Exposure Dread

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 Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  To suppress the recruit's so-called evil or precult personality and lifestyle, the group actively promotes increased participation in group-coordinated activities and in even more mind-altering practices. Either because the group forbids it or because it is an act of self-protection, access to outside information is limited and the new member is discouraged from maintaining precult contacts, most notably with family or close friends. Such contact might expose conflicts between new and old beliefs and upset the still delicate underpinnings necessary to secure adherence to the group. DreadGradually the cult's teachings insinuate a feeling of dread in the recruit that further isolates him and prevents his defection from the group. This is accomplished by increasing dependency on the group through escalated demands, intensified criticism and humiliation, and, in some cases, subtle or overt threats of punishment (physical, spiritual, emotional, or sexual). Even infants and children may be held responsible for the smallest infractions and forced to conform to group demands despite their age. Dread is also intensified once members become even partially dependent on the group or increasingly alienated from their former support network. Many groups use powerful forces of social control, such as threats of excommunication, shunning, and abandonment by the group. If a person is completely estranged from the rest of the world, then staying put in the group appears to be the only option. Members come to dread losing what they consider to be the group's emotional, psychological, and social support, regardless of how controlling or debilitating that support may actually be. Another dread-inducing technique is the induction of phobias. Many cults convey phobic messages such as: "If you leave, you are doomed to countless cycles of incarnation," "You will go crazy or die if you leave the group," "You will be ruined and never find a way to survive," "You are doomed to failure or terrible accidents if you do not obey," "If you leave this church, you are leaving God," "If you leave us, tragic events will occur in the lives of those you love," and so on. Many totalistic groups use phobia induction as a means of control and domination, and it's a rather effective way to keep doubting members from straying. The inevitable internalization of such fears goes quite deep. The Double BindThe effectiveness of a thought-reform program can also be enhanced through use of the "double bind" technique. This emotional cul-de-sac is defined in Merriam-Webster as a "psychological predicament in which a [usually dependent] person receives from a single source conflicting messages that allow no appropriate response to be made."15 Often a cult member faces disparagement no matter what he does. The double bind imparts a message of hopelessness: you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Cultic systems of influence and control are typically designed to elicit compliance and obedience. They demand and have an answer. The double bind, however, has no answer. The devotee gets criticized no matter what she does. Here is an example: Jackson D.

• From Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies (2020)

  - Everything outside this place is bullshit. - It certainly put butter on the map. - Stop! - If you go back to her interview, it really is that's a leap from what she's saying. I mean she stayed in touch with Brando, they were friends. - Listen, why don't you stop talking about things that don't matter here. - And I would describe her in that movie as nude instead of naked. There is something about her that's coquettish. And she's playing that. - All the mysteries that you're ever gonna know in life are right here. - The women in prison genre began, actually in the 1970s with Roger Corman. ♪ I'm a longtime woman ♪ And I'm serving my time - These were films that starred a wonderful actress named Pam Grier. - Where do you want to be buried, nigger? - And it's Miss Nigger to you. - Pam Grier should rule the movies. I mean if there was any justice in the world. - The first one, I think, was, "The Big Dollhouse," "Women in Cages," "Twilight People." And then, "Black Mama White Mama," and then, "Coffy," "Foxy Brown," and, "Sugar Hill." And then I had a three picture deal woo-hoo!. - And Pam Grier became the number one action, kick ass lady of the '70s. - And it was basically just a standard prison plot, but it was women in prison. - Something has set in motion, something where these women are deprived of their freedom, and their put all together in these terrible situations. - The cobra's venom attacks the nervous system. The victim dies in convulsions. - And they were frequently naked. - Does this do a little thing for you? - [Mike] And always rebelling at the end to get their freedom. - These movies became wildly popular, especially in the Deep South, and the Midwest. - And European was more accepting in nudity. the rubenesque, Sophia Loren, you could show a little more bust on her. In America they go [gasping] oh my God. When I was in, "The Arena," they gave us an option to turn face the camera, just act like you're really showering, you're bathing. And I said well, I'm not gonna cover up, like the other characters are. They're gonna pull your clothes off. And I had to be mentally prepared to have that done, because it had been done to me as a child. - The hint of promised lesbianism, if there were no actual lesbian scenes. - Okay, that's enough. Hurry up so you can get out of here and fix my hair. Women in prison oppressed, they're gonna explode with sexual appetites and attraction, and they're just gonna be borderline. Well, yeah that's for when you oppress anybody for a while. And then plus they didn't have wardrobe. We just had T-shirts. - And since nothing succeeds like success, they would churn out as many of them as they could.

