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 Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  recollected in tranquillity. For a few weeks you got up at six to compose short stories at the kitchen table while Amanda slept in the other room. Then your night life started getting more interesting and complicated, and climbing out of bed became harder and harder. You were gathering experience for a novel. You went to parties with writers, cultivated a writerly persona. You wanted to be Dylan Thomas without the paunch, F. Scott Fitzgerald without the crack-up. You wanted to skip over the dull grind of actual creation. After a hard day of work on other people’s manuscripts—knowing in your heart that you could do better—the last thing you wanted to do was to go home and write. You wanted to go out. Amanda was the fashion model and you worked for the famous magazine. People were happy to meet you and to invite you to their parties. So much was going on. Of course, mentally, you were always taking notes. Saving it all up. Waiting for the day when you would sit down and write your masterpiece. You dig your typewriter out of the closet and set it up on the dining- room table. You have some good twenty-pound bond from the supply cabinet in the office. You roll a sheet, with backing, onto the platen. The whiteness of the sheet is intimidating, so you type the date in the right- hand corner. You decide to jump immediately into the story you have in mind. Waste no time with preliminaries. You type: He was expecting her on the afternoon flight from Paris when she called to say she would not be coming home. “You’re taking a later flight?” he asked. “No,” she said. “I’m starting a new life.” You read it over. Then you tear the sheet out of the typewriter and insert a new one. Go farther back, maybe. Try to find the source of this chaos. Give her a name and a place. Karen liked to look at her mother’s fashion magazines. The women were elegant and beautiful and they were always climbing in and out of taxis and limousines on their way to big stores and restaurants. Karen didn’t think there were any stores or restaurants like that in Oklahoma. She wished she looked like the ladies in the pictures. Then maybe her father would come back.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  ated her infamous walk, a walk that was hardly natural but offered a strange gave her an unfair mix of innocence and sex. advantage by making everyone fall in love Over the next few years, Marilyn taught herself through trial and er-withthe wearer. "Very ror how to heighten the effect she had on men. Her voice had always been well" said Aphrodite attractive—it was the voice of a little girl. But on film it had limitations un-spitefully. " I will, on til someone finally taught her to lower it, giving it the deep, breathy tones condition that you remove your helmet— you look that became her seductive trademark, a mix of the little girl and the vixen. hideous without it. " • Before appearing on set, or even at a party, Marilyn would spend hours be- "Now, if you please, 1 fore the mirror. Most people assumed this was vanity—she was in love with must judge you one at a time" announced her image. The truth was that image took hours to create. Marilyn spent Paris. . . . Come here, years studying and practicing the art of makeup. The voice, the walk, the Divine Hera! Will you face and look were all constructions, an act. At the height of her fame, she other two goddesses be good enough to leave us for a would get a thrill by going into bars in New York City without her makeup while?" • "Examine me or glamorous clothes and passing unnoticed. conscientiously," said Hera, Success finally came, but with it came something deeply annoying to turning slowly around, and displaying her magnificent her: the studios would only cast her as the blond bombshell. She wanted se-figure, "and remember that rious roles, but no one took her seriously for those parts, no matter how if you judge me the fairest, hard she downplayed the siren qualities she had built up. One day, while she 1 will make you lord of all was rehearsing a scene from The Cherry Orchard, her acting instructor, Mi-Asia, and the richest man alive. " • " I am not to be chael Chekhov, asked her, "Were you thinking of sex while we played the bribed my Lady . . . Very scene?" When she said no, he continued, "All through our playing of the well, thank you. Now I scene I kept receiving sex vibrations from you. As if you were a woman in have seen all that I need to see. Come, Divine the grip of passion. . . . I understand your problem with your studio now, Athene!" • "Here I am," Marilyn. You are a woman who gives off sex vibrations—no matter what said Athene, striding you are doing or thinking. The whole world has already responded to those purposefully forward. "Listen, Paris, if you have vibrations. They come off the movie screens when you are on them." enough common sense to award me the prize, I will

• From What Are Biblical Values? (2019)

