Disgust

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 13 of 90 · 20 per page

• From Trash (1988)

  I didn’t tell her that it seemed to me that all those “boys” and “girls” were getting a hell of a lot of “help.” I just muttered an almost inaudible “yeah” and cut my sinful eyes at them all. “We could go sit under the stage,” Shannon suggested. “It’s real nice under there.” It was nice, close and dark and full of the sound of people stomping on the stage. I put my head back and let the dust drift down on my face enjoying the feeling of being safe and hidden, away from all the people. The music seemed to be vibrating in my bones. TAKING YOUR MEASURE, TAKING YOUR MEASURE, JESUS AND THE HOLY GHOST ARE TAKING YOUR MEASURE . . . I didn’t like the new music they were singing. It was a little too gimmicky. TWO CUPS, THREE CUPS, A TEASPOON OF RIGHTEOUS. HOW WILL YOU MEASURE WHEN THEY CALL OUT YOUR NAME? Shannon started laughing. She put her hands around me and rocked her head back and forth. The music was too loud and I could smell whiskey all around us. My head hurt terribly; the smell of Shannon’s hair was making me sick. “Uh huh uh.” I started to gag. Desperately I pushed Shannon away and crawled for the side of the stage as fast as I could. Air, I had to have air. “Uh huh uh.” I rolled out from under the stage and hit the side of the tent. Retching now, I jerked up the side of the tarp and wiggled through. Out in the damp evening air, I just let my head hang down and vomited between my widespread hands. Behind me Shannon was gasping and giggling. “You’re sick, you poor baby.” I felt her hand on the small of my back pushing down comfortingly. “Lord God!” I looked up. A very tall man in a purple shirt was standing in front of me. I dropped my head and puked again. He had silver boots with cracked heels. I watched him step back out of range. “Lord God!” “It’s all right.” Shannon got to her feet beside me, keeping her hand on my back. “She’s just a little sick.” She paused. “If you got her a Co-Cola, it might settle her stomach.” I wiped my mouth, and then wiped my hand on the grass. I looked up. Shannon was standing still, sweat running down into her eyes and making her blink. I could see she was hoping for two Cokes. The man was still standing there with his mouth hanging open, a look of horror and shock on his face. “Lord God,” he said again, and I knew before he spoke what he was gonna say. It wasn’t me who’d surprised him. “Child, you are the ugliest thing I have ever seen.”

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

  Paul teaches us to walk in the middle path, condemning either extreme, and saying, "Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not; and let not him that eateth not judge him that eateth" (Rom. 14:3). We must resist the hardened and obstinate ceremonialists, as Paul resisted the Judaizers who would compel Titus to be circumcised; and we must spare the weak who are not yet able to apprehend the liberty of faith. We must fight against the wolves, but on behalf of the sheep, not against the sheep. This Irenicon must meet with the approval of every true Christian, whether Catholic or Protestant. It breathes the spirit of a genuine disciple of St. Paul. It is full of heroic faith and childlike simplicity. It takes rank with the best books of Luther, and rises far above the angry controversies of his age, during which he composed it, in the full possession of the positive truth and peace of the religion of Christ.253 Luther sent the book to Pope Leo X., who was too worldly-minded a man to appreciate it; and accompanied the same with a most singular and undiplomatic, yet powerful polemic letter, which, if the Pope ever read it, must have filled him with mingled feelings of indignation and disgust. In his first letter to the Pope (1518), Luther had thrown himself at his feet as an obedient son of the vicar of Christ; in his second letter (1519), he still had addressed him as a humble subject, yet refusing to recant his conscientious convictions: in his third and last letter he addressed him as an equal, speaking to him with great respect for his personal character (even beyond his deserts), but denouncing in the severest terms the Roman See, and comparing him to a lamb among wolves, and to Daniel in the den of lions. The Popes, he says, are vicars of Christ because Christ is absent from Rome.254 Miltitz and the Augustinian brethren, who urged him to write an apologetic letter to Leo, must have been sorely disappointed; for it destroyed all prospects of reconciliation, if they had not been destroyed already. After some complimentary words about Leo, and protesting that he had never spoken disrespectfully of his person, Luther goes on to say, — "The Church of Rome, formerly the most holy of all churches, has become the most lawless den of thieves, the most shameless of all brothels, the very kingdom of sin, death, and hell; so that not even Antichrist, if he were to come, could devise any addition to its wickedness. "Meanwhile you, Leo, are sitting like a lamb in the midst of wolves, like Daniel in the midst of lions, and, with Ezekiel, you dwell among scorpions. What opposition can you alone make to these monstrous evils? Take to yourself three or four of the most learned and best of the cardinals. What are these among so many?

