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.

Page 70 of 189 · 20 per page

• From Action (2014)

  When they aren’t? You know how it’s rude to insert sidebars into conversations with three or more people that you know only you and one other person in the group will get? Imagine that same ill-mannered behavior, except naked. Nobody likes to feel neglected, or extrapolate that into butchered self-esteem. I am happy to say I’ve never experienced that, but that is, in large part, because I would never become involved in a threesome that I foresaw was an emotional demolition derby disguised as the kind of agreeable fuckfest that I wondered about from pornography. Asking the person to whom you are committed to have a threesome with you might feel daunting if you’re monogamous with them. This doesn’t mean it is impossible, or that they’ll shoot you down out of hand. If you’re uncertain whether your person will respond favorably to a three-part harmony, do some detective work. Just maybe don’t do it by saying, “Hey! You know your friend Dan from the radio show with the graceful hands and shag-carpet chest hair? I want to lobotomize him via fucking his brains out. Wanna join in, person I love?” This approach is obviously a bad one, but let’s dissect just how it would result in watching your their-place toothbrush get snapped over your partner’s knee: 1. It suggests a specific person. In addition to the above principles regarding who gets to pick, and why, in terms of the two of you: How do you know Dan would be down? If it’s because you asked him firsthand, you likely extracted that information via a proposition that your person would hate. You either dangled the prospect of a threesome without their permission, or you said, “Hey, DAN. DANIEL. HEY. Over here, behind the turntables. Real quick secret: I desperately want you to bend me over. No, Matt doesn’t know, but he could watch if he wanted, I guess?” or you didn’t even mention Matt at ALL, until now, when you confirmed to him that you and his colleague are making flimsy passes at each other behind his back. That’s insulting. Don’t do it. If you DON’T know Dan would be down, then you’re confounding this whole situation for a prospect that is unlikely to go down with the exact cast of characters you were hoping in reality, since finding willing and enthusiastic threesome partners is… complex. More on that later. First, I’m going to keep berating you for not saying something that I myself wrote! How could you???

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

  results: by the end of the century there were perhaps as many as 300,000 Christian converts in Japan, aided by a determined and imaginative effort to meet Japan on its own terms. From the beginning, the Jesuits took Japanese culture seriously: ‘these Japanese are more ready to be implanted with our holy faith than all the nations of the world,’ Xavier affirmed, and he recommended bringing members of the Society from the Low Countries and Germany since they were used to a cold climate and would work more efficiently in it.37 The Italian Jesuit Alessandro Valignano envisaged the formation of a native clergy, and a Portuguese, Gaspar Coelho, was active in recruiting some seventy novices by 1590, concentrating especially on the sons of noblemen and samurai who would command respect in Japanese society (his colleagues felt more cautious and restrained his initiative).38 In counterpoint to this success was a fatal entanglement with politics, both Portuguese trading policy and the internal concerns of Japan. The Portuguese trade was led by their so-called ‘Great Ship’ trading in bullion and luxury goods annually; the Jesuits not only invested in this to support what had proved to be an extremely expensive mission, but also encouraged the ship to travel to as many Japanese ports as possible to excite interest in Christianity. The missionaries and merchants were lucky enough to arrive at a time when Japan was split between rival feudal lords. Many lords saw Christianity as a useful way of attracting Portuguese trade and also of furthering their own political aims, particularly the powerful Tokugawa family, who initially encouraged the missionaries. By 1600 the Tokugawa had eliminated all their rivals in politics, and now saw Christianity not as a convenience but as a nuisance, even a threat. They had some justification: the Philippines fell under Spanish royal control with such comparative ease because missionary activity by Augustinian friars had preceded the arrival of King Philip’s ships and soldiers. Matters were made worse when Franciscan friars arrived in Japan to establish a missionary presence in 1593. Anticipating the controversies with Jesuits that were to arise in the Chinese Empire, they adopted an aggressively negative attitude towards Japanese culture, which led to a number of them suffering death by crucifixion. In the early seventeenth century the Tokugawa expelled Europeans from Japan except for one rigorously policed trading post.39 They then launched one of the most savage persecutions in Christian history, and their repression of Japanese Christians was not without some military assistance from the Protestant Dutch, who were doing their best to wreck Portuguese power in eastern Asia, and had few regrets about campaigns against popish Jesuits and friars. The Church in Japan, despite the heroism of its native faithful, was reduced to a tiny and half-instructed remnant. It struggled to maintain even a

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

  of directly contradicting Job and Qoheleth, with calls to activism in leading a morally upright life, such as those in the Book of Proverbs, whose cosy assertions of the value of everyday goodness have provided material for settled Jewish or Christian societies ever since. Writers seeking to rebuild Israel gave unambiguous answers to the great question aroused by Jewish experiences after 586. They created new sets of laws and careful restorations and extensions of past ceremonial practice in the Temple, taking care that most of it was represented as a return to ancient decrees of the Lord from before the Exile. They stated in ever more extreme terms the message of separation which had been the centrepiece of the Deuteronomistic reform movement; now they had the catastrophe of the Babylonian captivity to ram home the point that Yahweh wanted obedience to his law and had severely punished the nation for not providing that obedience. Never again should Israel make the same mistake. On this principle was founded the continuing existence and development of Judaism. Like its daughter religion, Christianity, Judaism has often fostered the idea that it has an exclusive approach to the divine. Yet this claim to exclusivity was coupled with a remarkable new feature of Yahweh’s religion – or perhaps really a return to its miscellaneous origins amid the displaced people of the Habiru. From this period under Persian rule comes an acceptance that it was not necessary to be born a Jew to enter the Jewish faith: what was necessary was to accept fully the customs of the Jews, including the rite of genital circumcision performed on all Jewish males. One could then be accepted as a convert (‘proselyte’, from a Greek word meaning ‘stranger’ or ‘foreigner living in the land’). It was enough to accept the story which Judaism told: so in theory, Judaism could become a universal religion. Jews did not generally take that logical step of thought. It was left first to Christianity and then to Islam to make it a great theme of their faith.36 In the centuries after the return from Babylon, the Jews in Palestine were repeatedly faced with the same prospect of more powerful cultures overwhelming their own and overpowering them. Most disturbing was the coming of Hellenistic kingdoms, after Alexander the Great burst into the eastern Mediterranean in the 330s (see pp. 37–40). First, the Ptolemaic Pharaohs of Egypt ruled the land, and then (from 198 BCE) the Seleucids of Syria. The worst confrontation between Jewish identity and the Greek world surrounding it exploded into open violence when their second Seleucid overlord, King Antiochos IV (who boastfully called himself Epiphanēs or ‘Manifestation’), tried to force Greek customs on to the Jews and attacked the religious life centred on the Temple in Jerusalem. From 167 BCE the Jews rebelled against him, first under the leadership of Judas Maccabeus. With the unpromising