• From Shunned (2018)

  Regardless, Lory was one of the most intelligent people I knew, the kind of person you could see becoming a revolutionary brain surgeon or physicist. Instead, when she got out of high school in the early ’70s, she immediately started pioneering and supported herself with part-time housekeeping jobs. After all, Armageddon was coming and all prophecies pointed to these being the Last Days of the worldly system. Her mental acuity became focused on the Scriptures, and she spent hours studying theocratic literature and researching topics in the encyclopedic Aid to Bible Understanding and other Watchtower Society tomes. Now, as my sister and I walked into her kitchen, I saw that she’d set out two sets of teacups and shot glasses, and a full bottle of Crown Royal Black. Steam was languishing over a teakettle on the stove. A small plate held tea biscuits and my favorite chocolate-covered toffee. “It looks like you’ve prepared for all contingencies,” I said. “Booze, caffeine, chocolate, and sugar.” “That’s right,” Lory said. She wasn’t the sort to fuss over me, and I was surprised and touched that she would have taken the time to make these preparations. It lessened the knot I felt in my belly. No. That is exactly what she wants—for you to relax. You’re dealing with a smart cookie here. Keep your wits about you. I took a deep breath. She surprised me by pouring whiskey into both shot glasses. My sister had never had a taste or physical tolerance for alcohol. “Would you like some tea?” she asked, and I said I would. She pulled a tray from the cupboard, lined it with a cloth napkin, and started placing the cups, glasses, and treats on it. “I thought we’d talk in the sunroom,” she said, pouring hot water over tea bags. “Fine,” I said, complying with her plans, a sense of both dread and guilt coming over me. She was going to a lot of trouble to receive me hospitably, and I knew in my heart she would be unsuccessful at dissuading me. It would take a long time for my family to accept that. Just the thought of it made me tired. I grabbed the bottle of Crown Royal and followed my sister past the dining room and into the beaming sunroom at the front of the house. She set the tray down on the coffee table, and we both sat down on the couch. “We’ve never done this before,” I said. “Sit in this room?” Lory said. “That too,” I said. “But I don’t think I’ve ever had tea and whiskey at the same time, and I can’t say I’d ever have imagined you’d be the one offering it to me.” I took my first sip from the shot glass, and Lory did the same. “Okay,” I said. “Go ahead and say what you have to say. I’m listening.”

• From The Breast Archives (2017)

  And they're all padded and big and they cover the whole thing. - We have to with the paradigms that are given to us, and I hope that amongst each other, at least, we can feel free and safe to expose. So I was wearing this scarf this morning, and actually around my throat. It somehow feels that that's an area that needs to be protected at times. And then I thought it would be nice to have a zipper so I can slowly unzip, and then under there I decided, even though I knew what I was doing, I decided to, I guess I'll take this off, to wear the bra and make that part of what I wanted to show. 'Cause look what I was saying before, how that it protects. And I don't know if you can see it, but when I'll take it off it even leaves marks on my skin because it's a little bit too tight. Now this is kind of scary because I never really know if my nipples are in or out. (laughs) So I guess it's still a little bit disconnected. Oh, I guess they're still saying, somewhat, yes. (laughs) (soft instrumental music) - The first time, it's like you're asking the question, when's the first time I exposed my breasts, and I'm kinda like, John, Bill, who, who got it first? I would have to say, I'm definitely in high school. Did I? It would certainly never be in the light. It would not be in the daylight. But it would be in a Chevy. (laughing) - When I first revealed my breasts, and I was only, 14, I pretended I was asleep and I let him look and touch, and I loved it but I couldn't possibly. A girl was not allowed, a Catholic girl on top of it, yow! But I found a way to enjoy without being responsible. (laughing) - Whenever I would be intimate with someone, I would always enter the intimacy, AKA, being naked, with a sort of, sort of hidey, nervousness, trying to be sexy but trying to hide them at the same time. It was an interesting dance. (laughing) - I can honestly say that I don't even know if I really exposed my breasts, but there's always the lifting up, the getting to the bra and kinda helpin' them out to maneuver. And it's like, can he do it? Can he undo it? And it's like, I'm always grateful when he can do it. And then the bra is always hanging there. There's no lifting the shift over your head or the sweater, so it's up all underneath this stuff. So nobody's really looking, and it's like, hope they get there. (wincing) - The moment of, voluntary intimacy in the early years were actually with girls. She was actually a woman, a young woman a few years older than me.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  Art, literature, and philosophy are attempts to found the world anew on a human freedom: that of the creator; to foster such an aim, one must first unequivocally posit oneself as a freedom. The restrictions that education and custom impose on woman limit her grasp of the universe; when the struggle to claim a place in this world gets too rough, there can be no question of tearing oneself away from it; one must first emerge within it in sovereign solitude if one wants to try to grasp it anew: what woman primarily lacks is learning from the practice of abandonment and transcendence, in anguish and pride. Marie Bashkirtseff writes: What I want is the freedom to walk around alone, come and go, sit on park benches in the Tuileries Gardens. Without this freedom you cannot become a true artist. You think you can profit from what you see when you are being accompanied or when you must wait for your car, your nursemaid, your family to go to the Louvre!… This is the freedom that is missing and without which one cannot seriously become something. Thinking is imprisoned by this stupid and incessant constraint … That is all it takes to clip one’s wings. This is one of the reasons there are no women artists.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  Indeed, for one to become a creator, it is not enough to be cultivated, that is, to make going to shows and meeting people part of one’s life; culture must be apprehended through the free movement of a transcendence; the spirit with all its riches must project itself in an empty sky that is its to fill; but if a thousand fine bonds tie it to the earth, its surge is broken. The girl today can certainly go out alone, stroll in the Tuileries; but I have already said how hostile the street is: eyes everywhere, hands waiting; if she wanders absentmindedly, her thoughts elsewhere, if she lights a cigarette in a café, if she goes to the cinema alone, an unpleasant incident can quickly occur; she must inspire respect by the way she dresses and behaves: this concern rivets her to the ground and to self. “Her wings are clipped.” At eighteen, T. E. Lawrence went on a grand tour through France by bicycle; a young girl would never be permitted to take on such an adventure: still less would it be possible for her to take off on foot for a half-desert and dangerous country as Lawrence did. Yet such experiences have an inestimable impact: this is how an individual in the headiness of freedom and discovery learns to look at the entire world as his fief. The woman is already naturally deprived of the lessons of violence: I have said how physical weakness disposes her to passivity; when a boy settles a fight with punches, he feels he can rely on himself in his own interest; at least the girl should be allowed to compensate by sports, adventure, and the pride of obstacles overcome. But no. She may feel alone within the world: she never stands up in front of it, unique and sovereign. Everything encourages her to be invested and dominated by foreign existences: and particularly in love, she disavows rather than asserts herself. Misfortune and distress are often learning experiences in this sense: it was isolation that enabled Emily Brontë to write a powerful and unbridled book; in the face of nature, death, and destiny, she relied on no one’s help but her own. Rosa Luxemburg was ugly; she was never tempted to wallow in the cult of her image, to make herself object, prey, and trap: from her youth she was wholly mind and freedom. Even then, it is rare for a woman to fully assume the agonizing tête-à-tête with the given world. The constraints that surround her and the whole tradition that weighs on her keep her from feeling responsible for the universe: this is the profound reason for her mediocrity.