• From Trash (1988)

  “You getting lazy, girl?” Lee teased me. “Better rev it up, we got cooking to do.” I wiped my mouth and imagined burying her under a truckload of carrots. I felt like I had been drinking whiskey, but my stomach was empty and flat. The blacktop on the way out to the Girl Scout camp seemed to ripple and sway in the sunlight. Lee kept talking about the camp kitchen, the big black gas stove and the walk-in freezer. “This is going to be fun.” I didn’t think so. The onions still had to be sliced. I got hysterical when someone picked up my knife. Lee was giggling with a woman I’d never seen before, the two of them talking about macrobiotic cooking while rinsing brown noodles. I got the meat cleaver and started chopping onions in big raw chunks. “Bite-sized,” Lee called to me, in a cheerful voice. “You want ’em bite-sized, you cut them,” I told her, and went on chopping furiously. It was late when we finally cleaned up. I hadn’t been able to eat anything. The smell of the sauce had made me dizzy, and the scum that rinsed off the noodles looked iridescent and dangerous. My stomach curled up into a knot inside me, and I glowered at the women who came in and wanted hot water for tea. There were women sitting on the steps out on the deck, women around a campfire over near the water pump, naked women swimming out to the raft in the lake, and skinny, muscled women dancing continuously in the rec room. Lee had gone off with her new friend, the macrobiotic cook. I found a loaf of Wonder Bread someone had left on the snack table, pulled out a slice, and ate it in tiny bites. “Want some?” It was one of the women from Atlanta. She held out a brown bag from which a bottle top protruded. “It would make me sick.” “Naw,” she grinned. “It’s just a Yoo-Hoo. I got a stash of them in a cooler. Got a bad stomach myself. Only thing it likes is chocolate soda and barbecue.” “Barbecue,” I sighed. My mouth flooded with saliva. “I haven’t made barbecue in years.” “You make beef ribs?” She sipped at her Yoo-Hoo and sat down beside me. “I have, but if you got the time to do slow pit cooking, pork’s better.” My stomach suddenly growled loudly, a grating, angry noise in the night. “Girl,” she laughed. “You still hungry?” “Well, to tell you the truth, I couldn’t eat any of that stuff.” I was embarrassed. My new friend giggled. “Neither did I. I had peanuts and Yoo-Hoo for dinner myself.” I laughed with her. “My name’s Marty. You come up to Atlanta sometime, and we’ll drive over to Marietta and get some of the best barbecue they make in the world.” “The best barbecue in the world?” “Bar none.” She handed me the bottle of Yoo-Hoo.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Now, leaving aside her many other tiresome and disagreeable mannerisms, and coming to the point, she happened one day to return from a walk, and, finding Fresco at home, she flounced into a chair at his side, simpering like a spoilt child, and fretting and fuming. Fresco cast her a quizzical look, and said: ‘Cesca, why do you come home so early, when today is a feast day?’ ‘The truth is,’ Cesca replied, affecting a thoroughly world-weary air, ‘that I have come home early because I doubt whether I have ever seen such a tiresome and disagreeable set of people as the ones who are walking our streets today. Every man and woman that I meet is utterly repellent to me, and I don’t believe there is a woman anywhere in the world who is so upset by the sight of horrid people as I am. So I came home early to spare myself the torment of looking at them.’ Whereupon Fresco, who found the fastidious airs of his niece highly distasteful, said to her: ‘If you can’t bear the sight of horrid people, my girl, I advise you, for your own peace of mind, never to look at yourself in the glass.’2 But the girl, whose head was emptier than a hollow reed even though she imagined herself to be as wise as Solomon, might have been a carcase of mutton for all she understood of Fresco’s real meaning, and she told him that she intended to look in the glass just like any other woman. So she remained as witless as before, and she is still the same to this day. NINTH STORYWith a barbed saying, Guido Cavalcanti politely delivers an insult to certain Florentine gentlemen who had taken him by surprise. The queen, perceiving that Emilia had dashed off her story and that she herself was the sole remaining speaker apart from the person who was privileged to speak last of all, began to address the company as follows: Sweet ladies, although you have deprived me of at least two of the stories that I had thought of telling you today, I still have another in reserve, towards the end of which there occurs a bon mot that is more subtle, perhaps, than any of the ones we have heard so far.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  According to Law’s son Richard, his father put his arms around the neck of the prophet and “was pleading with him to withdraw the doctrine of plural marriage . . . with tears streaming from his eyes. The prophet was also in tears, but he informed [Law] that he could not withdraw the doctrine, for God had commanded him to teach it, and condemnation would come upon him if he was not obedient to the commandment.” Law’s abhorrence of polygamy, to say nothing of the emotional support he provided Emma, severely strained his relationship with Joseph. Their friendship was finally severed altogether when Joseph “endeavored to seduce” Law’s wife, Jane, by making “the most indecent and wicked proposals” to her. Incensed and disgusted, in April 1844 William Law demanded that the prophet publicly acknowledge his wicked behavior and “cease from his abominations.” Joseph responded by having Law excommunicated; Law’s reaction to this insult was to declare that Joseph was a “fallen prophet” and then, on May 12, to establish an institution he called the Reformed Mormon Church, which did not sanction polygamy. According to Fawn Brodie, Law had courage, tenacity, and a strange, misguided idealism. Although he was surrounded chiefly by men who believed Joseph to be a base imposter, he clung to the hope that that he could effect a reformation in the church. To this end he set up a church of his own, with himself as president, following faithfully the organization of the main body. This in itself would not have been serious, for Joseph had seen rival prophets spring out of the grass at his feet before and they had come to naught. Usually they tried to imitate him, giving out revelations that sounded stale and flat beside his own. But Law was cut to a different pattern. Actually he was on the road to complete and ugly disillusionment, but he was walking backward away from the church, looking eagerly for something in the landscape to which he could cling, grasping at every tree and hedgerow. His desperate desire to reform the church made him far more formidable than if he had set out to damn the prophet and all his works. Law was also made formidable by dint of being rich, which allowed him to buy his own printing press. On June 7, 1844, the first and only edition of a newspaper called the Nauvoo Expositor emerged from the new press. Law printed one thousand copies. The lead editorial exclaimed, “We are earnestly seeking to explode the vicious principle of Joseph Smith, and those who practice the same abominations and whoredoms.” The four-page broadsheet railed against Joseph’s disdain for the separation of church and state, his usurpation of political power, and his shady financial dealings, but the paper’s primary objective was to expose the secret doctrine of polygamy.

