Hope

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 Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967)

  for instance, in the kabbalistic theosophies of “exile”). Parallels to this may be found in Christianity as well as in Islam. Even in Calvinism the starkness of submission to the inexorable decree of predestination was soon modified by means of various attempts to achieve certainty of election, be it through putative divine blessings upon one’s external activities or through an inner conviction of salvation (40). Yet all these “mitigations” of the masochistic theodicy are of less historical importance as compared with the essential Christian solution of the problem, namely, the one posited in Christology (41). Indeed, we would argue that, despite every conceivable variation of it in the history of Christianity, this may be called the fundamental Christian motif—the figure of the incarnate God as the answer to the problem of theodicy, specifically, to the unbearable tension of this problem brought about by the religious development of the Old Testament. And, however the metaphysics of this incarnation and its relationship to man’s redemption may have been formulated in the course of Christian theology, it is crucial that the incarnate God is also the God who suffers. Without this suffering, without the agony of the cross, the incarnation would not provide that solution of the problem of theodicy to which, we would contend, it owes its immense religious potency. This has been well stated by Albert Camus, whose understanding of Christianity may be taken as representative of that of its most insightful modern critics: In that Christ had suffered, and had suffered voluntarily, suffering was no longer unjust and all pain was necessary. In one sense, Christianity’s bitter intuition and legitimate pessimism concerning human behavior is based on the assumption that over-all injustice is as satisfying to man as total justice. Only the sacrifice of an 93

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

  The Monophysites are scattered upon the mountains and in the valleys and deserts of Syria, Armenia, Assyria, Egypt, and Abyssinia, and, like the orthodox Greeks of those countries, live mostly under Mohammedan, partly under Russian, rule. They supported the Arabs and Turks in weakening and at last conquering the Byzantine empire, and thus furthered the ultimate victory of Islam. In return, they were variously favored by the conquerors, and upheld in their separation from the Greek church. They have long since fallen into stagnation, ignorance, and superstition, and are to Christendom as a praying corpse to a living man. They are isolated fragments of the ancient church history, and curious petrifactions from the Christological battle-fields of the fifth and sixth centuries, coming to view amidst Mohammedan scenes. But Providence has preserved them, like the Jews, and doubtless not without design, through storms of war and persecution, unchanged until the present time. Their very hatred of the orthodox Greek church makes them more accessible both to Protestant and Roman missions, and to the influences of Western Christianity and Western civilization. On the other hand, they are a door for Protestantism to the Arabs and the Turks; to the former through the Jacobites, to the latter through the Armenians. There is the more reason to hope for their conversion, because the Mohammedans despise the old Oriental churches, and must be won, if at all, by a purer type of Christianity. In this respect the American missions among the Armenians in the Turkish empire, are, like those among the Nestorians in Persia, of great prospective importance, as outposts of a religion which is destined sooner or later to regenerate the East.

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

  But the laws of metre were an undue restraint to the new Christian spirit which required a new form. The Latin poetry of the church has a language of its own, a grammar of its own, a prosody of its own, and a beauty of its own, and in freshness, vigor, and melody even surpasses the Latin poetry of the classics. It had to cast away all the helps of the mythological fables, but drew a purer and richer inspiration from the sacred history and poetry of the Bible, and the heroic age of Christianity. But it had first to pass through a state of barbarism like the Romanic languages of the South of Europe in their transition from the old Latin. We observe the Latin language under the influence of the youthful and hopeful religion of Christ, as at the breath of a second spring, putting forth fresh blossoms and flowers and clothing itself with a new garment of beauty, old words assuming new and deeper meanings, obsolete words reviving, new words forming. In all this there is much to offend a fastidious classical taste, yet the losses are richly compensated by the gains. Christianity at its triumph in the Roman empire found the classical Latin rapidly approaching its decay and dissolution; in the course of time it brought out of its ashes a new creation. The classical system of prosody was gradually loosened, and accent substituted for quantity. Rhyme, unknown to the ancients as a system or rule, was introduced in the middle or at the end of the verse, giving the song a lyrical character, and thus a closer affinity with music. For the hymns were to be sung in the churches. This accented and rhymed poetry was at first, indeed, very imperfect, yet much better adapted to the freedom, depth, and warmth of the Christian spirit, than the stereotyped, stiff, and cold measure of the heathen classics.1245 Quantity is a more or less arbitrary and artificial device; accent, or the emphasizing of one syllable in a polysyllabic word, is natural and popular, and commends itself to the ear. Ambrose and his followers, with happy instinct, chose for their hymns the Iambic dimeter, which is the least metrical and the most rhythmical of all the ancient metres. The tendency to euphonious rhyme went hand in hand with the accented rhythm, and this tendency appears occasionally in its crude beginnings in Hilary and Ambrose, but more fully in Damasus, the proper father of this improvement.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  I could smell the cigarettes and chocolate on his breath. “You can do it,” Coach said. Oh, man, that sounded just like Eugene. He always shouted that during any game I ever played. It could be, like, a three-legged sack race, and Gene would be all drunk and happy in the stands and he’d be shouting out, “Junior, you can do it!” Yeah, that Eugene, he was a positive dude even as an alcoholic who ended up getting shot in the face and killed. Jeez, what a sucky life. I was about to play the biggest basketball game of my life and all I could think about was my dad’s dead best friend. So many ghosts. “You can do it,” Coach said again. He didn’t shout it. He whispered it. Like a prayer. And he kept whispering again. Until the prayer turned into a song. And then, for some magical reason, I believed in him. Coach had become, like, the priest of basketball, and I was his follower. And I was going to follow him onto the court and shut down my best friend. I hoped so. “I can do it,” I said to Coach, to my teammates, to the world. “You can do it,” Coach said. “I can do it.” “You can do it.” “I can do it.” Do you understand how amazing it is to hear that from an adult? Do you know how amazing it is to hear that from anybody? It’s one of the simplest sentences in the world, just four words, but they’re the four hugest words in the world when they’re put together. You can do it. I can do it. Let’s do it. We all screamed like maniacs as we ran out of the locker room and onto the basketball court, where two thousand maniac fans were also screaming. The Reardan band was rocking some Led Zeppelin. As we ran through our warm-up layup drills, I looked up into the crowd to see if my dad was in his usual place, high up in the northwest corner. And there he was. I waved at him. He waved back. Yep, my daddy was an undependable drunk. But he’d never missed any of my organized games, concerts, plays, or picnics. He may not have loved me perfectly, but he loved me as well as he could. My mom was sitting in her usual place on the opposite side of the court from Dad. Funny how they did that. Mom always said that Dad made her too nervous; Dad always said that Mom made him too nervous. Penelope was yelling and screaming like crazy, too. I waved at her; she blew me a kiss. Great, now I was going to have to play the game with a boner. Ha-ha, just kidding. So we ran through layups and three-on-three weave drills and free throws and pick and rolls, and then the evil Wellpinit five came running out of the visitors’ locker room.

