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.

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• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  condition as one of abhorrence. (The way Jerusalem is pictured as “flailing about in your blood” reflects the distaste of the purity-obsessed priest for blood and bodily fluids.) It was YHWH who made it possible for her to grow and become beautiful, and who adorned her with ornaments. Ezekiel 16:9, which says that YHWH pledged himself to Jerusalem and entered into a contract or covenant with her, implies the metaphor of marriage. The beauty of the young woman, however, becomes an occasion for prostitution. Ezekiel is primarily concerned with idolatry, but he also notes the practice of human sacrifice (16:20-21). Diplomatic relations with Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon in turn are also viewed as prostitution, with little regard for the circumstances of Judah’s dealings with these powers. Jerusalem was worse than a whore, because she gave rather than received payment for her services. The punishment of unfaithful Jerusalem in this oracle is severer than the fate of Israel in Hosea. Not only will she be stripped naked in public, but “they shall bring a mob against you, and they shall stone you and cut you to pieces with their swords” (16:40). The violence of this picture is undoubtedly inspired by the actual fate of Jerusalem, but it also carries the implication, or even a presupposition, that this is what a promiscuous woman deserves. Death by stoning was the punishment for adultery in biblical law (Deut 22:23-24). Stripping is the punishment in Hosea 2 (and later in the story of Susanna). There is no precedent for cutting in pieces as a punishment. There may be an allusion here to the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19, who was cut in pieces after she had been raped, but this was not a punishment. Feminist scholars have quite rightly expressed concern that such rhetoric may seem to sanction violence against women. Some go so far as to describe it as pornographic. Of course, this is not the point of the oracle. The passage is an allegory and deals with the punishment of Jerusalem, not of actual women. But the allegory accepts as its premise that an adulterous woman deserves to be stoned or hacked to pieces, and the vivid imagery may well have contributed to violence against women, promiscuous or not, over the centuries. It may not be fair to characterize Ezekiel as a misogynist. We know too little of his personal life, but he is grief-stricken at the death of his wife, whom he describes as “the delight of my eyes” (24:15-18). It is unfortunate

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  the unclean creatures of the dietary laws of Leviticus 11 and suggest the prophet’s priestly preoccupation with impurity. It is noteworthy that the offenders are said to include “Jaazaniah son of Shaphan.” Shaphan had played a prominent role in Josiah’s reform, and his family protected Jeremiah (Jer 26:24; 39:14). Ezekiel may have wished to indicate that idolatry was rampant even among traditional Yahwists, or the reference may indicate some animosity between the Zadokite priesthood and the Deuteronomic reformers. (Note, however, that 11:1 refers to Jaazaniah, son of Azzur. There may have been more than one Jaazaniah, but there is also reason to suspect textual corruption.) Ezekiel observes a number of idolatrous practices. There is no parallel for veneration of loathsome animals in Israel or Judah. “Women weeping for Tammuz” refers to a Mesopotamian ritual that can be traced back to ancient Sumer in the third millennium, where it marked the death and descent into the netherworld of the shepherd-god, Dumuzi. This ritual was observed in the Near East for thousands of years. Whether it was observed in Jerusalem we do not know. Ezekiel would certainly have been familiar with it from Babylon. Worship of the sun was practiced in Judah in the seventh century. Josiah is said to have suppressed it, destroying horses and chariots dedicated to the sun and deposing priests who made offerings to it (2 Kings 23). Whether “putting the branch to their nose” (Ezek 8:17) is a reference to a ritual is much disputed. No such ritual is known. It may be that the text should be emended to read, “putting the branch to my nose”—an idiomatic way of saying, “provoking me.” There is also a reference to “filling the land with violence” in 8:17. Since all the other offenses are cultic, some scholars have thought that this is an insertion. In any case, it is clear that Ezekiel is primarily disturbed by cultic offenses. Whether in fact any of these “abominations” was practiced in Jerusalem in this period, we do not know. It is not implausible that some Babylonian practices should have been adopted after the Babylonian conquest. What the vision primarily shows, however, is the kind of offenses that Ezekiel thought would trigger the massive destruction of Jerusalem that was to come. The reason why people are said to have indulged in those practices is that they think the Lord has abandoned the land and will not see (8:12). As we shall see, Ezekiel claims that YHWH does

