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.

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• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  254 : Severin Rossetti the bunch of keys she held resting lightly against her thigh, shining like a weapon against the dark material of her trousers. She had removed her jacket and the polo neck she wore was sleeveless, cut high at the shoulders to leave bare arms which he could see were firm and muscled. “So many keys, for just the one door? Didn’t you wonder?” she asked, a gentle twist of the wrist making the keys chime against each other, and her head turned slowly to the left, to the right, inviting Brian to take in his surroundings. This room at least had some rugs to make its bare stone floor more comfortable, hangings hid the naked brick of the walls, and in one corner was a large bed which seemed inviting enough. But such other more disturbing “furnishings” there were that he was momentarily lost for words! What he first took to be a child’s cot beside the bed he saw to be more like a cage, enclosed not just on its four sides but also on top, and apparently constructed of cold steel rather than polished wood; a large upholstered stool might have been unremarkable if it had not been for the shackles fixed to each of its four legs; a large wooden chair as grand as a throne was so intricately carved that it could surely not afford a comfortable seat, and hung with all manner of straps and chains and restraints. ‘These were everywhere, in fact, fastened not just to each item of furniture but also hanging from the walls, the low ceiling, even curled up on the floor, fixed there by stout bolts driven through the rugs, into the stone. And everywhere, too, the padlocks of assorted sizes, as many and as varied as the keys she held in her hand. “So, where shall I have you first?” she wondered, coming slowly towards him, and when he took a step back she grinned humourlessly. “Oh come on, don’t be shy,” she coaxed. “I told you, I may be a cruel heartless bitch, but at least I’m good at it.” “Look, this really wasn’t what I had in mind,’ Brian said, still backing away from her. - “No, I can guess just what you had in mind,” she said, and there was something mesmerizing about her voice, her cold gaze, that as he thought he was backing towards the door he found himself moving instead in a lazy arc, as if they were two wrestlers circling each other in the ring. Then his retreat was blocked as wood dug into his calves, her face came within inches of his and she grinned. A Giiel Heartless Bitch . 255 “Ah! So it’s to the heartless bitch’s throne?” she said, her body bumping into his, knocking him off balance and toppling him arse first into the large chair.

• From Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (1997)

  The shake annihilated fear, and allowed no sense of horror in looking round at the beast. This peculiar state is probably produced in all animals killed by the carnivore; and if so, is a merciful provision by our benevolent creator for lessening the pain of death.” [Italics mine] The best way to define dissociation is through the experience of it. In its mildest forms, it manifests as a kind of spaciness. At the other end of the spectrum, it can develop into so-called multiple personality syndrome. Because dissociation is a breakdown in the continuity of a person’s felt sense, it almost always includes distortions of time and perception. A mild variety of this symptom is responsible for the experience many people have when driving home from the corner store; suddenly, they find themselves arriving home with no memory of how they got ther e - the last thing they remember is driving away from the store. Dissociation is also operating when we put our keys down “somewhere” and then can’t remember where. At such times, we may tacitly acknowledge the momentary absence of the felt sense by facetiously referring to ourselves or others as having been “spaced out,” or “out to lunch.” In other words, out of our bodies. These are some of the forms that dissociation takes in our everyday lives. It enters into our experience specifically when we are faced with life-threatening situations. Imagine driving your car around a sharp curve on a narrow mountain road. Suddenly, you have to swerve to avoid a head-on collision with a truck coming straight at you. As you skid toward the narrow shoulder, watch the images unfold in slow motion. Then, with a fearless calm, notice that you are viewing someone else from the sidelines instead of confronting your own death. Similarly, the woman being raped, the soldier facing enemy fire, or the victim of an accident may experience a fundamental disconnection from his or her body. From a corner of the ceiling, a child may watch him/herself being molested, and feel sorry for or neutral toward the defenseless child below. Dissociation is one of the most classic and subtle symptoms of trauma. It is also one of the most mysterious. The mechanism through which it occurs is less easily explained than the experience of it or the role it plays. In trauma, dissociation seems to be a favored means of enabling a person to endure experiences that are at the moment beyond enduranc e - like being attacked by a lion, a rapist, an oncoming car, or a surgeon’s knife. Dissociation can become chronic and evolve into more complex symptoms when the hyperaroused energy is not discharged. Individuals who have been repeatedly traumatized as young children often adopt dissociation as a preferred mode of being in the world. They dissociate readily and habitually without being aware of it.

