by at least a measure of fairness toward their neighbors, the desire to gain an immediate selfish advantage always imperils their ultimate interests. 3 If they recognise this fact, they usually recognise it too late. Thus France, after years of intransigence, has finally accepted a sensible reparations settlement. Significantly and tragically, the settlement is almost synchronous with the victory of an extreme nationalism in Germany, which her unrelenting policies begot. America pursued a selfish and foolhardy tariff policy until it, together with other imbecilities in international life, contributed to the ruin of prosperity in the whole world.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  It is partially due to the reabsorption of the whole semi-proletarian movement into the national soul. That will seem a virtue to those who identify the nation with absolute values; but it must appear a weakness to those who recognise the perils of nationalism to all high human values. The nation will always claim a portion of man’s loyalties. Since it usually claims too large a portion, it is necessary that other communities compete with it. There is no reason why a class which is fated by its conditions of life to aspire after an equalitarian society should not have a high moral claim upon the loyalty of its members. Both its ultimate aims and the peril in which it stands justify such a loyalty by every rule of reason. If the nation’s claims seem to be higher, that is only because traditional sentiments overpower rational considerations. The tendency of socialist leaders to espouse the cause of the enemies of labor under the guise of preserving the peace of the state, may be actuated by the motives of personal ambition, which we have suggested; but the political milieu in which such a policy is at all possible is created by the semi-nationalism of the whole political movement which they lead. The parliamentary working class movement stands inside of the national ethos and thus creates the opportunities for its leaders to become imbued with the national instinct of self-preservation. This instinct expresses itself in defense against both internal and external foes of the state. Evolutionary socialists are therefore involved in both international wars and the suppression of strikes and other alleged perils to the state’s internal peace. When Briand defended himself against the attacks of Jaurés for his suppression of the strike of French railroad workers, he gave a very illuminating example of the triumph of the national spirit over class loyalty in the heart of a labor leader who had become a national official: “I am ready to admit that theoretically they possess the right to strike and that they may use it legally. But there is another right which has not been mentioned in this debate, and which is superior to all other rights. It is society’s right to live. There is no liberty, time-honored though it may be, whose exercise can be permitted to endanger the nation’s right to live. . . The right that is above all other rights is the nation’s right to live and to maintain its independence and pride.”

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  Such is the inclination of the human mind for beginning with assumptions which have been determined by other than rational considerations, and building a superstructure of rationally acceptable judgments upon them, that all this can be done without any conscious dishonesty. If the expert can function under any type of regime, whether conservative or radical, the experience of socialist governments of Britain and Germany proves that the civil servant is more inclined to conservatism than to radicalism and that he sometimes knows how to frustrate and divert the general policy of the government which he serves by the kind of detailed application which he makes of its general line of policy. A careful study of the history of political and economic life proves conclusively that the educators, as all other middle-class moralists, underestimate the conflict of interest in political and economic relations, and attribute to disinterested ignorance what ought usually to be attributed to interested intelligence. Their very error in this regard is a result of the faulty perspective of their class. There will always be individuals in the more privileged classes who will, by force of rational and moral idealism, identify themselves with the less privileged classes and fight their political battles. But the number of these will probably always remain limited. Whatever social intelligence is created in the total body of any privileged class, can be used to mitigate the conflict between the classes, but it will not be powerful enough to obviate the necessity of such a conflict. If it should be maintained that the past does not yield conclusions which are valid for the future, since no middle-class group has ever been subjected to an educational process which placed it in full possession of all relevant social facts, the answer is that there is no educational process which can place any class in possession of all the facts, or cause it to appreciate all the feelings which actuate another class. Since civilisation constantly increases indirect and mechanical human relations, this will probably be even more true in the future than it is at present. It is a question whether any middle class will ever be intellectually better disciplined and socially more intelligent than that class in England and Germany. In both of these nations the entire middle-class community turned to conservatism rather than radicalism in the moment of crisis; in England in the election of 1931, when it participated in the overwhelming tory defeat of labor, and in Germany, where it expresses itself through the policies of fascism. These very recent examples of middle-class attitudes in politically advanced and socially intelligent nations are a fairly good basis for predicting middle-class political attitudes in the future.

