Fear

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 100 of 529 · 20 per page

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

  to be witches. Encouraged by the precedent of medieval scholarly analysis dating back to the fourteenth century (see p. 420), they considered these unfortunates to be agents of the Devil. It is remarkable how seriously Protestants fearful of witchcraft took a misogynistic and rambling textbook on witchcraft written by two pre-Reformation Dominicans, one of whom, Jacobus Sprenger, had also been instrumental in promoting the Marian devotion of the Rosary: this was the egregious Malleus Maleficarum (‘Hammer of Witches’), first published in Strassburg in 1487.48 Maybe forty or fifty thousand people died in Europe and colonial North America on witchcraft charges between 1400 and 1800, most noticeably from around 1560, at just about the time when large-scale execution of heretics was coming to an end. The activity had curiously different peaks and troughs in different parts of Europe, and the common stereotype of the witch as a gnarled old woman does not reflect the reality in England that accused were characteristically prosperous or significant figures in their community, though commonly not the most peaceable. If they were indeed elderly women, there was often a long history of accusations against them, but also a sudden lack of male protection when their husbands died.49 A high incidence of witchcraft prosecutions was often found in western European regions, both Protestant and Catholic, which evolved effective systems of court discipline which people living under them would have difficulty in challenging. Individual personalities might then make all the difference. Some of the worst persecutions took place in the Archbishopric of Cologne after it was secured for the Bavarian Wittelsbach family. Ferdinand, Archbishop of Cologne from 1612, was a typical product of the radical Counter-Reformation self- discipline which characterized both his own Wittelsbach dynasty and the more militant Habsburgs in alliance with them (see p. 671). It has been plausibly suggested that these devoutly Catholic rulers were fighting more than the Protestantism which certainly obsessed them: their Jesuit mentors gave them a preoccupation with sin and judgement, now strengthened for the clergy among them by the new demands of a clerical celibacy much more conscientiously maintained than in the pre-Reformation Church. As Habsburgs, Wittelsbachs and an array of conscientious Counter-Reformation bishops struggled with their own temptations, witches became symbols of the general temptations which Satan used to torment society. Among Protestants it took one independent-minded Dutch Reformed minister, Balthazar Bekker, to excoriate witch-hunting in an influential book, Bewitched World (1691); this finally shamed many Protestant authorities in Germany into giving up witch trials. The Dutch Reformed Church did not thank him. Their colleagues in the mid-seventeenth-century Church of Scotland had distinguished

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

  conspire to give them a special and enduring place first in the history of Judaism, then of Christianity.22 The prophets’ primary job was to talk about the present, not the future, and there had been such prophets in Israel before this period – yet apparently not so ready as the new generation to confront people of power. Some prophetic concerns were now with external enemies: various threats to Jewish existence from the succession of great powers, provoking generally all-too- accurate prophetic warnings of imminent danger – one might consider such warnings as contributions to foreign policy debate. Yet prophets just as much feared internal enemies who would betray Yahweh and contaminate his worship by promoting inappropriate sacred places, or by stressing the theme of fertility so prominent in the widely flourishing cult of the fertility god Baal and in Canaanite worship generally. A classic conflict of the mid-ninth century was that with Queen Jezebel, a Phoenician princess who brought the worship of Baal with her on her marriage to King Ahab of Israel. She had to face the wrath of the prophet Elijah, whose name (‘Yahweh is my God’) economically encapsulated his agenda. In one of Elijah’s clashes with Ahab and Jezebel, Yahweh dramatically ended a long drought, showing that Elijah’s God could see off any fertility god if he so chose. Both Elijah and Jezebel in their confrontations indulged in massacres of prophets who adhered to the other side, the casualties reputedly running into hundreds.23 While only a few remnants of the pronouncements of Elijah or his fellow prophets of the ninth century survive embedded in later stories, the biblical record of eighth-century prophets (Amos, Hosea, Micah, the first Isaiah) probably represents the earliest sustained sequences in the Hebrew scriptures in something like their original form: these are impassioned, individual voices, not a careful editorial compilation from patches of earlier prose. Because there is so little surviving precedent, it is difficult to be certain how much of what they said was new or innovative, but the desperate nature of their times would suggest that they did bring a new message for the people of Yahweh. The prophets say much about their call to prophecy, which was not a career choice but generally associated with tension and trauma. So Amos is torn away from his prosperous Judaean farm to go north into hostile territory, still hotly denying that he is really a prophet, and Hosea finds that his wretched marriage shows him something of the faithlessness of Israel, to the extent that he will even say that the Lord ordered him to embark on this matrimonial disaster.24 The voice of these prophets is the singular ‘I’, but it is a very different singularity from the purposeful whimsicality of Diogenes in later Athens (see pp. 29–30). They speak of their loneliness and express their sense of bitter distance from the official religion of their day. They even attack the Temple cult of