• From Trash (1988)

  She laughed softly at the stories they told her, telling about her childhood now and then, but mostly getting them to talk. When I joined them to sit on the floor and drink a beer, Anna started teasing me about whether I’ve been over playing pool. “Just to watch,” I told her, and we both laughed. “I hate that pool hall.” Mona was embroidering a red-and-gold labrys on the back of her jacket. She bit off red yarn and spit it into her palm. “All those drunken punks out on the sidewalk all the time, pushing those big motorbikes around, and the women in there hanging on them. Makes me sick.” “They don’t all hang on the men, you know.” Lenore didn’t even look in my direction. “Twenty tables in there and never less than five of them have women playing each other—some pretty tough-looking women. The men stay out of their way, and that’s nice to see. ” “If you ask me there’s no difference between those women and the men in there anyway.” Judy took the bowl of sunflower seeds out of her lap and pushed it at Mona. Her face was twisted in disgust. “There’s always a couple of them punching each other in the arm, arms all ugly with ink tattoos, and their girlfriends in tight skirts sitting up on stools behind them, not daring to say a word. That’s what people think we are when we say we’re dykes, and that’s not what we are at all.” “I like tattoos,” I said, “and I like women who can really play pool, play it well enough to make all those men bite their tongues. They play for money, you know. Some of them pay their way out of what they earn off those boys, and I like that, too.” “Well, I don’t like it.” Judy looked like she was going to spit. “Competition games, swinging those sticks like they were holding swords, carrying knives—they do, you know—it’s a cesspit of violence in there, and they all get off on it. People are always getting beaten up in that parking lot and women get hassled on the sidewalk all the time. I think it should be closed down.” “I think it must be different for you, all of you,” Anna said after a while, carefully not looking in my direction. “When I was your age, places like that were the only way you could find other lesbians. I used to go in there and nod at women I would see nowhere else.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The Jew mounted a horse, and rode off with all possible speed to the court of Rome, where on his arrival he was warmly welcomed by his Jewish friends. And there he settled down, without telling anybody why he had come, and cautiously began to observe the behaviour of the Pope, the cardinals, the other Church dignitaries, and all the courtiers. Being a very perceptive person, he discovered, by adding the evidence of his own eyes to information given him by others, that practically all of them from the highest to the lowest were flagrantly given to the sin of lust, not only of the natural variety, but also of the sodomitic, without the slightest display of shame or remorse, to the extent that the power of prostitutes and young men to obtain the most enormous favours was virtually unlimited. In addition to this, he clearly saw that they were all gluttons, winebibbers, and drunkards without exception, and that next to their lust they would rather attend to their bellies than to anything else, as though they were a pack of animals. Moreover, on closer inspection he saw that they were such a collection of rapacious money-grubbers that they were as ready to buy and sell human, that is to say, Christian blood as they were to trade for profit in any kind of divine object, whether in the way of sacraments or of church livings. In this activity, they had a bigger turnover and more brokers than you could find on any of the Paris markets including that of the textile trade. They had applied the name of ‘procuration’ to their unconcealed simony, and that of ‘sustentation’ to their gluttony, as if (to say nothing of the meaning of the words) God were ignorant of the intentions of their wicked minds and would allow Himself to be deceived, as men are, by the there names of things. All this, together with many other things of which it is more prudent to remain silent, was highly distasteful to the Jew, who was a sober and respectable man. And so, feeling he had seen enough, he decided to return to Paris, which he did. On hearing of his arrival, Jehannot, thinking nothing to be less likely than that his friend should have turned Christian, came to his house, where they made a great fuss of each other. And after Abraham had rested for a few days, Jehannot asked him what sort of an opinion he had formed about the Holy Father and the cardinals and the other members of the papal court. Whereupon the Jew promptly replied:

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

  The Reformers first cleansed the sanctuary of gross abuses and superstitions, and cast out the money-changers with a scourge of cords. They abhorred idolatry, which in a refined form had found its way into the church. They abolished the sale of indulgences, the worship of saints, images, and relics, processions and pilgrimages, the private masses, and masses for the dead in purgatory.627 They rejected five of the seven sacraments (retaining only baptism and the eucharist), the doctrine of transubstantiation, the priestly sacrifice, the adoration of the host, the withdrawal of the cup from the laity, and the use of a dead language in public worship. They also reduced the excessive ceremonialism and ritualistic display which obscured the spiritual service. But the impoverishment was compensated by a gain; the work of destruction was followed by a more important and difficult work of reconstruction. This was the revival of primitive worship as far as it can be ascertained from the New Testament, the more abundant reading of the Scriptures and preaching of the cardinal truths of the gospel, the restoration of the Lord’s Supper in its original simplicity, the communion in both kinds, and the translation of the Latin service into the vernacular language whereby it was made intelligible and profitable to the people. There was, however, much crude experimenting and changing until a new order of worship could be fairly established. Uniformity in worship is neither necessary nor desirable, according to Protestant principles. The New Testament does not prescribe any particular form, except the Lord’s Prayer, the words of institution of the Lord’s Supper, and the baptismal formula. The Protestant orders of worship differ widely in the extent of departure from the Roman service, which is one and the same everywhere. The Lutheran Church is conservative and liturgical. She retained from the traditional usage what was not inconsistent with evangelical doctrine; while the Reformed churches of the Zwinglian and Calvinistic type aimed at the greatest simplicity and spirituality of worship after what they supposed to be the apostolic pattern. Some went so far as to reject all hymns and forms of prayer which are not contained in the Bible, but gave all the more attention to the Psalter, to the sermon, and to extemporaneous prayer. The Anglican Church, however, makes an exception among the Reformed communions: she is even more conservative than the Lutheran, and produced a liturgy which embodies in the choicest English the most valuable prayers and forms of the Latin service, and has maintained its hold upon the reverence and affection of the Episcopal churches to this day. They subordinate preaching to worship, and free prayer to forms of prayer.