  A book entitled The Prayer of Jabez: Breaking Through to the Blessed Life , published in 2000, became an international best-seller, sold nine million copies, and received the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association Gold Medallion Book of the Year award in 2001.33 It promised that those who used the prayer of Jabez would soon notice significant changes in their lives. The biblical credentials of Jabez notwithstanding, the “prosperity gospel” is a caricature of biblical teaching on wealth, poverty, and justice. The blessings of the covenant were promised to the people as a whole and were contingent on keeping the commandments, which were largely concerned with social justice. The idea that suffering and poverty are punishment for sin and that the righteous prosper is critiqued decisively in the Book of Job. Job is portrayed as a paradigmatically righteous person who loses everything. Fundamentally, both the Law and the Prophets are focused on concern for other people, especially the less fortunate in society. The God of Israel is not an ATM machine for personal advancement. The desire for prosperity is too easily corrupted by greed. The prophets especially were acutely attuned to the usual progression: that those who “join house to house, who add field to field” often do so by exploiting the less fortunate. The prosperity promised in the covenantal blessings is more modest. It is a state of sufficiency where everyone has enough to live on. This concern is fundamental to the Hebrew Bible and remains an important part of the biblical tradition. The New Testament allows even less scope for the prosperity gospel and changes the focus by urging people to lay up their treasure in heaven. CHAPTER NINE Social Justice in the Shadow of the Apocalypse S URPRISINGLY , despite the centrality of justice in the Hebrew Bible, some people question its importance in the context of Christianity. The objections are of various kinds. The provocative moral theologian Stanley Hauerwas has claimed that “justice is a bad idea for Christians.”1 He does not deny that Christians should feed the hungry and care for the sick, but he objects to thinking of such activities in terms of the liberal, secular ideal of justice; it is, rather, a matter of following the Gospel of Jesus.2 For anyone who does not share Hauerwas’s aversion to secular liberalism, however, his objection seems like a quibble. The important question is what the foundational Christian texts say about the treatment of our fellow human beings, not whether their prescriptions are peculiarly Christian.3 Another objection pretends to a higher ideal. Love rather than justice is supposed to be the ideal for Christians. The Swedish theologian and bishop Anders Nygren declared that “fellowship with God is not governed by law but by love. God’s attitude to men is not characterized by justitia distributiva but by agape , not by retributive righteousness but by freely giving and forgiving love.”4 This kind of love was the ideal for Christians.

• From What Are Biblical Values? (2019)

  Nonetheless, his strategy may have been effective in this context. He evinces more sympathy for the situation of this particular slave than we will find in the later epistles that were composed in his name. THE HOUSEHOLD CODES As in the case of women, freedom for slaves takes a back seat to social conformity in the household codes in the later epistles. We read in Colossians: Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, not only while being watched and in order to please them, but wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord. Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for your masters, since you know that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward; you serve the Lord Christ. (3:22–24) In effect, service to slave owners is service to Christ and will be rewarded or punished by Christ. Masters, too, are urged to treat their slaves justly and fairly, “for you know that you also have a Master in heaven” (4:1). Similarly, Ephesians 6:5–7 calls on slaves to “obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ,” and masters are warned to stop threatening their slaves, “for you know that both of you have the same Master in heaven” (6:8). All, it would seem, are slaves before God. 1 Timothy is more explicit as to the rationale behind this demand for obedience by slaves: Let all who are under the yoke of slavery regard their masters as worthy of all honor, so that the name of God and the teaching may not be blasphemed. Those who have believing masters must not be disrespectful to them on the ground that they are members of the church; rather they must serve them all the more, since those who benefit by their service are believers and beloved. (6:1–2) Presumably, the author was concerned that Christians not get a reputation for encouraging insubordination among slaves (or women) and thereby bring the church into disrepute. Rather, as in the Epistle to Titus 2:9–10, faithful slaves are an ornament to the Christian way of life. The logic of this position is that the social mores in question are not matters of importance; the liberation of slaves is not a requirement of the Christian message, and indeed, no such demand is made even of owners who are “believers,” even though, supposedly, in Christ there is neither slave nor free. The New Testament does not demand that Christians manumit slaves, then. It even sometimes commends slavery as a condition that Christians should embrace. So 1 Peter 2:18–21: Slaves, accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle but also those who are harsh. For it is a credit to you if, being aware of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly. If you endure when you are beaten for doing wrong, what credit is that?

• From What Are Biblical Values? (2019)

  It has been argued, reasonably, that the so-called Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus), represent a reaction against another strand of early Christianity, represented by Acts of Paul and Thecla , which glorified young women such as Thecla who rejected marriage and family life in order to embrace Christianity and thereby caused scandal and disruption in the socially conservative Roman world,63 and also against the teaching of Marcion, who rejected marriage and procreation and also rejected the God of the Hebrew Scriptures.64 Nonetheless, it was the reactionary epistles, not the radical Acts, that were included in the biblical canon. We will revisit the Pastoral Epistles in connection with biblical attitudes to slavery. They are sharply in contrast with modern Western values, but they are arguably equally in conflict with the teachings of Jesus and even those of Paul. These epistles are a long way from the ideal that in Christ there is no male or female. More than most parts of the Bible, they render any concept of biblical authority problematic in the modern world. CHAPTER FIVE The Bible and the Environment T HE role of the Bible in shaping attitudes toward the natural world was thrust into the center of debate by a famous article by Lynn White Jr. in 1967.1 White held, correctly, that what people do about their environment depends on their beliefs about their nature and their identity, and in the Western world, these were shaped to a great degree by the Bible. Specifically, White traced the human exploitation of nature to the mandate provided by Genesis 1:26–30: Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. The natural world, he inferred, exists “explicitly for man’s benefit and rule; no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purpose.”2 White was primarily concerned with the way Christian tradition interpreted this text to establish a dualism of humanity and nature. The root of the problem, however, was in the biblical text, which at least admitted of such an interpretation. Reactions to this thesis cover the full range of opinion. The supposed biblical mandate for exploitation has been welcomed gleefully by some politicians and media pundits, as well as by some conservative theologians.3 “The ethic of conservation,” writes Ann Coulter, paraphrasing the Bible rather freely, “is the explicit abnegation of man’s dominion over the earth. The lower species are here for our use.