• From The Perfect Vagina: The Dangers of Extreme Plastic Surgery

  24:49 that look like this just think 16 so 24:52 24:52 young to start mucking around with your 24:53 24:53 body if I'm going to truly understand 24:56 24:56 why girls want labia plasties I have to 24:58 24:58 put my myself in their position and see 25:00 25:00 whether he thinks I'd need surgery on 25:03 25:03 mine oh God it's all very well me doing 25:07 25:07 a program about plastic surgery on 25:08 25:08 people's vaginas and asking questions 25:10 25:10 about it and being quite critical about 25:12 25:12 it but um you know I shouldn't I 25:15 25:15 shouldn't I don't have the right to be 25:16 25:16 like that if I'm not prepared to to uh 25:19 25:19 you know not put my money where my mouth 25:21 25:21 is put my f where my mouth is and quite 25:23 25:23 frankly yeah I am slightly cing it 25:29 25:29 I decided to go on this journey to 25:31 25:31 discover why women are having vaginal 25:33 25:33 plastic 25:33 25:33 surgery but I didn't think for a minute 25:36 25:36 I'd have a surgeon giving a critique on 25:39 25:39 mine 25:42 25:42 I'm do you know what this is far worse 25:44 25:44 than getting me bits cast by Jamie 25:46 25:46 because somebody's looking at them with 25:49 25:49 with a judgmental 25:51 25:51 eye the way it works best is is if I lay 25:54 25:54 you down a little bit in this chair okay 25:56 25:56 then you put your feet up here mm and 25:58 25:58 then if you needes to the Sid okay yeah 26:01 26:01 so the back of the chair goes down a 26:03 26:03 little 26:07 26:07 bit 26:09 26:09 okay so if we open the outer labor a 26:13 26:13 little bit we can see the skin on the 26:15 26:15 clal hood and we can see the laor which 26:18 26:18 are fairly thin in your case the inset 26:22 26:22 of your inner labia is quite high they 26:24 26:24 don't they don't go down all the length 26:25 26:25 of the the vver SLP right so all in all 26:29 26:29 um I think your V is pretty normal okay 26:35 26:35 um I suppose the question I want to ask 26:37 26:37 is has anybody come to you with a Volver 26:39 26:39 that doesn't look that dissimilar to 26:40 26:40 mine who who would want surgery uh yes 26:43 26:43 they 26:44 26:44 have did she say what she wanted 26:46 26:46 different yes she felt that there was a 26:48 26:48 little bit too much skin on the little 26:50 26:50 hood and so she wanted that changed she 26:52 26:52 wanted that 26:54 26:54 changed if you have a little bit of 26:55 26:55 extra skin on your upper eyelids you 26:57 26:57 have it changed that's extraordinary 26:59

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  She thought nothing of leaving us alone in the toy department at Marshall Field’s in downtown Chicago while she and her friends did their Christmas shopping. Once, when I was about six, on a trip to the Brookfield Zoo, my mother loaded me up with so much Dramamine to keep me from getting carsick that I was too drowsy to walk. So, she draped me under a tree and left me there while she and the other kids toured the park. Today, this would be considered felony abandonment. Back then, it was the law of the herd: Do what you can for the greatest number and leave the rest. My mother couldn’t be the source of all our emotional nourishment. It wasn’t possible. There were too many of us. We’d have to look to each other or elsewhere for that. So, we roamed in packs, taking our chances, oblivious to the danger that lurked everywhere. We never wore bike helmets or seat belts. No one I knew did. We never owned a car seat. Babies rode in wicker baskets. My mother merely stuck out her right arm when she hit the brakes suddenly to keep one or more of us from crashing into the dashboard or flying through the windshield. For birthday parties, my mother and her friends would hire a man to pick us up in a rusty decommissioned fire engine and transport us to an amusement park in Skokie called Fun Fair. We’d hang over the side of the truck as it weaved its way through city traffic, and climb the ladder for a better view. Inside the park, we’d scramble on rides like the Little Dipper, the Tilt-A-Whirl, and the Wild Mouse, which proved a little too wild once and veered off the tracks. To the uninitiated, my mother appeared unflappable. She once stood smoking her cigarette and listening to her friend’s story in rapt attention at the grocery store entrance, never breaking eye contact, while five-year-old Billy toppled a tower of tin cans a few aisles away. Her friends admired her for how calm and collected she appeared, even as we made a ruckus. But, as we grew older, we became aware that her seemingly cool demeanor was really the result of medication that blunted her natural inclination to anxiety. The truth is, she was often frantic inside. We heard her pacing the hallways at night, humming to herself. We saw her rubbing her thumb nervously back and forth on her chin. The older we got, the more the responsibility for supervising all of us seemed to overwhelm her. She calculated the odds and considered that they were not in her favor. Too many opportunities for disaster: Light sockets. Sharp scissors. Swimming pools. Hyper kids darting around in busy parking lots. My mother began viewing us with increasing dread, as if sensing that something awful was heading our way and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do to stop it.