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

  rebranding of the Church of England attempted by Archbishop Laud and his associates in the early seventeenth century (see pp. 649–50), but there were other important elements. If the State was apparently no longer going to support the Church of England, then the Church would have to look to its own devices – and the only English precedent for that was to be found in that group of High Church refuseniks who, in impressively perverse loyalty to an ungrateful James II, had formed the ‘Non-Juring’ Church in 1689. Freed from the imperatives to discretion which establishment brings, and including in their ranks some formidable intellects, the Non-Jurors had ranged freely in their thoughts about the shape of an authentically Catholic Church of England, possessing an episcopate continuous with the Church of the Apostles, uncorrupted by Roman error and unshackled from the State. A large dose of their radical conclusions in both liturgy and ecclesiology (that is, their theology of the nature of the Church), together with their interest in Eastern Orthodoxy and their frequent open rudeness about the Reformation, now enriched the spiritual explorations of the Tractarians. That separated them from older High Churchmen, who had not shown much sympathy with the eventually expiring Non-Juring Church.56 Tractarianism was thus a movement with a good many opinions, as well as a good opinion of itself – perhaps not surprisingly, given the large number of young and single Oxford dons among its leadership.57 The Tractarians’ problem was that this good opinion was not shared by the bishops whose government in the Church they theoretically exalted. In 1841 Newman produced the ninetieth of their tracts, arguing, with more ingenuity than was sensible, that England’s Reformed Protestant doctrinal statement, the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563, was not directed against the doctrines which made the Church of Rome distinct from those of the Church of England. He seemed genuinely surprised at the uproar which followed, including his own bishop’s urgent requirement that the tract should be withdrawn.58 Later in the year came the hammer blow (as far as Newman and his sympathizers were concerned) of the project for the Anglo- Prussian bishopric of Jerusalem. Their fears for the Catholic integrity of the English Church were blended with a refined disdain for Michael Solomon Alexander, the first bishop appointed under the scheme, and for the fact that Evangelicals celebrated his Jewish ancestry. In retrospect, Newman reflected with not untypical feline sarcasm about the Jerusalem bishopric, ‘I never heard of any good or harm it has ever done, except what it has done for me; which many think a great misfortune, and I one of the greatest of mercies. It brought me on to the beginning of the end.’59 What Newman meant was that he could no longer escape the instability of the view of Anglicanism which he had constructed for himself. Behind Laud and the

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  everything out. Eventually a grand jury convened to examine the IRS evidence against him. It came out in the hearing that my mother had made a down payment on a property with thirty thousand dollars in cash. The attorney who handled the transaction remembered it ten years later as one of the strangest moments of his career. “This woman hands me all this money in a bag. A brown paper bag! I kept waiting for the wise guys with machine guns.” My mother told the grand jury she had borrowed the money from an individual, but she wasn’t at liberty to tell them who had loaned it to her. She had promised the person she wouldn’t. The jury sent her home to reconsider, but her answer remained the same. She spent several weeks in the Wichita County jail for contempt. Eventually the person she had “borrowed” the money from (she told me it was not Brother Terrell) released her from her promise and she answered the jury’s question. Mama told me later that while she was in jail, the preacher woman and Brother Terrell had been in Hawaii ready to leave the country “if things went wrong.” It was the closest my mother ever came to saying a bad word against Brother Terrell. She wouldn’t elaborate on which things could have gone wrong. I assumed she meant answering the grand-jury question in a way that would have incriminated Brother Terrell. I remembered that during the weeks my mother was in jail, he had called me almost every day. “I’m really concerned about your mama,” he said in that hoarse, overworked preacher voice. I asked my mother what she thought about a man who would have left the country when she was facing legal repercussions for protecting him. Instead of answering my question, she voiced a fear around which she had detoured for almost twenty years. “I guess he didn’t really care what happened to me.” She looked tired and defeated. If anyone had asked me at the time of this conversation if I still believed in David Terrell, I would have said no, and I would have been wrong. Belief, like love, can go underground. It can become a part of our operating system, without our knowledge or approval. As my mother spoke of Brother Terrell’s betrayal, another layer of faith fell away even as I recognized its existence. What a surprise to feel its absence. Within hours, the illness from which I had been healed returned. I had been symptom-free for nine years. One doctor said the symptoms I experienced can occur and then disappear and remain dormant for years. I nodded, thinking all the time, You have no idea. I sometimes think that