• From Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (1997)

  We don’t know that the centrifugal law of physics will prevent us from falling and being killed or injured. When we re-enact we may experience terror and/or the exhilaration of surviving it. We may also become addicted to the relief and thrill that ensues when we confront our deepest fears. However, we will not learn the true mastery and surrender that occurs when our traumas are transformed. In renegotiation we gradually get to understand these laws and forces so that we can learn to trust them and surrender to them. We can experience excitement without becoming tense or terrified. We can acquire a true sense of mastery. In Somatic Experiencing, renegotiation revolves around learning to experience the natural restorative laws of the organism. Marius (Chapter Nine) and Margaret (this chapter) experienced their sensations in going through the loop of the trauma and healing vortices. In surrendering to natural laws, they gained mastery. The forces they learned to master are centrifugal - like the forces that are set up when moving between the healing and trauma vortices. By moving through the warble and entering the healing vortex, then moving rhythmically back and forth between the two, these traumatized individuals gradually became certain that they would not be sucked into a black hole and burned to a cinder, or propelled into outer space. In re-enacting their experiences, Marius and Margaret may have learned that they could survive. They would not, however, have learned the new responses that would allow them to master the powerful forces set into motion by traumatic events. When we set up our initial conditions correctly and come into alignment (like the Galileo Probe ), we can put our trust in the natural laws to guide us on our healing journey. One of the most profound and conceptually challenging aspects of healing trauma is understanding the role played by memory. Many of us have the faulty and limiting belief that to heal our traumas we must dredge up horrible memories from the past. What we know for certain is that we feel damaged, fragmented, distressed, shameful, unhappy, etc. In an attempt to feel better we search for the cause(s) of our unhappiness, hoping that finding them will ease our distress. Even if we are able to dredge up reasonably accurate “memories” of an event, they will not heal us. On the contrary, this unnecessary exercise can cause us to re-enact the experience and get sucked into the trauma vortex once again. The search for memories may engender more pain and distress, while further solidifying our frozen immobility. The vicious cycle then escalates as we are compelled to search for other explanatory events (“memories”) to account for our additional distress. How important are these memories?

• From Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (1997)

  Johnny, age five, proudly riding his first bicycle, hits loose gravel and careens into a tree. He is momentarily knocked unconscious. Getting up amid a flow of tears, he feels disoriented and somehow different. His parents hug him, console him, and put him back on the bike, all the while praising his courage. They do not realize how stunned and frightened he is. Years after this apparently minor incident, John, driving with his wife and children, swerves to avoid an oncoming car. He freezes in the midst of the turn. Fortunately, the other driver is able to maneuver successfully and avoid catastrophe. One morning several days later, John begins to feel restless while driving to work. His heart starts racing and pounding; his hands become cold and sweaty. Feeling threatened and trapped, he has a sudden impulse to jump out of the car and run. He acknowledges the “craziness” of his feelings, realizes no one was hurt, and gradually, the symptoms subside. A vague and nagging apprehension, however, persists most of the day. Returning home that evening without incident, he feels relieved. The next morning, John leaves early to avoid the traffic and stays late to discuss business with some colleagues. When he arrives home, he is irritable and edgy. He argues with his wife and barks at the children. John goes to bed early. He is awakened in the middle of the night and faintly recalls a dream in which his car is sliding out of control. He is drenched in sweat. More fretful nights follow. John is experiencing a delayed reaction sensitized by the bike accident he had as a child. Incredible as it may seem, post-traumatic reactions of this type are common. After working for more than twenty-five years with people suffering from trauma, I can say that at least half of my clients have had traumatic symptoms that remained dormant for a significant period of time before surfacing. For many people, the interval between the event and the onset of symptoms is between six weeks and eighteen months. However, the latency period can last for years or even decades. In both instances, the reactions are often triggered by seemingly insignificant events. Of course, not every childhood accident produces a delayed traumatic reaction. Some have no residual effect at all. Others, including those viewed as “minor” and forgotten incidents of childhood, can have significant after effects. A fall, a seemingly benign surgical procedure, the loss of a parent through death or divorce, severe illness, even circumcision and other routine medical procedures can all cause traumatic reactions later in life, depending on how the child experiences them at the time they occur.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  One of the first evenings when Vernon was complaining that Raleigh hadn’t come in or sent, my father said: “Why not try, Joe?” (my nickname!) In a jiffy I had the gloves on and got my first lesson from Vernon who taught me at least how to hit straight and then how to guard and side-step. I was very quick and strong for my size; but for some time Vernon hit me very lightly. Soon, however, it became difficult for him to hit me at all and then I sometimes got a heavy blow that floored me. But with constant practice I improved rapidly and after a fortnight or so put on the gloves once with Raleigh. His blows were very much heavier and staggered me even to guard them, so I got accustomed to duck or side-step or slip every blow aimed at me while hitting back with all my strength. One evening when Vernon and Raleigh both had been praising me, I told them of Jones and how he bullied me; he had really made my life a misery to me: he never met me outside the school without striking or kicking me and his favorite name for me was “bog-trotter!” His attitude, too, affected the whole school: I had grown to hate him as much as I feared him. They both thought I could beat him; but I described him as very strong and finally Raleigh decided to send for two pairs of four ounce gloves or fighting gloves and use these with me to give me confidence. In the first half hour with the new gloves Vernon did not hit me once and I had to acknowledge that he was stronger and quicker even than Jones. At the end of the holidays they both made me promise to slap Jones’s face the very first time I saw him in the school. On returning to school we always met in the big schoolroom. When I entered the room there was silence. I was dreadfully excited and frightened, I don’t know why; but fully resolved: “he can’t kill me”, I said to myself a thousand times; still I was in a trembling funk inwardly though composed enough in outward seeming. Jones and two others of the Sixth stood in front of the empty fire-place: I went up to them: Jones nodded, “How d’ye do, Pat!”