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

  168 Lecture 32: Lord Acton, The History of Freedom it would control all aspects of the lives of its citizens, and that it would become fi scally irresponsible in its expansion. Acton admired Robert E. Lee. He wrote to Lee and asked him his feelings about the war. Lee replied that he had seen in states’ rights the only hope for avoiding the course of every democracy, including that of Athens. He believed that these democracies had destroyed the rights of the individual in the name of the majority. The defeat of the Confederacy was also the defeat of the federal idea. Acton believed that federalism, not centralization, was the hope for a guardian of liberty. Acton saw that the United States was no longer a federal republic but a unifi ed country. Federalism was also being discredited in Europe. Germany and Italy united, not as confederations of semiautonomous states, but as centralized nations. Since the time of his studies with Doellinger, Acton had planned to write a History of Liberty. This work would describe the history of liberty from its earliest days to the present. It would be based on the concept that ideas make history and that historical thinking is more important than historical knowledge. The History of Liberty would apply the lessons of history to Acton’s time. Acton believed that learning from the examples of the past was the greatest way to shape one’s conscience. Great events, individuals, and economic and social forces—all of these are shaped by ideas. He believed that the greatest of these ideas is liberty. Acton began to compile a library, which ultimately included 70,000 volumes. He took notes on slips of paper, wrote down his own ideas, penned aphorisms about liberty, corresponded with other historians, engaged in debates in English historical journals about such questions as moral judgment in history, and gave lectures based on his work. But he never actually wrote the book. Acton fi nally explained to two people why he never wrote this great work. To Mary Gladstone, he explained that no one agreed with him about what liberty truly is and about the importance of moral judgment. To Doellinger, he indicated that Doellinger did not agree with his idea of moral judgment. Acton believed that there could be no separation between public morality and private morality. A statesman should be judged by the same moral code used to judge an ordinary citizen. Murder is murder, whether committed by the state or by a criminal. Acton said that much of history is the justi fi cation

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

  organists, a large ancillary staff, and an inclination to use the English Prayer Book in a ceremonial style. The survival of cathedrals had given rise to an initially small group of English clergy and some lay sympathizers who had a very un-Reformed attitude to the Church, a style which in its later forms has come to be called ‘High Church’. These High Churchmen did not exactly despise preaching (indeed, one of their most influential members, Lancelot Andrewes, was a famous preacher), but they emphasized the solemn performance of public liturgy and the offering of beautiful music in settings of restrained beauty as the most fitting approaches to God in worship. They spoke much of the value of the sacraments: indeed, another useful label for them might be ‘sacramentalist’. To emphasize the sacraments placed more importance on the special quality and role of the clergy who performed the sacraments, so sacramentalists were also more clerical in their outlook than was common among English Protestants. They mostly held little respect for the Reformed scheme of salvation which stressed predestination, and in allusion to followers of a Dutch academic, Jacobus Arminius, who were also challenging predestination in the Dutch Reformed Church, during the 1610s their enemies took to calling them ‘Arminians’.71 Some of them, first in private but then provocatively in public, began saying that many aspects of the Reformation were regrettable. That might suggest a more radical conclusion that much in the Reformation should be reversed. Arminians defined all who disagreed with them, all the way up to bishops and noblemen, as ‘Puritans’, the implication being that such people were disloyal to the English Church (actually a version of the Church which existed beyond the cathedrals largely in the sacramentalists’ own imaginations). Notably for James, the Arminians were a good deal more respectful to monarchs than the ministers of the Scottish Kirk. The King favoured leading spokesmen of this group, but he judiciously balanced them with more conventional Reformed clergy. In one of the most statesmanlike actions in the career of a man who much esteemed himself as an international Reformed Protestant statesman, he persuaded both sides to cooperate in a new venture of biblical translation, an ‘Authorized Version’ which was issued in 1611 and which remains his happiest lasting achievement.72 Basing itself on the hierarchy of translations back to the time of William Tyndale ninety years before, even taking notice of the Roman Catholic ‘Douai’ version, which had scored some palpable hits against previous Protestant English translations, it has remained vital for anglophone culture worldwide: the ‘King James’ version beloved of conservative Christians professing their faith in Churches of whose nature the original King James would profoundly disapprove.73

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

  27 people wondered why, if God had chosen them, they were forced to suffer so much foreign oppression.  Answers to this question were given by the Prophets of the Hebrew Bible: The reason the people of God were suffering foreign domination is that they had sinned against God and God was punishing them. If they would repent, God would relent, and Israel would once again be an independent state.  At some point, however, this view of the Prophets no longer made sense. The people of Israel were doing their best to keep the Torah and the Law, yet they still suffered oppression. A view developed among some Jewish thinkers that evil forces existed in the world that were aligned against God and his people. In this view, the people of God were not suffering because they had broken God’s Law, but because they kept it. The powers of evil were out to destroy them because they were on the side of God.  According to this ancient view, this situation would not last long because God was soon going to intervene in history, overthrow the forces of evil, and bring in his good kingdom on earth, in which people could follow his Law in peace and prosperity. There would be a world of justice, with no more hatred, war, pain, or suffering. This end was to come very soon.  This is the view, known as Jewish apocalypticism, found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Interestingly enough, it’s a view that is also found in some of the gospels of the New Testament on the lips of Jesus. Jewish Apocalypticism  Jewish apocalypticists subscribed to four major tenets, the fi rst of which was dualism, a belief that there were two fundamental components of reality: the forces of good and the forces of evil. The forces of good have as their head God himself; the forces of evil have a personal counterpart to God, the devil.