• From Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1997)

  It’s easy to understand why Aché women aren’t big-game hunters: they can’t spend the time away from their children, and they can’t afford the risk of going even a day with an empty bag, which would jeopardize lactation and pregnancy. But why does a man eschew palm starch, settle for the lower average return from hunting, and not bring home his catch to his wife and kids, as the traditional view of anthropologists predicts? This paradox suggests that something other than the best interests of his wife and children lie behind an Aché man’s preference for big-game hunting. As Kristen Hawkes described these paradoxes to me, I developed an awful foreboding that the true explanation might prove less noble than the male’s mystique of bringing home the bacon. I began to feel defensive on behalf of my fellow men and to search for explanations that might restore my faith in the nobility of the male strategy. My first objection was that Kristen Hawkes’s calculations of hunting returns were measured in calories. In reality, any nutritionally aware modern reader knows that not all calories are equal. Perhaps the purpose of big-game hunting lies in fulfilling our need for protein, which is more valuable to us nutritionally than the humble carbohydrates of palm starch. However, Aché men target not only protein-rich meat but also honey, whose carbohydrates are every bit as humble as those of palm starch. While Kalahari San men (“Bushmen”) are hunting big game, San women are gathering and preparing mongongo nuts, an excellent protein source. While lowland New Guinea hunter-gatherer men are wasting their days in the usually futile search for kangaroos, their wives and children are predictably acquiring protein in the form of fish, rats, grubs, and spiders. Why don’t San and New Guinea men emulate their wives? I next began to wonder whether Aché men might be unusually ineffective hunters, an aberration among modern hunter-gatherers. Undoubtedly, the hunting skills of Inuit (Eskimo) and Arctic Indian men are indispensable, especially in winter, when little food other than big game is available. Tanzania’s Hadza men, unlike the Aché, achieve higher average returns by hunting big game rather than small game. But New Guinea men, like the Aché, persist in hunting even though yields are very low. And Hadza hunters persist in the face of enormous risks, since on the average they bag nothing at all on twenty-eight out of twenty-nine days spent hunting. A Hadza family could starve while waiting for the husband-father to win his gamble of bringing down a giraffe. In any case, all that meat occasionally bagged by a Hadza or Aché hunter isn’t reserved for his family, so the question of whether big-game hunting yields higher or lower returns than alternative strategies is academic from his family’s point of view. Big-game hunting just isn’t the best way to feed a family.