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

  In this great emergency his character shone forth in all its strength and splendor; he bore what God laid upon him in silence and made no complaint. Meanwhile Lewis the German came to his support. In 846 the see of Bremen became vacant. The see of Hamburg was then united to that of Bremen, and to this new see, which Ansgar was called to fill, a papal bull of May 31, 864, gave archiepiscopal rank. Installed in Bremen, Ansgar immediately took up again the Danish mission and again with success. He won even king Horich himself for the Christian cause, and obtained permission from him to build a church in Hedeby, the first Christian church in Denmark, dedicated to Our Lady. Under king Horich’s son this church was allowed to have bells, a particular horror to the heathens, and a new and larger church was commenced in Ribe. By Ansgar’s activity Christianity became an established and acknowledged institution in Denmark, and not only in Denmark but also in Sweden, which he visited once more, 848–850. The principal feature of his spiritual character was ascetic severity; he wore a coarse hair-shirt close to the skin, fasted much and spent most of his time in prayer. But with this asceticism he connected a great deal of practical energy; he rebuked the idleness of the monks, demanded of his pupils that they should have some actual work at hand, and was often occupied in knitting, while praying. His enthusiasm and holy raptures were also singularly well-tempered by good common sense. To those who wished to extol his greatness and goodness by ascribing miracles to him, he said that the greatest miracle in his life would be, if God ever made a thoroughly pious man out of him.129 Most prominent, however, among the spiritual features of his character shines forth his unwavering faith in the final success of his cause and the never-failing patience with which this faith fortified his soul. In spite of apparent failure he never gave up his work; overwhelmed with disaster, he still continued it. From his death-bed he wrote a letter to king Lewis to recommend to him the Scandinavian mission. Other missionaries may have excelled him in sagacity and organizing talent, but none in heroic patience and humility. He died at Bremen, Feb. 3, 865, and lies buried there in the church dedicated to him. He was canonized by Nicholas I.