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

  60 Lecture 9: Did the Jews Kill Jesus? o Scholars have recently proposed another explanation for Jesus’s actions at the Temple. He had declared that the Son of man would soon arrive and destroy all of God’s enemies. He may have thought that the enemies included not only the Romans but also Jewish authorities. o According to Mark 13:1, the disciples of Jesus had marveled at the magnifi cent Temple, but Jesus had said, “Not one stone will be left upon another”—all would be destroyed. o Jesus apparently taught that when the Son of man arrived, the entire Jewish system would be restructured, and those in power among the Jews would be taken out of power. It’s not hard to imagine that this message caught the attention of the authorities.  The Sadducees, who were in charge of the Temple and would have been the people that Jesus was opposing by his declarations, were led by the high priest of the Jews, a man named Caiaphas. Caiaphas and the other chief priests may well have become fearful of what would happen if Jesus continued proclaiming his message. Riots might result, and thousands could be killed. The Sadducees needed a legal charge to eliminate the threat posed by Jesus. Once Judas provided that legal charge, Jesus was handed over to Pontius Pilate.  We don’t know what actually happened when Pilate questioned Jesus. It’s almost certainly not true that the trial was conducted in front of large crowds. Pilate probably had several cases a day in which he had to deal with people who were understood to be troublemakers, as Jesus was.  When Pilate asked Jesus if he called himself the king of Jews, Jesus would have faced a dilemma. He did think that he was the king of the Jews, but not in the sense that he was going to lead an army against the Romans. As we’ve seen, he believed that he would be the king of God’s kingdom. When Pilate asked him the question, he probably was either silent or said yes. Pilate ordered Jesus to be taken off and crucifi ed.

• From Action (2014)

  I had had a great time and hadn’t hurt anyone—I was, of course of course, as safe as one can be while having sex, and not one of my partners was in love with me to a degree that knowledge of my travails would have thrashed inside their brain or heart with any great agitation. Still, I thought that if anyone found out, I was sunk. I knew that nothing about this weighted or negated my ability to be kind to the people I held close, do well in my academic life or at my job, or think critically and write well. I just didn’t think the rest of the world would know it, too, and so I felt imperiled by the idea of someone misunderstanding me based on that day’s tally marks in my diary. I thought anyone’s finding out would herald a life-sized crisis. Maybe it will. Writ large, that has been my fear throughout writing this entire book, but I believe in it too much to care. I hadn’t yet figured out back when, but no one who’s living a fulfilling and generous life (same thing) gives a rat’s ass about what other people want to do in bed. They’d rather not hear it, most of the time. It’s so strange—the twin pinnates of this fear that, by relating my sexual autobiographies honestly, I will be seen as boastful while simultaneously also contemptible. Together, this duo is the great oxymoron comprising how plenty of people categorize those who have a lot of sex. The eternal rule of life is that no one sees you as you see yourself unless you make them. Stop forcing how you feel down their throats. If you think that you’re an undesirable and are intent on letting other people know that, their initial impression of you as a potential font of mutual orgasms is compromised, and then you’re sunk. Not to be totally fucking gross and disgusting, but bonobos, our closest living relatives, are constantly on the move from one partner to the next. (They also live in a matriarchal society, which makes me think that bonobos may have their shit together better than we do across the board.)

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

  If there was any major failure now, Borman would have to twist the abort handle and allow the rocket-propelled escape tower at the top of the spacecraft to pull the command module free and hurtle them out to sea. There was no failure. Each engine was erupting and functioning just as von Braun had envisioned, producing a combined 7.6 million pounds of thrust, or 160 million horsepower—enough energy to power the entire United Kingdom at peak usage time—as the rocket began to inch upward. Blocks of ice formed by the supercool liquid oxygen in the rocket’s first stage shook free from the Saturn’s torso and splintered into a white confetti that rained into the firestorm below. A few feet off the pad, the Saturn V began to lean away from the support tower. This was the maneuver Lovell had described to Marilyn, designed to keep the vehicle safe from wind gusts that might throw it back into the tower. Down the nearby beaches, the ground began to shake, and people’s chests were pounded by the pressure waves, and it spread out at the speed of sound for miles around the Cape. Inside the command module, the noise had already become deafening for the astronauts, their headsets rendered useless for communicating with the Cape or with one another. Borman and Lovell could sense the slowness of the acceleration due to the sheer weight of the Saturn V, a much different kind of movement than they’d experienced from the nimble Titan II rocket that had powered the Gemini program just two years earlier. But it wasn’t just the speed that was different. The cabin shook so violently that Anders believed the rocket’s fins were grinding through the girders of the launch tower and being shorn off. He tried to find an instrument or a gauge to monitor, something that would confirm the disaster unfolding beneath him, but his head was being shaken with such force he couldn’t focus or even think, and even if he could have, he never could have communicated any information to Borman, either by speaking or signaling, since he was no longer in control of his body and his arms had turned to lead. None of this had been predicted or simulated. In the mountains of books and reams of papers, no one had mentioned that even before the rocket cleared the tower, the world inside it would be coming apart. Holy shit, Anders managed to think as the bodies of the three astronauts were rag-dolled against their straps, what the hell is going on? And the rocket still hadn’t cleared the launch tower. Groaning under its own weight, the Saturn V began to move higher, bending farther away from the tower as the spitting tail of flame grew longer.