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

  The Phoenix bus had left already and the next one didn’t come through until late that night, but we were in luck—there was a bus leaving for Portland in a couple of hours, and from there we could make an easy connection to Seattle. I tried to conceal my disappointment but my mother saw it and bought me off with a handful of change. I played the pinball machines for a while and then stocked up on candy bars for the trip, Milk Duds and Sugar Babies and Idaho Spuds, most of which were already curdling in my stomach when at dusk we boarded our bus and stood in the dazed regard of the other passengers. We hesitated for a moment as if we might get off. Then my mother took my hand and we made our way down the aisle, nodding to anyone who looked at us, smiling to show we meant well. Uncool____ We lived in a boardinghouse in West Seattle. At night, if my mother wasn’t too tired, we took walks around the neighborhood, stopping in front of different houses to consider them as candidates for future purchase. We went for the biggest and most pretentious, sneering at ranches and duplexes—anything that smelled of economy. We chose half-timbered houses, houses with columns, houses with sculpted bushes in front. Then we went back to our room, where I read novels about heroic collies while my mother practiced typing and shorthand so she wouldn’t fall behind in her new job. Our room was in a converted attic. It had two camp beds and between them, under the window, a desk and chair. It smelled of mildew. The yellow wallpaper was new but badly hung and already curling at the edges. It was the kind of room that B-movie detectives wake up in, bound and gagged, after they’ve been slipped a Mickey. The boardinghouse was full of old men and men who probably only seemed old. Besides my mother only two women lived there. One was a secretary named Kathy. Kathy was young and plain and shy. She stayed in her room most of the time. When people addressed her she would look at them with a drowning expression, then softly ask them to repeat what they had said. As time went on, her pregnancy began to show through the loose clothes she wore. There didn’t seem to be a man in the picture. The other woman was Marian, the housekeeper. Marian was big and loud. Her arms were as thick as a man’s, and when she pounded out hamburger patties the whole kitchen shook. Marian went with a marine sergeant from Bremerton who was even bigger than she was but more gentle and soft-spoken. He had been in the Pacific during the war. When I kept after him to tell me about it he finally showed me an album of photographs he’d taken. Most of the pictures were of his buddies. Doc, a man with glasses.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  Fabianism, which gave British socialism its philosophy, had little use for the class conflict. It was an ethical socialism, in which the nation as such was called upon to extend the principles of justice which had been previously accepted in the more radical type of liberalism. The spiritual history of British socialism, as an extension and logical consequence of radical liberalism, is rather well symbolised in the development of the thought of John Stuart Mill, who turned in his later years from individualistic to collectivistic political ideas. “In view of the fact,” declared Sidney Webb, “that the socialist movement has been hitherto inspired, instructed and led by members of the middle class or bourgeoisie, the Fabian society protests against the absurdity of socialists, denouncing the very class from which socialism has sprung, as especially hostile to it.” 2 This judgment is, interestingly enough, a good example of the natural confusion into which ethically motivated middle-class leaders, who have identified themselves with the working class, fall, when they imagine that their own attitudes and convictions offer a significant clue to the dominant attitudes of their class. The middle class, though it has furnished leadership for the labor movement, has remained hostile to the labor cause, for all of Mr. Webb’s assurances. The less bellicose attitude of British labor and its softer emphasis upon the class conflict may be a result of the long history of British parliamentarism and the solid achievements of British liberalism in the nineteenth century, which justified, or seemed to justify, confidence in the democratic movement as something more than mere middle-class strategy. Nevertheless it is significant that the difference between the more Marxian socialism of the continent and the quite indigenous socialism of England has been pretty well wiped out by subsequent history. The parliamentary socialists of the continent have not been more revolutionary than the English, even though they did have a stronger admixture of Marxism in their thought. And the British socialists, who seemed for a time to be winning the middle classes to a degree, which the continental socialists found impossible, saw in the election of 1931 how the middle class will inevitably turn against socialism in a crisis when national patriotism is arrayed against the policy of the working class. In both England and Germany the socialist party has been at one time or another the largest party in the nation; and in these countries as well as in France, Belgium and the Scandinavian countries, the party has collaborated in government in either a major or minor capacity. The hope that socialism could be achieved progressively by parliamentary action has been at least partially justified by the history of all these nations.