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  67 It is found in a Quranic passage about the Battle of Uhud, when the “laggers” urged the more intrepid Muslims to “stay at home.” But they had simply replied: “God is enough for us: He is the best protector,” and because of their faith, they had “returned with grace and bounty from God; no harm befell them.” 68 If they repeated these words, the document assured the hijackers, “You will find matters straightened; and [God’s] protection will surround you; no power can penetrate that.” The recitation of this verse would not only keep their fear at bay but overcome all physical obstacles: “All of their devices, their [security] gates and their technology will not save [the Americans].” 69 The mere repetition of the first part of the shehadah, “There is no god but God,” would itself be enough to secure their entry into paradise. The hijackers are told to “consider the awesomeness of this statement while they were fighting the Americans,” remembering that in the Arabic script this verse had “no pointed letters—this is a sign of perfection and completeness, as the pointed words or letters lessen its power.” 70 Just over a year after 9/11, Louis Atiyat Allah would write an essay for a jihad website after watching al-Omari’s martyr video. There is absurdity in Allah’s extravagant eulogy, which imagines the hijackers—“mountains of courage, stars of masculinity, and galaxies of merit”—weeping for joy as the planes hit the target. However, it was obviously written to rebut widespread criticism of the 9/11 perpetrators. It was not only “moderates” who deplored the atrocity; even in radical circles, Muslims were apparently objecting that the Quran forbids suicide; they believed that the hijackers had acted irresponsibly. Their action had been counterproductive too: not only had the atrocity inspired worldwide sympathy for America, but it had weakened the Palestinian cause by strengthening Israel’s bond with the United States. In his article rebutting these complaints, Allah retorted that the hijackers had not “committed suicide”; nor were they simply “crazy people who found planes to hijack.” No, they had had a clearly defined political objective: “to smash the foundations of the tyrant and to demolish the idol of the age, America.” They had also struck a blow against the structural violence of the American-dominated Middle East, rejecting the “silly [rulers] of Ibn Saud, and Husni [Mubarak], and all the other retards who falsely call themselves ‘those in authority’ ” (Quran 4:59) but who were actually “nothing but tentacles of the octopus upon you, with the head of the [octopus] being in New York and Washington DC.” The purpose of this operation was to take a “ terrifying historical leap which will … extricate the Muslims in one fell swoop from humiliation, dependency and servility.” 71 These political objectives were certainly uppermost in Bin Laden’s mind too in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, although he would also invoke the divine will.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Stories about the Temple’s violence had begun to circulate in 1972: defectors spoke of beatings, verbal abuse, and emotional cruelty. Members were viciously castigated for making racist or sexist remarks, complaining about the communal living arrangements, or wasting food. Culprits were subjected to brutal physical punishment and other humiliations in public, and the community was kept in a state of constant terror. Jones filled their minds with graphic descriptions of CIA torture methods, Nazi concentration camps, and Ku Klux Klan lynchings. In 1972, while still in California, he announced that the U.S. government was gonna put people in this country in concentration camps. They’re gonna put them in gas ovens, just like they did the Jews.… They’re gonna put you in the concentration camps that’re already in Tule Lake, California, Allentown, Pennsylvania, near Birmingham, outside El Reno, Oklahoma. They’ve got them all ready.… They still have the concentration camps, they did it to the Japanese, and they’ll do it to us. 2 “I tell you, we’re in danger from a corporate dictatorship,” Jones insisted, “a great fascist state, a great communist state.” 3 The ultimate terror began in 1978, when members started to rehearse their mass suicide. On “white nights” they would be roused suddenly from sleep and informed that they were about to be killed by U.S. agents; suicide was said to be the only viable option. They were then given a drink that they believed to be poisoned and waited to die. On November 18, 1978, the community had been visited by U.S. congressman Leo Ryan, who had come to investigate reports of human rights abuses. After Ryan left, Jones dispatched Temple members to shoot him at the airstrip and then summoned the entire community to the Jonestown pavilion. There medical staff administered potassium cyanide in a batch of the soft drink Flavor-Aid, which parents fed to their children before taking it themselves. Most seem to have died willingly, though the two hundred children were certainly murdered and about a hundred of the elderly may have been injected involuntarily. They recorded their last messages on audiotape. Jones had taken the concept of “revolutionary suicide” from Black Panther leader Huey Newton. 4 “I made the decision to commit revolutionary suicide. My decision has been well thought out,” said one Jonestown resident. “And in my death, I hope that it would be used as an instrument to further liberation.” “It’s been my pleasure walking with all of you in this revolutionary struggle,” one woman stated. “No other way I would rather go [than] to give my life for socialism, communism.” People who were convinced that they had no voice in their own society had come to believe that they could be heard only in the shocking spectacle of their dying.