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 Going Clear (2013)

  Altogether, about 120 people were huddled in the pitch-black basement, serving time in the Rehabilitation Project Force. The ranks of the RPF had expanded along with the church’s need for cheap labor to renovate its recently purchased buildings in Hollywood. The federal agents had no idea what they were seeing. Within moments, a representative of the church’s Guardian’s Office arrived and began shouting at the agents that they were exceeding the limits of their search warrants. Seeing that the Sea Org members posed no threat to them, the agents shrugged and moved on. It is instructive to realize that none of the Sea Org members consigned to the RPF dungeon took the opportunity to escape. If the FBI had bothered to interrogate them, it’s unlikely that any of them would have said that they were there against their will. Most of them believed that they were there by mistake, or that they deserved their punishment and would benefit by the work and study they were prescribed. Even those who had been physically forced into the RPF were not inclined to leave. Despite federal laws against human trafficking and unlawful imprisonment, the FBI never opened the door on the RPF again. Jesse Prince, one of the very few black members of the Sea Org, was among those being punished. He had been attracted to Scientology by the beautiful girls and the promise of superhuman powers. He recalls being told he would learn to levitate, travel through time, control the thoughts of others, and have total command over the material universe. In 1976, when he signed up for the Sea Org, Scientology had just purchased the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, part of the real-estate empire that the church was acquiring in Hollywood, along with the Château Élysée and the old Wilcox Hotel, which functioned as Sea Org berthing. The hospital was a mess; there were leftover medical devices and body parts in laboratory jars; there was even a corpse in the basement morgue. The Sea Org crew slaved to convert the hospital into a dormitory and offices. One night Prince was awakened after an hour of sleep and ordered to report to a superior, who chewed him out for slacking off. Prince had had enough. “ Fuck you, I’m outta here,” he said. His superior told him he wasn’t going anywhere. “He snapped his fingers and six people came and put me in a room,” Prince recalled. “I was literally incarcerated.” It was March 1977. Prince was placed in the RPF with two hundred other Sea Org members, doing heavy labor and studying Hubbard’s spiritual technology. He would be held there for eighteen months. “They told me the only way to get out is to learn this tech to a ‘T’ and then be able to apply it.” The question posed by Prince’s experience in the RPF is whether or not he was brainwashed.

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

  Can you imagine a place where white people are scared of Indians and not the other way around? That’s Montana. And my sister had married one of those crazy Indians. She didn’t even tell our parents or grandmother or me before she left. She called Mom from St. Ignatius, Montana, on the Flathead Indian Reservation, and said, “Hey, Mom, I’m a married woman now. I want to have ten babies and live here forever and ever.” How weird is that? It’s almost romantic. And then I realized that my sister was trying to LIVE a romance novel. Man, that takes courage and imagination. Well, it also took some degree of mental illness, too, but I was suddenly happy for her. And a little scared. Well, a lot scared. She was trying to live out her dream. We should have all been delirious that she’d moved out of the basement. We’d been trying to get her out of there for years. Of course, my mother and father would have been happy if she’d just gotten a part-time job at the post office or trading post, and maybe just moved into an upstairs bedroom in our house. But I just kept thinking that my sister’s spirit hadn’t been killed. She hadn’t given up. This reservation had tried to suffocate her, had kept her trapped in a basement, and now she was out roaming the huge grassy fields of Montana. How cool! I felt inspired. Of course, my parents and grandmother were in shock. They thought my sister and I were going absolutely crazy. But I thought we were being warriors, you know? And a warrior isn’t afraid of confrontation. So I went to school the next day and walked right up to Gordy the Genius White Boy. “Gordy,” I said. “I need to talk to you.” “I don’t have time,” he said. “Mr. Orcutt and I have to debug some PCs. Don’t you hate PCs? They are sickly and fragile and vulnerable to viruses. PCs are like French people living during the bubonic plague.” Wow, and people thought I was a freak. “I much prefer Macs, don’t you?” he asked. “They’re so poetic.” This guy was in love with computers. I wondered if he was secretly writing a romance about a skinny, white boy genius who was having sex with a half-breed Apple computer. “Computers are computers,” I said. “One or the other, it’s all the same.” Gordy sighed. “So, Mr. Spirit,” he said. “Are you going to bore me with your tautologies all day or are you going to actually say something?” Tautologies? What the heck were tautologies? I couldn’t ask Gordy because then he’d know I was an illiterate Indian idiot. “You don’t know what a tautology is, do you?” he asked. “Yes, I do,” I said. “Really, I do.