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

  Archbishop Michael Ramsey of Canterbury in 1966, when the Pope presented the Anglican Primate with his own bishop’s ring. Pope Paul travelled the world as no previous pope had done, and he cautiously opened dialogue with the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, while reducing the temperature of Rome’s relations with General Franco’s regime to unprecedented iciness – it is reliably reported that Franco during the last year of his life came close to excommunication.14 Around the Pope, often way beyond his control, Catholics seized on the raft of reforms and recommendations made by Vatican II and implemented them in a multitude of different forms. Apart from the furore on contraception, nothing in the life of the Church was so universally disruptive as the changes made to public worship. These were an expression of the council’s wish to stress the priesthood of all people in active participation in worship, and to encourage them to do more in the liturgy than hymn-singing. Laudable in the intention of involving the whole body of the faithful in liturgical action, the implementation of this principle represented Rome at its most woodenly centralizing. Overnight, the Tridentine rite of the Mass was virtually banned (with carefully hedged-around exceptions), and its Latin replacement was used almost universally in vernacular translations. The service of Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, which had sustained and comforted so many for so long (see pp. 414–15), was widely discountenanced by the clergy in an effort to concentrate the minds of the laity on the Mass, and in large sections of the Catholic world it disappeared. The altar furniture that had grown with such exuberance in churches in the wake of the Council of Trent was rendered redundant by the decision to reposition the celebrant at Mass facing the people: the priest therefore stood behind the altar, which had previously been affixed to a wall of sculpture and painting and thus had been designed for celebration in the other direction. A multitude of tables often cheap in appearance if not in cost camped out in historic church buildings, while the emphasis on celebrating congregational Masses at a single main altar left the greater galaxy of side altars dusty and neglected. With the vernacular Mass also came a musical revolution. Early-twentieth- century Catholicism had witnessed an outburst of scholarly and musical energy devoted to the proper and reverent performance of the Church’s ancient plainchant. The training which had gone into such sensitivity was now as redundant as the Baroque altar, when the requirement was for congregations to perform music in their own language. Priests completely untrained in teaching music to their congregations were now forced often against their instincts to impose a musical idiom which had previously hardly existed in Catholicism and which, to begin with, had virtually no repertoire native to the Catholic Church.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  had momentous consequences, and it makes a joke of the idea that long-term developments are predictable. Yet the illusion of valid prediction remains intact, a fact that is exploited by people whose business is prediction—not only financial experts but pundits in business and politics, too. Television and radio stations and newspapers have their panels of experts whose job it is to comment on the recent past and foretell the future. Viewers and readers have the impression that they are receiving information that is somehow privileged, or at least extremely insightful. And there is no doubt that the pundits and their promoters genuinely believe they are offering such information. Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, explored these so-called expert predictions in a landmark twenty- year study, which he published in his 2005 book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Tetlock has set the terms for any future discussion of this topic. Tetlock interviewed 284 people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends.” He asked them to assess the probabilities that certain events would occur in the not too distant future, both in areas of the world in which they specialized and in regions about which they had less knowledge. Would Gorbachev be ousted in a coup? Would the United States go to war in the Persian Gulf? Which country would become the next big emerging market? In all, Tetlock gathered more than 80,000 predictions. He also asked the experts how they reached their conclusions, how they reacted when proved wrong, and how they evaluated evidence that did not support their positions. Respondents were asked to rate the probabilities of three alternative outcomes in every case: the persistence of the status quo, more of something such as political freedom or economic growth, or less of that thing. The results were devastating. The experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned equal probabilities to each of the three potential outcomes. In other words, people who spend their time, and earn their living, studying a particular topic produce poorer predictions than dart-throwing monkeys who would have distributed their choices evenly over the options. Even in the region they knew best, experts were not significantly better than nonspecialists. Those who know more forecast very slightly better than those who know less. But those with the most knowledge are often less reliable. The reason is that the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident. “We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,” Tetlock writes. “In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  You can recognize this type by the books they read and films they go to, the way their ears prick up when told of the real-life adventures some people manage to live out. In their clothes and home furnishings, a taste for exuberant romance or drama will peek through. They are often trapped in drab relationships, and little comments here and there will reveal their disappointment and inner tension. The Seducer's Victims—The Eighteen Types • 151 These types make for excellent and satisfying victims. First, they usually have a great deal of pent-up passion and energy, which you can release and focus on yourself. They also have great imaginations and will respond to anything vaguely mysterious or romantic that you offer them. All you need do is disguise some of your less than exalted qualities and give them a part of their dream. This could be the chance to live out their adventures or be courted by a chivalrous soul. If you give them a part of what they want they will imagine the rest. At all cost, do not let reality break the illusion you are creating. One moment of pettiness and they will be gone, more bitterly disappointed than ever. The Pampered Royal. These people were the classic spoiled children. All of their wants and desires were met by an adoring parent—endless entertainments, a parade of toys, whatever kept them happy for a day or two. Where many children learn to entertain themselves, inventing games and finding friends, Pampered Royals are taught that others will do the entertaining for them. Being spoiled, they get lazy, and as they get older and the parent is no longer there to pamper them, they tend to feel quite bored and restless. Their solution is to find pleasure in variety, to move quickly from person to person, job to job, or place to place before boredom sets in. They do not settle into relationships well because habit and routine of some kind are inevitable in such affairs. But their ceaseless search for variety is tiring for them and comes with a price: work problems, strings of unsatisfying romances, friends scattered across the globe. Do not mistake their restlessness and infidelity for reality—what the Pampered Prince or Princess is really looking for is one person, that parental figure, who will give them the spoiling they crave.