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

  He indicates that he has heard of these problems from two different sources, one oral and one written. At the beginning of the letter, after the pre- script (1:1-3) and thanksgiving (1:4-9; notice how much shorter it is than the one to the Thessalonians), Paul states that he has learned about the activities of the congregation from "Chloe's people" (1:11). We do not know who this Chloe was; the name occurs nowhere else in the letter or in the rest of the New Testament. We do know that it was the name of a woman, and the reference to her "people" is usually taken to mean her slaves or former slaves who had come to Ephesus, perhaps on her business, and had met with Paul to pass along some news. Since Chloe owned slaves who managed her business affairs, she must have been a wealthy woman in Corinth; whether she herself was a member of the Christian community is difficult to judge. In any event, her unnamed "people" must have been active in the congregation, given the inside information that they passed along to Paul. The news was not good. The church was divided against itself, with different factions claiming differ- ent leaders, each of whom, from Paul's perspective, 2?6 THE Nw TESTAMENT: A HISTOP. ICAI_ INllODUCTION was seeking to usurp the claims of others by demon- strating their own spiritual superiority and claiming to represent the true faith as expounded by one or another famous authority (Paul, Cephas, Apollos, and Christ himself; 1:12). The conflicts had gotten nasty at times, with some of the members taking others to court over their differences (not their dif- ferences over inner church politics, of course, but over matters that the civil law courts could decide). Moreover, immorality was evidently rampant. Generally, this was not the happy community of the faithful that Paul had envisioned, especially com- pared to the model church of the Thessalonians. The information from Paul's other source was equally troubling. It appears that he had received a letter from some of the Corinthians (probably not all of them; as we will see, not everyone felt beholden to him) in which they expressed their different opinions on some critical matters and sought Paul's judgment (e.g., see 7:1). The letter had been brought by three members of the church Stephanas, Fortunatus, and Achaicus-- who evidently had waited for Paul to pen a reply (16:15-18). The issues were of some moment; there were members of the congregation, just to take one example, who had been teaching that it was not right even for married couples to have sex. One can sense the urgency of their query. Paul wrote 1 Corinthians to deal with the various problems and issues that had arisen. Giving fairly straightforward answers, he deals with each problem in turn, in the sequence shown in box 19.1. From Paul's perspective, however, one big problem evidently underlay all of these specific problems.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  It is moreover, much more remote from the will of the nation than in private individuals; for the government expresses the national will, and that will is moved by the emotions of the populace and the prudential self-interest of dominant economic classes. Theoretically it is possible to have a national electorate so intelligent, that the popular impulses and the ulterior interests of special groups are brought under the control of a national mind. But practically the rational understanding of political issues remains such a minimum force that national unity of action can be achieved only upon such projects as are either initiated by the self-interest of the dominant groups, in control of the government, or supported by the popular emotions and hysterias which from time to time run through a nation. In other words the nation is a corporate unity, held together much more by force and emotion, than by mind. Since there can be no ethical action without self-criticism, and no self-criticism without the rational capacity of self-transcendence, it is natural that national attitudes can hardly approximate the ethical. Even those tendencies toward self-criticism in a nation which do express themselves are usually thwarted by the governing classes and by a certain instinct for unity in society itself. For self-criticism is a kind of inner disunity, which the feeble mind of a nation finds difficulty in distinguishing from dangerous forms of inner conflict. So nations crucify their moral rebels with their criminals upon the same Golgotha, not being able to distinguish between the moral idealism which surpasses, and the anti-social conduct which falls below that moral mediocrity, on the level of which every society unifies its life. While critical loyalty toward a community is not impossible, it is not easily achieved. It is therefore probably inevitable that every society should regard criticism as a proof of a want of loyalty. This lack of criticism, as Tyrrell the Catholic modernist observed, makes the social will more egotistic than the individual will. “So far as society has a self,” he wrote, “it must be self-assertive, proud, self-complacent and egotistical.” 5 The necessity of using force in the establishment of unity in a national community, and the inevitable selfish exploitation of the instruments of coercion by the groups who wield them, adds to the selfishness of nations. This factor in national life has been previously discussed and may need no further elaboration. It may be well to add that it ought not to be impossible to reduce this source of national selfishness. When governing groups are deprived of their special economic privileges, their interests will be more nearly in harmony with the interests of the total national society. At present the economic overlords of a nation have special interests in the profits of international trade, in the exploitation of weaker peoples and in the acquisition of raw materials and markets, all of which are only remotely relevant to the welfare of the whole people.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  More specifically, they have refused or failed (it is unclear which) to carry forth the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, whom Baker characterizes as “not only the most exemplary race man ever born in the United States, but also the greatest black public intellectual leader of the liberation struggle our world has ever known.” 10 Although Baker raises a number of important concerns about the ways in which the radical messaging of the contemporary Black intellectual elite has been co-opted by mainstream forces and the seduction of celebrity, his turn back to King should give us pause. Most notably, Baker’s chapter “After Civil Rights: The Rise of Black Public Intellectuals,” manages not to mention even one Black woman public intellectual from the past or present. This is in part a problem of numbers, because the rise of prominent Black female public intellectuals did not keep pace in the post–Civil Rights years with the rise of figures like West, Gates, or Dyson. This is precisely why folks like hooks and Harris-Perry (who came to prominence after Baker’s book) are so visible. Their brilliance and intellectual skill is undeniable, but they also have a level of visibility available to only a select and elite few Black women scholars. However, the refusal to even acknowledge the work and career of bell hooks is an egregious error on Baker’s part. Not only has she maintained a strident critique of structures of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy , a term she coined and popularized, but she has resisted formal structures of elitism in a number of ways that dovetail the kinds of radical political critique for which Baker calls. Baker also offers a paragraph of acknowledgment to Angela Davis, particularly her work on prison abolition, in the final chapter of Betrayal. But other than cursory gestures to the work of women like Davis and Tricia Rose, Black women are absent from Baker’s account of Black intellectual leadership in the twentieth century. Though Baker claims gender inclusivity in his use of the term race people , it is clear that he thinks race men have failed us and that a deliberate turn back to the race man model of the King era is the only thing that has the potential to save us. But Baker’s account of the problems in Black leadership say much more about the persistence and limitations of the politics of racial manhood in defining and mapping effective forms of Black leadership than they do about the actual state of Black leadership. The story shifts dramatically when we look toward the work of race women.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  must have been to those who controlled the teaching of the Church.) So the millennium was dropped out, while the safer and more distant parts of the Jewish eschatology were retained. Personal immortality, of course, had long ago crowded the racial eschatology aside in point of real interest. But the most decisive fact in transforming the substance of primitive eschatology was the Church itself. Its future was now the future of Christianity. In Jewish eschatology there was no Church in the picture; only the people. In primitive Christian thought the Church was real, but it was like a temporary house put up to shelter the believers till the Lord came and the real salvation began. But the Parousia did not come, and the temporary shelter grew and grew, and became the main thing. Even if the doctrines of eschatology had been kept unchanged, they would no longer have been the same after the Catholic Church had come on the scene. The considerations discussed above are necessary, it seems to me, for a proper understanding and valuation of the biblical material in traditional eschatology. A few constructive propositions can now be made about the future of the race. 1. The future development of the race should have a larger place in practical Christian teaching. The great ethical issues of the future lie in this field, and the mind of Christian men and women should be active there. If we can not be guided by moral and spiritual thought, we shall be guided by bitter experience. The Great War is in truth a grim discussion of the future of the race on this planet, but a discussion with both reason and religion left out. We have the amplest warrant for directing the prophetic thought of religious men toward the social and political future of humanity, for all eschatology derived from Hebrew sources dealt with these interests. A stronger emphasis on the future of the race will simply restore the genuinely Christian emphasis. But if Christian teachers are to teach truth about history, they must have truth to teach. If all ministers and Bible School teachers should now suddenly begin to talk on these subjects, the angels above would probably be astonished to see a still thicker vapour of partisan fury and nationalistic egotism rising from all countries. 2. All Christian discussions of the past and the future must be religious, and filled with the consciousness of God in human affairs. God is in history. He has the initiative. Where others see blind forces working dumb agony, we must see moral will working toward redemption and education. A religious view of history involves a profound sense of the importance of moral issues in social life. Sin ruins; righteousness establishes, and love consolidates. In the last resort the issues of future history lie in the moral qualities and religious faith of nations. This is the substance of all Hebrew and Christian eschatology.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  3. In the New Testament it is our business to sift out what is distinctively Christian in origin and spirit. It stands to reason that the leaven of the Christian spirit was not able at once to transform the inherited ideas of Jews and Gentiles of the first generation. For instance, Christianity had to struggle hard with the stubborn nationalistic pride of Judaism which claimed either a monopoly of messianic salvation or at least special privileges within it. Even Paul, the chief exponent of international religion, could not get away from his pro-Jewish feelings, and thought God was saving the Gentiles in order to stir up the Jews and get them saved. Jesus did not make the judgment depend on nationality but on the sense of human solidarity, and repeatedly foreshadowed that the Jews would be supplanted. In the Apocalypse we are carried back into Jewish feeling and points of view. The mind of Jesus Christ is our criterion for an ethical scrutiny of these ingredients. 4. The effort to systematize the eschatological statements of biblical writers has always been muddled by the supposition that they all thought alike. There was, as yet, no orthodoxy. All were deeply interested in these questions, and men of strong conviction made their own formulations. The Apocalypse, Paul, and the fourth gospel are strikingly unlike. The Apocalypse expounds the old social hope of Israel. The great woes and the overthrow of the mystic Babylon have political significance. There are a thousand years of messianic peace on this earth. Even after the last eruption of Satan and the great judgment the new earth is still on the old earth; the new Jerusalem comes down here, and there are trees, and a river, and happy people. Paul, on the other hand, has no room for a millennium of flesh and blood men on a material earth. The coming of Christ would usher in a cosmic change; the material world would end and the groaning of dying creation would cease; the living and the dead would receive spiritual bodies; therewith the last enemy, Death, would be overcome, and God would be all in all. In Paul the Jewish and the Greek streams of thought join. Probably in this, as in other things, Paul stood for a new theology; the Apocalypse comes nearer to being the prevalent view of the first generation. In the fourth gospel and the epistles of John we see the future translated into the present tense. The chief points of primitive eschatology, the antichrist, the parousia, the judgment, the resurrection, are still acknowleged; but there are many antichrists now present; the coming of the Comforter takes the place of the parousia; the judgment takes place when men accept or reject the light; the spiritual transformation into eternal life takes place now. Eschatology is dissolved into Christology; the Kingdom of God gives way to the Church. It is