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  “Okay, all together, on the count of three, let’s throw Suzy out the window and get rid of her for good.” Standing next to Mary Catherine, I was stupefied. What kind of a charade is this? Suzy? That ’s not even a Catholic name! Joining the two of them in this pantomime, I mimicked the swinging motion as Sister Catherine called out, “One, two, three, go!” Then we flung our arms out toward the open window and the highway beyond. So this was the secret Mary Catherine had to keep from me! I found the ploy repulsive. It was as though Sister Catherine was saying that my little sister had a devil in her, and we were engaging in an act of exorcism. If my participation in this ritual was supposed to have helped, it didn’t. At lunch, Mary Catherine refused to eat. And the next morning at second breakfast, when Sister Catherine saw that Mary Catherine’s eggs lay untouched on her plate, her cajoling ended and the beatings with the Big Punisher resumed. I felt a sense of hopelessness, knowing that I’d failed. Each day I awoke with dread, fearful that if Mary Catherine didn’t eat, pretty soon she would die. Why is no one able to help her? I was sure that Sister Elizabeth Ann would be able to get her to eat. But Mary Catherine’s eating problems were kept from my parents. Sister Catherine’s determination to shatter the natural bonds of love among family members would not have been served by including parents in any decision-making. The sparse opportunities she did provide for communication, in the form of that increasingly rare but glorious Sunday morning community meeting, were (perhaps deliberately) too short for serious exchanges. And anyway, as I saw it, much as I adored my parents, they had long been relieved of their parental role. They had no authority over me, and I had no recourse to them. Sharing with them the sordid details of punishments and troubles would only lead to their unhappiness. It could serve no purpose. That didn’t mean, however, that my parents were oblivious to the fact that the five of us might get into trouble. Nor did Sister Catherine even try to hide that fact. She set up a system called “Badges.” Badges represented an array of virtues, including devotion, obedience, table manners, curiosity (This was actually deemed to be a vice rather than a virtue.), generosity, and more. The Angels determined which badges each of their charges earned or lost each week, and on Friday evening when we attended Benediction, all thirty-nine of us wore a pink satin sash across our chests on which were glued the badges we had earned that week. Missing badges sent a visible message to the entire community that screamed, “I did something wrong! I was bad!” But the rule of silence between children and adults prohibited any opportunity to defend oneself or to explain the painful embarrassment.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  At a party in Cambridge one night, a loud and raucous affair, I felt the urge to escape and was followed out of the house by a girl a few years older than I was. It was well past midnight and I was hungry, the kind of hunger that goes with having had a bit too much alcohol. “My house is around the corner,” she said, inviting me to come over. I relented—a free meal was a rare treat. As we approached her house, I realized with a start that we were in an old familiar neighborhood. I recognized the houses and was struck with panic when we entered her house—it was next door to Sacred Heart Hall, on Putnam Avenue, the house where Father and the Big Brothers had lived before we moved to Still River. I wanted to bolt, to disappear, but I was trapped. Why did I ever let my guard down? I chastised myself as I followed her into the kitchen that smelled of fried food, that rancid odor that clings to the gritty wallpaper because the ventilation system is broken, or worse, never existed. Sitting down at the square metal table that filled most of the walking space in the cramped kitchen, I invoked my guardian angel, that heavenly protector I had become less reliant upon as I had gained confidence in the “evil world.” Suddenly the girl seemed vulgar, her voice too loud, her manners coarse. “Who’s there?” came a yell from upstairs. “It’s just my old lady,” the girl whispered as I started. “Ignore her.” The creaking stairs told me that the girl’s mother was on her way down. As she stomped into the kitchen I found myself repulsed. Bundled in a decrepit housecoat and with rollers in her hair, her sunken eyes and wrinkled face carried the evidence of a life of abuse—too much alcohol and too many cigarettes. “Whatch youz girls doin’ up at this hour?” she barked. “Been drinkin’? Need some eggs and bacon?” She was already at the refrigerator hauling out items, as though this were her nightly routine. A cast-iron frying pan was sitting on the stove, grease still thick on its black surface. She tossed a package of bacon onto the uncleaned pan, without so much as separating the strips, and as it turned into a ball of curling, fat-spewing, burned-at-the-edges lump of bacon, she flipped it onto a plate and then cracked the eggs into the sizzling inch-deep fat. This was bacon and eggs ? My stomach retched as she passed me a plate laden with the inedible. Only the toast and coffee saved the meal. It’s your own fault , I thought as I contrasted this notion of a meal with the elegance and flavor of meals at the Center. I cringed as the girl shoved food into her mouth, using the back of her hand as a napkin and holding her fork as though it were a weapon.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  23Throughout high school, I went through the motions, pretending to be the good student at school and the good daughter when I was talking to my parents, as my mind continued to splinter. With each passing year, I became more and more disgusted with myself. I was convinced that having been raped was my fault, that I deserved it, that what happened in the woods was all a pathetic girl like me could expect. I slept less and less because when I closed my eyes, I could feel boy bodies crushing my girl body, hurting my girl body. I smelled their sweat and beer breath and relived every terrible thing they did to me. I would wake up gasping and terrified and would spend the rest of the night staring at the ceiling or reading myself out of my body and out of my life and into something better. There was no rhyme or reason to what I read: lots of Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler for the pure escape they provided, Harlequin romances because they were so bountiful, whatever I could find in the campus library. During the day, I went to class, which was, in its way, another kind of escape. Academically, Exeter was intense, way more rigorous than my college classes would ever be. I loved my classes. In architecture, we had to build a vessel that would keep an egg safe if we dropped it from the roof of the building, but we could only use, like, Styrofoam and rubber bands. In an English class every Upper (or junior, to the rest of the world) had to write a Reporter at Large essay—an in-depth project for which we had to do research and interview sources and immerse ourselves in a topic that interested us. Back then I wanted to be a doctor, one of the Haitian-parent-approved professions, so I wrote about a surgeon who was my family’s next-door neighbor. He was patient with my questions and allowed me to observe a surgery over spring break. While I worked on my Reporter at Large, I felt like I was so much more than a lame high school student.