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

  The flight was now just ten seconds old, but Anders already felt like a rat in the jaws of a giant, angry terrier, helpless to do anything but hang on and breathe while the five massive F-1 engines constantly swiveled their thrust to keep the 363-foot rocket from toppling over. Again, Anders tried to pick out instruments to get an idea of what was happening, but the rocket kept thrashing him into Lovell, against the wall, into his straps. The crew had trained for hundreds of hours for every kind of emergency, but NASA’s simulators were not the kind of dynamic, multiaxis machines that could come close to approximating such violence. If an engine had fallen off or exploded, if the rocket had been engulfed in flames, if any number of disasters had been unfolding, the crew wouldn’t have known about it, and they wouldn’t have been able to hear Mission Control tell them about it, either. Still, Borman kept his hand clear of the abort handle. To Anders, it seemed that the flight had already lasted an hour when he and his crewmates heard the first, faint transmission in their headphones, a call from the launch operations manager at the Cape that conveyed a simple but essential piece of information. “Tower clear.” The call had come thirteen seconds into the flight. At home, Borman’s seventeen-year-old son, Fred, watched on TV. He’d never known anyone as committed to his work as his father, a man he still saw as a fighter pilot at Edwards Air Force Base, a man who refused to crash in machines that crashed all the time. So Fred was calm today as the rocket climbed, just as he had been during Gemini 7, just as he had been every time there had been sirens and black smoke in the sky at Edwards. Just keep going, Dad, Fred thought. If you just keep doing that, everything’s going to be fine. Borman radioed back to Houston, which had just assumed command from the Cape now that the tower was clear. His voice quaked along with the rocket: “Roll and pitch program.” He was confirming that the vehicle was turning to head out to sea exactly as required. “Roger,” answered CapCom Mike Collins. The punishing cacophony began to diminish as a seagull—the same one Borman had seen before lift-off?—flew past the ripples of sound and smoke made by the rocket. “How do you hear me, Houston?” Borman asked. “Loud and clear,” Collins answered. Apollo 8 climbed higher, riding a column of fire into a brilliant blue sky. In Houston, controllers watched for any sign of catastrophe, ready to relay abort instructions to Borman, but all they saw were solid reports from their consoles. Inside the spacecraft, Anders could feel the ride smoothing out, and while he hoped the rocket’s fins hadn’t been ripped off by the tower, he figured he was probably okay given that, by all indications, he was still alive. My God, he thought.

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

  Some thought they heard an astronaut saying “We’re burning up!” After that, there was nothing but silence. Flames spread through the capsule. None of the astronauts could overcome the cabin’s highly pressurized atmosphere and move the inward-opening hatch. Seconds later, the capsule ruptured. Technicians rushed to the scene but were beaten back by heat and fire; almost six minutes passed before they could get inside. Rescue personnel found the crew, already expired from asphyxiation, their space suits fused to the melted interior of the spacecraft. Seven hours passed before the bodies could be removed. Until now, the American space program had owned an excellent safety record; even a chimpanzee named Ham, who’d flown on a suborbital mission in 1961, had come through it safely. Suddenly, three American heroes had died without ever leaving the launchpad, and in a way that seemed entirely preventable. Hundreds of grown men at NASA were reduced to tears by the accident. Media reports blamed an electrical spark for igniting the pure oxygen environment of the spacecraft’s cabin. But to many, there seemed a more basic explanation. “There’s reason to believe that establishing a deadline of 1970 for the Moon flight contributed to their deaths,” said NBC News anchor Frank McGee. Like many, he thought that by rushing, NASA was risking safety. After surviving the congressional investigation into the fire, and enduring months of delay while instituting new safety measures, NASA was ready to resume flight operations. On November 9, 1967, controllers counted down the final seconds to the launch of Apollo 4 (Apollo 2 and 3 had been canceled in a reorganization after the fire). This would be the first test of the massive Saturn V booster, a rocket that was orders of magnitude more powerful than any NASA had ever launched, and the only one capable of taking a man to the Moon. The agency dared not put a man on board. At 7 A .M ., the rocket’s five enormous engines ignited, sending shock waves of sound and light and energy in every direction as 7.5 million pounds of thrust lifted the six-million-pound behemoth up and away from the launchpad. Three miles away, plaster dust fell from the ceiling in the Launch Control Center, while windows shook at the Howard Johnson’s Motel twelve miles from the launch site. Describing the event for a live television audience, CBS anchor Walter Cronkite grabbed the plate glass window of his booth to keep it from collapsing. “Our building is shaking here!” Cronkite said with uncharacteristic exuberance. “Oh, it’s terrific! The building’s shaking! This big blast window is shaking and we’re holding it with our hands! Look at that rocket go into the clouds at three thousand feet! The roar is terrific! Look at it going!” The flight worked, every part of it, almost perfectly. It was clear now that America stood a fighting chance, not just of putting a man on the Moon, but of doing it by a long-dead president’s impossible deadline.

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

  Yet the spacecraft was still turning—Anders knew it because he could see the cabin rotating against the pattern of sunlit dust motes floating freely inside it. By now, Lovell had called to Anders and Borman that he’d made a mistake by resetting the guidance system. That explained why the eight ball had rotated to its launch orientation. And that explained why a thruster was not the problem. The thruster Anders had heard had fired automatically by program, a coincidence. Furious at Lovell’s mistake, Borman made his way to the control area, but already Anders had begun to fight the spacecraft’s roll. He couldn’t use the seized-up eight ball to judge how to rotate the ship, so he turned to a more ancient indicator the men had on board. The dust. Firing his thrusters, Anders turned Apollo 8 just enough to move the cabin back in the direction of the floating dust particles. When the cabin no longer moved in relation to its interior dust, he knew the spacecraft had stopped rotating. Apollo 8 was now in a steady attitude. But no one knew which way it was pointed, and the guidance system still said the ship was on the launchpad. Borman took the controls. In an airplane, a pilot could eyeball the horizon and his runway and his surroundings if his instruments failed. Astronauts far from Earth couldn’t do that. Borman and Anders now worried deeply about their ability to be sure of the spacecraft’s attitude as they approached reentry; it was crucial that Apollo 8 be properly oriented by the time they hit the atmosphere in order to make a safe entry back into the world. Everyone was angry: Borman and Anders at Lovell, Lovell at himself. It was a life-or-death situation. If they could not figure out how to reorient the spacecraft, Apollo 8 might not survive. The best idea, they agreed, was to use the stars. If they could pick out just a few they knew, they could begin rebuilding the computer’s idea of their orientation. Out the windows, the Sun shone against an all-black cosmos. Borman, Lovell, and Anders strained to locate stars, but crystals from the ship’s evaporators, along with crystals from their own urine, followed the spacecraft, all of them masquerading as stars. Even when the astronauts thought they could distinguish between these tagalong crystals and a genuine star, it was impossible for them to identify the star, which was necessary for the computer to do its thinking. It was then that Lovell found help from an old friend. Looking through the spacecraft’s optical system, he spotted the Moon. Then, locating Earth, he began to form a rough idea of the spacecraft’s attitude with respect to the thirty-seven stars stored in the computer’s database. Now, when he saw a star out the window, he could make an educated guess about its identity. If the crew still didn’t know exactly how they were positioned in the heavens, at least they knew the neighborhood.