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  I could see that there were two strategies to cutting the time short, perhaps best exemplified by the tortoise and the hare. The hare moves as fast as possible, hands a blur, instruments clattering, falling to the floor; the skin slips open like a curtain, the skull flap is on the tray before the bone dust settles. As a result, the opening might need to be expanded a centimeter here or there because it’s not optimally placed. The tortoise, on the other hand, proceeds deliberately, with no wasted movements, measuring twice, cutting once. No step of the operation needs revisiting; everything moves in a precise, orderly fashion. If the hare makes too many minor missteps and has to keep adjusting, the tortoise wins. If the tortoise spends too much time planning each step, the hare wins. The funny thing about time in the OR, whether you race frenetically or proceed steadily, is that you have no sense of it passing. If boredom is, as Heidegger argued, the awareness of time passing, then surgery felt like the opposite: the intense focus made the arms of the clock seem arbitrarily placed. Two hours could feel like a minute. Once the final stitch was placed and the wound was dressed, normal time suddenly restarted. You could almost hear an audible whoosh. Then you started wondering: How long until the patient wakes up? How long until the next case is rolled in? And what time will I get home tonight? It wasn’t until the last case finished that I felt the length of the day, the drag in my step. Those last few administrative tasks before leaving the hospital were like anvils. Could it wait until tomorrow? No. A sigh, and Earth continued to rotate back toward the sun. — As a chief resident, nearly all responsibility fell on my shoulders, and the opportunities to succeed—or fail—were greater than ever. The pain of failure had led me to understand that technical excellence was a moral requirement. Good intentions were not enough, not when so much depended on my skills, when the difference between tragedy and triumph was defined by one or two millimeters. One day, Matthew, the little boy with the brain tumor who had charmed the ward a few years back, was readmitted. His hypothalamus had, in fact, been slightly damaged during the operation to remove his tumor; the adorable eight-year-old was now a twelve-year-old monster. He never stopped eating; he threw violent fits. His mother’s arms were scarred with purple scratches. Eventually Matthew was institutionalized: he had become a demon, summoned by one millimeter of damage. For every surgery, a family and a surgeon decide together that the benefits outweigh the risks, but this was still heartbreaking. No one wanted to think about what Matthew would be like as a three-hundred-pound twenty-year-old.