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

  Madam was, however, so well pleased with her bargain that fearing I presume, lest better advice or some accident might occasion my slipping through her fingers, she would officiously take me in a coach to my inn, where, calling herself for my box, it was, I being present, delivered without the least scruple or explanation as to where I was going. This being over, she bid the coachman drive to a shop in St. Paul’s Churchyard, where she bought a pair of gloves, which she gave me, and thence renewed her directions to the coachman to drive to her house in ——— street, who accordingly landed us at the door, after I had been cheered up and entertained by the way with the most plausible flams, without one syllable from which I could conclude anything but that I was, by the greatest luck, fallen into the hands of kindest mistress, not to say friend, that the vast world could afford; and accordingly I entered her doors with most complete confidence and exultation, promising, myself that, as soon as I could be a little settled, I would acquaint Esther Davis with my rare good fortune. You may be sure the good opinion of my place was not lessened by the appearance of a very handsome back parlor, into which I was led and which seemed to me magnificently furnished, who had never seen better rooms than the ordinary ones in inns upon the road. There were two gilt pier-glasses, and a buffet, on which a few pieces of plate, set out to the most shew, dazzled, and altogether persuaded me that I must be got into a very reputable family. Here my mistress first began her part, with telling me that I must have good spirits, and learn to be free with her; that she had not taken me to be a common servant, to do domestic drudgery, but to be a kind of companion to her; and that if I would be a good girl, she would do more than twenty mothers for me; to all which I answered only by the profoundest and the awkwardest curtsies, and a few monosyllables, such as “’yes! no! to be sure!” Presently my mistress touched the bell, and in came a strapping maid-servant, who had let us in. “Here, Martha,” said Mrs. Brown, “I have just hired this young woman to look after my linen; so step up and show her her chamber; and I charge you to use her with as much respect as you would myself, for I have taken a prodigious liking to her, and I do not know what I shall do for her.”

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

  Chapter 38Upon pondering Valbois' opinions, I recognized they were that much better the more certain it appeared I would be beheld with suspicion; the less my guilt, the wiser his suggestions; the one thing that spoke in my behalf, the recommendation I had made to Dubreuil at the outset of our promenade, which had, so they told me, been unsatisfactorily explained by the article of his death, would not appear so conclusive as I might hope; whereupon I promptly made my decision; I imparted it to Valbois. "Would," said he, "that my friend had charged me with some dispositions favorable to you, I should carry out such requests with the greatest pleasure; I am sorry indeed he did not tell me 'twas to you he owed the advice to guard his room; but he said nothing of the sort, not a word did I have from him, and consequently I am obliged to limit myself to merely complying with his orders. What you have suffered by his loss would persuade me to do something in my own name were I able to, Mademoiselle, but I am just setting up in business, I am young, my fortune is not boundless, I am compelled to render an account of Dubreuil to his family and without delay; allow me then to confine myself to the one little service I beg you to accept: here are five louis and I have here as well an honest merchant from Chalon-surSaone, my native city; she is going to return there after a day and a night's stop at Lyon where she is called by business matters; I put you into her keeping." "Madame Bertrand," Valbois continued, "here is the young lady I spoke of; I recommend her to you, she wishes to procure herself a situation.

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

  But this has gone...I won the Peter Pan Prize for Young Adult Literature in Scandinavia. I mean, the green tights looked great on me at the awards ceremonies. JW: If you’re going to win the Peter Pan Prize, I would think it would be for not growing up. SA: [Laughs] So, the international reach, the fact that it’s taught in thousands of high schools...I still get letters. Ten years later, I still get letters from high school students. I’m meeting people who are college graduates who read it in junior high. JW: Ten years, and reaching out to young readers that way—we know some great readers, but those young readers, the power the book holds on them, a book like this, it must be really profound to hear from them. SA: Well, think of the books that we read when we were kids and how formative they are. I think of It by Stephen King or The Snowy Day when I was much younger, the picture book by Ezra Jack Keats. I didn’t have imaginary playmates growing up like some kids did; I had books. Books were my imaginary playmates. Books were my siblings and sometimes books were the best version of a parent I could have. So to think I might have even a fraction of that power for a kid with True Diary is amazing. JW: You must see it. I see kids carrying the book around. You must get letters from kids that just blow you away. SA: The most powerful ones are the ones I get from the teachers or the kids themselves about reluctant readers. The thing I hear all the time is, “This is the first book I ever finished,” which is on one level very sad, an indictment of our education system, but on the other level, you think, well, maybe I’m the gateway book, the gateway drug. Maybe my book will lead this kid into other books. But to have had that influence on somebody who didn’t like books, who didn’t like to read and then all of a sudden I get these letters from these kids: “This is the first book I’ve finished.” “I stole it from the library.” I get very excited. And teachers write me letters and say, “I can’t keep this in my classroom because all these kids steal it.” JW: Oh, that’s so great. SA: One of the great moments for me was maybe about six or seven years ago, I read in New York and this entire class of kids from the Bronx came.