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  EILIKRINĒS AND EILIKRINEIATHE PERFECT PURITYEilikrinēs and eilikrineia—the first is the adjective and the second is the noun—are two most interesting words. Eilikrinēs occurs in Phil. 1.10, where the AV translates it ‘sincere’, the American RSV ‘pure’, and Moffatt ‘transparent’; it also occurs in II Pet. 3.1, where both the AV and Moffatt translate it ‘pure’, and the American RSV ‘sincere’. Eilikrineia, the noun, occurs in I Cor. 5.8, II Cor. 1.12 and II Cor. 2.17. The regular translation of all the versions is ‘sincerity’, with the one exception that Moffatt in the first example translates it ‘innocence’. Neither the noun nor the adjective is very common in classical Greek. In classical Greek eilikrinēs has two characteristic usages. First it means ‘unmixed, without alloy, pure’. For instance, fire, the purest thing of all, is said to be eilikrinēs. It is used of a ‘total’ eclipse of the sun. Second, it is used as we use the words ‘pure’ and ‘sheer’. For instance it is used of ‘pure’ intellect, or ‘sheer’, ‘unrelieved’ evil. In the papyri neither is common. A suppliant appeals to the eilikrineia of an official, where the word must mean ‘probity, fairness, justice’. The etymology and derivation of these words in Greek has always been doubtful. There are two suggestions. (i) They may be derived from a Greek word eilein which means ‘to shake to and fro in a sieve’ until the last particle of foreign matter is extracted and the substance is left absolutely pure. So then these words describe a purity which is ‘sifted’. They describe the character which has been so cleansed and purified by the grace of God that there is no evil admixture left. (ii) They may be derived from a combination of two Greek words, heilē, which means ‘the sunlight’, and krinein, which means ‘to judge’. They would, in that case, describe something which can stand the judgment of the sunlight, something which even when it is held up to the clear light of the sun reveals no faults and flaws. There is a vivid picture here. In the eastern bazaars the shops were small and dark and shadowed. An article, say a piece of pottery or glassware or cloth, might look all right in the dim recesses of the trader’s booth; but the wiser buyer would take it out into the street and hold it up and submit it to the judgment of the sunlight; and many a time the clear rays of the sun would reveal faults and flaws that would never have been noticed in the shadows of the shop. Theopylact must have been thinking of that when he spoke of ‘eilikrineia, purity of mind and guilelessness which have nothing concealed in the shadows and nothing lurking beneath the surface’.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  I don’t fault people their suspicions. I learned long ago to distrust my childhood and the stories that shaped it. It was only many years later, after I had sat at my father’s grave and spoken to him through Africa’s red soil, that I could circle back and evaluate these early stories for myself. Or, more accurately, it was only then that I understood that I had spent much of my life trying to rewrite these stories, plugging up holes in the narrative, accommodating unwelcome details, projecting individual choices against the blind sweep of history, all in the hope of extracting some granite slab of truth upon which my unborn children can firmly stand. At some point, then, in spite of a stubborn desire to protect myself from scrutiny, in spite of the periodic impulse to abandon the entire project, what has found its way onto these pages is a record of a personal, interior journey—a boy’s search for his father, and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American. The result is autobiographical, although whenever someone’s asked me over the course of these last three years just what the book is about, I’ve usually avoided such a description. An autobiography promises feats worthy of record, conversations with famous people, a central role in important events. There is none of that here. At the very least, an autobiography implies a summing up, a certain closure, that hardly suits someone of my years, still busy charting his way through the world. I can’t even hold up my experience as being somehow representative of the black American experience (“After all, you don’t come from an underprivileged background,” a Manhattan publisher helpfully points out to me); indeed, learning to accept that particular truth—that I can embrace my black brothers and sisters, whether in this country or in Africa, and affirm a common destiny without pretending to speak to, or for, all our various struggles—is part of what this book’s about. Finally, there are the dangers inherent in any autobiographical work: the temptation to color events in ways favorable to the writer, the tendency to overestimate the interest one’s experiences hold for others, selective lapses of memory. Such hazards are only magnified when the writer lacks the wisdom of age; the distance that can cure one of certain vanities. I can’t say that I’ve avoided all, or any, of these hazards successfully. Although much of this book is based on contemporaneous journals or the oral histories of my family, the dialogue is necessarily an approximation of what was actually said or relayed to me. For the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology. With the exception of my family and a handful of public figures, the names of most characters have been changed for the sake of their privacy.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  In that last year of law school, I began to organize in my mind, with a frightening confidence, just how the book would proceed. There would be an essay on the limits of civil rights litigation in bringing about racial equality, thoughts on the meaning of community and the restoration of public life through grassroots organizing, musings on affirmative action and Afrocentrism—the list of topics filled an entire page. I’d include personal anecdotes, to be sure, and analyze the sources of certain recurring emotions. But all in all it was an intellectual journey that I imagined for myself, complete with maps and restpoints and a strict itinerary: the first section completed by March, the second submitted for revision in August …. When I actually sat down and began to write, though, I found my mind pulled toward rockier shores. First longings leapt up to brush my heart. Distant voices appeared, and ebbed, and then appeared again. I remembered the stories that my mother and her parents told me as a child, the stories of a family trying to explain itself. I recalled my first year as a community organizer in Chicago and my awkward steps toward manhood. I listened to my grandmother, sitting under a mango tree as she braided my sister’s hair, describing the father I had never truly known. Compared to this flood of memories, all my well-ordered theories seemed insubstantial and premature. Still, I strongly resisted the idea of offering up my past in a book, a past that left me feeling exposed, even slightly ashamed. Not because that past is particularly painful or perverse but because it speaks to those aspects of myself that resist conscious choice and that—on the surface, at least—contradict the world I now occupy. After all, I’m thirty-three now; I work as a lawyer active in the social and political life of Chicago, a town that’s accustomed to its racial wounds and prides itself on a certain lack of sentiment. If I’ve been able to fight off cynicism, I nevertheless like to think of myself as wise to the world, careful not to expect too much.