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

  We begin with Jovinian, the most important among them, who is sometimes compared, for instance, even by Neander, to Luther, because, like Luther, he was carried by his own experience into reaction against the ascetic tendency and the doctrines connected with it. He wrote in Rome, before the year 390 a work, now lost, attacking monasticism in its ethical principles. He was at that time himself a monk, and probably remained so in a free way until his death. At all events he never married, and according to Augustine’s account, he abstained "for the present distress,"391 and from aversion to the encumbrances of the married state. Jerome pressed him with the alternative of marrying and proving the equality of celibacy with married life, or giving up his opposition to his own condition.392 Jerome gives a very unfavorable picture of his character, evidently colored by vehement bitterness. He calls Jovinian a servant of corruption, a barbarous writer, a Christian Epicurean, who, after having once lived in strict asceticism, now preferred earth to heaven, vice to virtue, his belly to Christ, and always strode along as an elegantly dressed bridegroom. Augustine is much more lenient, only reproaching Jovinian with having misled many Roman nuns into marriage by holding before them the examples of pious women in the Bible. Jovinian was probably provoked to question and oppose monasticism, as Gieseler supposes, by Jerome’s extravagant praising of it, and by the feeling against it, which the death of Blesilla (384) in Rome confirmed. And he at first found extensive sympathy. But he was excommunicated and banished with his adherents at a council about the year 390, by Siricius, bishop of Rome, who was zealously opposed to the marriage of priests. He then betook himself to Milan, where the two monks Sarmatio and Barbatian held forth views like his own; but he was treated there after the same fashion by the bishop, Ambrose, who held a council against him. From this time he and his party disappear from history, and before the year 406 he died in exile.393 According to Jerome, Jovinian held these four points (1) Virgins, widows, and married persons, who have once been baptized into Christ, have equal merit, other things in their conduct being equal. (2) Those, who are once with full faith born again by baptism, cannot be overcome (subverti) by the devil. (3) There is no difference between abstaining from food and enjoying it with thanksgiving. (4) All, who keep the baptismal covenant, will receive an equal reward in heaven.

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

  We may freely acknowledge the profound and beautiful truth at the bottom of this old catholic doctrine of the church, and the historical importance of it for that period of persecution, as well as for the great missionary work among the barbarians of the middle ages; but we cannot ignore the fact that the doctrine rested in part on a fallacy, which, in course of time, after the union of the church with the state, or, in other words, with the world, became more and more glaring, and provoked an internal protest of ever-growing force. It blindly identified the spiritual unity of the church with unity of organization, insisted on outward uniformity at the expense of free development, and confounded the faulty empirical church, or a temporary phase of the development of Christianity, with the ideal and eternal kingdom of Christ, which will not be perfect in its manifestation until the glorious second coming of its Head. The Scriptural principle "Out of Christ there is no salvation," was contracted and restricted to the Cyprianic principle: "Out of the (visible) church there is no salvation;" and from this there was only one step to the fundamental error of Romanism: "Out of the Roman Church there is no salvation." No effort after outward unity could prevent the distinction of all Oriental and Occidental church from showing itself at this early period, in language, customs, and theology;—a distinction which afterwards led to a schism to this day unhealed. It may well be questioned whether our Lord intended an outward visible unity of the church in the present order of things. He promised that there should be "one flock one shepherd," but not "one fold."243 There may be one flock, and yet many folds or church organizations. In the sacerdotal prayer, our Lord says not one word about church, bishops or popes, but dwells upon that spiritual unity which reflects the harmony between the eternal Father and the eternal Son. "The true communion of Christian men—’the communion of saints’ upon which all churches are built—is not the common performance of external acts, but a communion of soul with soul and of the soul with Christ. It is a consequence of the nature which God has given us that an external organization should help our communion with one another: it is a consequence both of our twofold nature, and of Christ’s appointment that external acts should help our communion with Him. But subtler, deeper, diviner than anything of which external things can be either the symbol or the bond is that inner reality and essence of union—that interpenetrating community of thought and character—which St. Paul speaks of as the ’unity of the Spirit,’ and which in the sublimest of sublime books, in the most sacred words, is likened to the oneness of the Son with the Father and of the Father with the Son."244 § 54. Councils. Best Collections of Acts of Councils by Harduin (1715, 12 vols.), and Mansi (1759, 31 vols.).