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

  In less than a minute, the propellant for the first-stage engines would run out. At that point, the stage would have to be severed and allowed to fall away from the ship. The engines continued to burn staggering amounts of propellant, causing the ship to grow lighter and g-forces to increase, pressing the astronauts into their seats with up to four times the force of gravity on Earth, making each man’s arm feel as if it weighed about thirty-six pounds. At an altitude of about 215,000 feet, the spacecraft reached a speed of 4,236 miles per hour. With the onboard clock nearing two and a half minutes’ elapsed time, the first stage shut down, explosives fired, then retro rockets ignited, separating the first stage from the rest of the Saturn V and enveloping all of Apollo 8 in a cocoon of fire. To many of those watching from the ground and on television, it appeared that the entire ship had exploded, but it was just the precursor to the first stage falling back toward the Atlantic, glowing a brilliant goodbye. Inside the spacecraft, the sudden shutdown of the first stage caused g-forces to drop from four to zero almost instantly. Having been severely compressed, the 363-foot tower of aluminum alloy suddenly sprang back, flinging the astronauts forward with explosive force. By instinct, Anders threw up his hand in front of his face to prevent being catapulted through the instrument panel, but by that time, the five J-2 engines of the second stage had kicked in and the acceleration threw Anders’s outstretched hand back so hard against his head that the wrist ring on his glove carved a gouge in his helmet. As with the launch itself, simulations hadn’t come close to preparing the astronauts for the violence of this moment. Pinned back once again by the force of five screaming engines, the crew began to check instruments to make sure all was okay. Out of the corner of his eye, Anders glanced to check whether Borman or Lovell had noticed the gouge in his helmet, the sure mark of a rookie astronaut. Thankfully, it seemed they hadn’t. A few seconds after the first-stage booster fell away, Borman prepared to get rid of the other end of the vehicle, the thirty-four-foot-tall spire-shaped escape tower and conical boost protective cover, which had ridden atop Apollo 8, poised to rocket the command module away from the Saturn V in case of emergency. Cutting it loose meant a great saving in weight. If an abort was necessary after losing the escape tower, the crew would use propulsion systems built into the command and service modules to separate from the Saturn V, redirect their course, and ride the command module back to splashdown. Borman threw a switch, causing a small rocket motor to jettison the escape tower. Instantly, the cabin was awash in sunlight, its five windows no longer obstructed by the boost protective cover.

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

  social equality. Most people expected to spend their lives being given orders and showing deference, so when someone ordered dramatic change, it was a question of obeying rather than making a personal choice. Once they had obeyed, the religion which they met was as much a matter of conforming to a new set of forms of worship in their community as of embracing a new set of personal beliefs. Christian missionaries were just as much at home with worldly as with supernatural power. They expected people to be unequal, that was what God wanted, and inequality was there to be used for God’s glory. Mass rallies were not their style; most evangelists were what we would call gentry or nobility, and they normally went straight to the top when preaching the faith. That way they could harvest a whole kingdom, at least as long as local rulers did not have second thoughts or take a better offer. Above all, Christians everywhere had a big advantage in being associated with the ancient power that obsessed all Europe: imperial Rome. The Latin-speaking Church became a curator of Romanitas, Romanness. That was a paradox, since Jesus had been crucified by a Roman provincial governor and Peter by an emperor, but the cultural alliance stuck. By Bede’s account, when discrepant methods of calculating Easter in the Atlantic Isles were debated at the Synod of Whitby in 664, King Oswy of Bernicia decided in favour of the Roman method over the Celtic because Peter was the guardian of the gates of Heaven and Columba of Iona was not.45 Everyone wanted to be Roman: the memory of the empire stood for wealth, wine, central heating and filing systems, and its two languages, Latin and Greek, could link Armagh to Alexandria. But, as King Oswy’s judgement showed, there was more to mission than simple material matters. People hungered for meaning; they were terrified of their own frailty. Famously, Bede told a story that when Oswy’s father-in-law, King Edwin of Deira and Bernicia, was weighing up whether or not to become Christian in the 620s, one of his advisers reminded his master of the baffling brevity and inconsequentiality of human life: he compared it to a sparrow which swoops in suddenly through one door into the warm, brightly lit, noisy royal hall and then flies straight out through the other door, back to the darkness and storms outside.46 Bede probably made the speech up, as historians did at the time, but he made it up because he thought that his readers would think it plausible. The troubled people of Europe sought not only good drains and elegant tableware, but a glimpse of the light which would make sense of their own brief flights out of the darkness. The missionaries of Christianity talked to them of love and forgiveness shaping the purposes of God, and there is no reason to believe that ordinary folk were too obtuse to perceive that this could be good news. As the Anglo-Saxons travelled east into mainland Europe, so did their