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

  Such a personage as Augustine, still holding a mediating place between the two great divisions of Christendom, revered alike by both, and of equal influence with both, is furthermore a welcome pledge of the elevating prospect of a future reconciliation of Catholicism and Protestantism in a higher unity, conserving all the truths, losing all the errors, forgiving all the sins, forgetting all the enmities of both. After all, the contradiction between authority and freedom, the objective and the subjective, the churchly and the personal, the organic and the individual, the sacramental and the experimental in religion, is not absolute, but relative and temporary, and arises not so much from the nature of things, as from the deficiencies of man’s knowledge and piety in this world. These elements admit of an ultimate harmony in the perfect state of the church, corresponding to the union of the divine and human natures, which transcends the limits of finite thought and logical comprehension, and is yet completely realized in the person of Christ. They are in fact united in the theological system of St. Paul, who had the highest view of the church, as the mystical "body of Christ," and "the pillar and ground of the truth," and who was at the same time the great champion of evangelical freedom, individual responsibility, and personal union of the believer with his Saviour. We believe in and hope for one holy catholic apostolic church, one communion of saints, one fold, and one Shepherd. The more the different churches become truly Christian, or draw nearer to Christ, and the more they give real effect to His kingdom, the nearer will they come to one another. For Christ is the common head and vital centre of all believers, and the divine harmony of all discordant human sects and creeds. In Christ, says Pascal, one of the greatest and noblest disciples of Augustine, In Christ all contradictions are solved. LIST OF POPES AND EMPERORSFrom Constantine the Great to Gregory the Great, A.D. 314–590. Comp. the lists in vol. ii. 166 sqq., and vol. iv. 205 Sqq. This list is based upon Jaffé’s Regesta, Potthast’s Biblioth. Hist. Medii Aevi, and Cardinal Hergenröther’s list, in his Kirchengesch., third ed. (1886), vol. iii. 1057 sqq. Date Pope Emperor Date 311–314 Melchiades Constantine I, or The Great 306 (323)–337 314–335 Silvester I 336–337 Marcus Constantine II (in Gaul) 337–340 337–352 Julius I Constantius II (In the East) 337–350 Constans (In Italy) " 352–66 Liberius 357 Filix II, Antipope Constantius Alone 350–361 Julian 361–363 Jovian 363–364 366–843 Damasus Valentinian I 364–375 Valens 364–378 366–367 Ursicinus, Antipope Gratian 375–383 Valentinian II (in the West) 375–392 385–398 Siricius Theodosius 379–395 398–402 Anastasius Arcadius (in the East) 395–408 402–417 Innocent I Honorius (in the West) 395–423 417–418 Zosimus Theodosius II (E.) 408–450 418–422 Bonifacius (418 Dec. 27) (Eulalius, Antipope) 422–432 Coelestinus I Valentinian III (W.) 423–455 432–440 Sixtus III 440–461 Leo I the Great Marcian (E.) 450–457 Maximus Avitus (W.) 455–457 Majorian (W.) 457–461 Leo I. (E.)