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

  Contemporary accounts of the sacking of Rome are collected by Carlo Milanesi: Il Sacco di Roma del MDXXVII., Florence, 1867. Alfred von Reumont: Geschichte der Stadt Rom (Berlin, 1870), vol. III. 194 sqq.; Comp. the liter. he gives on p. 846 sq. Ranke: bk. V. (vol. III. I sqq.). Janssen: vol. III. 124 sqq. Charles V. neither signed nor opposed the edict of Speier. He had shortly before fallen out with Clement VII., because this Pope released King Francis I. from the hard conditions of peace imposed upon him after his defeat at Pavia, June 26, 1526, and placed himself at the head of a Franco-Italian league against the preponderance of Austria the Holy League" of Cognac, May 22, 1526). The league of the Emperor and the Pope had brought about the Edict of Worms; the breach between the two virtually annulled it at the Diet of Speier. Had the Emperor now embraced the Protestant doctrines, he might have become the head of a German imperial state church. But all his instincts were against Protestantism. His quarrel with the Pope was the occasion of a fearful calamity to the Eternal City. The Spanish and German troops of the Emperor, under the lead of Constable Charles de Bourbon, and the old warrior Frundsberg (both enemies of the Pope), marched to Rome with an army of twenty thousand men, and captured the city, May 6, 1527. Bourbon, the ablest general of Charles, but a traitor to his native France, was struck by a musket-ball in climbing a ladder, and fell dead in the moment of victory. The pope fled to the castle St. Angelo. The soldiers, especially the Spaniards, deprived of their captain, surpassed the barbarians of old in beastly and refined cruelty, rage and lust. For eight days they plundered the papal treasury, the churches, libraries, and palaces, to the extent of ten millions of gold; they did not spare even the tomb of St. Peter and the corpse of Julius II., and committed nameless outrages upon defenseless priests, monks, and nuns. German soldiers marched through the streets in episcopal and cardinal’s robes, dressed a donkey like a priest, and by a grim joke proclaimed Luther as pope of Rome. Never before had Rome suffered such indignities and loss. The sacking was a crime against civilization, humanity, and religion; but, at the same time, a fearful judgment of God upon the worldliness of the papacy, and a loud call to repentance.946