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

  He knew that the Soviets had experienced trouble with their parachutes and that the technology, in general, was unreliable. Neither he nor the others could see the parachutes in the dark, but when Borman and Lovell checked their instruments, they could tell that the craft’s sink rate had declined significantly, indicating proper functioning of all three chutes. With the red-and-white parachutes fully blossomed, Apollo 8’s descent rate fell to just 19 miles per hour. On board, thrusters were ignited and their tanks purged of propellant to prevent harmful substances from polluting the splashdown and recovery area. The fire spitting from the burning thrusters lit the still-dark sky, giving the astronauts their first view of their parachutes, and good reason to believe they were floating down as planned. Under the chutes’ risers, the capsule was tipped on an angle to allow it to knife into the water rather than belly-flop onto its blunt base. At an altitude of just 8,000 feet, Apollo 8 was less than five minutes from scheduled impact with the water. Moments later, one of the recovery aircraft made radio contact with the spacecraft. “Welcome home, gentlemen,” a crewman called to the astronauts, “and we’ll have you aboard in no time.” At three minutes to splashdown, recovery helicopters spotted flashing beacons from the falling spacecraft. Apollo 8 was almost directly over the Yorktown, a bull’s-eye of almost unimaginable accuracy. “Stand by for Earth landing!” Borman called from his commander’s seat. At their homes in Houston, the astronauts’ wives stared at their televisions. For Valerie, it was thrilling to hear that the parachutes had opened—that meant Apollo 8 was somehow reconnected to Earth. But she thought, “They’re heading for a big, dark, rough ocean, and the ships still don’t know where they are.” At one thousand feet altitude, radio traffic from the recovery forces grew so voluminous that the astronauts couldn’t communicate with one another. “Turn him down!” Anders told his partners. “Christ, we can’t get anything done.” Just a hundred or so feet remained. The crew braced themselves, not knowing exactly when impact might come. Borman called to Lovell and Anders. “Maybe we better get these—” At that moment, Apollo 8 came in flat, not on its intended angled edge, and bashed into the Pacific Ocean, its blunt end colliding against the upswell of a wave, just about the most violent impact possible. Inundated by water (and perhaps stunned by the crash), Borman could not flip the switch to cut the parachutes from the capsule, and Apollo 8 was dragged over by its chutes and turned upside down in the ocean. None of the men was ready for an impact that jarring; nothing in simulation had come close. By the time Borman came around a few seconds later and cut the lines, all three men were hanging upside-down in their straps. Garbage that had collected in the cabin streamed down on them, and water poured over their bodies and faces.

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

  —Borman greeted his wife with a kiss and told her about the new mission. As always, Susan smiled and clasped his hand. Inside, she was dying. The Moon? she thought, trying to absorb what he was telling her. It was August. NASA hadn’t even tested the command module yet. December—that was what, four months away? Usually crews trained for a year or more. To the Moon ? She told Frank how proud she was, how important the mission sounded, that there was no better man for the job. Then she turned and went into another room, where she wished she could kick down a door. They’re rushing it, she thought. They’re leapfrogging, they’re too anxious to get it going . Over the course of Frank’s career, she’d closed her eyes and hoped for the best, but she could see that this mission was different, that she needed to stop living in a cocoon and pretending her husband would always be home for Sunday dinner, because this time Frank wouldn’t just be running another test flight—this time he would be leaving the world. As always, Frank thanked God for Susan. She always supported him, never made him worry about her or their two teenage boys. He had no inkling of what was going on inside her, or how badly she’d been hurting since Apollo 1 had taken Ed White, the husband of her close friend Pat White. Susan knew Frank had enough pressure at work, and she considered it her mission to make home a place where he never worried. Borman told the news to his two sons, Fred and Edwin. To the boys, the Moon sounded pretty cool. Borman would have showed them where he was going if only he’d owned a lunar map. At his home, Anders shared the news with his wife, Valerie. Even as he spoke she thought This is a big and scary change, but she also had been steeling herself to danger since she was a little girl (her father had been a motorcycle-riding California Highway Patrolman), and she believed beating the Soviets to be a worthy goal. Bill had always been straight with Valerie, and it would do no good to sugarcoat things now. He laid out his thinking on the risks. He thought there was a one-third chance of a successful mission, a one-third chance of a failed mission that managed to make it back home, and a one-third chance the crew wouldn’t return at all. He hated to worry her, but he knew if she sensed he was bullshitting, she just would have worried more. Valerie trusted that these odds were accurate, though they were not numbers any young mother of five liked to hear. She thought about other military wives, some of whom had husbands missing in action, and she remembered that her husband, like most astronauts, would be fighting in Vietnam—eagerly—if he weren’t training to fly to the Moon.