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

  From these testimonies it is clear, that the growing influence of the Roman see was rooted in public opinion and in the need of unity in the ancient church. It is not to be explained at all by the talents and the ambition of the incumbents. On the contrary, the personality of the thirty popes of the first three centuries falls quite remarkably into the background; though they are all canonized saints and, according to a later but extremely doubtful tradition, were also, with two exceptions, martyrs.225 Among them, and it may be said down to Leo the Great, about the middle of the fifth century, there was hardly one, perhaps Clement, who could compare, as a church leader, with an Ignatius, a Cyprian, and an Ambrose; or, as a theolooian, with an Irenaeus, a Tertullian, an Athanasius, and an Augustin.226 Jerome, among his hundred and thirty-six church celebrities, of the first four centuries, brings in only four Roman bishops, Clement, Victor, Cornelius, and Damasus, and even these wrote only a few epistles. Hippolytus, in his Philosophumena, written about 225, even presents two contemporaneous popes, St. Zephyrinus (202–218) and Callistus (St. Calixtus I., 218–223), from his own observation, though not without partisan feeling, in a most unfavorable light; charging the first with ignorance and avarice,227 the second with scandalous conduct (he is said to have been once a swindler and a fugitive slave rescued from suicide), and both of them with the Patripassian heresy. Such charges could not have been mere fabrications with so honorable an author as Hippolytus, even though he was a schismatic rival bishop to Callistus; they must have had at least some basis of fact. § 51. Chronology of the Popes. I. Sources. The principal sources for the obscure chronology of the early bishops of Rome are the catalogues of popes. These are divided into two classes, the oriental or Greek, and the occidental or Latin. To the first belong the lists of Hegesippus and Irenaeus, from the second century, that of Eusebius (in his Chronicle, and his Church History), and his successors from the fourth century and later. This class is followed by Lipsius and Harnack. The second class embraces the catalogues of Augustin (Ep. 55, al. 165), Optatus of Mileve (De schism. Donat. II. 3), the "Catalogus Liberianus" (coming down to Liberius, 354), the "Catalogus Felicianus" (to 530), the "Catalogus Cononianus," based perhaps on the "Catalogus Leoninus" (to 440), the "Liber Pontificalis" (formerly supposed to be based on the preceding catalogues, but according to the Abbé Duchesne and Waitz, older than the "Liber Felicianus"). The "Liber Pontif." itself exists in different MSS., and has undergone many changes. It is variously dated from the fifth or seventh century. To these may be added the "Martyrologia" and "Calendaria" of the Roman Church, especially the "Martyrologium Hieronymianum," and the "Martyrologium Romanum parvum" (both of the seventh or eighth century). The inscriptions on the papal tombs discovered in Rome since 1850, contain names and titles, but no dates.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  As a consequence eschatology is usually loved in inverse proportion to the square of the mental diameter of those who do the loving. Calvin was the greatest exegete of his day and he wrote commentaries on nearly all the books of the Old and New Testaments, but he gave the Apocalypse a wide berth. No interpretation of this main biblical source ever won general consent as long as it was interpreted doctrinally. The wise threw up their hands; those who devoted their minds to it, often suffered from mild obsession. Our generation is the first in eighteen hundred years to understand this book as its author, or authors, meant it to be understood, and now it is one of the most enlightening and interesting books of them all. In primitive Christianity eschatology was in the centre of religious interest and thought. Today it is on the circumference, and with some Christians it lies outside the circumference. Theologians of liberal views are brief or apologetic when they reach eschatology. This situation is deeply regrettable. Perhaps no other section of theology is so much in need of a thorough rejuvenation. Those who believe in the social gospel are especially concerned in this element of weakness in theology. The social gospel seeks to develop the vision of the Church toward the future and to co-operate with the will of God which is shaping the destinies of humanity. It would be aided and reinforced by a modern and truly Christian conception about the future of mankind: At present no other theological influence so hampers and obstructs the social gospel as that of eschatology. All considerations taken from the life of the twentieth century cry out for something like the social gospel; but the ideas of the first century contained in eschatology are used to veto it. Those who have trained their religious thinking on the Hebrew prophets and the genuine teachings of Jesus are for the social gospel; those who have trained it on apocalyptic ideas are against it. This is all the more pathetic because the pre-millennial scheme is really an outline of the social salvation of the race. Those who hold it exhibit real interest in social and political events. But they are best pleased when they see humanity defeated and collapsing, for then salvation is nigh. Active work for the salvation of the social order before the coming of Christ is not only vain but against the will of God. Thus eschatology defeats the Christian imperative of righteousness and salvation. Historical science and the social gospel together may be able to affect eschatology for good. Historical criticism by itself makes it look imbecile and has no creative power. The social gospel has that moral earnestness and religious faith which exerts constructive influence on doctrine. In the first place, the social gospel can at least give us a sympathetic