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

  He and Nixon would run on a campaign of law and order, one aimed at a “silent majority” and voters shaken by the events of the year. The Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago later in August. As protests erupted around the city, McCarthy seemed unwilling to seize the moment and lead the passionate supporters who’d backed him for so long. In the end, he received just 23 percent of the votes at the convention, and Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who hadn’t entered a single primary, became the Democratic nominee, with Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine his running mate. It was a crushing blow to believers in the antiwar movement. In London, the Beatles were set to release a new single, “Hey Jude,” written by Paul McCartney to reassure John Lennon’s son, Julian, during his parents’ divorce. It would include as its B side the John Lennon–penned song “Revolution,” which questioned the tactics of the year’s aggressive political protesters: “But when you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out.” It had been just four years since the Beatles had dressed in matching suits and run from screaming fans in the opening scene of the film A Hard Day’s Night . In 1968, they had long hair and flowing beards and were singing about the pain in the world. Even in music, little seemed the same anymore. At the end of the summer, Atlantic City hosted the 1968 Miss America pageant. Outside the venue, at least a hundred women protested the event, which they deemed exploitative. Officials had feared that the demonstrators would start fires, as happened so often during protests in 1968, but the women had promised they wouldn’t do anything dangerous—“just a symbolic bra-burning.” When the event began, they tossed false eyelashes and girdles into a garbage can and crowned a sheep Miss America. But from that day forward, the concept of a “bra-burning women’s libber” gained currency in the United States, despite the fact that nothing was ever set ablaze. In October, the Summer Olympic Games were held in Mexico City. Two American sprinters, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, won the gold and bronze medals, respectively, in the 200-meter race. Standing on the podium to receive their medals, each wearing a black glove on one hand, the two Americans bowed their heads and raised a fist in a Black Power salute during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a protest of the inequality of treatment and opportunity for black people in their home country. Immediately, the athletes were suspended from the team and sent home from Mexico City. The silent statement by the two sprinters had a polarizing and powerful effect in the United States. On October 20, almost five years after her husband’s death, Jacqueline Kennedy became Jackie O. Everyone seemed to have an opinion—mostly negative—of the surprise wedding between the former First Lady and the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, a man twenty-three years her senior.

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

  with a head cold—a condition made even more uncomfortable given that noses don’t run in zero gravity. To make matters worse, the crew struggled with their biomedical equipment, strained to see out their windows, and were forced to pump waste water manually from the spacecraft. When Mission Control asked about the live television broadcast scheduled for that day, Schirra made it clear where he stood. “You’ve added two burns to this flight schedule, and you’ve added a urine water dump, and we have a new vehicle up here, and I can tell you [at] this point TV will be delayed without any further discussion until after the rendezvous.” It got worse. Though the spacecraft was functioning beautifully, the astronauts’ attitudes were breaking down. On day seven, Cunningham said to controllers, “I’d just like to go on record here as saying that people that dream up procedures like this after you lift off have somehow or another been dropping the ball for the last three years....It looks kind of Mickey Mouse.” On day eight, Schirra said, “I wish you would find out the idiot’s name who thought up this test....I want to talk to him personally when I get back down.” In Houston, Kraft and Slayton were seething. Not only were Schirra and his crew nearly insubordinate, they were doing it for the public to hear. At a press briefing, a reporter said, “I’ve covered sixteen flights, and I don’t recall ever finding a bunch of people up there growling the way these guys are. Now, you’re either doing a bad job down here, or they’re a bunch of malcontents. Which is it?” Apollo 7 splashed down eleven days after lift-off. Every mission objective had been achieved, and more. The spacecraft had worked beautifully. The SPS engine, so critical to a lunar journey, had performed well. By virtually every measure, the flight had been nearly perfect, and it would open the door to Apollo 8’s flight to the Moon. Many attributed the negative behavior by the crew of Apollo 7 to the constant discomfort from their head colds. Others wondered if Schirra had been terrified by the Apollo 1 fire. The commander of that mission, Gus Grissom, had been Schirra’s next-door neighbor. Schirra had been Grissom’s backup pilot for the flight. Long after the fire, Schirra had told people, “We all spent a year wearing black arm bands for three very good men. I’ll be damned if anybody’s going to spend the next year wearing

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

  different in their social profile from the exalted figures around the emperor. At the peak of the Chinese mission’s success at the end of the seventeenth century, it was serving perhaps around a quarter of a million people — an extraordinary achievement, even though still, as in India, a tiny proportion of the whole population.33 Yet at that time there were only seventy-five priests to serve this number, labouring under enormous difficulties with language: how, for instance, to solve that problem already encountered in America, to hear confessions in such circumstances? What the Jesuits did very effectively in this situation was to inspire a local leadership which was not clerical, both catechists in the classic American mould and a particular Chinese phenomenon (perhaps inspired by the Ursulines), ‘Chinese virgins’: laywomen consecrated to singleness but still living with their families, teaching women and children. This preserved the mission into the nineteenth century despite worsening clerical shortages, which became acute when the emperor expelled foreign clergy in 1724. If the trend in Counter- Reformation Europe was for the clergy to take more control of the lives of the laity, circumstances in China consistently promoted lay activism — and the same was to prove true of Chinese Catholicism’s daughter-mission to Korea in the eighteenth century (see pp. 899–902).34 As elsewhere in Asia and Africa, Portuguese suspicion of non-Portuguese clergy complicated the spread of Catholicism in China, and more serious problems emerged. When Dominicans and Franciscans arrived in China from the Philippines in the 1630s, they launched bitter attacks on their Jesuit rivals, and raised major matters of missionary policy. The friars, with a background in America assuming total confrontation with previous religions, violently disagreed with the Jesuits in their attitude to the Chinese way of life, particularly traditional rites in honour of Confucius and the family; they even publicly asserted that deceased emperors were burning in Hell. The French, including many French Jesuits of ‘Jansenist’ sympathies (see pp. 797–9), weighed in against the policy of flexibility when they became a significant presence in the 1690s. Complaints about the ‘Chinese rites’ were taken as far as Rome itself, and after a long struggle successive popes condemned the rites in 1704 and 1715. This was a deeply significant setback for Western Christianity’s first major effort to understand and accommodate itself to another culture, and it was not surprising that the Yongzheng Emperor reacted so angrily in 1724.35 Christian work in Japan was the most extreme story, as the most spectacular success of any mission launched from Portuguese bases in Asia or Africa ended in almost total destruction.36 Francis Xavier and his fellow Jesuits arrived as early as 1549, only seven years after the first Portuguese visit to Japan, and Jesuits continued to dominate the Japanese mission. They quickly achieved