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  “Okay, all together, on the count of three, let’s throw Suzy out the window and get rid of her for good.” Standing next to Mary Catherine, I was stupefied. What kind of a charade is this? Suzy? That ’s not even a Catholic name! Joining the two of them in this pantomime, I mimicked the swinging motion as Sister Catherine called out, “One, two, three, go!” Then we flung our arms out toward the open window and the highway beyond. So this was the secret Mary Catherine had to keep from me! I found the ploy repulsive. It was as though Sister Catherine was saying that my little sister had a devil in her, and we were engaging in an act of exorcism. If my participation in this ritual was supposed to have helped, it didn’t. At lunch, Mary Catherine refused to eat. And the next morning at second breakfast, when Sister Catherine saw that Mary Catherine’s eggs lay untouched on her plate, her cajoling ended and the beatings with the Big Punisher resumed. I felt a sense of hopelessness, knowing that I’d failed. Each day I awoke with dread, fearful that if Mary Catherine didn’t eat, pretty soon she would die. Why is no one able to help her? I was sure that Sister Elizabeth Ann would be able to get her to eat. But Mary Catherine’s eating problems were kept from my parents. Sister Catherine’s determination to shatter the natural bonds of love among family members would not have been served by including parents in any decision-making. The sparse opportunities she did provide for communication, in the form of that increasingly rare but glorious Sunday morning community meeting, were (perhaps deliberately) too short for serious exchanges. And anyway, as I saw it, much as I adored my parents, they had long been relieved of their parental role. They had no authority over me, and I had no recourse to them. Sharing with them the sordid details of punishments and troubles would only lead to their unhappiness. It could serve no purpose. That didn’t mean, however, that my parents were oblivious to the fact that the five of us might get into trouble. Nor did Sister Catherine even try to hide that fact. She set up a system called “Badges.” Badges represented an array of virtues, including devotion, obedience, table manners, curiosity (This was actually deemed to be a vice rather than a virtue.), generosity, and more. The Angels determined which badges each of their charges earned or lost each week, and on Friday evening when we attended Benediction, all thirty-nine of us wore a pink satin sash across our chests on which were glued the badges we had earned that week. Missing badges sent a visible message to the entire community that screamed, “I did something wrong! I was bad!” But the rule of silence between children and adults prohibited any opportunity to defend oneself or to explain the painful embarrassment.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  I took the onions and peas off the heat and added some chopped mint, and then added it to fresh ricotta, an egg, and some Parmesan cheese. This was, in theory, the filling for my ravioli. It’s interesting, I’ve noticed while cooking, how ingredients in their individual and naked state can be a bit repulsive but necessary, kind of like people. The egg, Parmesan, and ricotta, so wet and loose, did not thrill me. It felt way too intimate. And then it came time to assemble the ravioli. I thought I followed the instructions correctly, but the ravioli did not reflect that. The assembly process itself was irritating. The pasta sheets wouldn’t hold together, no matter what I tried. I crimped the edges with a fork, but the edges would not stay crimped. I nearly threw the disastrous-looking ravioli against a wall because the tenor of my aggravation was wildly disproportionate to the potential of the meal I was attempting. In the end, I decided, Fuck it, and threw the sloppy mess into boiling water, hoping for the best, prepared to eat the worst. The pockets of pasta I had tried to create quickly dissembled, coming apart limply at the seams. Tragedy was multiplying. Once I thought the pasta sufficiently cooked, I drained the whole mess into a strainer, and then put that mess in a saucepan with browned butter and let it simmer until it looked at least somewhat edible. The dissembled ravioli ended up tasting fine and I am sure there was a lesson in there somewhere about how almost anything can be salvaged when you cook, but I never did find that lesson. Blue Apron and other meal kit services are well and good, but sometimes cooking is such a pain in the ass. It is exhausting wrapping my mind around having to prepare food to put in my body every single day, and living alone, I am always the one responsible for that preparation. The more I cook for myself, the richer my appreciation for women and men who cook for their families every day grows. Some nights, it is a question of whether I have peanut butter, jelly, and bread so that the dinner problem is thusly solved. Of course, I cannot help but wonder when basic meals became problems rather than meals, complicated ordeals rather than daily, sustaining rituals. I love food, but it is so difficult to enjoy food. It is so difficult to believe I am allowed to enjoy food. Mostly, food is a constant reminder of my body, my lack of willpower, my biggest flaws. 66When I ask my mother for her recipes, she is, at once, helpful and vague. She shares the basic ingredients and cooking instructions, but I can never quite replicate the taste of her dishes. Once I asked her for a recipe for soup joumou, which Haitians prepare for New Year’s Day, our Independence Day. This is what my mother offered. Two heads of cabbage Peas