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

  The historian, moreover, must make his work readable and interesting, without violating truth. Some parts of history are dull and wearisome; but, upon the whole, the truth of history is "stranger than fiction." It is God’s own epos. It needs no embellishment. It speaks for itself if told with earnestness, vivacity, and freshness. Unfortunately, church historians, with very few exceptions, are behind the great secular historians in point of style, and represent the past as a dead corpse rather than as a living and working power of abiding interest. Hence church histories are so little read outside of professional circles. 3. Both scientific research and artistic representation must be guided by a sound moral and religious, that is, a truly Christian spirit. The secular historian should be filled with universal human sympathy, the church historian with universal Christian sympathy. The motto of the former is: "Homo sum, nihil humani a me alienum puto;" the motto of the latter: "Christianus sum, nihil Christiani a me alienum puto." The historian must first lay aside all prejudice and party zeal, and proceed in the pure love of truth. Not that he must become a tabula rasa. No man is able, or should attempt, to cast off the educational influences which have made him what he is. But the historian of the church of Christ must in every thing be as true as possible to the objective fact, "sine ira et studio;" do justice to every person and event; and stand in the centre of Christianity, whence he may see all points in the circumference, all individual persons and events, all confessions, denominations, and sects, in their true relations to each other and to the glorious whole. The famous threefold test of catholic truth—universality of time (semper), place (ubique), and number (ab omnibus)—in its literal sense, is indeed untrue and inapplicable. Nevertheless, there is a common Christianity in the Church, as well as a common humanity in the world, which no Christian can disregard with impunity. Christ is the divine harmony of all the discordant human creeds and sects. It is the duty and the privilege of the historian to trace the image of Christ in the various physiognomies of his disciples, and to act as a mediator between the different sections of his kingdom.

• From Quiet (2012)

  Is it how it should be?” And when the situation falls short of expectations, they form associations between the moment of disappointment (losing points) and whatever was going on in their environment at the time of the disappointment (hitting the number nine.) These associations let them make accurate predictions about how to react to warning signals in the future. Introverts’ disinclination to charge ahead is not only a hedge against risk; it also pays off on intellectual tasks. Here are some of the things we know about the relative performance of introverts and extroverts at complex problem-solving. Extroverts get better grades than introverts during elementary school, but introverts outperform extroverts in high school and college. At the university level, introversion predicts academic performance better than cognitive ability. One study tested 141 college students’ knowledge of twenty different subjects, from art to astronomy to statistics, and found that introverts knew more than the extroverts about every single one of them. Introverts receive disproportionate numbers of graduate degrees, National Merit Scholarship finalist positions, and Phi Beta Kappa keys. They outperform extroverts on the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal test, an assessment of critical thinking widely used by businesses for hiring and promotion. They’ve been shown to excel at something psychologists call “insightful problem solving.” The question is: Why? Introverts are not smarter than extroverts. According to IQ scores, the two types are equally intelligent. And on many kinds of tasks, particularly those performed under time or social pressure or involving multitasking, extroverts do better. Extroverts are better than introverts at handling information overload. Introverts’ reflectiveness uses up a lot of cognitive capacity, according to Joseph Newman. On any given task, he says, “if we have 100 percent cognitive capacity, an introvert may have only 75 percent on task and 25 percent off task, whereas an extrovert may have 90 percent on task.” This is because most tasks are goal-directed. Extroverts appear to allocate most of their cognitive capacity to the goal at hand, while introverts use up capacity by monitoring how the task is going. But introverts seem to think more carefully than extroverts, as the psychologist Gerald Matthews describes in his work. Extroverts are more likely to take a quick-and-dirty approach to problem-solving, trading accuracy for speed, making increasing numbers of mistakes as they go, and abandoning ship altogether when the problem seems too difficult or frustrating. Introverts think before they act, digest information thoroughly, stay on task longer, give up less easily, and work more accurately. Introverts and extroverts also direct their attention differently: if you leave them to their own devices, the introverts tend to sit around wondering about things, imagining things, recalling events from their past, and making plans for the future. The extroverts are more likely to focus on what’s happening around them. It’s as if extroverts are seeing “what is” while their introverted peers are asking “what if.” Introverts’ and extroverts’ contrasting problem-solving styles have been observed in many different contexts.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  His father, Matthew Kissinger, one of eight children, dropped out of school after sixth grade to help make ends meet, doing odd jobs, fixing cars, and selling vitamins. Matt was a voracious reader and a hard worker, but he had trouble getting ahead during the Depression. Sometimes, money was so tight that they had to rent out the bedrooms of their Shorewood bungalow while Holmer and his brother and sister slept on cots in the hallway. Christmas 1932, the same year that my mother received a dollhouse with electric lights and running water, Holmer begged for the sailor suit that he had seen in the window at Schuster’s department store in downtown Milwaukee. Oh, we could never afford that, Grandma told him. But when six-year-old Holmer bounded downstairs on Christmas morning, he discovered the little navy-blue suit with the matching hat and grosgrain ribbon nestled under the tree. He jumped up and down with glee and spent the day marching around the house, fighting imaginary pirates. His joy was short-lived. The next day, Grandma made him fold up the uniform and put it back into the box. Then they hopped on the streetcar and returned it to the store for a full refund. He was crushed. As Grandma watched my mother walk back from Communion that Sunday, she knew that her boy would be set for life if he could snare the Gutenkunst girl. So, she set the trap with help from a little unexpected inheritance, her portion of the sale of her family’s farm. Instead of investing her windfall in the stock market or parking it in a savings account, Grandma bought Holmer a red convertible, hoping that would catch my mother’s eye. Holmer, now twenty-three, had jet-black hair, piercing brown eyes, a square jaw, and chiseled looks good enough that he landed top modeling jobs in town. He didn’t need his mother’s help finding romance. In fact, he already had a girlfriend named Joan. But Grandma was going for the big payday, betting everything she had on the girl with the family fortune. By anyone’s accounting, my mother was quite a prize. A Junior Leaguer with a pilot’s license, she spoke French and studied English literature at Carleton College (two of her brothers were Princeton men). Her friends called her Curly—not for her hair (which indeed was curly) but for her toes. She had big, doe eyes, legs that could rival Betty Grable’s, and the cutest dimples Bill Kissinger had ever seen. She was quiet—shy even—but get a few martinis into her and she could belt out all the words to “Mimi the College Widow.” My mother secretly worried that Holmer was too much for her. He danced on top of bars, guzzled beer, and introduced her to his friends as Jean “Dirty Word.” It’s Guten-KUNST, she’d say, trying to hide her amusement with a scowl of false indignation.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 3 (451 – 1500) (2009)