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

  Her intentional invocation of her own corporeality through the use of embodied discourse reminds us that intellectual work is not a disembodied project. That fact alone makes it untenable for scholars to continue to read Black women’s literature solely or primarily through the corporeal frames offered to us by the culture of dissemblance or the politics of respectability. Respectability and dissemblance belong to a broader constellation of social formulations that race women theorized and enacted to protect themselves and make themselves known on their own terms. But if we fail to move beyond respectability, we will continue to miss critical parts of the story. Cooper, like other Black women thinkers of her time, recognized that muting her body, or dissembling, offered little safety and limited prospects for achieving respectability. For instance, in what is most assuredly an allusion to Ida B. Wells’s violent encounter on a train in the late 1880s, Cooper wrote, “I purposely forbear to mention instances of personal violence to colored women traveling in less civilized sections of our country, where women have been forcibly ejected from cars, thrown out of seats, their garments rudely torn, their person wantonly and cruelly injured.”19 This forthright presentation of a Black female body injured in the process of doing race work is just one of many examples of how embodied discourse shows up in Cooper’s work and that of other Black women—pushing us to deal with the embodied dimensions of public Black women’s lives. Cooper’s use of embodied discourse as a disruptive textual practice ultimately locates Black female bodies within the project of racial knowledge production and the reorganization of place or public space. For Cooper, and for this project, Black bodies—and in particular, Black women’s bodies—mark possibilities and generative tensions that are sites of inspiration and theory production. Whether the orienting Black body included a pregnant woman, a young man, an embryonic, gender neutral body, or even her own body experiencing various modes of segregation, Cooper’s work can be read through tracking the varying invocations of Black bodies as a mechanism for theory production itself.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  The word of God is penetrating. The writer piles up phrases to show how penetrating it is. It penetrates to the division of soul and spirit. In Greek, the psuchē, the soul, is the essence of life. All living things possess psuchē; it is physical life. In Greek, the pneuma, the spirit, is that which is characteristic of human beings. It is by spirit that we think and reason and look beyond the earth to God. It is as if the writer to the Hebrews were saying that the word of God tests our earthly life and our spiritual existence. He says that the word of God scrutinizes our desires and intentions. Desire (enthumēsis) is the emotional part, and intention (ennoia) is the intellectual part of every individual. It is as if he said: ‘Your emotional and intellectual life must both be submitted to the scrutiny of God.’ Finally, the writer to the Hebrews sums things up. He says that everything is naked to God and compelled to meet his eyes. He uses two interesting words. The word for naked is the literal word (gumnos). What he is saying is that we may be able to wear our outward coverings and disguises; but in the presence of God these things are stripped away and we have to meet him as we are. The other word is even more vivid (tetrachēlismenos). This is not a common word, and its meaning is not quite certain. It seems to have been used in three different ways. (1) It was a wrestler’s word, and was used for seizing an opponent by the throat in such a way that he could not move. We may escape God for a while, but in the end he grips us in such a way that we cannot help meeting him face to face. God is one issue that no one can finally evade. (2) It was the word that was used for flaying animals. Animals were hung up and the hide was taken off them. Other people may judge us by our outer conduct and appearance, but God sees into the innermost secrets of our hearts. (3) Sometimes when a criminal was being led to judgment or to execution, a dagger, with point upwards, was fixed below his chin so that he could not bow his head to avoid being recognized, but had to keep it up so that all could see his face and know his dishonour. When that was done, the person was said to be tetrachēlismenos.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Of these two biological turning points, all four Gospels contain elaborately detailed descriptions of his arrest and death, which may be the earliest written elements in their text. By contrast, only two of four Gospels concern themselves with Jesus’s birth: Matthew and Luke. Mark, almost certainly the earliest Gospel, says nothing about it, but instead plunges straight into describing Jesus’s short public ministry in Palestine, heralded by the ancient prophet Isaiah and the modern forerunner prophet called John the Baptist. John the Evangelist’s Gospel, the outlier, bursts instead into a majestic cosmic hymn, a deliberate echo of the Creation stories in Genesis, which makes Jesus the eternal and pre-existing Word (Logos, a Greek term of divinity inherited from Plato and Philo Judaeus). This Word had been with God in the making of all things: John describes a beginning, not a birth. By contrast, Matthew and Luke craft an elaborate sequence of stories generally described by Christian commentators as the ‘Infancy Narratives’, describing his birth from Mary in Bethlehem and his early childhood. Much of this material is very familiar to even occasional churchgoers from their own childhood onwards, through its regular rehearsal in candle-lit services during the Yuletide season, and the familiarity extends to anyone choosing Christmas cards with a religious flavour. Consequently, to cast a critical eye on these accounts in Matthew and Luke is to enter perhaps the most emotionally charged territory in all Christian discussion of sex. In the 1980s, Jane Schaberg, a biblical scholar who conscientiously took a scalpel to their texts, had her car firebombed in her university car park, amid other less dramatic harassment and cold-shouldering by her academic colleagues.[5] Such extreme reactions may be reinforced by that deceptive familiarity of the Infancy Narratives, yet if one returns the excerpts commonly run together in Christmas services back into their actual places in their respective Gospels, it quickly becomes apparent how little overlap there is in the various incidents recorded in Matthew and Luke. Both Infancy Narratives contain linear genealogies for Jesus, but only some names occur in both (to the discreet puzzlement of Christian commentators from early times, resulting in much busyness in trying to reconcile them). Both genealogies end in a feature that makes no sense for a family tree, or for conventional accounts of the Incarnation: their genealogical goal is Joseph, who on any reading of the stories in the Infancy Narratives cannot be Jesus’s biological father. Both genealogies rather lamely make that clear, Luke launching his version by speaking of Jesus as ‘the son (as was supposed) of Joseph’ (Luke 3.23).[6] Matthew has previously stated that Joseph ‘knew [Mary] not’ (that is, did not consummate their marriage) ‘until she had borne a son’: that is, Jesus (Matt. 1.25).