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  But by the 1950s, the baby boom was in full swing and the “traditional” family appeared to be flourishing. (The nuclear family structured around a male breadwinner was in fact of recent invention, arising in the 1920s and peaking in the 1950s and 1960s; before then, multigenerational families relying on multiple contributors to the family economy had been the norm.) In the 1950s, too, Americans of all sorts were reinvesting in religion. Churches were springing up in new suburban neighborhoods across the country, and Sunday schools were bursting at the seams. Cold War politics also united Americans across party lines. To their delight, evangelicals found themselves securely within the political and cultural mainstream. The formation of the Religious Right was still two decades away, but the pieces were already falling into place. By the end of the decade, evangelicals had become active participants in national politics and had secured access to the highest levels of power. And they had come to see a Republican president as an ally in their cause.6 Confident that God was on their side, evangelicals were at home in a world defined by Cold War certainties. The next two decades, however, would threaten to undermine evangelical hopes for the nation, and their place in it. The civil rights movement, Vietnam, and feminism would all challenge reigning dogmas, and for evangelicals who had found a sense of security and significance in an America that affirmed “traditional” gender roles, a strong national defense, and confidence in American power, the sense of loss would be acute. But conservative evangelicals were not about to relinquish their newfound power. They would not go down without a fight. In various ways, each of these disruptions challenged the authority of white men. In the 1960s and 1970s, then, conservative evangelicals would be drawn to a nostalgic, rugged masculinity as they looked to reestablish white patriarchal authority in its many guises. Over time, the defense of patriarchy and a growing embrace of militant masculinity would come to define both substance and symbol of evangelical cultural and political values. TO WHITE AMERICANS who were willing to listen, the civil rights movement argued that America had never been a country of liberty and justice for all. Evangelicals’ response to civil rights varied, particularly in the early stages of the movement. It is easily forgotten, but some evangelicals—especially those who would come to constitute the “evangelical Left”—were vocal supporters of civil rights. Others, primarily fundamentalists and southerners, were staunch opponents. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Lost Cause of the Confederate South had blended with Christian theology to produce a distinctly southern variation of civil religion, one that upheld Robert E. Lee as its patron saint. In this tradition, fundamentalist pastors like W. A. Criswell of First Baptist Dallas (Robert Jeffress’s future home) crusaded against integration as “a denial of all that we believe in.” To such opponents, civil rights activism was a sign of disruption and disorder; many denounced Martin Luther King Jr.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Mike excused himself, but the danger, if danger there was, appealed to me almost as much as the big pay: my only fear was that they’d think me too small or too young. I had told Mrs. Mulligan I was sixteen, for I didn’t want to be treated as a child and now I showed her the eighty cents I had earned that morning boot-blacking, and she advised me to keep on at it and not go to work under the water; but the promised five dollars a day won me. Next morning Mike took me to Brooklyn Bridge soon after five o’clock to see the Contractor: he wanted to engage Mike at once but shook his head over me. “Give me a trial”, I pleaded, “You’ll see, I’ll make good.” After a pause, “O.K.”, he said, “four shifts have gone down already underhanded; you may try.” I’ve told about the work and its dangers at some length in my novel “The Bomb”, but here I may add some details just to show what labor has to suffer. In the bare shed where we got ready the men told me no one could do the work for long without getting the “bends”; the “bends”, it appeared, were a sort of convulsive fit that twisted one’s body like a knot and often made you an invalid for life. They soon explained the whole procedure to me. We worked, it appeared, in a huge bell-shaped caisson of iron that went to the bottom of the river and was pumped full of compressed air to keep the water from entering it from below: the top of the caisson is a room called the “material chamber” into which the stuff dug out of the river passes up and is carted away. On the side of the caisson is another room, called the “airlock”, into which we were to go to be “compressed.” As the compressed air is admitted, the blood keeps absorbing the gasses of the air till the tension of the gasses in the blood becomes equal to that in the air: when this equilibrium has been reached, men can work in the caisson for hours without serious discomfort if sufficient pure air is constantly pumped in. It was the foul air that did the harm, it appeared; “if they’d pump in good air, it would be O.K.: but that would cost a little time and trouble and men’s lives are cheaper.” I saw that the men wanted to warn me, thinking I was too young, and accordingly I pretended to take little heed.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “Shit, she does. She got that real platinum hair for sure.” The woman yanks me towards her and before I can stop she has me in a hug. My face is pressed into her neck and ’m smelling her hair and the odor of her sweat and she is clapping me on the back calling me things. The man is there and she passes me to him like a child and he’s all over me too and he’s hugging me, covering my face with his smell until my nose goes dead. “Naw, she don’ look like Delia.” He holds me at arm’s length and peers at my face. “Just got her hair’s all.” “Ain’t she got beautiful hair, ain’t she?” The woman is pawing her blood-fat fingers at my head and stroking it and she’s so happy. “Oh, I do love me that silver hair she got.” Other people are crowding me now and the hunter in me smells a trap. At any moment will come the silver bladed knife and my eyes are darting, searching the crowd, trying to pick out who it will be, some gypsy, some special person who will have serious eyes, but I can’t pick it out. “Bless you child!” An old white lady who came with them grabs my arm with white gloved hands and shakes it and my eyes are darting side to side — my other arm raised to ward off the attack I know is coming. How will they do it to me? If one grabs my other arm, do I dare kill them before I have rescued Daniel? “Don’t she look like Delia?” yells the black woman again. “Oh not at all, lands no,” says the old lady holding my arm, “but Delia’s older, ya’ all see can’t you, this here’s only a young girl.” The black woman smiles in my face. “Welcome to the revival. This here’s our Holy Ghost church. We got the Holy Ghost all night! You'll have a blessed evening. I’m Ruby.” Someone behind me, I try to spin around, but the old woman has see it all now, their plan and suddenly there me in her bony hands —I The Lady and the Unicorn 503 is a face of a young man close to mine. He has managed to creep up behind me, which never happens. My free hand rises to strike out his eyes before the weapon is in me but there is no hatred in him, he is truly happy to see me. His empty hand is out. “Welcome to our Holy Ghost revival. ’m Brother Edward.” “Howdy doody,” I mumble, and touch his hand. I don’t know what else to do.