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

  THE GERMAN REFORMATION FROM THE PUBLICATION OF LUTHER’S THESES TO THE DIET OF WORMS, A.D. 1517–1521. § 30. The Sale of Indulgences. St. Peter’s Dome is at once the glory and the shame of papal Rome. It was built over the bones of the Galilaean fisherman, with the proceeds from the sale of indulgences which broke up the unity of Western Christendom. The magnificent structure was begun in 1506 under Pope Julius II., and completed in 1626 at a cost of forty-six millions scudi, and is kept up at an annual expense of thirty thousand scudi (dollars).174 Jesus began his public ministry with the expulsion of the profane traffickers from the court of the temple. The Reformation began with a protest against the traffic in indulgences which profaned and degraded the Christian religion. The difficult and complicated doctrine of indulgences is peculiar to the Roman Church. It was unknown to the Greek and Latin fathers. It was developed by the mediaeval schoolmen, and sanctioned by the Council of Trent (Dec. 4, 1563), yet without a definition and with an express warning against abuses and evil gains.175 In the legal language of Rome, indulgentia is a term for amnesty or remission of punishment. In ecclesiastical Latin, an indulgence means the remission of the temporal (not the eternal) punishment of sin (not of sin itself), on condition of penitence and the payment of money to the church or to some charitable object. It maybe granted by a bishop or archbishop within his diocese, while the Pope has the power to grant it to all Catholics. The practice of indulgences grew out of a custom of the Northern and Western barbarians to substitute pecuniary compensation for punishment of an offense. The church favored this custom in order to avoid bloodshed, but did wrong in applying it to religious offenses. Who touches money touches dirt; and the less religion has to do with it, the better. The first instances of such pecuniary compensations occurred in England under Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury (d. 690). The practice rapidly spread on the Continent, and was used by the Popes during and after the crusades as a means of increasing their power. It was justified and reduced to a theory by the schoolmen, especially by Thomas Aquinas, in close connection with the doctrine of the sacrament of penance and priestly absolution.176 The sacrament of penance includes three elements,—contrition of the heart, confession by the mouth (to the priest), and satisfaction by good works, such as prayer, fasting, almsgiving, pilgrimages, all of which are supposed to have an atoning efficacy. God forgives only the eternal punishment of sin, and he alone can do that; but the sinner has to bear the temporal punishments, either in this life or in purgatory; and these punishments are under the control of the church or the priesthood, especially the Pope as its legitimate head.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  People had begun to turn round and stare; Wanda was caus- ıng quite a diversion. Dickie grinned and skilfully egged her on, not perceiving the tragedy that was Wanda. For in spite of her tender and generous heart, Dickie was still but a crude young creature, one who had not yet learnt how to shiver and shake, and had thus remained but a crude young creature. Stephen glanced anxiously at Mary, half deciding to break up this turbu- lent party; but Mary was sitting with her chin on her hand, quite unruffled, it seemed, by Wanda’s outburst. When her eyes met Stephen’s she actually smiled, then took the cigarette that Jeanne Maurel was offering; and something in this placid, self-assured indifference went so ill with her youth that it startled Stephen. She in her turn must quickly light a cigarette, while Pat still endeavoured to silence Wanda. Valérie said-with her enigmatic smile: ‘ Shall we now go on to our next entertainment? ’ They paid the bill and pursuaded Wanda to postpone her abuse of the ingratiating Pujol. Stephen took one arm, Dickie West the other, and between them they coaxed her into the 444 THE WELL OF LONELINESS motor; after which they all managed to squeeze themselves in = that is, all except Dickie, who sat by the driver in order to guide the innocent Burton. 3 Ar Le Narcisse they surprised what at first appeared to be the most prosaic of family parties. It was late, yet the mean room was empty of clients, for Le Narcisse seldom opened its eyes until midnight had chimed from the church clocks of Paris. Seated at a table with a red and white cloth were the Patron and a lady with a courtesy title. “ Madame,’ she was called. And with them was a girl, and a handsome young man with severely plucked eyebrows. Their relationship to each other was... well... all the same, they suggested a family party. As Stephen pushed open the shabby swing door, they were placidly engaged upon playing belotte. The walls of the room were hung with mirrors thickly painted with cupids, thickly sullied by flies. A faint blend of odours was wafted from the kitchen which stood in proximity to the toilet. The host rose at once and shook hands with his guests. Every bar had its social customs, it seemed. At the Ideal one must share Monsieur Pujol’s lewd jokes; at Le Narcisse one must gravely shake hands with the Patron. The Patron was tall and exceedingly thin — a clean-shaven man with the mouth of an ascetic. His cheeks were delicately tinted with rouge, his eyelids delicately shaded with kohl; but the eyes themselves were an infantile blue, reproachful and rather surprised in expression.

• From Trash (1988)

  I hated the whitewashed walls and the raw, shrinking creatures under my hands as much as the implacable mechanical motions of the professors in rubber gloves. After I got the job of cleaning up the lab, my dreams were full of monkeys’ teeth and the sibilant scratches of rats’ nails on Formica counters. On those rare nights when Toni and I could sleep over at a friend’s house in the city, I would wake shuddering, feeling her arms around me like the wires that trussed the monkeys. “You are one restless woman,” Toni would tell me in the morning, showing me the scratches I’d made on her arms and back. “Can’t lie still to save your life.” More out of guilt than desire, I’d kiss her shoulders and slide down between her legs to ease with my tongue what I could not cure with words. I felt about oral sex with Toni the way my roommate in the dorm felt about transcendental meditation. At the point at which my neck began to ache and my fingers spasm on her thighs, I would begin to feel righteous. The longer it took to get her off, and the greater the ache in my neck and back, the farther away I would go in my mind until finally it was as if I were not making love to Toni but to myself. I became a point of concentration, icy and hot at the same time. When she began to babble those love words that meant she was just about to come, my own thighs would shake sympathetically. I rarely came making love to Toni, but nothing made me feel so balanced as an hour or two pushing my tongue between her swollen labia. It was expiation and penance. It was redemption. But for Toni, sex was a matter of commitment; making love was a bond itself. She had her own cage, her own need for expiation, and she hated the way I could go away into my own head, the distance between us that she could not cross. She wanted a bridge across my nerves, a connection I could not break at will. Hanging out in the lab with me, she’d tease and flirt, laughing at the other lab assistants and the carefully serious expressions with which they’d clean rat shit off their fingers.

• From Trash (1988)

  It was nice, close and dark and full of the sound of people stomping on the stage. I put my head back and let the dust drift down on my face enjoying the feeling of being safe and hidden, away from all the people. The music seemed to be vibrating in my bones. TAKING YOUR MEASURE, TAKING YOUR MEASURE, JESUS AND THE HOLY GHOST ARE TAKING YOUR MEASURE . . . I didn’t like the new music they were singing. It was a little too gimmicky. TWO CUPS, THREE CUPS, A TEASPOON OF RIGHTEOUS. HOW WILL YOU MEASURE WHEN THEY CALL OUT YOUR NAME? Shannon started laughing. She put her hands around me and rocked her head back and forth. The music was too loud and I could smell whiskey all around us. My head hurt terribly; the smell of Shannon’s hair was making me sick. “Uh huh uh.” I started to gag. Desperately I pushed Shannon away and crawled for the side of the stage as fast as I could. Air, I had to have air. “Uh huh uh.” I rolled out from under the stage and hit the side of the tent. Retching now, I jerked up the side of the tarp and wiggled through. Out in the damp evening air, I just let my head hang down and vomited between my widespread hands. Behind me Shannon was gasping and giggling. “You’re sick, you poor baby.” I felt her hand on the small of my back pushing down comfortingly. “Lord God!” I looked up. A very tall man in a purple shirt was standing in front of me. I dropped my head and puked again. He had silver boots with cracked heels. I watched him step back out of range. “Lord God!” “It’s all right.” Shannon got to her feet beside me, keeping her hand on my back. “She’s just a little sick.” She paused. “If you got her a Co-Cola, it might settle her stomach.” I wiped my mouth, and then wiped my hand on the grass. I looked up. Shannon was standing still, sweat running down into her eyes and making her blink. I could see she was hoping for two Cokes. The man was still standing there with his mouth hanging open, a look of horror and shock on his face. “Lord God,” he said again, and I knew before he spoke what he was gonna say. It wasn’t me who’d surprised him. “Child, you are the ugliest thing I have ever seen.” Shannon froze. Her mouth fell open, and as I watched, her whole face seemed to cave in. Her eyes shrank to little dots and her mouth became a cup of sorrow. I pushed myself up. “You bastard!” I staggered forward and he backed up, rocking on his little silver heels. “You goddamned gutless son of a bitch!” His eyes kept moving from my face to Shannon’s wilting figure. “You think you so pretty? You ugly sack of shit!