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I ask whether there can be any hesitation, lovely Therese, and where will your little mind find an argument able to combat that one ?" Chapter 9 "Oh Monsieur," I replied with the vehemence a good cause inspires, "there are a thousand; but must this life be man's unique concern? Is this existence other than a passage each of whose stages ought only, if he is reasonable, to conduct him to that eternal felicity, the prize vouchsafed by Virtue? I suppose together with you (but this, however, is rare, it conflicts with all reason's informations, but never mind), I will for an instant grant you that the villain who abandons himself to crime may be rendered happy by it in this world, but do you imagine God's justice does not await that dishonest man, that he will not have to pay in another world for what he does in this? Ah! think not the contrary, Monsieur, believe it not," I added, tears in my eyes, " 'tis the misfortunate one's sole consolation, take it not away from us; forsaken by mankind, who will avenge us if not God ?" "Who? No one, Therese, absolutely no one; it is in no wise necessary that the misfortunate be avenged; they flatter themselves with the notion because they would like to be, the idea comforts them, but it is not on that account the less false: better still, it is essential that the misfortunate suffer; their humiliation, their anguishes are included in what Nature decrees, and their miserable existence is useful to the general scheme, as is that of the prosperity which crushes them; such is the truth which should stifle remorse in the tyrant's soul or in the malefactor's; let him not constrain himself; let him blindly, unthinkingly deliver himself up to causing every hurt the idea for which may be born in him, it is only Nature's voice which suggests this idea; such is the only fashion in which she makes us her laws' executors. When her secret inspirations dispose us to evil, it is evil she wishes, it is evil she requires, for the sum of crimes not being complete, not sufficient to the laws of equilibrium, the only laws whereby she is governed, she demands that there be crimes to dress the scales; therefore let him not be afraid, let him not pause, whose brain is driven to concerting ill; let him unheeding commit wrong immediately he discerns the impulsion, it is only by lagging and snuffling he outrages Nature.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  It had the misfortune of opening to mixed reviews on the same night that the last installment of the Harry Potter series premiered. Haggis had to close his office. It looked like another bleak period in his career, but he followed it by writing a screenplay for a video game, Modern Warfare 3 , which would go on to set a sales record, earning $1 billion in the first sixteen days after its release. I once asked Haggis about the future of his relationship with Scientology. “These people have long memories,” he told me. “My bet is that, within two years, you’re going to read something about me in a scandal that looks like it has nothing to do with the church.” He thought for a moment, then said, “I was in a cult for thirty-four years. Everyone else could see it. I don’t know why I couldn’t.” MARTY RATHBUN DIVIDES the people who leave Scientology into three camps. There are those who reject the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard entirely, such as Paul Haggis; and those who still believe entirely but think that the church under David Miscavige has taken Scientology away from the original, true teachings of the founder. There is a third category, which he has been struggling to define, that includes those people who are willing neither to swallow all the dogma nor to throw away the insights they gained from their experience. Hubbard’s life and teachings are still the guideposts of their lives. “ It wouldn’t stick if there wasn’t a tremendous amount of good it did for them,” Rathbun says. He’s been studying the history of other religions for parallels, and he quotes an old Zen proverb: “When the master points at the Moon, many people never see it at all, they only look at the master.” Rathbun has been counseling Scientologists who leave the church, and because of that he’s been subject to continual monitoring and harassment from the church. His computers have been hacked and phone records have been stolen. A group of “Squirrel Busters” moved into his little community of Ingleside on the Bay, near Corpus Christi, in order to spy on him and drive him away through constant harassment. They wore video cameras on their hats and patrolled the neighborhood in a golf cart or occasionally a paddleboat. This lasted for 199 days. That tactic didn’t work, because his neighbors rallied to his support. Many other defectors have been harassed and followed by private investigators. [image file=Image00028.jpg] Marty Rathbun with an E-Meter at his home in Ingleside on the Bay, Texas, 2011 On a sweltering Fourth of July weekend, 2011, a group of about a hundred “independent” Scientologists gathered at a lake cabin in East Texas. Rathbun and Mike Rinder had organized it. A few courageous swimmers were leaping off the dock, but rumors of alligators kept most people on the shore. A brief, powerful storm rolled through, driving everyone to shelter.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  He painted a far different picture in a letter to the Veterans Administration, which was demanding reimbursement for an overpayment: “ I cannot imagine how to repay this $51.00 as I am nearly penniless and have but $28.50 to last me for nearly a month to come,” he writes. “My expenditures consist of $27 a month trailer rent and $80 a month food for my wife and self which includes gas, cigarettes and all incidentals. I am very much in debt and have not been able to get a job.” Instead of repaying the VA, he boldly asks for a loan. In Hollywood, Hubbard began perfecting techniques that he first developed in the naval hospital and that later became Dianetics. He boasts to Hays, “ Been amusing myself making a monkey out of Freud. I always knew he was nutty but didn’t have a firm case.” He adds that he has been conducting research on inferiority complexes: “Nightly had people writhing in my Hollywood office, sending guys out twice as tall as superman.” For the first time, he floats the idea of a book, which he tentatively titles An Introduction to Traumatic Psychology . He thinks it will require about six weeks to write. “ I got to revolutionize this here field because nobody in it, so far as I can tell, knows his anatomy from a gopher hole.” Hubbard was casting around for a new direction in his life. He took up acting at the Geller Theater Workshop, paid for in part by the VA, but that didn’t satisfy him. There was a larger plan stirring in his imagination. “ I was hiding behind the horrible secret. And that is I was trying to find out what the mind was all about,” he recalls. “I couldn’t even tell my friends; they didn’t understand. They said, ‘Here’s Hubbard, he’s leading a perfectly wonderful life. He gets to associate with movie actresses. He knows hypnotism and so has no trouble with editors. He has apartments and stuff.’ ” [image file=Image00010.jpg] IT WAS THE LARVAL STAGE of Hubbard’s astonishing transformation—from the depressed, rejected, impoverished, creatively exhausted figure he paints in the Affirmations, to his nearly overnight success as a thinker and founder of an international movement when his book Dianetics was finally published. He wrote his friend Robert Heinlein, “ I will soon, I hope give you a book risen from the ashes of the old Excalibur which details in full the mathematics of the human mind, solves all the problems of the ages, and gives six recipes for aphrodisiacs and plays the mouth organ with the left foot.” He writes a little about recovering from the war, then remarks, “The main difficulty these days is getting sane again. I find out that I am making progress. Of course there is always the danger that I will get too sane to write.” He is angling for a Guggenheim grant for his book on psychology.

• From Between Us

  If we don’t want that to happen, we need to look into ways of understanding emotions across cultures. Beyond Empathy In his book The War for Kindness, psychologist Jamil Zaki makes a case that, as a human species, we need kindness: we need each other’s understanding and help, because only together, as families, groups, and societies, can we survive. Kindness has played a role in our evolutionary survival, but it is not merely a relic of the past. We still need it to flourish, as individuals and as a society. Zaki assumes a big role for empathy. “Empathy is the mental superpower that overcomes [the] distance” between people, he writes. Where hate dehumanizes others and creates schisms, empathy humanizes them and grows connection. Empathy has been key to our survival as a species, because it inspires kindness towards each other. A culture of empathy grows social cohesion: it shows the human face of students, employees, patients, and citizens, and in doing so, creates room for development and well-being. Some of us may be endowed with a higher “set point” of empathy than others, but each of us can decide to become more empathic than we are. We can invest in becoming more attuned to other people’s feelings and experiences. So how do we grow empathy? Zaki’s answer is to try to imagine how another person thinks or feels. Meditating on someone else’s “motives, beliefs, and history . . . conjures an authentic inner world.” Attend to another person, grasp their circumstances, and know what they feel. I hope you now understand that we can neither directly read emotions from other people’s faces, nor simply “catch” the emotions of other people. We can think we can, but our perception need not match the interpretation of the target—even less so when they are from a different culture. It is challenging to “meditate on someone else’s motives, beliefs and history,” as Zaki suggests we do, when the distance with your own motives, beliefs, and history is large. Just imagining how you would feel in a similar situation will not do the job. If you tried, you would almost certainly make sense of a given situation in a way that fits your culture’s values and relationship goals. You would be likely to have emotions that are “right” in your culture. You would interact with others who draw from the same collective repertoire of emotional episodes as you do. As Coates points out: “It is funny when you have never been in that environment, but very serious when you don’t have anything else to lean on, if you are from a place where all you have is like the basic, physical respect.” Projecting your own feelings is of limited value when you try to understand emotions that are embedded in another cultural reality. I met Hazel Markus thirty years ago at a conference that she and Shinobu Kitayama organized on the topic of culture and emotion.