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

  first in the 1520s the pragmatism of the Graubünden in Switzerland, then the Hungarians and Transylvanians in the Declaration of Torda, soon followed by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s Confederation of Warsaw (see pp. 639–43). Just as the increasing confessional rigidity of old Europe was turning from these sixteenth-century ideals, a new European enterprise was taking up the challenge. THE FIGHT FOR PROTESTANT SURVIVAL (1660-1800) The growing success and stability of these new transatlantic Protestant polities (gained at the price for Native American societies of increasing disruption and exile westwards) contrasted with a long-drawn-out crisis for Protestants in late- seventeenth-century Europe. The Habsburgs began systematically dismantling a century and more of Protestant life in central Europe from Bohemia to Hungary, Catholic advance in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth continued apace, and France re-emerged under Louis XIV (reigned 1643–1715) as a major European power with an aggressively Catholic agenda. The Stuart dynasty restored in Britain in 1660 was from its return a client of Louis, seeking his financial support against its stridently but selectively loyal and inconveniently Anglican English Parliaments. Charles II and James II became pawns in Louis’s plans, which included improving, or better still reversing, the marginal position of Catholics in the Atlantic Isles.30 Louis XIV died an exhausted and defeated old man, but in his prime he directed an army of 400,000, supported by a taxable population of twenty million; he had increased the size of that army fivefold in four decades.31 Beyond his own borders, he spurred on the Duke of Savoy in murderous campaigns against Savoy’s Protestant minority, and in 1685 he overturned his grandfather Henri IV’s religious settlement for France by revoking the Edict of Nantes — 150,000 Protestants are estimated to have fled France as a result, the largest displacement of Christians in early modern Europe.32 Louis conquered largely Protestant lands of the Holy Roman Empire in Alsace, making a Catholic Strasbourg out of Lutheran Strassburg, which long before in Martin Bucer’s time had been the prime candidate to lead the Protestant world (see pp. 629–30). In his military campaigns of 1672, Louis nearly succeeded where the Spanish monarchy had failed, in overwhelming the United Provinces of the Netherlands — and in that ambitious venture lay the seeds of his own failure. For the outrage of France’s invasion provoked Prince Willem of Orange, appointed Stadhouder (the word which in French would be ‘Lieutenant’) by most provinces in the

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

  Out his window, Anders saw a terrifying sight—baseball-sized chunks of the heat shield flying off, many times larger than the grain-sized pieces NASA expected—and he waited for the heat to sear through the spacecraft and melt the crew. But Apollo 8 did not melt. Instead, after about a minute of this peak intensity, the onboard computer automatically began to roll the spacecraft. Though the ship had no wings, its designed shape and offset center of mass made it capable of lift if positioned correctly, and now it began to climb a bit back out of the atmosphere, lowering the g-forces and cooling down in the process. “Cabin temperature is still holding real good,” Anders called to his crewmates, sounding a bit astonished and relieved. “Quite a ride, huh?” “Damnedest thing I ever saw,” Borman said. Three minutes after losing contact with the spacecraft, Houston began calling to the ship, but CapCom Ken Mattingly couldn’t get through. Apollo 8 had swooped back down for its second grind into the atmosphere. The crew held on. “How much will this one go up, do you think?” Anders asked of the building g-forces. “Three!” Lovell called. Twenty seconds or so later, the spacecraft had been slowed by the atmosphere to suborbital speeds and began rolling one way, then the other, as the computer steered them toward the recovery ships. It had been nearly five minutes since the crew lost contact with Houston, but now Lovell began calling home. “Houston, Apollo 8. Over.” Mattingly made out the voice through the static. “Go ahead, Apollo 8. Read you broken and loud.” Borman jumped in. “Roger. This is a real fireball.” One hundred thousand feet below, the USS Yorktown found Apollo 8 on its radar. A minute later, the spacecraft was at an altitude of just 40,000 feet and plummeting at a speed of about 680 miles per hour. At around 30,000 feet, an altitude sensor fired explosives to jettison the top of the heat shield at the pointy end of the spacecraft. A moment later, two drogue parachutes shot out of the ship, making a giant thwack that Borman heard as they streaked up into the sky. The ship jolted when their lines went taut. These were not the chutes that would lower the craft to the water, but rather the smaller ones designed to stabilize Apollo 8, to keep it from wobbling and make it ready for the primary chutes. By the time they were out, the spacecraft was just 20,000 feet above the Pacific, but now its descent rate had slowed. Inside the cabin, an air vent opened to equalize inside and outside pressures. Falling at a speed of 300 miles per hour, Apollo 8 rode gravity until an altitude of 10,000 feet, when the three main 80-foot parachutes were deployed. When their lines pulled tight, the spacecraft jerked hard. Anders worried that he’d felt only one jerk, not three.

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

  At the Anders home, Valerie scrambled to round up her five children, seating them atop the toy box in the playroom where the family kept their new color TV. Joining them were Bill’s aunt and uncle, several family friends, and the wives of some of the other astronauts (Bill’s parents were at home in San Diego to watch the launch). Valerie tried to stay in the moment, absorbing everything, even the fear, full of hope. Among those watching the countdown from behind a giant window at the Launch Control Center at the Cape was backup crew member Neil Armstrong, who couldn’t get over the moxie NASA had shown in conceiving the mission. The Saturn V had never been flown with men aboard and had suffered profound problems on its second and most recent test. To put a crew on that rocket now, and to point that crew at the Moon, seemed astonishingly aggressive—and wonderful—to him. Just twenty minutes remained until launch. For miles along the Cape, thousands of cars and motorcycles and buses and campers jammed the beaches and roadways, a quarter of a million people standing on hoods or in sand or on one another’s shoulders, craning their necks for a view of the rocket, passing binoculars back and forth, checking their watches every few seconds. An eighty-year-old woman from South Dakota, who’d traveled in her son’s trailer to witness the launch, said, “Those men, what they will do! And I have lived to see it. I am still alive to see it.” “T minus 7 minutes, 30 seconds and counting, still aiming toward our planned lift-off time,” King told a riveted nation. In the morning light, the view from the spacecraft became clearer. For several minutes, Anders watched a mud dauber wasp build a nest on the capsule window. At T minus 5 minutes, the access arm and loading area pulled away from the spacecraft and retracted. At Mission Control in Houston, Chris Kraft stared at a giant color screen that was broadcasting a view of the spacecraft. He had always considered launch to be the riskiest part of manned spaceflight, and that was true even with proven rockets. Now, feeling scared to death, he watched as his agency prepared to catapult three good men from the planet aboard the most powerful machine ever built, despite the fact that this machine had never lifted a living thing, not even a mealworm, off the ground. At T minus 3 minutes, 6 seconds, computers took over full checkout of the rocket. In the Borman and Anders homes, hands were squeezed tight. On the sand dune, Marilyn Lovell huddled with her children. Photographers from various media outlets were stationed with all three families, pressing shutter buttons and swapping film rolls as fast as they could, desperate not to miss a moment. In Mission Control, Flight Director Cliff Charlesworth and CapCom Mike Collins watched the monitors.