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  With every day that went by, I hated myself more. I disgusted myself more. I couldn’t get away from him. I couldn’t get away from what those boys did. I could smell them and feel their mouths and their tongues and their hands and their rough bodies and their cruel skin. I couldn’t stop hearing the terrible things they said to me. Their voices were with me, constantly. Hating myself became as natural as breathing. Those boys treated me like nothing so I became nothing.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  4This book, Hunger, is a book about living in the world when you are not a few or even forty pounds overweight. This is a book about living in the world when you are three or four hundred pounds overweight, when you are not obese or morbidly obese but super morbidly obese according to your body mass index, or BMI. “BMI” is a term that sounds so technical and inhumane that I am always eager to disregard the measure. Nonetheless, it is a term, and a measure, that allows the medical establishment to try and bring a sense of discipline to undisciplined bodies. One’s BMI is one’s weight, in kilograms, divided by the square of one’s height in meters. Math is hard. There are various markers that then define the amount of unruliness a human body might carry. If your BMI is between 18.5 and 24.9, you are “normal.” If your BMI is 25 or higher, you are overweight. If your BMI is 30 or higher, you are obese, and if your BMI is higher than 40, you are morbidly obese, and if the measure is higher than 50, you are super morbidly obese. My BMI is higher than 50. In truth, many medical designations are arbitrary. It is worth noting that in 1998, medical professionals, under the direction of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, lowered the BMI threshold for “normal” bodies to below 25 and, in doing so, doubled the number of obese Americans. One of their reasons for lowering the cutoff: “A round number like 25 would be easy for people to remember.” These terms themselves are somewhat horrifying. “Obese” is an unpleasant word from the Latin obesus, meaning “having eaten until fat,” which is, in a literal sense, fair enough. But when people use the word “obese,” they aren’t merely being literal. They are offering forth an accusation. It is strange, and perhaps sad, that medical doctors came up with this terminology when they are charged with first doing no harm. The modifier “morbidly” makes the fat body a death sentence when such is not the case. The term “morbid obesity” frames fat people like we are the walking dead, and the medical establishment treats us accordingly. The cultural measure for obesity often seems to be anyone who appears to be larger than a size 6, or anyone whose body doesn’t naturally cater to the male gaze, or anyone with cellulite on her thighs.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  There was no hidden truth, accessible only to a learned elite. The Bible meant exactly what it said. A millennium meant ten centuries; if the prophets spoke of ‘Israel’ they meant Jews not the Church; if Revelation prophesied a battle outside Jerusalem, that was exactly what would happen. 37 This reading of scripture would become even easier after the publication of The Scofield Reference Bible (1909), which became an instant bestseller. Cyrus I. Scofield explained the Rapture theory in detailed notes – a gloss, which for many Christian fundamentalists has become almost as authoritative as the Bible itself. The Jewish world was also divided between those who wanted to embrace modernity and those determined to fight it. In Germany, the maskilim who had embraced the Enlightenment believed that they could be a bridge between the ghetto and the modern world. In the early years of the nineteenth century, some decided to reshape the religion itself. Reform Judaism, whose worship was conducted in German, with choral singing and mixed choirs, seemed more Protestant than Jewish. To the disgust of the orthodox rabbis, synagogues – now called ‘temples’ – were established in Hamburg and Berlin. In America, the playwright Isaac Harby founded a reformed temple in Charleston, and by 1870 a substantial proportion of the two hundred synagogues in the United States had adopted at least some Reform practices. 38 The Reformers belonged to the modern world. They had no time for the irrational, the mystical or the mysterious. By the 1840s, some Reform scholars who had embarked on a critical study of Jewish history founded a school aptly known as the Science of Judaism. They were influenced by the philosophies of Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), who had argued in The Phenomenology of Mind (1807) that God, which he called the universal Spirit, could achieve its full potential only if it came down to earth and was most fully realized in the human mind. Both Hegel and Kant had seen Judaism as the epitome of bad religion: the Jewish God, Hegel argued, was a tyrant, who required unquestioning submission to his intolerable laws. Jesus had tried to liberate humans from this base servitude, but Christians had reverted to the old tyranny. The scholars of the Science of Judaism all rewrote the biblical story in Hegelian terms to correct this prejudice. In their work, the Bible recorded the spiritualizing process whereby Judaism attained self-consciousness.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  It was something none of the grown-ups knew a thing about, though once in a while I’d hear a much shorter, much tamer version of one of Shannon’s stories from her mama. At those moments, Shannon would give me a grin of smug pride. Can’t I tell it better? she seemed to be saying. Gradually I admitted to myself what hid behind Shannon’s impassive pink-and-white features. Shannon Pearl simply and completely hated everyone who had ever hurt her, and spent most of her time brooding on punishments either she or God would visit on them. The fire that burned in her eyes was the fire of outrage. Had she been stronger or smarter, Shannon Pearl would have been dangerous. But half-blind, sickly, and ostracized, she was not much of a threat to anyone. Mr. and Mrs. Pearl were as short as Shannon was, and almost as pale. Neither of them trusted their fine complexions to the sun’s glare. Mr. Pearl always wore a dark worsted fedora and a suit to match. Mrs. Pearl stayed in the store out of the sun and wore both hat and gloves whenever she went out. They always looked secretive and self-contained, their prim mouths shut tight. It was impossible to imagine them naked, stepping out of their baths or pressing their pulpy bodies close together in the privacy of their bedroom. They looked like children dressed in their parents’ clothes, and their various enterprises seemed to me no way for grown people to make a living. Mrs. Pearl admitted they never quite covered Shannon’s medical expenses, so they took up collections from sympathetic congregations. I couldn’t imagine asking strangers to pay your bills, but I didn’t say anything. I was so careful with the Pearls, so quiet and restrained and politely attentive, I might have been a cousin of theirs. It was worth it to me to play at being one of them. With Shannon and her family I finally got to meet the people I’d dreamed about—the Blue Ridge Mountain Boys, the Tuckerton Family, the Carter Family, Little Pammie Gleason (blessed by God), the Smoky Mountain Boys, and now and then—every time he’d get saved—Johnny Cash. Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday prayer service, revival weeks; Mr. Pearl would book a hall, a church, or a local TV program. Because I was Shannon’s friend I got to go on the tours, to meet the stars of both the country western and gospel circuits. That was enough to stop me worrying about my fascination with Shannon.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “Sometimes you’d think Mama’s simple,” Shannon said one night, giggling oddly. I wished she would shut up and the music would start. I was still hungry. Mrs. Pearl had packed less food than usual, and Mama had told me I was always to leave something on my plate when I ate with Shannon. I wasn’t supposed to make the Pearls think they had to feed me. Not that that particular tactic worked. I’d left half a biscuit, and damned if Shannon hadn’t popped it in her mouth. “Maybe it’s all that tugging at her throttle.” Shannon giggled again, and I knew somebody had finally given her a pull at a paper cup. Now, I thought, now her mama will have to see. But when Shannon fell over her sewing machine, Mrs. Pearl just laid her down with a wet rag on her forehead. “It’s the weather,” she whispered to me over Shannon’s sodden brow. It was so hot that Jesus and the lamb were wilting off the paper fans provided by the local funeral home. But I knew if there had been snow up to the hubcaps, Mrs. Pearl would have said it was the chill in the air. An hour later, one of the Tuckerton cousins spilled a paper cup on Mrs. Pearl’s sleeve, and I saw her take a deep, painful breath. Catching my eye, she just said, “Can’t expect that frail soul to cope without a little help.” I didn’t tell her that it seemed to me 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. If they’d let me sing I’d never shame myself like that. “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 the crowd. 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 arms around me and rocked her head back and forth. The music was too loud, and I could smell whiskey all around us. Suddenly my head hurt terribly; the smell of Shannon’s hair was making me sick. “Uh uh uh.” Desperately I pushed Shannon away and crawled for the side of the stage as fast as I could, gagging. Air, I had to have air.