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  “They’re coming after us again,” he complains, “and they’re even using the same language.” But there is a documented pattern of sexual abuse in Colorado City that severely undermines Mayor Barlow’s attempt to frame the issue as one of religious persecution. In April 2002, for instance, the mayor’s own son and namesake, Dan Barlow Jr., was charged with molesting five of his daughters over a period of many years. The town closed ranks around him, and his father, the mayor, went before the court and pleaded for leniency. In the end, four of the daughters refused to testify against Barlow. He got off with a suspended sentence after agreeing to sign a statement that said, “I made a mistake. I want to make it right. I am so sorry. I want to be a good person. I have raised a good family, been a good father. I love them all, a fatherly love.” “Nobody who knows anything about this religion is surprised Dan didn’t go to jail,” says Debbie Palmer, a former member of the Canadian branch of the religion, barely able to contain her disgust. “Do you have any idea what kind of pressure those poor Barlow girls must have been under not to testify against their father, the mayor’s son? I’m sure the prophet told them that if they said one word, they were going straight to hell. When I was abused by prominent members of the religion, that’s what I was told, every time.” Folks in Colorado City pay little heed to such blasphemous talk from the likes of Palmer. They’re convinced that Satan, along with nefarious Gentiles and apostates who’ve fallen under his influence, are wholly to blame for the town’s problems. “Satan has been jealous of God since day one,” a young, bright-eyed, very devoted member of the priesthood explains after first looking nervously up and down the dry bed of Short Creek, then looking up and down the wash once more, to make sure nobody is around to see him talking to a Gentile writer. “Satan wants to rule. He doesn’t want God to rule, so he tricks weak people into apostatizing and going over to the other side.” This young man, along with most of the other residents of Colorado City, believes that in very short order the world will be thoroughly cleansed of Satan’s minions—apostates, mainline Mormons, and Gentile writers alike—because the prophet has told him so many times in the past few years. In the late 1990s, as the new millennium approached, Uncle Rulon assured his followers that they would soon be “lifted up” to the Celestial Kingdom, while “pestilence, hail, famine, and earthquake” would sweep the wicked (i.e., everyone else) from the face of the earth. Fearing that single women would be left behind to perish in the apocalypse because they had not yet been given the opportunity to live the Principle, the prophet married off a spate of teenage girls to older, already married men.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Next came Valérie Seymour and Jeanne Maurel to be dropped at the flat on the Quai Voltaire; then Pat who lived a few streets away, and last but not least the drunken Wanda. Stephen had to lift her out of the car and then get her upstairs as best she could, assisted by Burton and followed by Mary. It took quite a long time, and arrived at the door, Stephen must hunt for a missing latchkey. When they finally got home, Stephen sank into a chair. ‘Good Lord, what a night—it was pretty awful.’ She was filled with the deep depression and disgust that are apt to result from such excursions. But Mary pretended to a callousness that in truth she was very far from feeling, for life had not yet dulled her finer instincts; so far it had only aroused her anger. She yawned. ‘Well, at least we could dance together without being thought freaks; there was something in that. Beggars can’t be choosers in this world, Stephen!’ CHAPTER 491O n a fine June day Adèle married her Jean in the church of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires—the shrine of innumerable candles and prayers, of the bountiful Virgin who bestows many graces. From early dawn the quiet old house in the Rue Jacob had been in a flutter—Pauline preparing the déjeuner de noces, Pierre garnishing and sweeping their sitting-room, and both of them pausing from time to time to embrace the flushed cheeks of their happy daughter. Stephen had given the wedding dress, the wedding breakfast and a sum of money; Mary had given the bride her lace veil, her white satin shoes and her white silk stockings; David had given a large gilt clock, purchased for him in the Palais Royal; while Burton’s part was to drive the bride to the church, and the married pair to the station. By nine o’clock the whole street was agog, for Pauline and Pierre were liked by their neighbours; and besides, as the baker remarked to his wife, from so grand a house it would be a fine business. ‘They are after all generous, these English,’ said he; ‘and if Mademoiselle Gordon is strange in appearance, one should not forget that she served la France and must now wear a scar as well as ribbon.’ Then remembering his four sons slain in the war, he sighed—sons are sons to a king or a baker. David, growing excited, rushed up and down stairs with offers to help which nobody wanted, least of all the flustered and anxious bride at the moment of putting on tight satin slippers. ‘Va donc! Tu ne peux pas m’aider, mon chou, veux tu te taire, alors!’ implored Adèle.