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

  It was a match far from Camelot. To many, it seemed that Kennedy had traded her quiet dignity and near-saintly virtue for a life with a crude, short, cigarette-smoking man who appeared to offer little more than money. And it seemed a break with a more innocent time, one when fairy-tale stories still happened in America. As October bled into November, and with America just days away from electing a new leader, Jimi Hendrix’s new cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” rang out from cars and college campuses and protests, his guitar making a sound no guitar had ever quite made before, a black man singing a white man’s song with the opening lyric, “There must be some kind of way out of here,” and a reminder, in the midst of one of America’s most volatile years, that “the hour is getting late.” —Polling at 15 percent, independent presidential candidate George Wallace controlled millions of votes, most in the deep South. At a time when many in the country were offended by what they perceived to be a disregard for decorum and civility, Wallace made no secret of his contempt for the unkempt. “You got some folks out here who know a lot of four-letter words,” he said when interrupted by hecklers. “But there are two four-letter words they don’t know: W-O-R-K and S-O-A-P.” When the election results were tallied, Nixon received 43.4 percent of the vote, Humphrey 42.7 percent, and Wallace 13.5 percent. More than 73 million votes had been cast; Nixon’s total exceeded Humphrey’s by just 499,704—about the size of the population of Atlanta. For the first time in more than a century, a new president would not have his party control either the Senate or the House of Representatives. As with most everything in 1968, America seemed split in two. —In late November, the Beatles released their first double album. Officially titled The Beatles, it quickly came to be known as the White Album, for its stark white cover. It was worlds apart from their 1967 album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band . Neither the songs nor the sides seemed connected, or to flow from one another; some of the lyrics were overtly political; and each member seemed, more than ever, to be writing solo material rather than as part of a whole. Two weeks after the White Album’s debut, the Rolling Stones released their own classic, Beggars Banquet . The LP featured the track “Sympathy for the Devil,” sung by Mick Jagger from the perspective of Lucifer, asking “Who killed the Kennedys?” and answering “After all, it was you and me.” In “Street Fighting Man,” Jagger, who admired the spirit of revolution during 1968 and had even joined big protests, seemed to lament that the best help he could give was by singing. —As America entered the final two weeks of the year, a grim statistic emerged from Vietnam.

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

  activity which led to Loyola’s hasty exit from Spain for the University of Paris in 1528, a year before Valdés’s own flight. Around the exiled Spaniard gathered a group of talented young men who were inspired by his vision for a new mission to the Holy Land. To their severe disappointment, the international situation in 1537 made it impossible for them to take ship, but the friends resolved to look positively on their setback and create yet another variant on the gild/confraternity/oratory model: not a religious order, but what they called a Compagnia or Society of Jesus. Soon the Society’s members were known informally as Jesuits: a weapon to be placed in the pope’s hand as a gift to the Church. Ignatius never lost his courtly skills, particularly with pious noble ladies of exceptional political power, and his pastorally sensitive intervention in a papal family crisis was the main spur to secure the Society Pope Paul III’s generous Bull of Foundation in 1540. It was an astonishingly quick promotion for such an unformed organization, whose purposes were at that stage unclear.7 The early history of the Jesuits has been interestingly obscured in light of their extraordinary later success and institutionalization. The reasons for that obscurity are enmeshed in the turbulent politics of the 1540s which decided the future direction of the Catholic Reformation. Before this outcome, the Jesuits were part of that multiform movement of spiritual energy, the Spirituali, and like much else in Spirituale activity, their work could easily have been destroyed.8 That they and their work were not is a tribute to the inspired political talents of both Ignatius and his successors. A curious feature of Ignatius’s voluminous surviving correspondence is that almost all of it concerns matters of business. One has difficulty gauging from it what spiritual qualities singled out the writer to be a saint – this author of that key text of Catholic spirituality, the Exercises. The silence indicates a huge missing body of letters. Evidently an efficiently comprehensive hand, probably in the 1560s, refashioned the early years of the Society by deleting large portions of the story.9 REGENSBURG AND TRENT, A CONTEST RESOLVED (1541-59) There was good reason for this prudence. In the early 1540s the Spirituali might seem to be shaping the future of reform in the Church; yet against Cardinal Contarini’s energetic efforts to find common ground with Protestants, particularly on justification by faith, was ranged the hostility of Cardinal Carafa to any such concession. Carafa’s suspicion of the newly formed Jesuits was equally heartfelt, for he detested Ignatius Loyola. The dislike may have been personal, but in the Neapolitan Carafa’s mind the crucial factor was that Loyola