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  It was as though they imagined that the wrath of God would not unleash this plague against men for their iniquities irrespective of where they happened to be, but would only be aroused against those who found themselves within the city walls; or possibly they assumed that the whole of the population would be exterminated and that the city’s last hour had come. Of the people who held these various opinions, not all of them died. Nor, however, did they all survive. On the contrary, many of each different persuasion fell ill here, there, and everywhere, and having themselves, when they were fit and well, set an example to those who were as yet unaffected, they languished away with virtually no one to nurse them. It was not merely a question of one citizen avoiding another, and of people almost invariably neglecting their neighbours and rarely or never visiting their relatives, addressing them only from a distance; this scourge had implanted so great a terror in the hearts of men and women that brothers abandoned brothers, uncles their nephews, sisters their brothers, and in many cases wives deserted their husbands. But even worse, and almost incredible, was the fact that fathers and mothers refused to nurse and assist their own children, as though they did not belong to them. Hence the countless numbers of people who fell ill, both male and female, were entirely dependent upon either the charity of friends (who were few and far between) or the greed of servants, who remained in short supply despite the attraction of high wages out of all proportion to the services they performed. Furthermore, these latter were men and women of coarse intellect and the majority were unused to such duties, and they did little more than hand things to the invalid when asked to do so and watch over him when he was dying. And in performing this kind of service, they frequently lost their lives as well as their earnings. As a result of this wholesale desertion of the sick by neighbours, relatives and friends, and in view of the scarcity of servants, there grew up a practice almost never previously heard of, whereby when a woman fell ill, no matter how gracious or beautiful or gently bred she might be, she raised no objection to being attended by a male servant, whether he was young or not. Nor did she have any scruples about showing him every part of her body as freely as she would have displayed it to a woman, provided that the nature of her infirmity required her to do so; and this explains why those women who recovered were possibly less chaste in the period that followed. Moreover a great many people died who would perhaps have survived had they received some assistance.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Many of their Muslim subjects were dazzled by their brilliant courts and were fascinated by their new rulers. But so much Muslim scholarship and culture had been lost in the devastation that some jurists decreed that the “gates of ijtihad [independent reasoning]” had closed. This was an extreme version of the conservative tendency of agrarian civilization, which lacked the economic resources to implement innovation on a large scale, valued social order over originality, and felt that culture was so hard won that it was more important to conserve what had already been achieved. This narrowing of horizons was not inspired by an inherent dynamic of Islam but was a reaction to the shocking Mongol assault. Other Muslims would respond to the Mongol conquests very differently . Muslims were always ready to learn from other cultures, and in the late fifteenth century they did so from the heirs of Genghis Khan. The Ottoman Empire in Asia Minor, the Middle East, and North Africa, the Safavid Empire in Iran, and the Moghul Empire in India would be created on the basis of the Mongol army state and become the most advanced states in the world at the time. But the Mongols also unwittingly inspired a spiritual revival. Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207–73) had fled the Mongol armies with his family, migrating from Iran to Anatolia, where he founded a new mystical Sufi order. One of the most widely read Muslims in the West today, his philosophy is redolent of the refugee’s homelessness and sense of separation, but Rumi was also enthralled by the vast extent of the Mongol Empire and encouraged Sufis to explore boundless horizons on the spiritual plane and to open their hearts and minds to other faiths. No two people will respond to the same trauma identically, however. Another thinker of the period who has also achieved great influence in our own time was the “fighting scholar” Ahmed ibn Taymiyyah (1263–1382), also a refugee who, unlike Rumi, hated the Mongols. He saw the Mongol converts, now fellow Muslims, as kufar (“infidels”). 88 He also disapproved of the suspension of ijtihad: in these fearful times jurists needed to think creatively and adapt Shariah to the fact that the ummah had been weakened by two ruthless enemies: the Crusaders and the Mongols. True, the Crusaders seemed a spent force, but the Mongols might still attempt the conquest of the Levant. In preparation for a military jihad to defend their lands, Ibn Taymiyyah urged Muslims to engage in the Greater Jihad and return to the pure Islam of the Prophet’s time, ridding themselves of such inauthentic practices as philosophy ( falsafah ), Sufi mysticism, Shiism, and the veneration of saints and their tombs.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  She starts to scream, really screaming now. The blanket in her arms slips away — and I see him — it is the baby boy. This woman, I know her! The baby looks at me, he sees me. His eyes! He should not be looking at me that way. His eyes fill me with terror. The horror of it sweeps over me. It is unbearable! The Lady and the Unicorn 529 “Love me,” I plead to the baby, my voice cracking, backing away from him in fear and shame. “Please love me too.” I look down. Somehow I am covered in blood. So much blood. He must not look upon me! The baby opens his mouth as he sees the blood of his father drenched all over me. His toothless grin. He laughs at me. A gurgling, bubbling sound like someone drowning in their blood. I know that sound so well! I throw my arm up over my face. Don’t laugh at your daddy’s blood! Don’t look at me! I can’t stand it. The mother screams, far away the shouting of voices. Under the scream all I can hear is the terrifying gurgling laughter of the little boy I will never ever have. I am melting. Throwing down the knife. Get away! The baby, the drowning laugh — get him away from me! Help me! Blood! Blood, little baby! So much blood! Jumping into the river to flee from his laughing eyes. Down. Down. The dark water, so dark even my eyes can’t see. The deep cold water and my mind is clearer.