• From What Are Biblical Values? (2019)

  Anyone who wishes to use the Bible to argue for gay rights would have to argue from the general command to love our neighbor and would then have to face the difficulties of determining what love of the neighbor requires. Conversely, the explicit biblical condemnations of homosexual activity are confined to narrow strands of tradition in both Testaments. Modern discussions of gender and sexuality provide a very different context for this issue than is envisioned in the Bible. Many other considerations besides the few scriptural passages we have discussed would have to be taken into account in a responsible discussion of the ethics of homosexuality. CHAPTER FOUR Marriage and Family I N 2012, Christopher Rollston, a respected Hebrew Bible scholar, then teaching at Emanuel Christian Seminary in Tennessee, published a piece in the Huffington Post entitled “The Marginalization of Women: A Biblical Value We Don’t Like to Talk About.”1 He had no difficulty citing examples from both Testaments to support his case. A notable example is found in the Ten Commandments. The tenth commandment reads: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male slave, his female slave, his ox, his donkey, or anything which belongs to your neighbor” (Exodus 20:17; Deuteronomy 5:21). Here the wife is apparently classified as her husband’s property, since she is listed with slaves and work animals.2 Many scholars would say that Rollston was belaboring the obvious. Nonetheless, and even though he was a tenured professor, he was told that he was alienating donors and should find employment elsewhere, which, happily, he did.3 The following year, Carol Meyers, a distinguished feminist scholar of the Hebrew Bible, gave the annual presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature.4 She addressed the question “Was ancient Israel a patriarchal society?” and answered in the negative: “The term ‘patriarchy’ is an inadequate and misleading designation of the social reality of ancient Israel.”5 Meyers was not responding to the piece in the Huffington Post; her concern was with the implications of the specific term “patriarchy.” She is not suggesting that there was gender neutrality in ancient Israel, and she does not dispute that female sexuality is subjected to male control in the Bible, as in many traditional societies. Nonetheless, she paints a very different picture of the portrayal of women both in the Bible and in ancient Israel as we know it from archeology. She insists that “male control of female sexuality does not mean male control of adult women in every aspect of household or community life. In short, male dominance is real; but it was fragmentary, not hegemonic.”6 Wives were not, in fact, placed on the same level as slaves and cattle, regardless of the formulation in the Decalogue. There is some truth on both sides of this debate. The sweeping condemnation of the marginalization of women is oversimplified and disregards the nuances of the ancient evidence.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  arrived, few could disguise their disappointment: his face was ugly, his hair instruction. She had never was stringy, he was gangly and awkward. They wondered why they had seen either him or a come. But then Rasputin approached them one by one, wrapping his big portrait of him before, and met him for the first time hands around their fingers and gazing deep into their eyes. At first his gaze in his house. When he was unsettling: as he looked them up and down, he seemed to be probing came up to her and spoke and judging them. Yet suddenly his expression would change, and kindness, to her, she thought him like joy, and understanding would radiate from his face. Several of the ladies he one of the peasant preachers she had often actually hugged, in a most effusive manner. This startling contrast had pro-seen in her own country found effects. home. His gentle, monastic The mood in the salon soon changed from disappointment to excite-gaze and the plainly parted light brown hair around the ment. Rasputin's voice was so calm and deep; his language was coarse, yet worthy simple face, all at the ideas it expressed were delightfully simple, and had the ring of great first inspired her confidence. spiritual truth. Then, just as the guests were beginning to relax with this But when he came nearer to her, she felt immediately dirty-looking peasant, his mood suddenly changed to anger: "I know you, that another quite different I can read your souls. You are all too pampered. . . . These fine clothes and man, mysterious, crafty, arts of yours are useless and pernicious. Men must learn to humble them-and corrupting, looked out from behind the eyes that selves! You must be simpler, far, far simpler. Only then will God come radiated goodness and nearer to you." The monk's face grew animated, his pupils expanded, he gentleness. • He sat down looked completely different. How impressive that angry look was, recalling opposite her, edged quite Jesus throwing the moneylenders from the temple. Now Rasputin calmed close up to her, and his light blue eyes changed down, returned to being gracious, but the guests already saw him as some-color, and became deep and one strange and remarkable. Next, in a performance he would soon repeat The Charismatic • 105 in salons throughout the city, he led the guests in a folk song, and as they dark. A keen glance sang, he began to dance, a strange uninhibited dance of his own design, reached her from the corner of his eyes, bored into her, and as he danced, he circled the most attractive women there, and with his and held her fascinated. eyes invited them to join him. The dance turned vaguely sexual; as his A leaden heaviness partners fell under his spell, he whispered suggestive comments in their overpowered her limbs as his great wrinkled face, ears. Yet none of them seemed to be offended. distorted with desire, came