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

  historiography as a sterile interlude in a smoothly developing Protestant Reformation. Mary deserves pity for the disappointment of her passionate hopes for a son who would carry on her work, making her believe in pregnancies long after it was sadly obvious to all those around her that they did not exist. She did not improve her historical legacy by sponsoring the burning of Protestants as heretics, a campaign whose intensity was, in comparison with other parts of Europe, a decade or two out of date. It only bred a celebration of martyrs to which English Protestantism rallied for centuries. At the same time the Queen was not helped by Pope Paul IV, who after his accession, among his many efforts to settle old scores, tried to bring down his old adversary Cardinal Pole, as a pestilential survivor of the Spirituali. Pole was now back in his native land, having succeeded the executed Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury. Julius III had very sensibly chosen Pole as papal legate (representative) to the newly Catholic England, but now Paul summoned the Cardinal Archbishop to Rome to face charges of heresy. Pope Paul also declared war on Mary’s husband, King Philip II of Spain. Poor Mary, devout daughter of the Church, found herself in the crazy position of defying the Pope and forbidding Pole to leave her realm for what would almost certainly have been a heretic’s death in Rome. The equally Catholic King of Poland had a similar experience of Paul’s paranoia.17 Yet if we look past the ghastly mistake of the burnings and the dismal relations with the papacy, creative re-examination reveals Mary’s Church as a forerunner of much which happened in the Tridentine world, led after all by an archbishop who had devoted his career to meditating on Church reform.18 England undertook a remarkably efficient operation to discipline clergy who had married in King Edward VI’s reign, in no more than a couple of years separating them from their wives and successfully redeploying most of them in new parishes; Rome spent the next half-century trying to secure such uniform clerical celibacy in central Europe. In the synod of the English Church which he was able to summon as papal legate, Pole sorted out decades of deteriorating Church finance and pioneered new eucharistic devotions; his bishops encouraged preaching and published official sermons to match those of Protestants, and crucially set out to implement a programme of clergy training schools, seminaries, for each diocese: the first time that the Catholic Church had seriously addressed the problem of equipping a parish clergy to equal the developing articulacy of Protestant ministers. In the five years of Mary’s reign, the Jesuits did not begin work in England. For the time being they left the task to distinguished Spanish Dominicans imported by King Philip, since they had much else to do and currently had no

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  I didn’t know what it was, and 2. I didn’t care to learn, and 3. I never really excelled at small talk. My mom, however, can talk small for hours, and so she extended the awkwardness by asking them about their rehearsal schedule, and how the show had gone, and whether it was a success. “I guess it was,” Marie said. “A lot of people came, I guess.” Marie was the sort of person to guess a lot. Finally, Will said, “Well, we just dropped by to say good-bye. I’ve got to get Marie home by six. Have fun at boarding school, Miles.” “Thanks,” I answered, relieved. The only thing worse than having a party that no one attends is having a party attended only by two vastly, deeply uninteresting people. They left, and so I sat with my parents and stared at the blank TV and wanted to turn it on but knew I shouldn’t. I could feel them both looking at me, waiting for me to burst into tears or something, as if I hadn’t known all along that it would go precisely like this. But I had known. I could feel their pity as they scooped artichoke dip with chips intended for my imaginary friends, but they needed pity more than I did: I wasn’t disappointed. My expectations had been met. “Is this why you want to leave, Miles?” Mom asked. I mulled it over for a moment, careful not to look at her. “Uh, no,” I said. “Well, why then?” she asked. This was not the first time she had posed the question. Mom was not particularly keen on letting me go to boarding school and had made no secret of it. “Because of me?” my dad asked. He had attended Culver Creek, the same boarding school to which I was headed, as had both of his brothers and all of their kids. I think he liked the idea of me following in his footsteps. My uncles had told me stories about how famous my dad had been on campus for having simultaneously raised hell and aced all his classes. That sounded like a better life than the one I had in Florida. But no, it wasn’t because of Dad. Not exactly. “Hold on,” I said. I went into Dad’s study and found his biography of François Rabelais. I liked reading biographies of writers, even if (as was the case with Monsieur Rabelais) I’d never read any of their actual writing. I flipped to the back and found the highlighted quote (“NEVER USE A HIGHLIGHTER IN MY BOOKS,” my dad had told me a thousand times. But how else are you supposed to find what you’re looking for?). “So this guy,” I said, standing in the doorway of the living room. “François Rabelais.

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

  Bucher was put before a mock firing squad in order to obtain his confession, which he refused to make. He was then told his crew would be executed, one by one, until he acknowledged American guilt—which he finally did. After American officials signed a confession and apology, the North Koreans agreed to release the crew. “The big news right now,” Carr radioed to the spacecraft, “…is that all eighty-two crewmen of the Pueblo have been returned. They walked across the Bridge of Freedom Monday night.” “Wonderful!” Borman replied. Anders had a different reaction. He was happy for the Americans who’d been released, but he couldn’t help but compare the incident to the one his father had endured. Arthur Anders had defended the USS Panay from an unprovoked Japanese air attack in 1937, refusing to give up his ship, manning guns and returning fire even as he was gravely wounded. By contrast, the Pueblo hadn’t even fought back. There were good reasons for that—the crew hadn’t been trained well for combat, were not well armed, had been taken by surprise, and were outnumbered. But all that had been true of the Panay, too. It was hard for Anders not to wonder whether the crew of the Pueblo might have tried a little harder, as his father had. Out his window, Anders looked toward Earth, now 165,000 miles away. From here, it was hard to pick out North Korea, or South Korea, or any countries at all. —The astronauts continued to sleep in fits and starts as the flight neared its two-day mark. In Houston, the wives maintained their squawk box vigils, listening for telltale signals in their husbands’ voices—the subtle cues they first learned to hear when the men were teenagers—that would reveal how they really felt. So far, everyone seemed to sound good, though Susan, Valerie, and Marilyn each wondered if her husband was getting enough to eat. At nearly forty-seven hours into the flight, Lovell provided a status report to Mission Control. Each of the men today had ingested between 40 and 60 ounces, or “clicks,” of water (so called for the squirt gun contraption that dispensed it), along with some rehydrated and solid foods. By now, the crew had discarded NASA’s feeding plan as completely as it had the sleeping plan. They were supposed to eat four meals a day, but it was clear that Lovell’s appetite was biggest and that each man preferred some foods to others. The crew took to swapping—Anders would trade almost anything for apricot cubes, Lovell for bacon squares. No one could give away his beef and egg bites, which left a pasty coating on the tongue. Much of the food had to be reconstituted, either by injecting water into pouches or by mushing it with saliva in one’s mouth. At Mission Control, the doctors were not yet convinced that Borman, or even his crewmates, were operating at full strength.