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  Prosecutor Sheila Polk said shortly before sentencing that Ray “led the life of a pretender, and there are predictable consequences when one leads a life of pretense.”1049 Polk later received the 2012 Arizona State Bar Criminal Justice Award for her outstanding work as a prosecutor.1050 Beverly Bunn, an orthodontist from Texas who endured Ray’s sweat lodge, offered this impression of her former self-help guru. “James Ray preaches that thoughts, feelings and actions are all connected. That was true in his own life.”1051 LGATs suggest that their philosophy can potentially solve almost any life problem, from personal issues to professional performance. However, it is doubtful that this “one size fits all” prescription is in fact a meaningful solution. Instead of succumbing to the lure of LGATs, there are far safer and more focused ways to address professional and personal concerns. Professionals can seek career enhancement through continuing education at accredited institutions. Those struggling with personal problems can seek counseling from a licensed professional or advice from a trusted friend. There are also support groups that may specifically address a perceived problem recommended by local community services. This approach to self-improvement is more proved and pragmatic and largely avoids the accountability and safety issues that seem inherent in many LGATs. Psychologist Margaret Singer summarized her impressions. “Having observed a number of LGATs and having interviewed many persons who attended variants of these programs as part of their work assignments, I am astonished at the gross childishness and unkindness of humiliating anyone under the guise of education, experiential learning, or the claim that participation in such travesties enhances work performance.”1052 She labeled such LGATs as “high-confrontation, psychologically intense programs”1053 and said, “They are a modern-day, corporate version of social and psychological influence techniques that make people deployable without their knowledge or consent—precisely my objection to cults.”1054 CHAPTER 17 LGAT INTERVENTION At the urging of his adult son, a medical doctor agreed to attend the Forum, which is large group awareness training (LGAT) run by Landmark Education, a privately owned for-profit company. The son persuaded his father to participate with him when he repeated the initial weekend of training called the Forum. The doctor thought the weekend offered an opportunity to spend quality time with his son. The son believed the training would improve their relationship and bring them closer together. The son also thought the LGAT had helped him with many personal problems. The Forum weekend can be a deeply cathartic and stressful experience. This LGAT format serves as the vehicle through which participants are introduced to the world view and philosophy of the LGAT creator and its “Source,” Werner Erhard, formerly known as Jack Rosenberg.1055 Erhard reportedly created “a consciousness-raising cult,” which combined a mix of “Scientology, Zen and Gestalt.”1056 His idiosyncratic philosophy is funneled through an LGAT format to paying participants. Landmark staff members, with frequent assistance from volunteers, facilitate this process. The Forum can be confrontational and emotionally draining.