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  She was sobbing terribly, so to give her something to do, I asked her to fetch me a kettle full of hot water; she vanished downstairs to get it and I stood before the glass to make up my accounts with my own soul. I knew now it was the belladonna I had taken, all of it on an empty stomach: no chance; in ten minutes I should be insensible, in a few hours dead: dead! was I afraid? I recognized with pride that I was not one whit afraid or in any doubt. Death is nothing but an eternal sleep, nothing! Yet I wished that I could have had time to prove myself and show what was in me! Was Smith right? Could I indeed have become one of the best heads in the world? Could I have been with the really great ones had I lived? No one could tell now but I made up my mind as at the time of the rattlesnake bite, to do my best to live. All this time I was drinking cold water: now my sister brought the jug of warm water, saying, “It may make you throw up, dear” and I began drinking it in long draughts. Bit by bit I felt it more difficult to think, so I kissed my sister, saying, “I had better get into bed while I can walk, as I’m rather heavy!” And then as I got into bed I said, “I wonder whether I shall be carried out next feet-foremost while they chant the Miserere! Never mind, I’ve had a great draught of life and I’m ready to go if go I must!” At this moment Dr. Richards came in: “Now how, how in Goodness’ name, man, after our talk and all, how did ye come to take it?” His fussiness and strong Welsh accent made me laugh: “give me the stomach pump, doctor, for I’m full of liquid to the gullet”, I cried. I took the tube and pushed it down, sitting up in bed, and he depressed it; but only a brownish stream came: I had absorbed most of the belladonna. That was nearly my last conscious thought, only in myself I determined to keep thinking as long as I could. I heard the Doctor say: “I’ll give him opium—a large dose”, and I smiled to myself at the thought that the narcotic opium and the stimulant belladonna would alike induce unconsciousness, the one by exciting the heart’s action, the other by slackening it....

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, found no need to apologize for the War on Terror or to confess any sins “against our Muslim neighbors.” It was all quite confounding to him: “For whom are we apologizing and for what are we apologizing?” Dobson’s Citizen magazine criticized the Yale Letter for claiming that the two faiths shared a deity, and for showing weakness and endangering Christians. Apologizing for past violence against Muslims would make Christians in Muslim countries more vulnerable to violence, he reasoned. Focus on the Family urged like-minded critics to register their displeasure with the NAE and included the NAE’s PO box for their convenience. Dobson and other conservative evangelicals pressured the NAE to oust Cizik that year, both for his attempts at Muslim-Christian dialogue and for his activism on global warming. This was easily accomplished the next year, when Cizik came out in support of same-sex civil unions.16 Most evangelicals appeared to side with Dobson and Mohler. In 2007, white evangelical Protestants continued to register more negative views of Muslims than other demographics, and to persist in their belief that Islam encouraged violence. A 2009 survey also revealed that evangelicals were significantly more likely than other religious groups to approve of the use of torture against suspected terrorists. Sixty-two percent agreed that torture could be justified “often” or “sometimes,” compared to 46 percent of mainline Protestants and 40 percent of unaffiliated respondents. The widespread embrace of a militant Christian nationalism would have far-reaching consequences in the age of terror.17 SCATTERED THROUGHOUT THE MILITARY , including at the highest levels of leadership, evangelicals who had embraced a militant interpretation of their faith used their positions of power to advance their religious agenda, which they saw as wholly fused with their military mission. Such was the case for Lt. Gen. William G. (Jerry) Boykin. In the course of a storied military career, Boykin served in an Airborne division in Vietnam and as a Delta Force commander, participated in the failed Iranian hostage rescue in 1980 and in the invasion of Grenada, and took part, too, in the mission to apprehend Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and the failed 1993 Somalian mission of “Black Hawk Down.” He later served at the CIA, and from 2002 to 2007 as under secretary of defense for intelligence under President Bush. In that capacity he played an important role in the War on Terror.18 In the wake of 9/11, President Bush worked to consolidate control over the military and intelligence communities. His immediate concern was the war in Iraq, but the administration had declared war on “bad guys” everywhere, and he and his national security advisors were already looking ahead to Iran. By issuing executive orders and placing the War on Terror under the Pentagon’s control, Bush essentially enabled Donald Rumsfeld to pursue the war off the books, free from restrictions imposed on the CIA, including the oversight of Senate and House intelligence committees.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  For both, a bunker mentality strengthens identity and loyalty, and fuels militancy. Even though conservatives have dominated public policy on gun control for decades, a persecution narrative rooted in a sense of cultural decline has long mobilized gun rights advocates and driven gun sales, especially during Democratic administrations. For conservative white evangelicals, guns carry a symbolic weight that can only be understood within this larger culture of militancy.3 Or consider evangelical views on immigration and border security. More than any other religious demographic, white evangelicals see immigrants in a negative light. Two years into Trump’s presidency, more than two-thirds of white evangelicals did not think the United States had a responsibility to accept refugees. In 2019, nearly the same percentage supported Trump’s border wall. Given that the Bible is filled with commands to welcome the stranger and care for the foreigner, these attitudes might seem puzzling. Yet evangelicals who claim to uphold the authority of the Scriptures are quite clear that they do not necessarily look to the Bible to inform their views on immigration; a 2015 poll revealed that only 12 percent of evangelicals cited the Bible as their primary influence when it came to thinking about immigration. But this does not mean that religion does not matter. Evangelicals may self-identify as “Bible-believing Christians,” but evangelicalism itself entails a broader set of deeply held values communicated