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

  Lovell recalled his childhood, when he’d dreamed of an opportunity like this. “It seems like I’ve been here forever,” he said. “You know,” Anders remarked, “it really isn’t all that…anywhere near as interesting as I thought it was going to be. It’s all beat up.” “The things that I saw that were interesting were the new craters,” Lovell said. He liked the idea that the Moon remained alive in the heavens, that it was still changing, still becoming. A few minutes later, the spacecraft slid again behind the lunar far side. Apollo 8 had now been at the Moon for about ten hours and was halfway through its ten orbits. Just ten more hours remained until Trans Earth Injection, or TEI, the maneuver designed to get Apollo 8 out of lunar orbit and on its way back home. Nothing worried Kraft, and many others at NASA, more than TEI. So much could go wrong, and with such dire consequences. The men back in Houston tried to remain optimistic. Around the time Apollo 8 disappeared behind the Moon (about three o’clock in Houston), a message lit up on one of Mission Control’s large data panels. In red, white, and blue letters, it read MERRY CHRISTMAS APOLLO 8 . —By the time Apollo 8 launched, NASA was considering just two possible sites for a future landing mission. Both were located in the Sea of Tranquillity, to the right side of the full Moon as seen from America and other places in Earth’s northern hemisphere. NASA wanted to land during the lunar morning, when temperatures were moderate and low Sun angle would create long shadows that would help a commander discern a smooth spot on which to set down. But those conditions shifted every day on the Moon. By choosing two sites, twelve degrees apart, NASA ensured that if it had to delay launch by a day, the lunar module would still have an optimal landing site when it arrived. Both sites also satisfied other important NASA criteria for the first lunar landing. They were accessible to a spacecraft flying a free-return trajectory—a NASA safety requirement—and they existed in areas with ample level terrain, which meant a lunar module wouldn’t have to expend an undue amount of propellant hovering and maneuvering to avoid boulders and slopes before setting down. Among Apollo 8’s tasks were to confirm that its own trajectory could be used by future spacecraft to reach these landing sites, and to get a close-up view of the areas under the same lighting conditions as the future landing mission would encounter. As Apollo 8 coasted over the first of these sites during its sixth pass over the near side, Lovell described it for Houston. Even the shadows, a critical element to judging shape, depth, and distances, looked excellent to him. “I have a beautiful view of it.

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

  added a pairing of words, ‘perils and dangers’, in place of the Latin insidias for ‘snares’ – and crucially, at the end, he has enriched the Trinitarian idea with the word ‘love’: Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.41 Anglican Evensong has proved such a dignified and compelling approach to the divine that it has brought spiritual consolation way beyond the borders of the Anglican Communion, to Protestant and Roman Catholic alike. There is some paradox in its use today, because Cranmer did little to hide his contempt for both cathedrals and elaborate church music, yet nowadays Evensong is most characteristically encountered sung by the choirs of Anglican cathedrals, and draws on a rich five-centuries-old inheritance of specially composed anthems and settings. It is possible that Cranmer’s quiet sense of humour might make him appreciate this strange outcrop of his attempt to provide England with a decently Reformed vehicle for the worship of God. Yet this English experimentation abruptly ended when Edward, after a healthy and assertive childhood in which he bade fair to be as over-life-size as his formidable father, died young in 1553.42 With dramatic speed, England rejected Edward’s chosen Protestant successor, his cousin Jane Grey. Against the expectations of English politicians and foreign ambassadors alike, widespread popular fury challenged the deal done in Westminster, more decisively than at any other moment in the Tudor age. Armed demonstrations across south-eastern England forced the kingdom’s leaders to accept the claim to the throne made by the dead king’s Catholic half-sister, the Lady Mary.43 Although Mary’s status as King Henry’s daughter probably mattered to the kingdom more than her religion, once she had thrust aside Queen Jane, she embarked on as great an experiment as that of Edward, but in mirror-image. She returned an entire kingdom to Roman obedience and the possibility of innovations in Catholic reform. In the process she burned at the stake some of the leading English Protestant reformers, Thomas Cranmer included. She also overcame the objections of English politicians to her marriage plans to King Philip II of Spain, which promised to bind the future of her kingdom to the most powerful Catholic monarchy in Europe (see pp. 671–5). The hopes for asserting God’s word seemed doomed through most of Europe. The Last Days had not arrived; many had rejected the message. What could be done? The man who led Protestantism out of stagnation in the 1550s was an exiled French humanist legal scholar who had wandered Italy and Switzerland and