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

  the whole city of Zürich. To opt in to baptism as an adult was to split the wholeness of the community, into believers and non-believers. That would end the assumption which both he and Luther held as dear as the Pope, that all society should be part of the Church in Christendom. So from 1526 Zürich, embittered by the recent Farmers’ War, persecuted Anabaptists to the extent of drowning four of them in the River Limmat, just at the time when the old Church began persecuting champions of the magisterial Reformation. The Anabaptists were harried out of ordinary society. Their one alliance with a magistrate, when Count Leonhard von Liechtenstein allowed them to take over the Moravian town of Nikolsburg and form an established Church professing believers’ baptism, ended abruptly in 1527 on the orders of the Count’s Habsburg overlords; the Habsburgs burned at the stake the would-be Zwingli of Nikolsburg, a former senior academic called Balthasar Hubmaier. Accordingly, radicals began stressing their difference from ordinary society.When they turned to the Bible for guidance, such people noticed quite correctly that early Christians had separated themselves from the world around. The Book of Acts talked of Christians holding all goods in common (see pp. 119–20). ‘Do not swear at all,’ said Jesus Christ (Matthew 5.34). ‘Commit no murder,’ said the Ten Commandments. So radicals looked for the rare corners of Europe where they had a chance to create their own little worlds, in which goods could be held in common, where no one would force them to swear the oaths which governments and magistrates required, or take up the sword when rulers ordered them to. They took a selective view of the demand for obedience in Romans 13.1, infuriating and frightening the superior powers. Many looked back to the nearest thing that ‘Anabaptists’ ever had to a common confessional statement: articles drawn up in 1527 at the Swiss town of Schleitheim, which were insistent on ‘separation from the Abomination’. Their principal author was a former Benedictine monk, Michael Sattler, and it is tempting to see the communal institutions of radicals as a new effort to return to the early Benedictine ideal. Yet one feature was far from Benedictine: it returned radicals to a still earlier Christianity, which had suffered from official persecution. ‘True believing Christians are sheep among wolves, sheep for the slaughter. They must be baptized in anguish and tribulation, persecution, suffering, and death, tried in fire, and must reach the fatherland of eternal rest not by slaying the physical but the spiritual,’ wrote the young Zürich patrician Conrad Grebel to Thomas Müntzer, a year before Müntzer, a leader in the 1525 revolts, was cut down by the vengeful soldiers of princes.24 More frightening still for Christendom was that, even after the defeats of 1525, some radicals continued to believe that they needed force to usher in the

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

  One model of Anders’s jet was armed with two rocket-propelled missiles, each with a 3.5-kiloton nuclear warhead attached—combined, it equaled about half the explosive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. To fire the weapons, the radar operator in the backseat had to throw a switch, and the pilot in the front seat had to throw his own switch. That’s all it required. Officially, the crew needed an order from the ground, but if Anders and a buddy wanted to start World War III, they could do it on their own. “That’s the Cold War,” Anders told Valerie. “It’s up to us not to screw up.” In February 1957, the Anders family welcomed their first child, Alan. And in July 1958, Valerie gave birth to Glen. Raising a young family in California was idyllic, with the warm weather and abundant culture, maybe too good to be true, so it came as little surprise when Anders got a new assignment: Iceland. Valerie would stay with the kids in California while her husband moved four thousand miles away. Again, Anders’s job was to fly interceptors. This time, he would be going after Soviet bombers, long-range machines that flew missions near Iceland and the North Atlantic designed to test American air defenses. To help avoid starting a world war, his aircraft and others would be armed only with conventional air-to-air rockets, no nukes. Early in his assignment, a Soviet bomber penetrated the eastern edge of Iceland’s Air Defense Identification Zone. Anders and his wingman scrambled into the air, afterburners blazing, and caught up with the Russian plane. Anders positioned his wingman to shoot down the bomber if its pilot gave the Americans any trouble, then flew his F-89 so close he could call out the eye colors of the Soviet crew. The Russians smiled and waved. Anders offered his own American greeting—a middle finger. The Soviet crew kept smiling and waving, then broke back to where they belonged. Low on fuel, Anders returned to base, knowing the incident would be important to American intelligence officers, as it was among the first—if not the very first—intercept of a Soviet bomber in the zone. On the ground, he described the event. “Anything else?” asked a representative of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Anders feared he would be facing some discipline. Still, he had to be honest. “There is something else,” Anders said nervously. “I probably should tell you that, you know…I gave them the finger.” The man smiled. There was no trouble. Anders flew more missions in Iceland, many of them risky, both for the dangerous flying conditions and for the potential conflict with Soviet bombers. Three or four months after Anders flipped off the Russian crew, another pilot in his squadron intercepted a Soviet bomber. This time, the Russians had a response to their American pursuers, and they held it up to their window—a sign printed in English—for the Air Force pilots to see.