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

  But now some ahadith claimed that the wars of conquest heralded the Last Days 61 and imagined Muhammad speaking as a doomsday prophet: “Behold! God has sent me with a sword, just before the Hour.” 62 Muslim warriors are depicted as an elite vanguard fighting the battles of the end time. 63 When the end came, all Muslims would have to abandon the ease of settled life and join the army, which would not only defeat Byzantium but complete the conquest of Central Asia, India, and Ethiopia. Some soldiers were dreaming of martyrdom, and the ahadith supplemented with Christian imagery the Quran’s brief remarks about the fate of those who die in battle. 64 Like the Greek martus, the Arabic shahid meant “one who bears witness” to Islam by making the ultimate surrender. Ahadith list his heavenly rewards: he would not have to wait in the grave for the Last Judgment like everybody else, but would ascend immediately to a special place in paradise. In the sight of God the martyr has six [unique] qualities: He [God] forgives him at the first opportunity, and shows him his place in paradise; he is saved from the torment of the grave, he is safe from the great fright [of the Last Judgment], a crown of honor is placed upon his head—one ruby of which is better than the world and all that is in it—he is married to 72 of the houris [women of paradise], and he gains the right to intercede [with God] for 70 of his relatives. 65 As a reward for his hard life in the army, the martyr will drink wine, wear silk clothes, and bask in the sexual delights he had forsaken for the jihad. But other Muslims, who were not so wedded to the new military ideal, would insist that any untimely death was a martyrdrom: drowning, plague, fire, or accident also “bore witness” to human finitude, showing that there was no security in the human institutions in which people put their trust but only in the illimitable God. 66 It was probably inevitable that, as Muslims made their astonishing transition from a life of penury to world rule, there would be disagreements about leadership, the allocation of resources, and the morality of empire. 67 In 656 Uthman was killed during a mutiny of soldiers backed by the Quran reciters, the guardians of Islamic tradition who were opposed to the growing centralization of power in the ummah.

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

  May we not then cherish at least a charitable hope, if not a certain belief, that a God of infinite love and justice will receive into his heavenly kingdom all those who die innocently ignorant of the Christian revelation, but in a state of preparedness or disposition for the gospel, so that they would thankfully accept it if offered to them? Cornelius was in such a condition before Peter entered his house, and he represents a multitude which no man can number. We cannot know and measure the secret operations of the Spirit of God, who works "when, where, and how he pleases." Surely, here is a point where the rigor of the old orthodoxy, whether Roman Catholic, or Lutheran, or Calvinistic, must be moderated. And the Calvinistic system admits more readily of an expansion than the churchly and sacramental type of orthodoxy. The General Love of God to all Men. This doctrine of a divine will and divine provision of a universal salvation, on the sole condition of faith, is taught in many passages which admit of no other interpretation, and which must, therefore, decide this whole question. For it is a settled rule in hermeneutics that dark passages must be explained by clear pas-sages, and not vice versa. Such passages are the following: — "I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord our God: wherefore turn yourselves, and live" (Ezek. 18:32, 23; 33:11). "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself" (John 12:32). "God so loved the world" (that is, all mankind) "that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life" (John 3:16). "God our Saviour willeth that all men should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth "(1 Tim. 2:4).855 "The grace of God hath appeared, bringing salvation to all men" (Tit. 2:11). "The Lord is long-suffering to you-ward, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance" (2 Pet. 3:9).856 "Jesus Christ is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for (the sins of) the whole world" (1 John 2:2). It is impossible to state the doctrine of a universal atonement more clearly in so few words.857 To these passages should be added the divine exhortations to repentance, and the lament of Christ over the inhabitants of Jerusalem who "would not" come to him (Matt. 23:37). These exhortations are insincere or unmeaning, if God does not want all men to be saved, and if men have not the ability to obey or disobey the voice. The same is implied in the command of Christ to preach the gospel to the whole creation (Mark 16:15), and to disciple all nations (Matt. 28:19). It is impossible to restrict these passages to a particular class without doing violence to the grammar and the context.