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  or three months later they ther very beautiful or very kind or in the last resort very haul it out covered with a wicked; very witty or very stupid, but something. shining deposit of crystals. The smallest twig, no —ALFRED DE MUSSET bigger than a torn-tit's claw, is studded with a galaxy of scintillating diamonds. The Keys to Seduction original branch is no longer recognizable. • What I have called crystallization We all have a self-image that is more flattering than the truth: we is a mental process which think of ourselves as more generous, selfless, honest, kindly, intelli- draws from everything that happens new proofs of the gent, or good-looking than in fact we are. It is extremely difficult for us to perfection of the loved be honest with ourselves about our own limitations; we have a desperate one. . . . • A man in love need to idealize ourselves. As the writer Angela Carter remarks, we would sees every perfection in the rather align ourselves with angels than with the higher primates from object of his love, but his attention is liable to which we are actually descended. 282 • The Art of Seduction wander after a time because This need to idealize extends to our romantic entanglements, because one gets tired of anything when we fall in love, or under the spell of another person, we see a reflec-uniform, even perfect tion of ourselves. The choice we make in deciding to become involved happiness. • This is what happens next to fix the with another person reveals something important and intimate about us: we attention: • 6. Doubt resist seeing ourselves as having fallen for someone who is cheap or tacky or creeps in. . . . He is met tasteless, because it reflects badly on who we are. Furthermore, we are often with indifference, coldness, likely to fall for someone who resembles us in some way. Should that peror even anger if he appears too confident. . . . The son be deficient, or worst of all ordinary, then there is something deficient lover begins to be less sure and ordinary about us. No, at all costs the loved one must be overvalued of the good fortune he was and idealized, at least for the sake of our own self-esteem. Besides, in a anticipating and subjects his grounds for hope to a world that is harsh and full of disappointment, it is a great pleasure to be critical examination. • He able to fantasize about a person you are involved with. tries to recoup by indulging This makes the seducer's task easy: people are dying to be given the in other pleasures but finds them inane. He is seized

• From Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life (2005)

  166 Lecture 32: Lord Acton, The History of Freedom most of his life in Europe and had served at the court of the king of Naples. Denied admission to Cambridge because of his Catholicism, Acton was sent by his family to study in Germany under the Catholic theologian and priest Johann Ignaz von Doellinger, who was a historian of the church. Acton, like Gibbon, never received a university degree. Under Doellinger, Acton developed a sense for 19 th-century progressive history, which focused on the use of documents. After his return to England, Acton sought to use his skills as a journalist to take an active role in the reform of the Catholic church, a movement in which Doellinger was involved. The purpose of this movement was to bring the Catholic Church into the 19 th century. Although Acton was a devout Catholic who accepted the doctrine of the church, he believed that the church had to be brought into agreement with the liberal currents sweeping Europe. Acton believed that instead of supporting autocratic governments, the Catholic Church should support democratic governments and accept scientifi c thought. He saw no contradiction between the truth of God and the truth of science. At that time, the Catholic Church was becoming more reactionary, fearing the loss of political authority over the Papal States and the temporal power of the pope. Acton had already developed a central theme in his life, the idea of the educated conscience, which was the most important guarantee of individual freedom. He called liberty the reign of conscience and said that true freedom would exist in the world when every individual was free to exercise his or her conscience. Acton believed that papal infallibility stood in opposition to the idea of freedom of conscience, because people were not allowed to question the pope’s actions. Through his study of history, he learned that papal infallibility Johan Joseph Ignaz Doellinger. © Photos.com/Thinkstock.

• From What Are Biblical Values? (2019)