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  Derek’s retirement had been brought on by his realization, as a fourth grader, that he just wasn’t much of a player, that he was not only shorter and chubbier but slower and less coordinated than his teammates. He raised this in a matter-of-fact way with his parents. When he said that he would prefer a spot in “the front office,” they laughed, talked the decision through with him, hugged him, and agreed. Yet in his first season in his new position, Alison had gradually stopped coming to practices and soon also to games, because of her own work as an attorney, she told her husband and son, and because Derek’s younger sister was getting old enough to have her own schedule. What Alison suspected, though, what she suspected with something awfully like certainty, was that she wasn’t merely avoiding the sight of her son draping towels around the shoulders of the boys and girls on the team (the league was coed) or the cooing, complimentary remarks she received about Derek from the other moms, but that she was avoiding a new—no, a partially new—vision of Thomas. She just didn’t want to see him teaching the box-out technique or charting another play on his clipboard in a time-out huddle. Then, as Derek’s second front-office season was about to start, her son begged her to watch the opener. So, after Thomas had cooked Saturday pancakes, scrubbed the griddle, loaded the dishwasher, and driven off with Derek to the New Jersey community center to make sure all was ready for the Blazers’ arrival, Alison helped Derek’s sister pick out a special outfit and followed in her car. A circle and a line defined a debate in sexology, a debate about the natural course and velocity of female desire, a dispute entangled with a question: how well do marriage and monogamy work for women’s libidos? Rosemary Basson, a physician and professor of psychiatry and gynecology at the University of British Columbia, had started devising and drawing the circle over a decade ago, sketching it for female patients and couples, for women worried about their lack of lust. She was just past sixty now, feathery brown hair cropped above her ears. Her voice was wispy, her skin pale. As we talked across a coffee table in her Vancouver office, she wore a flowing skirt with a pattern of leaves; she seemed almost formless, ethereal. Yet there was something quietly stern, no-nonsense, governess-like in her speech. She’d been pulled toward the field of eros as an internist in England. Assigned to a ward of patients with spinal-cord injuries, a floor with a steady supply of men left paralyzed by motorcycle accidents, she found herself confronting, now and then, a man who had worked up the courage to ask how—or whether—he could ever have sex. She asked a supervisor for advice. “Change the subject,” he told her. “Change the subject.” She still remembered his tone: tight, panicked. She’d been dealing with the subject of sex ever since.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Like the earlier Swiss theologian Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), Calvin was not particularly interested in dogma: his concern was centered on the social, political and economic aspects of religion. He wanted to return to a simpler, scriptural piety but adhered to the doctrine of the Trinity, despite the unbiblical provenance of its terminology. As he wrote in The Institutes of the Christian Religion, God had declared that he was One but “clearly sets this before us as existing in three persons.”31 In 1553 Calvin had the Spanish theologian Michael Servetus executed for his denial of the Trinity. Servetus had fled Catholic Spain and had taken refuge in Calvin’s Geneva, claiming that he was returning to the faith of the apostles and the earliest Fathers of the Church, who had never heard of this extraordinary doctrine. With some justice, Servetus argued that there was nothing in the New Testament to contradict the strict monotheism of the Jewish scriptures. The doctrine of the Trinity was a human fabrication which had “alienated the minds of men from the knowledge of the true Christ and presented us with a tripartite God.”32 His beliefs were shared by two Italian reformers—Giorgio Blandrata (ca. 1515–1588) and Faustus Socinus (1539–1604)—who had both fled to Geneva but discovered that their theology was too radical for the Swiss Reformation; they did not even adhere to the traditional Western view of the atonement. They did not believe that men and women were justified by Christ’s death but simply by their “faith” or trust in God. In his book Christ the Savior, Socinus repudiated the so-called orthodoxy of Nicaea: the term “Son of God” was not a statement about Jesus’ divine nature but simply meant that he was specially loved by God. He had not died to atone for our sins but was simply a teacher who “showed and taught the way of salvation.” As for the doctrine of the Trinity, that was simply a “monstrosity,” an imaginary fiction that was “repugnant to reason” and actually encouraged the faithful to believe in three separate gods.33 After the execution of Servetus, Blandrata and Socinus both fled to Poland and Transylvania, taking their “Unitarian” religion with them. Zwingli and Calvin relied on more conventional ideas of God and, like Luther, they emphasized his absolute sovereignty. This was not simply an intellectual conviction but the result of an intensely personal experience. In August 1519, shortly after he had begun his ministry in Zurich, Zwingli contracted the plague that eventually wiped out twenty-five percent of the population of the city. He felt completely helpless, realizing that there was absolutely nothing he could do to save himself. It did not occur to him to pray to the saints for help or ask the Church to intercede for him. Instead he threw himself on God’s mercy. He composed this short prayer: Do as you will for I lack nothing. I am your vessel to be restored or destroyed.34

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  Lastly, when a theory of this range is inspired (inarticulately) by a hypergood, it cannot but distort our delibe rative predicament and draws a rigid boundary between the 'mo ral' and the 'non-mo ral' or (in Haber mas's case) between 'ethic al' considerations and those relating to the 'good life', which badly occludes their relation, and abov e all, prevents us from asking one of the crucial questions of modern mo ral thought: to what extent the "revisionist " claims made on beh alf of hype rgoods ought to be accepted at all (see section 3. 2.). The existence of this cast of thought and its import ance in our culture create an overwhelm ing case for articulation of the good. It suppresses so many questions and hides so many confusio ns that one cannot but experience it as intellectually asphyxiating, once one has escaped, even partially, from its spell. Moral Sources · 9 9 Of course a complex position of this kind, whose parts interlock so well as to form a kind of fortress, in which the different epistemological, metaphysical, and moral motives buttress each other while hiding their joint operation, will inspire attack from many sides. Not all will be concerned to articulate the underlying notions of the good. There is an influential line of attack today, which can loosely be called neo-Nietzschean, and of which the late Michel Foucault propounded an influential variant, which has its own strong reasons to deny articulation . The neo-Nietzch ean position attacks the procedural ethic mainly for its implicit moral inspirations: to for the concep tion of freedom it defends, and for its attachment to a hypergood and consequent radical revisionism. In this it resembles my critique, because we both want to show that this modern philosophy has moral motives, instead of being uniquely determined by epistemic ones. But there the convergence ends. The neo-Nietzschean type of theory sees no value in this articulation other than the polemical one of unmasking the pretensions of modern moral philosophy and, indeed, of much of moral philosophy in general. It sees no value in this articulation itself. On the contrary, it has espoused its own version of projection theory. If intellectual positions are closely tied up with moral ones, this is because both are to be seen as orders which we have imposed on reality, following a line of thinking drawn largely from The Gay Science.11 No position is to be seen as more or less ju stified than any other. All are ultimately based on fiat. Such are the "regimes of truth" of which Foucault spoke.