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

  1860), the master-critic among sceptical church historians, and the corypheus of the Tübingen school, came at last to the conclusion (as stated in the revised edition of his Church History of the First Three Centuries, published shortly before his death, 1860) that "nothing but the miracle of the resurrection could disperse the doubts which threatened to drive faith itself into the eternal night of death (Nur das Wunder der Auferstehung konnte die Zweifel zerstreuen, welche den Glauben selbst in die ewige Nacht des Todes verstossen zu müssen schienen)." Geschichte der christlichen Kirche, I. 39. It is true he adds that the nature of the resurrection itself lies outside of historical investigation ("Was die Auferstehung an sich ist, liegt ausserhalb des Kreises der geschichtlichen Untersuchung"), but also, that "for the faith of the disciples the resurrection of Jesus became the most solid and most irrefutable certainty. In this faith only Christianity gained a firm foothold of its historical development. (In diesem Glauben hat erst das Christenthum den festen Grund seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung gewonnen.) What history requires as the necessary prerequisite of all that follows is not so much the fact of the resurrection itself [?] as the faith in that fact. In whatever light we may consider the resurrection of Jesus, whether as an actual objective miracle or as a subjective psychological one (als ein objectiv geschehenes Wunder, oder als ein subjectiv psychologisches), even granting the possibility of such a miracle, no psychological analysis can penetrate the inner spiritual process by which in the consciousness of the disciples their unbelief at the death of Jesus was transformed into a belief of his resurrection .... We must rest satisfied with this, that for them the resurrection of Christ was a fact of their consciousness, and had for them all the reality of an historical event." (Ibid., pp. 39, 40.) Baur’s remarkable conclusion concerning the conversion of St. Paul (ibid., pp. 44, 45) we shall consider in its proper place. Dr. Ewald, of Göttingen (d. 1874), the great orientalist and historian of Israel, antagonistic to Baur, his equal in profound scholarship and bold, independent, often arbitrary criticism, but superior in religious sympathy with the genius of the Bible, discusses the resurrection of Christ in his History of the Apostolic Age (Gesch. des Volkes Israel, vol. VI. 52 sqq.), instead of his Life of Christ, and resolves it into a purely spiritual, though long continued manifestation from heaven. Nevertheless he makes the strong statement (p. 69) that "nothing is historically more certain than that Christ rose from the dead and appeared to his own, and that this their vision was the beginning of their new higher faith and of an their Christian labors." "Nichts steht geschichtlich fester," he says, "als dass Christus aus den Todten auferstanden den Seinigen wiederschien und dass dieses ihr wiedersehen der anfang ihres neuen höhern glaubens und alles ihres Christlichen wirkens selbst war.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I was exclusively busied with preparing my departure when one evening a lackey clad in gray and completely unknown to me brought me a note; upon presenting it, he said his master had charged him to obtain my response without fail. The missive was worded this way: "A man who has somewhat wronged you, who believes he recognized you in the Place de Belle-cour, is most desirous to see you and to make amends for his conduct: hasten to come to meet him; he has things to tell you which may help liquidate his entire indebtedness to you." The message carried no signature and the lackey offered no explanations. Having declared I was resolved to make no answer at all lest I was informed of who his master was: "He is Monsieur de Saint-Florent, Mademoiselle," the lackey said; "he has had the honor to know you formerly in the neighbor-hood of Paris; you rendered him, he maintains, services for which he burns to attest his gratitude. Presently risen to a position of undisputed eminence in this city's commercial circles, he at once enjoys the consideration and the means which put him in a position to prove his regard for you. He awaits you." My deliberations were soon completed. If this man had other than good intentions, I said to myself, would he be apt to write to me, to have me spoken to in this fashion? He repented his past infamies, was covered with remorse, it was with horror he remembered having torn from me what I cherished most and, by inaugurating a sequence of nightmares, having reduced me to the cruelest circumstances a woman may know... yes, yes, no doubt of it, this is repentance, I should be culpable before the Supreme Being were I not to consent to assuage his sufferings. Am I in a position, furthermore, to spurn the support that is proposed here? Rather, ought I not eagerly snatch at all that is offered to relieve me? This man wishes to see me in his town house: his prosperity must surround him with servants before whom he will have to act with enough dignity to prevent him from daring to fail me again, and in my state, Great God! can I inspire anything but sympathy in him?

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

  Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948), however, disagreed with this interpretation. He had been born into a vaishya family and had many Jain friends who influenced his later attitudes. In 1914, after working for years as a lawyer in South Africa to oppose discriminatory legislation against Indians, he had returned to India and become interested in the issue of home rule, founding the Natal Indian Congress Party and developing his unique method of resisting colonial oppression by nonresistance. Besides the Hindu religious tradition, he had been influenced by Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You, John Ruskin’s Unto This Last, and Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience. Central to Gandhi’s worldview was the insight, first developed in the Upanishads, that all beings were manifestations of the Brahman. Since everybody shared the same sacred core, violence went against the metaphysical bias of the entire universe. This deeply spiritual vision of the oneness of existence directly countered the aggressive separatism and chauvinism of the nation-state. Gandhi’s peaceable refusal to obey the self-serving obduracy of the British regime was based on three principles: ahimsa, satyagraha (the “soul force” that comes with the realization of the profound unity of humanity), and swaraj (“self-rule”). In the Gita, Gandhi maintained, Arjuna’s initial refusal to fight had not been true ahimsa, because he still regarded himself as different from his enemies and had not realized that they were all, friend and foe alike, embodiments of the Brahman. Had Arjuna truly understood that he and Duryodana, the adversary he was about to fight, were ultimately one, he would have acquired the “soul force” that had the power to transform an enemy’s hatred into love. But as we have seen, the same texts and spiritual practices can lead to entirely different courses of actions. Others opposed this interpretation of the Gita. The Hindu scholar Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950) argued that Krishna’s validation of violence in the Gita was simply an acknowledgment of life’s grim reality. Yes, it would be nice to remain peacefully above the fray, but until Gandhi’s “soul force” actually became an effective reality in the world, the natural aggression inherent in both men and nations “tramples down, breaks, slaughters, burns, pollutes as we see it doing today.” Gandhi might discover that he had caused as much destruction of life by abjuring violence as those who had resorted to fighting. 8 Aurobindo was voicing the view of Gandhi’s critics, who thought that he closed his eyes to the fact that the British response to his nonviolent campaigns actually resulted in hideous bloodshed.