  Nonetheless, it has a clear biblical basis and is no more oversimplified than the way the Bible is generally perceived in popular culture. FEMINIST BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP Of all the developments that roiled the field of biblical studies in the last third of the twentieth century, none has proved more fundamental than feminist scholarship.7 Prior to this development, few people saw a problem with the androcentric perspective of the biblical text, typified in the use of the masculine adam , “man,” as the designation for humanity in general. The pioneers of feminist biblical scholarship, such as Phyllis Trible for the Hebrew Bible and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza for the New Testament, must be credited with removing scales from the eyes of their readers.8 What they helped them see was not a pretty picture. At the least, the Bible as traditionally interpreted seldom takes account of female perspectives and is often guilty of sexism. For interpreters with religious commitments, whether Jewish or Christian, this new perspective on the Bible was problematic. Interpreters have adopted various apologetic strategies to deal with this problematic perspective. Phyllis Trible, in an early formulation, claimed that “the intentionality of biblical faith, as distinguished from a general description of biblical religion, is neither to create nor to perpetuate patriarchy but rather to function as salvation for both women and men . . . the hermeneutical challenge is to translate biblical faith without sexism.”9 But the attempt to salvage a pure grain of biblical faith from the husk of cultural context is problematic and presupposes a commitment to vindicate the biblical text, appearances notwithstanding. Carol Meyers moved in a different direction.10 In her view, the biblical text is admittedly androcentric, but the social reality was more complex. Women had their own spheres of power and influence. Much of biblical feminist scholarship has been driven by a theological impulse to redeem traditions that seem utterly incompatible with feminist interests.11 In contrast, the approach of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has been characterized as a “hermeneutic of suspicion.”12 Schüssler Fiorenza is willing to reject the authority of texts she sees as promoting oppression, but she also engages in the retrieval of tradition. In her most influential book, In Memory of Her , subtitled A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins , she seeks to reconstruct the early Jesus movement as a resource for feminism.13 She is not interested in producing an objective history.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  flashes of lightning, exciting and frightening. Allowing no time to react or run for shelter, the rain comes, and brings with it a sense of release. At last. Reversal If two people come together by mutual consent, that is not a seduction. There is no reversal. Beware the Aftereffects Danger follows in the aftermath of a successful se- duction. After emotions have reached a pitch, they often swing in the opposite direction— toward lassitude, distrust, disappointment. Beware of the long, drawn-out goodbye; insecure, the victim will cling and claw, and both sides will suffer. If you are to part, make the sacrifice swift and sudden. If necessary, deliberately break the spell you have created. If you are to stay in a relationship, beware a flagging of energy, a creeping familiarity that will spoil the fantasy. If the game is to go on, a second seduction is required. Never let the other person take you for granted— use absence, create pain and con- flict, to keep the seduced on ten- terhooks. Disenchantment Seduction is a kind of spell, an enchantment. When you seduce, you are not quite your normal self; your presence is heightened, you are playing more than one role, you are strategically concealing your tics and insecurities. You have deliberately created mystery and suspense to make the victim experience a real-life drama. Under your spell, the seduced gets to feel In a word, woe to the transported away from the world of work and responsibility. woman of too monotonous You will keep this going for as long as you want or can, heightening the a temperament; her monotony satiates and tension, stirring the emotions, until the time finally comes to complete the disgusts. She is always the seduction. After that, disenchantment almost inevitably sets in. The release of same statue, with her a tension is followed by a letdown—of excitement, of energy—that can even man is always right. She is so good, so gentle, that she materialize as a kind of disgust directed at you by your victim, even though takes away from people the what is happening is really a natural emotional course. It is as if a drug were privilege of quarreling with wearing off, allowing the target to see you as you are—and being disap- her, and this is often such a great pleasure! Put in her pointed by the flaws that are inevitably there. On your side, you too have place a vivacious woman, probably tended to idealize your targets somewhat, and once your desire is capricious, decided, to a satisfied, you may see them as weak. (After all, they have given in to you.) certain limit, however, and You too may feel disappointed. Even in the best of circumstances, you are things assume a different aspect. The lover will find dealing now with the reality rather than the fantasy, and the flames will in the same person the slowly die down—unless you start up a second seduction. pleasure of variety. Temper

• From What Are Biblical Values? (2019)

  But the picture of God that we get in Deuteronomy and Joshua seems in flagrant conflict with those acclamations and with that command.5 Equally, the acceptance of slavery and the strictures against women fall short of the ideal of loving one’s neighbor and of the utopian ideal where there is neither slave nor free, male nor female. The Bible is often called the Good Book. In fact, it is more of a proverbial curate’s egg: good in spots. The good parts are considerable. No other document from the ancient world exhibits the passion for justice or the concern for the vulnerable members of society that we find in the Old Testament books of the prophets.6 Despite the dominion granted to humanity over the earth in Genesis, the sabbatical laws of the Hebrew Bible show great concern for the sustainability of the land. The idea that we should love our enemies (Matthew 5:44) is an exceptional ideal by any standard, ancient or modern, as is the ideal of turning the other cheek. Even Dawkins grants that Jesus must be considered one of the great ethical innovators of history.7 But Dawkins is right that Jesus did not blindly follow the scriptures he had inherited and that the New Testament has its own share of moral problems. If the preaching of the prophets or the Sermon on the Mount still inspires us, this is not because they are found in the Bible but because they appeal to principles that are compelling on broad humanistic grounds. The humanistic principle of ethics fundamental to all others is some formulation of the Golden Rule, that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us, or the negative formulation of the Talmud, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.”8 This principle is affirmed in many cultures, East and West.9 It is also the principle underlying the concern for the alien in the Book of Exodus: “You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (23:9). It is explicitly formulated by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:12; Luke 6:31). The Bible provides considerable support for this principle, but not everything in the Bible is in accordance with it. BIBLICAL AUTHORITY ? What, then, should we make of biblical authority? Not everything in the Bible can be accepted as a divine command even when it is presented as such. Wolterstorff has noted that the supposed divine command to extirpate the Canaanites in Deuteronomy 7 is found in a narrative now widely thought to be fictional. Archeological evidence, or lack thereof, shows that there was no violent conquest of Canaan by the Israelites.