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

  On the 9th of February, 1529, an unbloody revolution broke out. Aroused by the intrigues of the Roman party, the Protestant citizens to the number of two thousand came together, broke to pieces the images still left, and compelled the reactionary Council to introduce everywhere the form of religious service practised in Zürich. Erasmus, who had advised moderation and quiet waiting for a general Council, was disgusted with these violent, measures, which he describes in a letter to Pirkheimer of Nürnberg, May 9, 1529. "The smiths and workmen," he says, "removed the pictures from the churches, and heaped such insults on the images of the saints and the crucifix itself, that it is quite surprising there was no miracle, seeing how many there always used to occur whenever the saints were even slightly offended. Not a statue was left either in the churches, or the vestibules, or the porches, or the monasteries. The frescoes were obliterated by means of a coating of lime; whatever would bum was thrown into the fire, and the rest pounded into fragments. Nothing was spared for either love or money. Before long the mass was totally abolished, so that it was forbidden either to celebrate it in one’s own house or to attend it in the neighboring villages."177 The great scholar who had done so much preparatory work for the Reformation, stopped half-way and refused to identify himself with either party. He reluctantly left Basel (April 13, 1529) with the best wishes for her prosperity, and resided six years at Freiburg in Baden, a sickly, sensitive, and discontented old man. He was enrolled among the professors of the University, but did not lecture. He returned to Basel in August, 1535, and died in his seventieth year, July 12, 1536, without priest or sacrament, but invoking the mercy of Christ, repeating again and again, "O Lord Jesus, have mercy on me!" He was buried in the Minster of Basel. Glareanus and Beatus Rhenanus, humanists, and friends of Zwingli and Erasmus, likewise withdrew from Basel at this critical moment. Nearly all the professors of the University emigrated. They feared that science and learning would suffer from theological quarrels and a rupture with the hierarchy. The abolition of the mass and the breaking of images, the destruction of the papal authority and monastic institutions, would have been a great calamity had they not been followed by the constructive work of the evangelical faith which was the moving power, and which alone could build up a new Church on the ruins of the old. The Word of God was preached from the fountain. Christ and the Gospel were put in the place of the Church and tradition. German service with congregational singing and communion was substituted for the Latin mass. The theological faculty was renewed by the appointment of Simon Grynäus, Sebastian Münster, Oswald Myconius, and other able and pious scholars to professorships.

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  Li has said, “The only way to find yourself comfortably free of illnesses is through cultivation practice!”795 Udo Schuklenk, a professor of philosophy at Queen’s University who currently holds the Ontario research chair in bioethics, observes, “Falun Gong adherents believe fervently that practicing Falun Gong can cure ailments ranging from brain cancer to arthritis and many other diseases.”796 Schuklenk warns, “The delusions of the Falun Gong adherents matter, because they might not go themselves to receive life-preserving medical care when they could benefit from it, or worse in another form of child abuse they might not take their children to see a doctor when they could and should have.”797 Chinese officials have reported that nineteen hundred Falun Gong practitioners have died in China due to medical neglect.798 This was one of the reasons China officially banned Falun Gong in 1999, declaring it an “evil cult.” Li’s teachings also include telling his disciples they will appear younger and that elderly devotees “will have less wrinkles and eventually they [the wrinkles] will almost be gone.” He also claims that elderly women “will again have their menstrual cycle.” Li says that this will be accomplished because “all cells in the bodies of practitioners will be replaced by high energy matter.”799 In response to criticism of this bizarre claim, a practitioner wrote me, “Can you prove that elderly women who practice Falun Gong don’t regain their menstrual periods? Have you ever considered the possibility that Li’s teachings in this regard are true? I know for a fact that they are true. I suggest you do more research on the subject before mocking these teachings.”800 Psychologist Margaret Singer noted the apparent lack of reasoning and critical thinking that is common in cult groups and which Falun Gong practitioners often display. In describing her experience with Falun Gong devotees, Singer explained that a practitioner will “actually say ‘Don’t Think. Just recite the Master’s teaching.’” She concluded, “If you want a good description of a cult, all you have to do is read what [Falun Dafa followers] say they are.”801 Singer said, “Imagine an inverted T. The leader is alone at the top and the followers are all at the bottom.”802 A destructive cult is not only totalitarian, but, according to Singer, it employs “the overriding philosophy…that the ends justify the means, a view that allows [such groups] to establish their own brand of morality, outside normal society bounds.”803 Cult and communication experts Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman describe cultic practices that lead to a diminished ability to process information and employ critical thinking. They said, “Almost every major cult and cult-like group we came upon teaches some form of not thinking…as part of its regular program of activity.