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

  the last of the prominent Schoolmen to declare that the priest did not give absolution for guilt. The later Schoolmen with one consent oppose him at this point and teach that the priest absolves both from the guilt and the punishments of sin in this world and in purgatory. Thomas Aquinas asserted that, "if the priest cannot remit these temporal punishments,—for the punishments of purgatory are temporal,—then he cannot remit at all and this is contrary to the words of the Gospel to Peter that whatsoever he should loose on earth should be loosed in heaven."1737 The ultimate and, as it proved, a most vicious form of priestly absolution was the indulgence. An indulgence is a remission of the guilt and punishment of sin by a mitigation or complete setting aside of the works of satisfaction which would otherwise be required. A lighter penalty was substituted for a severer one.1738 Gottlob1739 has recently divided indulgences into three classes: (1) indulgences which are secured by going on a crusade; (2) such as are secured by the payment of money for some good church cause, and (3) such as are secured by the visiting of certain churches. Towards the close of this period this substitution usually took the form of a money-payment. For a lump sum absolution for the worst offences might be secured. It became a tempting source of gain to churches and the Roman curia, which they were quick to take advantage of. The dogmatic justification of this method of remission found positive expression before the practice became general. Alexander of Hales here again has the distinction of being the first to give it careful definition and unequivocal emphasis. Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventura, and the other Schoolmen follow him closely and add little. Thomas Aquinas declared it impious to say the Church might not dispense indulgences.1740 The first known case occurred about 1016 when the archbishop of Arles gave an indulgence of a year to those participating in the erection of a church building.1741 The Crusades furnished the popes the occasion to issue indulgences on a magnificent scale. Urban II,’s indulgence, 1095, granting plenary absolution to all taking the journey to Jerusalem was the first of a long series of such papal franchises. That journey, Urban said, should be taken as a substitute for all penance. Granted at first to warriors fighting against the infidel in the Holy Land, they were extended so as to include those who fought against the Slavs, as by Eugenius III., 1147, against the Stedinger, Albigenses, and the Hussites, 1425, and against all enemies whatsoever of the papacy, such as Frederick II. and Manfred. Innocent II., in 1135, promised full remission to those who fought the battle of the papal chair against Roger of Sicily, and the anti-pope, Anacletus II.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  DeLoy has recently arrived at a different opinion, however. He’s decided that the three explorers were murdered not by Native Americans but by the Mormons of southern Utah. And the bloodshed, he believes, stemmed from an unfortunate misunderstanding that grew out of the Mountain Meadows massacre. In 1858, a year after the massacre, Brigham Young reluctantly agreed to admit federal troops into Utah and to step down as territorial governor, bringing an end to the threat of all-out war between the Saints and the United States. But persistent rumors that Mormons had committed unspeakable atrocities against the Fancher wagon train kept drifting up from the southern settlements, threatening the fragile peace. President Buchanan’s secretary of war ordered army brevet major James H. Carleton to investigate the matter. Arriving at the Mountain Meadows in the spring of 1859, Carleton was sickened to discover that, nearly two years after the event, the valley was littered with skulls, bones, clumps of women’s hair, and scraps of children’s clothing bleaching in the sun. An army surgeon reported that many of the skulls “bore marks of violence, being pierced with bullet holes, or shattered with heavy blows, or cleft with some sharp-edged instrument.” The nature of the bullet wounds, he concluded, “showed that fire-arms had been discharged close to the head.” “There has been a great and fearful crime perpetrated,” Carleton declared. His soldiers gathered up whatever bones they could find, interred them in a common grave, and then laboriously hauled stones from the surrounding hillsides to build a massive, if crude, monument above it. At the apex of this rock pile, which was twelve feet high and fifty feet in circumference, they placed a wooden cross inscribed with the epigraph “Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord.” In May 1861, Brigham Young happened upon this memorial as he was passing through the meadow during a tour of his southern settlements. According to Apostle Wilford Woodruff, who was accompanying the prophet, when Brigham read the inscription on the cross he pondered it for a short while and then proposed an emendation: “Vengeance is mine, ” the prophet smugly asserted, “and I have taken a little.” A moment later one of the Saints in his entourage threw a rope over the cross and pulled it down, while others began dismantling the stones and scattering them. By the time Brigham’s party departed the Mountain Meadows, the monument to the slaughtered emigrants had been obliterated. Things had lately been looking up for the Kingdom of God, leaving the prophet in a cheerful frame of mind. The territorial governor installed by President Buchanan as Brigham’s replacement, a bureaucrat from Atlanta named Alfred Cummings, had turned out to be a patsy who was easily manipulated to do the Saints’ bidding.