• From The Greatest Controversies of Early Christian History (2013)

  77 o In 2 Samuel, David wants to build a permanent temple for the God of Israel. After the Exodus, God had been worshiped in the tabernacle, a large tent, but by the time of King David, the children of Israel had been in the Promised Land for at least two centuries, and David thought it was time for God to be worshiped in a permanent dwelling. o God, through his prophet, tells David that he will not be allowed to build a temple because of the sin that David has committed against God. God will, however, allow David’s son, Solomon, to build the temple. In the context of God’s refusal to allow David to build a temple, God indicates that he will build a house for David. This is not a literal house but a metaphorical one; he will give David a dynasty. o The passage (2 Samuel 7:11–16) reads in part: “He [Solomon] shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be a Father to him and he shall be a son to me.” From this, we get the idea that the king of Israel is the son of God. The passage goes on: “Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever.” This is God’s unconditional promise to David: An anointed one, a mashiach, will always sit on the throne of Israel. o The descendants of David ruled Judah for 450 years, but in 586 B.C.E., the Babylonians destroyed the Judeans and removed the Davidic king from the throne. From that time on, there was no Davidic king ruling in Israel, despite God’s promise. Some Jewish thinkers came to believe that the promise would be ful fi lled in the future. In other words, the idea of a future messiah came about because the Davidic kingship was disrupted by the Babylonians. Expectations for the Messiah  Over the centuries, the views of a future messiah developed, expanded, and changed.

• From Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life (2005)

  180 Lecture 34: Gandhi, An Autobiography Gandhi was imprisoned many times. He found in prison new sources of strength. He read Unto This Last , by John Ruskin, which taught him three crucial lessons. First, the good of all is encompassed in the good of one individual. Harm to one individual is harm to everyone. Second, every form of work has its own dignity. A barber is as worthy of respect as an attorney. Third, the noblest form of work is to farm and make something with your own hands. Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is within You opened a new world to Gandhi. According to Tolstoy, Jesus was not God but taught that everyone has a God within himself. A similar teaching also appears in the Bhagavad Gita. Gandhi’s readings showed that unfamiliar books, in addition to great books, can touch the soul. Gandhi used self-imposed hunger strikes to protest British actions or the actions of his followers when they refused to follow his path of truth and nonviolence. When Gandhi went on a hunger strike, the British raj feared that he might die and would give in. Gandhi thus harmed no one in his fi ght for the truth. Gandhi’s moral authority played a decisive role in Britain’s decision to give India its freedom and in the decision of many Indians to form political parties that could achieve freedom under a constitutional government. Gandhi was bitterly disappointed in 1947 when India gained its independence but allowed itself to be divided into a largely Muslim Pakistan and a largely Hindu India. Gandhi believed that this partition contradicted his teaching that God had fashioned many roads to truth and that all religions teach the same fundamental values. When civil war broke out over disputed territory and thousands were killed, the elderly Gandhi walked from village to village trying to bring people together. The moral authority of Gandhi had become a threat. Radicals who wanted a truly separate Hindu India set out to assassinate Gandhi, and he was shot. With his last word, “Ram,” Gandhi invoked the name of God. The Bhagavad Gita says, “He who dies with my name upon his lips is freed forever from the cycle of life and joins me in bliss.” ■ Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with the Truth. Essential Reading 181 Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope. 1. Expound on your understanding of Gandhi’s ideal that “it is more important to believe that truth is God than that God is truth.” 2. What would Gandhi have said to Dietrich Bonhoeffer regarding the plot to assassinate Hitler? Supplementary Reading Questions to Consider

• From Middlesex (2002)