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

  came from Spain. Spirituali and Jesuits now faced a crisis. Contarini’s peace- making efforts gained warm backing from the Holy Roman Emperor, but the Cardinal failed to clinch an ambitious scheme of reconciliation proposed in discussions with Protestant leaders (a ‘colloquy’) around the Imperial Diet at Regensburg (Ratisbon) in 1541. Within a year Contarini died a bitterly disappointed man under house arrest. After that, some of the more exposed leaders of the Spirituali fled north to shelter with Protestants. Valdés avoided the emergency, having died in 1541, but Ochino and Vermigli led the stampede, their departure causing a huge sensation – Ochino was by then General of the Capuchin Order. Prominent among other defectors were wealthy merchants, more able to relocate their assets than either humble adherents or members of the nobility; soon they and the intellectuals they financed were bringing a remarkable variety of religious views and free-thinking to the Reformed lands of eastern and northern Europe, with momentous long-term consequences (see pp. 640–42 and 778–9).Gian Pietro Carafa’s hour had come. The conciliators had not merely failed to land a result from the Regensburg Colloquy (an enterprise which he had consistently denounced), but many of their brightest stars were revealed as traitors to the Church, and tainted all their associates who stayed. Now Carafa could persuade the Pope to set up a Roman Inquisition, modelled on the Spanish Inquisition founded seventy years before, with Carafa himself as one of the Inquisitors-General. One of its functions (a function which remains to the present day in the Roman Inquisition’s rather more bland guise as the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) was to determine what the norm for theology was within the Catholic Church. It usurped this role from the Sorbonne in Paris, a venerable academic institution, but inconveniently beyond the pope’s control. There was much less incentive now for remaining Spirituali to feel any commitment to the traditional Church. Cardinal Pole, who always tried to avoid closing options or drawing clear boundaries, did what he could to protect his dependants, who included some of Valdés’s former admirers, and to keep them faithful to the Church. His friend Cardinal Giovanni Morone held the Inquisition at bay in his religiously turbulent diocese of Modena by an extensive campaign of swearing leading citizens to a Formulary of Faith which Contarini had designed to persuade truculent evangelicals back into the fold. Some persisted within the Church. The most influential work of Italian spirituality in these years, the Beneficio di Cristo, was published in 1543 under Pole’s patronage and apparently sold in tens of thousands before being translated into other European languages. Originally written by a Benedictine monk, Benedetto da Mantova, drawing on Benedictine devotional themes, it was

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

  the ‘Iron Curtain’ enclosing the Soviet Union’s satellites, outside the continuing authoritarian and Catholic dictatorships of Spain and Portugal. But Pius’s own conservative instincts mirrored Europe’s widespread longing to find comfort in the past. In 1950 he used papal infallibility to define the doctrine of the bodily Assumption of the Virgin Mary into Heaven, a move which infuriated Protestant, Orthodox and Eastern Churches alike, and which did not please those Catholic theologians who cared about the doctrine’s lack of justification in the Bible or in early Church tradition. Something like the Modernist campaign of Pius X gathered momentum against those whom Pius XII regarded as dissenters against Catholic truth. In his last years, the ailing Pope presented an increasingly pitiable figure, as he tried ever more frantically to be a universal teacher: Vicar of the Encylopaedia Britannica rather than Vicar of Christ. Symptomatic of his conscientious but inept effort to remain in dialogue with the contemporary world was his proclamation just before his death in 1958 that St Francis’s associate St Clare of Assisi was now to be the patron saint of television. This was because, on her deathbed, she had been able to attend Christmas Mass in the neighbouring basilica in the form of a vision, a miraculous medieval outside broadcast.76 Catholic activity in the 1950s ran in parallel to but had very little contact with the proliferation and diversification of global Protestantism. Over the previous half-century, Protestantism had developed in two different new directions which themselves had increasingly little to do with each other: on the one hand, there was a self-consciously liberal exploration of faith and social activism, and on the other, a host of newly founded Churches, many of which identified themselves as Pentecostal, and whose congregations expressed themselves in full-blooded extrovert Evangelical style. Both these Protestant impulses in fact had a common root in anglophone Evangelicalism. Eventually it may be inappropriate to see them as polarities, but that is how it seemed in the twentieth century. Between them, there remained a great spectrum of Evangelical Protestant belief, much of which, in reaction to the liberals, increasingly took to itself the label ‘conservative’. Liberal Protestantism after 1900 chose a very different path from either the Holiness/Keswick styles of the conservatives, or the proliferation of identities in the new Churches. Increasingly it seemed to dominate most of the older Protestant Churches – Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican and Methodist – while the Baptists tended to be more resistant. This new liberalism was a wider phenomenon than the liberal Protestantism whose stronghold had been in nineteenth-century Germany. It could include within its ranks such formidable critics of Schleiermacher and the older German theology as Karl Barth, whose approach to the Bible owed much to the continuing progress of critical biblical

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

  Half a million American troops were in country; since 1965, when official combat units arrived, nearly twenty thousand American lives had been lost in the fighting against North Vietnamese Communist and guerrilla forces. Still, President Johnson and William Westmoreland, the general in charge of U.S. forces in Vietnam, promised the public that the war was going well and that victory was on the horizon. On January 21, fifteen days after the operation, the heart transplant recipient in California died despite having made it through “a fantastic galaxy of complications,” according to his surgeon. Just after midnight on the final day of January, tens of thousands of North Vietnamese troops and Vietcong guerrillas launched a coordinated attack on nearly every major city and town in South Vietnam. The action came as a surprise to American troops, who were honoring a two-day cease-fire with the enemy during Tet, the country’s sacred holiday. By sunrise, over 120 population centers and military bases had been assailed by more than 80,000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong fighters, an attack now being called the Tet Offensive. For the first time, Americans were able to watch news coverage of combat without government control of images or information, thanks to reporters and cameramen embedded with the troops. The United States was supposed to be on its way to victory—the president and his generals had sworn to it—and yet here was an enemy that had stormed the American embassy and damaged nearly every stronghold in the south. Night after night, the evening news showed graphic footage from the battle; often, 90 percent of the telecast was devoted to the war. One image sank especially deeply into the American psyche. In a still photograph and on film, it showed a North Vietnamese prisoner, hands tied behind his back, being executed by a single pistol shot to the head, delivered from a distance of a few inches by a South Vietnamese national police chief. There had been no charges, no trial, no last words—just the raising of the gun and a single shot to the temple. The photo ran on the front page of nearly every newspaper in America on the first day of February; no one who saw it, or watched the film of the shooting on the evening news, knew that the prisoner himself had executed, in cold blood, an entire family. All that America knew was that this terrible war was more ugly and brutal than they’d imagined, and that the clean and quick ending they had been promised seemed very far away. In Orangeburg, South Carolina, a bowling alley remained one of the few local businesses to refuse service to black patrons, despite civil rights laws prohibiting such discrimination. In early February, black students at South Carolina State University began to protest, first by sitting at the lunch counter at the bowling alley, then by gathering in larger numbers and demonstrating outside.