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

  In fact the Germans again and again showed their resentment and put Inquisitors to death.1162 The centres of heresy in Germany were Strassburg, as early as 1212, Cologne, and Erfurt. The number of victims is said to have been very large and at least five hundred can be accounted for definitely in reported burnings.1163 Banishment, hanging, and drowning were other forms of punishment practised. In 1368 the Inquisitor, Walter Kerlinger, banished two hundred families from Erfurt alone. The prisons to which the condemned were consigned were wretched places, the abode of filth, vermin, and snakes.1164 As Torquemada stands out as the incorporation of all that is inhuman in the Spanish Inquisition, so in the German does Konrad of Marburg. This Dominican ecclesiastic, whom Gregory IX. called the "Lord’s watch-dog," first came into prominence at the court of Louis IV. of Thuringia on the Wartburg, the old castle which was the scene of the contests of the Minnesingers, and was destined to be made famous by Luther’s confinement after the diet of Worms, 1521. Konrad became confessor of Louis’ wife, the young and saintly Elizabeth. The daughter of King Andreas II. of Hungary, she was married to the Landgrave of Thuringia in 1221, at the age of fourteen. At his death at Brindisi, on his way to the Holy Land, in 1227, she came more completely under the power of Konrad. Scarcely any scene in Christian history exhibits such wanton and pitiless cruelty to a spiritual ward as he displayed to the tender woman who yielded him obedience. From the Wartburg, where she was adored for her charities and good works, she removed to Marburg. There Konrad subjected her to daily castigations and menial services, deprived her gradually of all her maids of honor, and separated her from her three children. On one occasion when she visited a convent of nuns at Oldenburg, a thing which was against their rigid rule, Konrad made Elizabeth and her attendant lie prostrate and receive a severe scourging from friar Gerhard while he himself looked on and repeated the Miserere. This, the most honored woman of mediaeval Germany, died of her castigations in 1231. Four years later she was canonized, and the St. Elizabeth church was begun which still stands to her memory in Marburg. The year of Elizabeth’s death, Gregory IX. invested Konrad with a general inquisitorial authority and right to appoint his own assistants and call upon the secular power for aid. Luciferans, so called, and other heretics were freely burned. It was Konrad’s custom to burn the offenders the very day their sentences were pronounced.1165 A reign of terror broke out wherever he went. He was murdered in 1233, on his way back to Marburg from the diet of Mainz. After his death Gregory declared him to be a man of consummate virtue, a herald of the Christian faith.

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

  sufficient to say here, that Sixtus IV., in 1476, definitely connected the payment of money with indulgences, and legislated that, by fixed sums paid to the papal collectors, persons on earth may redeem their kindred in purgatory. Thus for gold and silver the most inveterate criminal might secure the deliverance of a father or mother from purgatorial pain, and neither contrition nor confession were required in the transaction.1758 Such was the ultimate conclusion of the sacramental doctrine of penance, the sacrament to whose treatment the Schoolmen devoted most time and labor. The council of Trent reasserted the Church’s right to grant indulgences.1759 But what could seem to be more agreeable to the plain statements of Scripture than that men have the right of immediate access to Christ, who said, "Him that cometh unto me, I will in no wise cast out," and what more repugnant to its plain teachings than to make confession to a priest and the priest’s absolution conditions of receiving pardon! The superstitious, practical extravagances, which grew out of this most unbiblical penitential theory of the Middle Ages, are reported in the pages of the popular writers of the age, such as Caesar of Heisterbach and De Voragine, who express no dissent as they relate the morbid tales. Here are two of them as told by De Voragine which are to be taken as samples of a large body of similar literature. A bishop, by celebrating thirty masses, helped out of purgatory a poor soul who was frozen in a block of ice. In the second case, a woman who had neglected, before dying, to make a confession to the priest, was raised from her bier by the prayer of St. Francis d’Assisi. She went and confessed to the priest and then had the satisfaction of lying down in peace and dying over again.1760 § 119. Extreme Unction, Ordination, and Marriage. Extreme Unction,—unctio infirmorum,—the fifth in the list of the sacraments, is administered to those who are in peril of death, and is supposed to be referred to by James 5:14. "Is any among you sick? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord." The earlier view, represented by Hugo of St. Victor, Peter the Lombard, and also by Bonaventura, was that the sacrament is of Apostolic institution. Thomas Aquinas traced it directly to Christ. Many things, he said, were spoken by Christ to the Apostles which are not contained in the Gospels.1761 Thomas was followed by Duns Scotus and the council of Trent. The effect of the sacrament is to remit venial sins and the remainders of sin left after penance, and to heal the body. It may be repeated.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The Jew mounted to horse and as quickliest he might betook himself to the court of Rome, he was honourably entertained of his brethren, and there abiding, without telling any the reason of his coming, he began diligently to enquire into the manners and fashions of the Pope and Cardinals and other prelates and of all the members of his court, and what with that which he himself noted, being a mighty quick-witted man, and that which he gathered from others, he found all, from the highest to the lowest, most shamefully given to the sin of lust, and that not only in the way of nature, but after the Sodomitical fashion, without any restraint of remorse or shamefastness, insomuch that the interest of courtezans and catamites was of no small avail there in obtaining any considerable thing. Moreover, he manifestly perceived them to be universally gluttons, wine-bibbers, drunkards and slaves to their bellies, brute-beast fashion, more than to aught else after lust. And looking farther, he saw them all covetous and greedy after money, insomuch that human, nay, Christian blood, no less than things sacred, whatsoever they might be, whether pertaining to the sacrifices of the altar or to the benefices of the church, they sold and bought indifferently for a price, making a greater traffic and having more brokers thereof than folk at Paris of silks and stuffs or what not else. Manifest simony they had christened 'procuration' and gluttony 'sustentation,' as if God apprehended not,--let be the meaning of words but,--the intention of depraved minds and would suffer Himself, after the fashion of men, to be duped by the names of things. All this, together with much else which must be left unsaid, was supremely displeasing to the Jew, who was a sober and modest man, and himseeming he had seen enough, he determined to return to Paris and did so.