through symbol, ritual, and political allegiances.4 From the Cold War to the present, evangelicals have perceived the American nation as vulnerable. Tough, aggressive, militant men must defend “her.” The border is the line of defense, a site of danger rather than a place of hospitality. Since the 1960s, evangelicals, too, have exhibited a dogged commitment to “law and order.” What started as a backlash against hippies, antiwar protestors, civil rights activists, and urban minorities evolved into a veneration of law enforcement and the military. It’s no surprise, then, that the majority of evangelicals would agree that “building walls is not non-Christian,” that there is “nothing anti-gospel about protecting our nation from those who would do our nation harm,” and that those perceived as threats are members of nonwhite populations.5 Despite evangelicals’ frequent claims that the Bible is the source of their social and political commitments, evangelicalism must be seen as a cultural and political movement rather than as a community defined chiefly by its theology. Evangelical views on any given issue are facets of this larger cultural identity, and no number of Bible verses will dislodge the greater truths at the heart of it. Rather than seeing culture as pitted against theology, however, we should treat the interplay between the two as what ultimately defines evangelicalism. Here, recent debates over the nature of the Triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—are illuminating. Having pronounced patriarchal authority and female submission nonnegotiable “gospel truths,” some complementarian theologians went a step further.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “Oh well, they'll fade. Here they come!” The girls watched their young husbands approach. Pat wore trunks and a white tee, and Gene was dressed similarly, though, as usual, his trunks had a blue streak on them, while Pat’s had a flash of pink. As they neared their wives they stripped off their tees, rolled them into balls, and tossed them to the sand. Together, the boys dashed into the ocean for a final swim before departing the island. “What the—” Jeannie’s grin morphed into an open-mouthed expression of astonishment. “Oh. My. God.” Patty’s face mirrored her sister’s. For it wasn’t Patrick’s back that bore the mark of Patty’s ardour — it was Gene’s. Which could only mean one thing. It seemed twins, at least these two pairs of twins, think alike. The Escape Jett Zandersen Her lungs seized as she heard the creak of a floorboard near the door’s entrance. The moonlight coming through the French window cast shadows that moved whenever the breeze swept through the muslin curtains — the tendons on her hand contrasted as she froze above the keyboard. A voice permeated through the tension. “What are you doing here?’ There was no point running. She had tried that a week ago when she awoke from being drugged. The guards had shrugged and chuckled when she jumped out the window and dashed across the lawn, running madly despite the cuts and bruises from the recent struggle. After an hour of darting through thickets and forest, she knew she was trapped on an island. Somewhere. Escape would not be easy. Letting out her breath, her shoulders slumped and she felt like bursting into tears. She was so close. All she needed was the code to the tunnel that brought supplies from the mainland. And then she’d be free. Another day of what she had already endured would tip her over the edge — and she couldn’t give in. There was no point lying either, to the voice in the darkened doorway. The man she knew as “Caspar” could read her mind even when her lips mouthed other words. ‘The lips that he watched as she bit them in concentration when they played chess or poker, supervised by a retinue of guards and the presence of the operation controller, Mr White. Perhaps that’s why Caspar had lost the occasional game, if only to grant her some freedoms in the bets he made. If she won, she got a privilege, such as not being handcuffed to the table, or being able to butter bread with a knife. If he won, she would tell Mr White a name or a code. She never gave up her secrets easily though. After a game, Mr White made Caspar leave the room, and when he returned she always had a new bruise, another bandage. But she gave a name. The Escape 199 Even though they all knew it was fake. And then the next day would be another game of chess or poker.

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

  That problem is encapsulated by a horrible tale told by one of the chief writers in early monasticism, John Cassian, a fourth-century ascetic from the Eastern Empire whose writings brought eastern monastic discipline to the attention of ascetic communities in the western Mediterranean. In his book of community instruction, the Institutes, Cassian reminisces about a wealthy man whom he calls Patermutus, who, when he became a monk, brought his eight- year-old son with him. The abbot now assumed the role of paterfamilias: he deliberately broke them up to sever the biological bond, and sent them to separate communities. Patermutus was then sadistically tested: his little son was ‘purposely neglected’, ‘clothed in rags’ and left filthy, even randomly beaten until he cried, just to emphasize that the natural father should not intervene in this cruelty. The tale shockingly culminates in a ritually enacted parody of the Old Testament patriarch Abraham’s offering his son Isaac for a sacrificial death: the abbot ordered Patermutus to throw his son into the river, and the pair were actually at the water’s edge before a couple of strategically placed monks intervened to tell the father that he had passed the test of loyalty to his new vocation. The boy did not die, any more than Isaac had done, but now Patermutus had lost everything from the past; he was no longer even a parent. [26] * Yet not all Christians submitted as Patermutus did to this twisted version of the ‘silent rebellion’. The growing establishment of the Church brought in many converts who were no less aspiring Christians because they were powerful and wealthy, and who did not choose to reject their existing place in the society of their day. They too could be swept up in the movement to asceticism, but accommodating their power and wealth alongside its flat rejection by other ascetics was not straightforward. One wealthy and spiritually distinguished Christian family set useful patterns providing an answer. With an honourable ancestry among senators and urban magistrates, they lived in rural respectability in Asia Minor. Even before the fourth century, it was not so unusual in Asia Minor to encounter a Christian family among the local landed elite, but one fourth-century generation of the children of Basil and Emmelia made a remarkable joint contribution to Christian life and theology. Basil the son of Basil became Bishop of Caesarea Mazaca (now Kayseri in eastern inland Turkey). Having become a monk, he is known as ‘the Great’ both for his writings about structuring monastic life and general pastoral discipline, and for his strong support of the anti-Arian cause in the Church. Basil’s brother Gregory became Bishop of Nyssa in Asia Minor and was likewise a great Nicene theologian and spiritual writer. They both revered their older sister Macrina (‘the younger’ to distinguish her from a saintly grandmother), who played a major part in educating and bringing up her various brothers.