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  35 K. Stendahl, 'The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West', HTR 56, 1963, pp. 199-215. The summary is given by Kasemann, 'Justification and Salvation History', Perspectives, pp. 6of. Kasemann stresses salvation history somewhat more than Stendahl did, who was principally concerned to argue that the problem of Jews and Gentiles, not that of a guilty conscience, accounts for most of Romans. Chapters 9-11 are not an appendix, but the climax of chs. 1-8 (p. 205). Stendahl agreed with Schweitzer on the limited role of righteousness by faith in Paul (p. 204 n. 10). Stendahl's position has been accepted, for example, by J. A. Fitzmyer, 'Saint Paul and the Law', The Jurist 27, 1967, p. 19. 36 'Justification and Salvation History', Perspectives, pp. 6of., 73f. 37 Ibid., p. 74. 38 Ibid., p. 64. Paul [V immunized us deeply against a conception of salvation history which broke in on us in secularized and political form with the Third Reich and its ideology. It will be understandable that as burnt children we are unwilling to add fuel to the fire which at the present day, for the third time in a century, is awakening such general enthusiasm. 39 Further, Kasemann suspects that the attractiveness of salvation history is not entirely without its support in modern religious aspirations. He sees it as being agreeable to the ecumenical movement, which tends 'to stress what binds rather than what divides, and looks for the same disposition in the New Testament' .4° Kasemann does not consider his own view to be based on modern theological considerations, but they clearly impart an urgency to the question and to its right solution as he sees it. What is instructive about this debate is this: both Kasemann and his critics are right, although in different ways. Kasemann, Stendahl and others are correct that the heart of Paul's theology cannot be centred on the indi vidual, while Bultmann, Bornkamm and Conzelmann are correct in main taining that the particular formulation 'righteousness by faith' does pri marily concern the individual.41 What this means is that the catch-word 'righteousness by faith' must be given up as the clue to Paul's thought. To some extent, it is a dispute about terms, as we shall see; for Paul can in certain circumstances summarize his own position by that very phrase. Yet that phrase, if taken as the centre or starting point of Paul's theology, leads one to miss its basic thrust. How we are to understand 'righteousness by faith' we shall discuss in a subsequent section. We shall here only summarize the reasons for which it is inadequate as a term to indicate the centre of Paul's theology. The reasons which tell against the phraseology 'righteousness by faith' as central to Pauline thought were briefly and persuasively put by Schweitzer, ai{d we may quote his summary:

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  The question that this word asks is, Could our inmost thoughts stand being brought out into the full light of day? Could our inmost motives stand being dragged out into the full glare of revealing light? To put the matter at its highest, Could the inmost thoughts of our minds and motions of our heart stand the scrutiny of the light of God’s eye? The Christian purity is a purity which is sifted until the last admixture of evil is gone, a purity which has nothing to conceal and whose inmost thoughts and desires will bear the full glare of the light of day. EKKLĒSIATHE CHURCH OF GODEkklēsia is the NT word for ‘church’, and is, therefore, one of the most important of all NT words. Like so many NT words it has a double background. (i) Ekklēsia has a Greek background. In the great classical days in Athens the ekklēsia was the convened assembly of the people. It consisted of all the citizens of the city who had not lost their civic rights. Apart from the fact that its decisions must conform to the laws of the State, its powers were to all intents and purposes unlimited. It elected and dismissed magistrates and directed the policy of the city. It declared war, made peace, contracted treaties and arranged alliances. It elected generals and other military officers. It assigned troops to different campaigns and dispatched them from the city. It was ultimately responsible for the conduct of all military operations. It raised and allocated funds. Two things are interesting to note. First, all its meetings began with prayer and sacrifice. Second, it was a true democracy. Its two great watchwords were ‘equality’ (isonomia) and ‘freedom’ (eleutheria). It was an assembly where everyone had an equal right and an equal duty to take part. When a case involving the right of any private citizen was before it—as in the case of ostracism or banishment—at least 6,000 citizens must be present. In the wider Greek world ekklēsia came to mean any duly convened assembly of citizens. It is interesting to note that the Roman world did not even try to translate the word ekklēsia; it simply transliterated it into ecclesia and used it in the same way. There is an interesting bilingual inscription found in Athens (dated A.D. 103-4). It can be read against the background of Acts 18. A certain Caius Vibius Salutaris had presented to the city an image of Diana and other images. The inscription lays it down that they are to be set up on their pedestals at every ekklēsia of the city in the theatre. To Greek and Roman alike the word was familiar in the sense of a convened assembly. So, then, when we look at it against this background, as Deissmann puts it, the Church was God’s assembly, God’s muster, and the convener is God.