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  New initiates were “smothered in attention.”340 Many contributed substantially to their guru’s cash revenue, often paying as much as [$625.00] a month into his personal bank account. Detective Giles told reporters, “When he was first charged the movement managed to put up his [$468,300.00] bail incredibly quickly.”341 One die-hard devotee even testified in his defense at trial despite the fact that her parents strongly opposed the guru and had cooperated with the prosecution.342 After appearing in court as a witness for the prosecution, one of Michael Lyons’s victims told the press, “It was an incredibly liberating experience. Looking at him in court I felt disgusted by him. I can’t believe that a master manipulator like him walked the streets for so long and I’m just glad that he will no longer be able to take advantage of other vulnerable people.” 2012—Faith Healing Deaths During 2012 there were multiple criminal convictions in the United States tied to the deaths of minor children due to medical neglect. This focused public attention on the faith healing beliefs of certain small religious groups and somewhat larger but not widely known churches. In May 2012 Jacqueline Crank and her “spiritual father,” Ariel Ben Sherman, were found guilty of misdemeanor neglect resulting from the 2002 death of Crank’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Jessica. Under Sherman’s influence Crank decided not to pursue medical treatment for a growing tumor in her daughter’s shoulder. By the time authorities intervened, it was too late to help the girl. The conviction of the pair occurred only after years of legal wrangling and proceedings in the state of Tennessee. Tennessee law allows parents to choose between faith and medicine, even in a medical emergency. The law, however, states that their faith must be a “recognized church or denomination.”343 Apparently Crank’s mentor, Sherman, didn’t meet this criterion. Instead, he led a very small group that included the Cranks and about six other members. They lived together in a six-bedroom house. After their conviction Crank and Sherman were sentenced to probation, but despite this they both promised to appeal the court decision.344 Ariel Ben Sherman had a history of legal troubles. The itinerant preacher previously led a religious commune in Oregon during the 1980s. He was charged in Oregon with five counts of child abuse but fled prosecution.345 Susan Grady of Oklahoma didn’t find refuge in any special provision under the law as Jacqueline Crank did. In 1983 the Oklahoma state legislature specifically ended the use of religious faith as a defense in the event of a child’s death due to medical neglect.346 In May 2012 Grady was found guilty of second-degree manslaughter in the death of her son, Aaron. The nine-year-old boy died in 2009 of complications from diabetes. Grady is a member of a controversial religious group known as the General Assembly Church of the First Born. The group has a long history of legal problems due to its beliefs about modern medicine. Susan Grady didn’t receive probation.

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

  This evil has rested as a curse on all nations, and at the time of Christ the greater part of the existing race was bound in beastly degradation—even in civilized Greece and Rome the slaves being more numerous than the free-born and the freedmen. The greatest philosophers of antiquity vindicated slavery as a natural and necessary institution; and Aristotle declared all barbarians to be slaves by birth, fit for nothing but obedience. According to the Roman law, "slaves had no head in the State, no name, no title, no register;" they had no rights of matrimony, and no protection against adultery; they could be bought and sold, or given away, as personal property; they might be tortured for evidence, or even put to death, at the discretion of their master. In the language of a distinguished writer on civil law, the slaves in the Roman empire "were in a much worse state than any cattle whatsoever." Cato the elder expelled his old and sick slaves out of house and home. Hadrian, one of the most humane of the emperors, wilfully destroyed the eye of one of his slaves with a pencil. Roman ladies punished their maids with sharp iron instruments for the most trifling offences, while attending half-naked, on their toilet. Such legal degradation and cruel treatment had the worst effect upon the character of the slaves. They are described by the ancient writers as mean, cowardly, abject, false, voracious, intemperate, voluptuous, also as hard and cruel when placed over others. A proverb prevailed in the Roman empire: "As many slaves, so many enemies." Hence the constant danger of servile insurrections, which more than once brought the republic to the brink of ruin, and seemed to justify the severest measures in self-defence. Judaism, indeed, stood on higher ground than this; yet it tolerated slavery, though with wise precautions against maltreatment, and with the significant ordinance, that in the year of jubilee, which prefigured the renovation of the theocracy, all Hebrew slaves should go free.635

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Mediterranean late antiquity was a special hothouse for the growth of group ideologies of bodily control along a particular axis of denial. “Flee from the body,” commanded Porphyry,524 and many agreed. The story has been elaborately retold, and recently, by a master, as far as the history of Christianity goes, and he was consciously following in the traces of another more tendentious master, whose thoughts on the subject may be surmised and may yet someday be known.525 What we still want and may never get is a more comprehensive treatment of the late-antique war with the body, which is also its fawning, obsessive love affair with the soul. Such histories are condemned to be written. We know what people said about the body and its practices in the books they wrote, and from those books we form conclusions about how they behaved.526 They are seldom, however, as indiscreet as we would like. It would be, for example, a great thing to know more than we do about the habits and practices of late-antique men of all social classes regarding sexual relations with women not their wives. Men of the higher social classes slept with the slave women on their property, and this was widely tolerated. Even the bishop expected them to distinguish between a concubine and a mere prostitute and thought the concubine’s role a defensible one.527 We do not know who else slept with those women. Did they have monogamous spouses within their own class? Or was slave sexual commerce more indiscriminate and less possessive? Generalization would probably be error here. And we do not know what happened when men slept with their own wives. I do not see that we even know who slept in whose bed, and how often. Nor do we know what happened there.528 Were late-antique husbands considerate and companionable, or did they regularly approach their wives in ways that now would be marked as abusive?529 When we write and speak about the much more abundantly documented and theorized practices of ascetics, who would leave all such behavior aside, fretting about their wet dreams, we should remember that their neighbors were going about more conventional and perhaps more interesting lives in much greater numbers all around them, without bothering to write it all down. When Christianity began it was Jewish, Greek, and eastern and it flourished in those worlds. Every important step in Christian history was taken first in the east and only later in the Latin west, and the outbreak of ascetic passions and practices of late antiquity conforms to that rule. That said, we needn’t believe very much of the literal sense of the first narratives of the heroic Christian desert-tamers. The tale-telling began with the Life of Anthony written by Athanasius in the fourth century to support his own very urban political agenda, and it sets out a perfectly satisfactory history of increasing heroism, increasing popularity, and doctrinal regularity. Some of that history is probably true.530