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

  For without Thee nought we find, Pure or strong in human kind, Nought that has not gone astray. Lava quod est sordidum, Riga quod est aridum, Sana quod est saucium. Wash us from the stains of sin, Gently soften all within, Wounded spirits heal and stay. Flecte quod est rigidum, Fove quod est languidum, Rege quod est devium. What is hard and stubborn bend, What is feeble soothe and tend, What is erring gently sway. Da tuis fidelibus, In te confitentibus, Sacrum septenarium; To Thy faithful servants give, Taught by Thee to trust and live, Sevenfold blessing from this day; Da virtutis meritum, Da salutis exitum, Da perenne gaudium.488 Make our title clear, we pray, When we drop this mortal clay; Then,—O give us joy for aye.489 The following is a felicitous version by an American divine.490 Come, O Spirit! Fount of grace! From thy heavenly dwelling-place One bright morning beam impart: Come, O Father of the poor; Come, O Source of bounties sure; Come, O Sunshine of the heart! O! thrice blessed light divine! Come, the spirit’s inmost shrine With Thy holy presence fill; Of Thy brooding love bereft, Naught to hopeless man is left; Naught is his but evil still. Comforter of man the best! Making the sad soul thy guest; Sweet refreshing in our fears, In our labor a retreat, Cooling shadow in the heat, Solace in our falling tears. Wash away each earthly stain, Flow o’er this parched waste again, Real the wounds of conscience sore, Bind the stubborn will within, Thaw the icy chains of sin, Guide us, that we stray no more. Give to Thy believers, give, In Thy holy hope who live, All Thy sevenfold dower of love; Give the sure reward of faith, Give the love that conquers death, Give unfailing joy above. Notker, surnamed the Older, or Balbulus ("the little Stammerer, "from a slight lisp in his speech), was born about 850 of a noble family in Switzerland, educated in the convent of St. Gall, founded by Irish missionaries, and lived there as an humble monk. He died about 912, and was canonized in 1512.491

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  You have to get to a clearing. Somewhere they can see you. But all around me there are trees. I’ve walked so far. I am in the thickest of thickets. I can reach out and touch the nearest tree trunk with my pinkie. Did I stop here because I thought it would be warmer? Did I just collapse? I can’t remember. But I hear a helicopter whipping the air, and I have to make them see me. I utilize the nearest tree trunk and pull myself to my feet. I stumble forward, heading in the direction I came from. I can see my prints in the snow. I think I remember a thicket just ahead. One where I could see the sky. It’s farther than I thought, and by the time I reach it and tilt my head back, I can’t hear the Whump-Whump quite as clearly as before. Not enough time to build a fire. I picture myself crouched in the snow whittling away at a pile of wood, and laugh. Too late to go back to the house, how long have I been out her? I’ve lost all concept of time. Two days? Three? Then I think it. Isaac is alive! He sent them. There is nothing to do but to stand in the clearing, head tilted up, and wait. I am airlifted to the nearest hospital in Anchorage. There are already news trucks outside. I see flashes and hear slamming doors and voices before I am wheeled on the gurney through the back door and into a private room. Nurses and doctors in salmon-colored scrubs come rushing toward me. I am compelled to roll off the gurney and hide. There are too many people. I want to tell them that I’m fine. I’m a death escapist. There is no need for this many medical professionals or this many tests. Their faces are serious; they are concentrating on saving me. There’s nothing really left for them to save. Nevertheless, needles slide into my arms over and over until I can’t even feel them anymore. They make me comfortable in a private room, with only an IV to keep me company. The nurses ask how I feel, but I don’t know what to tell them. I know that my heart is beating and that I am not cold anymore. They tell me that I’m dehydrated, undernourished. I want to say, “No shit” but I can’t form words yet. After a few hours they feed me. Or they try to. Simple food that my hollow stomach can handle: bread and something that is white and mushy. I push the food aside and ask for coffee. They say, “No.” When I try to stand up and tell them that I’m getting my own, they bring me coffee.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  Until it comes. Clarity, bleeding through my denial, warm against my numb brain. Warm—it’s a word I’m becoming less and less familiar with. Isaac has become increasingly worried about the generator lately. He calculates how long we’ve been here. “It’s going to run out of gas. I don’t know why it hasn’t already…” We turned off the heat and used the wood from the closet downstairs. But now we are running out of wood. Isaac has rationed us down to four logs a day. Any day now the generator could run out of fuel. It is Isaac’s fear that we will no longer be able to get water through the faucet without the power. “We can burn things in the house for heat,” he tells me. “But once we run out of water we’re dead.” My feet are cold, my hands are cold, my nose is cold; but right now, my brain is cooking something. I press my face into the pillow and will it away. My brain is sometimes like a rogue Rubik’s cube. It twists until it finds a pattern. I can figure out any movie, any book within five minutes of starting it. It’s almost painful. I wait for it to pass, the twisting. My mind can see the picture that Isaac has been looking for. While he, no doubt, paces the kitchen, I get up and sit on the floor in front of my dwindling fire. The wood is hard against my legs, but wood absorbs heat and I’d rather be warm and uncomfortable than cold and cushioned. I’m trying to distract my thoughts, but they are persistent. Senna! Senna! Senna! My thoughts sound like Yul Brynner. Not girl voice, not my voice, Yul Brynner’s voice. Specifically in The Ten Commandments. “Shut up, Yul,” I whisper. But, he doesn’t shut up. And no wonder I didn’t see it before. The truth is more twisted than I am. If I am right, we will be home soon; Isaac with his family, me with mine. I giggle. If I am right, the door will open and we can walk to a place where there is help. All of this will be over. And it’s a good thing, too, we are down to a dozen logs. When my toes are thawed, I stand and head downstairs so that I can tell him.