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  General Jerry Boykin agreed to serve as a national security advisor to his campaign.4 Around this time, Russell Moore, president of the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and a Rubio supporter, summed up the evangelical vote: “I would say that Ted Cruz is leading in the ‘Jerry Falwell’ wing, Marco Rubio is leading the ‘Billy Graham’ wing and Trump is leading the ‘Jimmy Swaggart’ wing.” With the last remark, Moore was referring to prosperity gospel Pentecostals, but also no doubt alluding to Swaggart’s sex-with-prostitute scandals. But Iowa evangelical political operative Bob Vander Plaats cautioned against pigeonholing evangelicals in this way. “I don’t think we want to divide Christianity along those lines,” he advised. “We all break off the same church.” In the words of fellow operative David Lane, “Politics is about addition and multiplication, not subtraction and division.” Vander Plaats and Lane were right. Before long the evangelical vote began to coalesce. Behind Donald Trump.5 Why Trump, many wondered, including many evangelicals themselves. For decades, the Religious Right had been kindling fear in the hearts of American Christians. It was a tried-and-true recipe for their own success. Communism, secular humanism, feminism, multilateralism, Islamic terrorism, and the erosion of religious freedom—evangelical leaders had rallied support by mobilizing followers to fight battles on which the fate of the nation, and their own families, seemed to hinge. Leaders of the Religious Right had been amping up their rhetoric over the course of the Obama administration. The first African American president, the sea change in LGBTQ rights, the apparent erosion of religious freedom—coupled with looming demographic changes and the declining religious loyalty of their own children—heightened the sense of dread among white evangelicals. But in truth, evangelical leaders had been perfecting this pitch for nearly fifty years. Evangelicals were looking for a protector, an aggressive, heroic, manly man, someone who wasn’t restrained by political correctness or feminine virtues, someone who would break the rules for the right cause. Try as they might—and they did try—no other candidate could measure up to Donald Trump when it came to flaunting an aggressive, militant masculinity. He became, in the words of his religious biographers, “the ultimate fighting champion for evangelicals.”6 When he announced his candidacy in the summer of 2015, Trump made clear that his campaign would not be politics-as-usual. He ridiculed his opponents and carped about the country not having victories anymore, about it becoming “a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.” He talked of Mexican “rapists” and drugs and crime and terrorists crossing the border, “because we have no protection.” Mexico and China were taking “our jobs,” the country was getting weaker and our enemies stronger. “Even our nuclear arsenal doesn’t work.” America needed a leader, “a truly great leader,” a leader who could bring back jobs, bring back the military, and revive the American dream—which was dead.

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

  Yet while I write on the assumption that this is likely to be true, in the last half-century sex and gender have rapidly become more instrumental in internal Church conflict than at virtually any time over the last two millennia of Christian life. [5] Some institutional Churches have recently split apart as a result; everywhere there is hurt and contention. Once upon a time, ecclesiastical explosions were fuelled by such matters as the nature of the Trinity or the Eucharist, the means of salvation or patterns of Church authority; now human genitalia overshadow most other organs of ill- will. That sudden convulsion in religious thought reflects the extraordinary speed of societal changes centring on sex and gender over a period of, so far, little more than half a century. This transformation has been experienced right across the world, not just in societies with a Christian complexion. More than half a century ago as a young graduate student, I was exhilarated at my radicalism in being open about homosexuality, and in subsequent years I felt rather pleased with myself in being at the forefront of sexual liberation. Then I found that my assumptions had been completely outflanked by proclamation of trans identities hardly ever discussed in my youth, and equally by vituperative criticism of trans identities on feminist grounds; those opposing but passionately held convictions both shared roots in the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. These confusing experiences have taught me a lesson about being more observant or empathetic about the differences of others. In such circumstances, we should not be surprised that those slow-moving conglomerations of myriad opinions known as Churches have found it agonizingly hard to react coherently to questions they had not previously asked, let alone answered. Church leaders feel obliged to bring some clarity or comfort to those whom they seek to guide, and they are right to be wary of embracing the latest primrose path to novelty. The story of eugenics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which we shall visit in this book, is a salutary warning about that (below, Chapter 17). Yet everyone confronting the unfamiliar, inside or outside a religious system, has a duty of enquiry and exploration, as a means of combating fear. Fear is generally fear of the unknown. Knowledge is like a medicine to soothe a fever; in particular, proper knowledge of the past is a medicine for intellectual fevers contracted from prejudiced views of history. Prejudice, like fear, generally bases itself on ignorance, and such ignorance breeds distorted perspectives that poison present-day lives. My aim for this book is to deal with some of that fear by chronicling and even celebrating the sheer complexity and creativity of past generations grappling with their most profound emotions and consequent deeds. Looking at past attitudes to sexuality, we will find that over centuries they have been startlingly varied.