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  From Africa, we have miracle stories, but Orosius voyaged beyond Africa and back to Spain, stopping off in the Balearic Islands. If in Africa the saint’s dust generated fairly ordinary pious enthusiasm, in the islands he inspired terrorism and his enthusiasts mobbed to force the Jews of Minorca to convert to Christianity in one of the ugliest episodes of anti-Semitic hostility to come to us from this period.328 But stories went on begetting stories. Back at Uzalis in Africa, where Augustine’s old friend Evodius was bishop, the letter in which Severus of Minorca detailed the uproar in his homeland was received and read from the pulpit to great enthusiasm. We know this because we are told the story to introduce a collection of the signs and wonders Stephen worked there. By this time it is Easter week, 425 or 426. Augustine is old, in his seventies now. He has probably already designated his successor and begun to pull back from daily involvement in the affairs of the church. But Easter is the great feast of the year, and the bishop himself must be present throughout. This year we have a series of his sermons from that week, all having to do with Stephen, who is flourishing at Hippo. One sermon we have was held on Sunday, one on Monday, two on Tuesday, and one on Wednesday. Augustine will never say just why Stephen is so useful for him. In the 410s Augustine had acquired a new flock, the ex-Donatists, among whom reverence for martyrs ran hot and high, and they had their own martyrs—some of them done to death by other Christians. Stephen, in that environment, was a trump card, an undoubtedly ancient and authentic and powerful martyr, greater than the local ones. Years before, Augustine had mentioned in passing329 that the Donatists “adore the dust” that had been brought from the Holy Land. Now he had dust of the highest value for them to venerate. (Similarly, in the same post-Donatist period, new shrines to martyrs would be found springing up around old circumcellion sites near Hippo, to satisfy the old tastes.330)

• From An Anomalous Jew: Paul Among Jews, Greeks, and Romans (2016)

  Nanos, Romans, 9-10, 177-79. 22 Paul the Jew .. . of Sorts defending Gentiles from proselytism, even while they joined Christ-believing Jewish groups that practiced Torah observance and adopted some token mea- sures of Torah observance themselves. Thus, Nanos regards Paul as engaging in an intra-Jewish debate about the status of Christ-believing Gentiles within Jewish assemblies rather than engaging in an adversus Israel debate that pits the “Christian” Paul against the Jewish people. Pamela Eisenbaum is a contemporary Jewish New Testament scholar who teaches at a Christian seminary and has published a number of studies on Paul.’” She rejects the essentialist framework for understanding Paul, where Christianity is defined by devotion to Christ and Judaism by devotion to Torah. Such an approach squeezes Paul into Christianity from Judaism and makes him effectively “Christian.’’* The problem is that Paul was not a “Chris- tian,’ according to Eisenbaum, for his primary anthropological categories are not “Christian” and “non-Christian” but Jew and Gentile. Paul was a “typical Jew,’”’ but one who believed that the eschatological ingathering of the Gen- tiles was being accomplished through the death of Christ. “To put it boldly,’ Eisenbaum comments, “Jesus saves, but he only saves Gentiles.”*° She finds the idea deeply offensive that Judaism is a flawed religion inherently linked to sin. In her thinking, this is not what Paul was about; rather, Paul provides a way to maintain the particularity of his ethnic and religious identity without denying the ethnic and religious identity of others. Paul is, then, a working model for religious pluralism.*’ The lasting contribution of Nanos and Eisenbaum and their colleagues on the “Paul within Judaism” is their reclamation of Paul as a Jewish thinker, one who is a Torah-observant Jew, and his debates about Gentiles and circumcision can be understood as in-house Jewish debates about how to include Gentile outsiders in Jewish assemblies. That said, there is still something that just does not fit. A close reading of the Pauline letters suggests that Paul's problem with contemporary Jews is not merely the proper grounds for mutual relationships between Gentile 77. Pamela M. Eisenbaum, “A Remedy for Having Been Born of Woman: Jesus, Gentiles, and Genealogy in Romans,’ JBL 123 (2004): 671-702; idem, “Following in the Footnotes of the Apostle Paul,” in Identity and the Politics of Scholarship in the Study of Religion, ed. S. Davaney and J. Cabezon (New York: Routledge, 2004), 77-97; idem, “Paul, Polemics, and the Problem of Essentialism,” BI 13 (2005): 224-38; idem, Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). 78. Eisenbaum, “Problem of Essentialism,” 232. 79. Eisenbaum, Paul Was Not a Christian, 150. 80. Eisenbaum, Paul Was Not a Christian, 242. 81. Eisenbaum, Paul Was Not a Christian, 1-4. 23 INTRODUCTION Christ-believers and non—-Christ-believing Jews to take place; rather, it is an an- thropological problem.