• From Between Us

  It is not only emotional imperialism that drives the projection of our own emotions onto those of individuals from other cultures. Equally important in a globalized world is the desire to build on emotions for a shared understanding of humanity. There is no need for despair: It is possible to find humanity, even in the absence of universal feelings. It is possible to get familiar with the emotions of people from other cultures. Cultural differences in emotions have a logic: they become understandable once we know what people in these different contexts care about—that is, once we understand their norms, values, and goals. Most importantly, once you understand the emotions of people from other cultural groups, you will realize that your own emotions are not the universal default. Emotions—our own included—are as dependent on our culture as our clothes, our language, and the foods we feed our children. The mosaic of emotional life is too complex to ever fully map in a go-to reference manual and this is certainly not the goal of this book. What I want to convey, instead, is that there is a logic to cultural differences in emotions. We can teach ourselves to expect differences in emotions, and to keep an open mind. By embracing emotional difference, we lay the groundwork for truly bridging cultures and finding common ground. INDEX Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book.

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

  Beza was deeply grieved at this apostasy. But when he learned that the king favored his old co-religionists in many ways, and especially, when in 1598, he published the Edict of Nantes, which put the Protestants on a nearly common footing with the Roman Catholics in France, Beza took a more hopeful view of the king’s condition. In 1599 the king, in the course of a war with Charles Emmanuel, approached near Geneva. The city saw in this a chance to obtain from the king the promise of his protection, especially against the Duke of Savoy, who had built a fort called St. Catherine, quite near Geneva. To effect this the city sent a delegation headed by Beza, and the interview between the monarch and the reformer was honorable to both. The king gladly gave his promise, and the next year the fort was destroyed. He also came to Geneva and received its hospitality. § 175. Beza’s Last Days. Beza’s life was now drawing to its close. The weight of years had become a grievous burden. His bodily powers gradually deserted him. He partially lost his hearing. His memory became so enfeebled that the past only remained to him, while recent events made no lasting impression. It was the breaking up of an extraordinarily vigorous constitution, which had so supported him for sixty-five years that he had scarcely known what it was to be sick. Then he took the prudent course of giving up one by one the duties which he had so long discharged. In 1586 he was excused from preaching daily, and henceforth till 1600 preached only on Sunday. In 1598 he retired from active duty in the Academy, and sold his library, giving part of the proceeds, which were considerable, to his wife, and part to the poor. In 1600 he rendered his last public services in the Academy, and preached his last sermon—the only one preached in the seventeenth, by a reformer of the sixteenth, century.1306 Occasionally something of the old wit flashed forth. As when he made his reply to the silly rumor that he had yielded to the argumentation of François de Sales and had gone over to Rome. The facts are these: François came to Geneva in 1597 with the express purpose of converting Beza. He was then thirty years old, very zealous, very skilful, and in many other cases had been successful. But he met his match in the old Reformer, who however listened to him courteously. What argument failed to accomplish, the priest thought money might do, and so he offered Beza in the name of the pope a yearly pension of four thousand gold crowns and a sum equal to twice as much as the value of all his personal effects! This brought matters to a climax, and Beza dismissed him with the polite but sarcastic and decisive rebuke, "Go, sir; I am too old and too deaf to be able to hear such words."1307