  Back at the party, my birthday cake is coming out with its seven candles. My mother's silent lips are telling me to make a wish. What did I wish for at seven? I don't remember. In the film I lean forward and, Aeolian, blow the candles out. In a moment, they re-ignite. I blow them out again. Same thing happens. And then Chapter Eleven is laughing, entertained at last. That was how our home movies ended, with a prank on my birthday. With candles that had multiple lives. The question remains: Why was this Milton's last movie? Can it be explained by the usual petering out of parents' enthusiasm for documenting their children on film? By the fact that Milton took hundreds of baby photographs of Chapter Eleven and no more than twenty or so of me? To answer these questions, I need to go behind the camera and see things through my father's eyes. The reason Milton was disappearing on us: after ten years in busi- 227 ness, the diner was no longer making a profit. Through the front window (over Athena olive oil tins) my father looked out day after day at the changes on Pingree Street. The white family who'd lived across the way, good customers once, had moved out. Now the house belonged to a colored man named Morrison. He came into the diner to buy cigarettes. He ordered coffee, asked for a million refills, and smoked. He never ordered any food. He didn't seem to have a job. Sometimes other people moved into his house, a young woman, maybe Morrison's daughter, with her kids. Then they were gone and it was just Morrison again. There was a tarp up on his roof with bricks around it, to cover a hole. Just down the block an after-hours place had opened up. Its pa- trons urinated in the doorway of the diner on their way home. Streetwalkers had started working Twelfth Street. The dry cleaner's on the next block over had been held up, the white owner severely beaten. A. A. Laurie, who ran the optometrist's shop next door, took down his eye chart from the wall as workers removed the neon eye- glasses out front. He was moving to a new shop in Southfield. My father had considered doing the same. "That whole neighborhood's going down the tubes," Jimmy Fioretos had advised one Sunday after dinner. "Get out while the get- ting's good." And then Gus Panos, who had had a tracheotomy and spoke through a hole in his neck, hissing like a bellows: "Jimmy's right . . . sssss . . . You should move out to . . ssss . . . . Bloomfield Hills." Uncle Pete had disagreed, making his usual case for integration and support for President Johnson's War on Poverty.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  “Donna Marie, I’m warning you.”I couldn’t stop myself. I reminded Mama and Betty Ann and Brother Terrell that Pam and Randall had sat on the console during our last trip, that it was in fact my turn, and that I had never gotten to sit on the console even once. Brother Terrell slammed on the brakes and the car skidded to a stop. “Pamela, get off now and let Donna sit up here.”Pam slid into the backseat with Mama and Gary, and I climbed onto the narrow console. I had to sit straight up and my back hurt after about five minutes. I looked over my shoulder at Pam. She nestled against the door and smirked. I shifted from side to side and tried to get comfortable. I couldn’t lean forward and I couldn’t lean back. I couldn’t do anything except sit straight up. After a few miles I offered to trade places with Pam but she said no, she was comfortable, and that I could just ride up there for the rest of the trip.We uttered a collective sigh of relief as we drove through Atlanta to the community that would be our home for the duration of the revival. The house was located in an area of town that had elements of both city and country life. There were cracked sidewalks, a corner store, and yards that turned into small pastures with an occasional barn or lean-to. Brother Terrell eased the car along the curb, ducking his head slightly and squinting to see the house numbers. Betty Ann looked down at the address she had scratched on an envelope.“David, this has to be it.”I peered through the car window at the house, white with red shutters. Nice, much nicer than the last place we stayed. Two squares of brown grass lay on each side of the concrete walk that led to the front door. A metal roof extended from the house and covered a porch just wide enough for the glider that occupied one end. A swing. Okay, sort of a swing. A tree hugged the edge of the porch, small, too small for a tree house. We rolled past the house and turned into the dirt driveway that widened into a large rectangle of dirt side yard and extended beyond the house to the ramshackle barn. Brother Terrell jerked the car into park and fished in his pocket for the key his advance man had mailed a week earlier.We stepped stiff-legged from the car and headed for the side door of the house. Each adult carried two suitcases, all the clothes we owned. The door opened into a large kitchen with a little table pushed against the wall. The five boxes we had packed with pots, pans, plates, towels, sheets, and quilts sat on the table and the floor, delivered earlier that morning by one of the tent families. Betty Ann went to the sink and turned a handle. Rusty orange water poured out of the faucet.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  come with emotion, and felt rather pleased with himself. But the Chevalier KSHEMENDRA, TRANSLATED BY de Grammont, wondering why the pair had parted, visited Madame de E. POWYS MATHERS Senantes and asked her how it went. She told him the truth—Matta had dispensed with the formalities and was ready to bed her. The chevalier 138 • The Art of Seduction Just as ladies do love men laughed and thought to himself how differently he would manage affairs if which be valiant and bold he were the one wooing the lovely Madame. under arms, so likewise do Over the next few days Matta continued to misread the signs. He did they love such as be of like sort in love; and the man not pay a visit to Madame de Senantes's husband, as custom required. He which is cowardly and over did not wear her colors. When the two went riding together, he went chas-and above respectful toward ing after hares, as if they were the more interesting prey, and when he took them, will never win their good favor. Not that they snuff he failed to offer her some. Meanwhile he continued to make his would have them so overforward advances. Finally Madame had had enough, and complained to overweening, bold, and him directly. Matta apologized; he had not realized his errors. Moved by his presumptuous, as that they should by main force lay apology, the lady was more than ready to resume the courtship—but a few them on the floor; but days later, after a few trifling stabs at wooing, Matta once again assumed rather they desire in them a that she was ready for bed. To his dismay, she refused him as before. "I do certain hardy modesty, or not think that [women] can be mightily offended," Matta told the cheva-perhaps better a certain modest hardihood. For lier, "if one sometimes leaves off trifling, to come to the point." But while themselves are not Madame de Senantes would have nothing more to do with him, and the exactly wantons, and will Chevalier de Grammont, seeing an opportunity he could not pass by, took neither solicit a man nor yet actually offer their advantage of her displeasure by secretly courting her properly, and eventu-favors, yet do they know ally winning the favors that Matta had tried to force. well how to rouse the appetites and passions, and There is nothing more anti-seductive than feeling that someone has assumed prettily allure to the skirmish in such wise that that you are theirs, that you cannot possibly resist them. The slightest ap-he which doth not take pearance of this kind of conceit is deadly to seduction; you must prove occasion by the forelock and yourself, take your time, win your target's heart. Perhaps you fear that he or join encounter, and that without the least awe of she will be offended by a slower pace, or will lose interest. It is more likely, rank and greatness, without