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

  support for the family had not envisaged that it might be a competitor for rather than a mainstay of Church life. An unexpected result was beginning to be felt in the United Kingdom even amid the post-war boom in churchgoing. A perceptive curate in the English Midlands, for instance, noted in 1947 that parents on his newly built housing estate in Dudley were not sending their children along to Sunday School, reluctant ‘to interfere with the freedom of young people’s choice’. Elsewhere in the same district, a Free Church magazine complained seventeen years later, ‘Many of the newly married couples on the estates [are] concerned first and foremost with their pay-packets, their housing comforts, their interior decorations … their standing in the eyes of their workmates and neighbours.’ There were cars for Sunday family jaunts instead of morning church; there was television around which the whole family could sit after tea instead of evening church.39 These findings could endlessly be reproduced through European society from the early 1960s. In particular, that mainstay of Protestant Church practice from the eighteenth century, the children’s Sunday School, melted away. In 1900, 55 per cent of British children attended Sunday School; the figure was still 24 per cent in 1960, but 9 per cent in 1980 and 4 per cent in 2000.40 Around the family, other shifts occurred. ‘Companionate’ marriage created high expectations which were all too frequently disappointed. In the 1970s, divorce rates began rising across Europe, and against furious protests from the Roman Catholic Church, the possibility of divorce was introduced into the law codes of Catholic countries where it had previously been outlawed – in Italy, for instance, in 1970. That was a remarkable shift from the moment in 1947 when the constitution of the new Italian Republic had only missed affirming the indissolubility of marriage by three votes in the Constituent Assembly.41 Rates of extramarital births soared: in the nations already cited over four decades from 1960, twentyfold in Ireland, sixteenfold in the Netherlands and thirteenfold in Norway.42 Taboos around abortion broke down, in the face of the reality of death and physical damage in clandestine illegal abortions. In country after country there was legislation to legalize abortion, most famously in the United States through a judgement of the Supreme Court in 1973, Roe v. Wade. Homosexuality became less a subject of public paranoia. The first stage was its decriminalization in law, a measure not designed to make homosexuality acceptable or moral in the eyes of Christians, simply to remove a major catalyst for blackmail or suicide. It is often forgotten that in Britain, in contrast to the European-wide Catholic opposition to changes in divorce legislation, change came about in the highly contentious field of homosexuality largely through the Church. Elite liberal

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

  At the end, doctors failed him—or rather, his body—for having a bit too much bilirubin, a pigment produced by the liver and found in bile. They didn’t think the level dangerous, but that didn’t matter; what they seemed to demand was physical perfection. “You’re finished,” they told Lovell, and no matter how forcefully he explained their mistake, the doctors wouldn’t reconsider. “I could spell ‘rocket’ before these guys ever heard the term,” Lovell muttered as he walked away. Back at Pax River, Marilyn couldn’t remember having seen her husband so discouraged. A short time later, Lovell received orders to report to the next phase of astronaut testing. He knew he’d been rejected, and that the orders had been issued by mistake, but he seized his chance to get back in the game, even if by clerical error. He flew to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and took the last bed in quarters. The next morning, just as the miracle seemed complete, an Air Force test pilot named Gus Grissom showed up and apologized for being late. Lovell was again heading back home with nothing to show for his dreams but a little extra pigment in his liver. For the next three years, Lovell continued testing aircraft and teaching students at Pax River. It was there that the nickname Shaky was bestowed upon him, not just because no decent pilot would want such a moniker, but because the easygoing Lovell was among the least shaky men around. By 1962, Project Mercury was nearing its end and NASA needed new astronauts. That summer, the Navy asked if Lovell would like to apply. No one seemed to remember that he’d been medically disqualified, and Lovell could find no good reason to remind them. Again, Lovell went through the testing. As a teenager, he’d seen the engine of a Nazi V-2 rocket designed by Wernher von Braun. As a young pilot, he’d watched von Braun tell the nation how America would go to the Moon. After what seemed like forever, Deke Slayton called and asked if Lovell would like to ride the great engineer’s newest rockets for himself, and Lovell’s answer could be heard all the way to Milwaukee. He was officially one of NASA’s New Nine. —Lovell was introduced to NASA’s eight other new astronauts at the Rice Hotel in Houston. After dinner, he gave his first comment as a spaceman, telling his hometown newspaper, the Milwaukee Sentinel, that America would be first to the Moon, “and I want to be on the first team.” In Houston, Lovell took up residence in old World War II barracks at Ellington Air Force Base, where residents lived four to a unit and had bedsheets for walls. His family soon followed and before long, Marilyn found a house to rent in a nearby suburb.