  then became a prime bargaining counter in diplomacy when the new Sassanian Queen Boran, recognizing reality in the wake of Heraclius’s successful counterattacks, sought a peace settlement with Byzantium. The Sassanian peace delegation which returned the True Cross was led by Patriarch Ishoyahb, and in 630 he had a satisfaction unprecedented in the history of the Dyophysites when he celebrated the Eucharist according to the rites of his Church in the city of Berrhoea (now Aleppo) in the presence of the Byzantine Emperor and of Chalcedonian bishops. The treaty was a triumph for Heraclius too, for it enabled him to parade his relic back in what remained of Byzantine Jerusalem after its comprehensive trashing by the Sassanian armies.52 This climax of peace between the two traditional enemy great powers in fact proved a sad irrelevance to the future. Kavad II’s murder of his father, Khusrau II, swiftly followed by his own death, had poisonously destabilized Sassanian Court politics, leading to a procession of shortlived rulers struggling to maintain their position, while the constant frontier warfare with the Byzantines devastated the Middle East and weakened both imperial armies. Moreover, the clash of the two empires brought destruction to lesser Christian military powers, principally the Miaphysite Ghassānids, who for more than a century had kept the Byzantines in touch with events in Arabia and had brought security to the region. The Ghassānids could have alerted the Byzantines to the early formation of a new military power which had appeared quite unexpectedly from the south: the armies of Islam. The arrival of the Muslims proved terminal for the Sassanians. Within a decade in the 640s, the three-centuries-old empire was in ruins. Yazdgerd III, last ruling Sassanian shah, defeated and murdered, was buried not with Zoroastrian rites but by a bishop of the Church of the East; his son and heir fled all the way to China. There he was treated with respect, and one of his acts was to found the second monastery for Dyophysite Christianity to be sited in the capital, Chang’an.53 Yet this royal favour had all come all too late for the Church of the East. Now Christianity everywhere faced the consequences of the new prophecy from Arabia – consequences which are still unravelling in our own time.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  We first met Simon (Peter) in 1:16, James and John in 1:19, and the Twelve in 3:16–19. But even as the Twelve are appointed, the Leading Threesome all receive new names from Jesus in 3:16–17: “He appointed the twelve: Simon (to whom he gave the name Peter); James son of Zebedee and John the brother of James (to whom he gave the name Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder).” In other words, those three disciples are emphasized as a Leadership Threesome within the Twelve—and always in that order of Peter, James, John. Those three are the chosen ones taken by Jesus to the Mount of Transfiguration in 9:2 and the Garden of Gethsemane in 14:33. But, says Mark, they failed Jesus there as well—they wanted to stay on the Mount, and they wanted to sleep in the Garden. Across the three tests under present discussion Mark intends to criticize Peter, the first of the Leading Threesome, in 8:33, then the Twelve as a whole in 9:32–34, and last the other two of that Leading Threesome in 10:35–40. What, then, is the reaction of James and John to that detailed prophecy? It extends across a threefold dialogue with Jesus (10:35–36, 37–38, 39–40) and contains this incredibly insensitive reaction to his prophecy about execution and resurrection: “Grant us to sit,” they ask Jesus, “one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory” (10:37). And, worse still, their reaction begets this further and widening reaction: “When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John” (10:41). By now, we know that what must follow is a severely corrective response from Jesus. Here, once again, is Jesus’s response: So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” (10:42–45) First, there is that explicit contrast between Gentile-style leadership and this radical revision of Jewish-style leadership. Next, that “not so” is directed specifically to the Twelve. It is their view and style of leadership that are opposed by Jesus. And the unconventional leadership style they are to exhibit is to be modeled on that of Jesus himself. Jesus is not just talking about humility, but about humility-in-power, not just about being a servant, but being a servant-as-leader. Finally, in the ancient world, it was especially those enslaved who were “ransomed,” so that a leader who ransoms you is about liberation and not domination. Think about this for a moment. The Twelve—and all others—were challenged to take up their cross and follow Jesus (8:34).