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

  I figure Rowdy and I have spent an average of eight hours a day together for the last fourteen years. That’s eight hours times 365 days times fourteen years. So that means Rowdy and I have spent 40,880 hours in each other’s company. Nobody else comes anywhere close to that. Trust me. Rowdy and I are inseparable. She is so crazy and random that we call her Mary Runs Away. I’m not like her at all. I am steady. I’m excited about life. I’m excited about school. Rowdy and I are planning on playing high school basketball. Last year, Rowdy and I were the best players on the eighth-grade team. But I don’t think I’ll be a very good high school player. Rowdy is probably going to start varsity as a freshman, but I figure the bigger and better kids will crush me. It’s one thing to hit jumpers over other eighth graders; it’s a whole other thing to score on high school monsters. I’ll probably be a benchwarmer on the C squad while Rowdy goes on to all-state glory and fame. I am a little worried that Rowdy will start to hang around with the older guys and leave me behind. I’m also worried that he’ll start to pick on me, too. I’m scared he might start hating me as much as all of the others do. But I am more happy than scared. And I know that the other kids are going to give me crap for being so excited about school. But I don’t care. I was sitting in a freshman classroom at Wellpinit High School when Mr. P strolled in with a box full of geometry textbooks. And let me tell you, Mr. P is a weird-looking dude. But no matter how weird he looks, the absolutely weirdest thing about Mr. P is that sometimes he forgets to come to school. Let me repeat that: MR. P SOMETIMES FORGETS TO COME TO SCHOOL! Yep, we have to send a kid down to the teachers’ housing compound behind the school to wake Mr. P, who is always conking out in front of his TV. That’s right. Mr. P sometimes teaches class in his pajamas. He is a weird old coot, but most of the kids dig him because he doesn’t ask too much of us. I mean, how can you expect your students to work hard if you show up in your pajamas and slippers ? And yeah, I know it’s weird, but the tribe actually houses all of the teachers in one-bedroom cottages and musty, old trailer houses behind the school. You can’t teach at our school if you don’t live in the compound.

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

  “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. Man, you never heard such booing. Our crowd was as loud as a jet. They were just pitching the Wellpinit players some serious crap. You want to know what it sounded like? It sounded like this: BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! We couldn’t even hear each other. I worried that all of us were going to have permanent hearing damage. I kept glancing over at Wellpinit as they ran their layup drills. And I noticed that Rowdy kept glancing over at us. At me. Rowdy and I pretended that we weren’t looking at each other. But, man, oh, man, we were sending some serious hate signals across the gym. I mean, you have to love somebody that much to also hate them that much, too. Our captains, Roger and Jeff, ran out to the center circle to have the game talk with the refs. Then our band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” And then our five starters, including me, ran out to the center circle to go to battle against Wellpinit’s five. Rowdy smirked at me as I took my position next to him. “Wow,” he said. “You guys must be desperate if you’re starting.” “I’m guarding you,” I said. “What?” “I’m guarding you tonight.” “You can’t stop me. I’ve been kicking your ass for fourteen years.”

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Meantime, he was so pressed financially that he begged Heinlein for a loan of fifty dollars. “ Golly, I never was so many places in print with less to show for it,” Hubbard complained. “I couldn’t buy a stage costume for Gypsy Rose Lee.” Hubbard was writing these letters from Savannah, Georgia, in the waning days of 1948 and the spring of 1949. He said he was volunteering in a psychiatric clinic at St. Joseph’s Medical Center, “ getting case histories at the request of the American Psychiatric Assoc.” It is a shadowy period in his life, but it was in Savannah that he began to sketch out the principles that would form the basis of his understanding of the human mind. He claimed to be getting phenomenal results on nearly every malady he addressed. “One week ago I brought in my first asthma cure,” he writes to Heinlein. “I have an arthritis to finish tomorrow and so it goes.” It’s unclear whether Hubbard himself was receiving treatment in Savannah. “ My hip and stomach and side are well again,” he writes to Heinlein, adding that he is “straightening out the kinks that have held down production on the money machine.” In his letters, Hubbard continually speculates about the book he hopes to finish soon. “ It ain’t agin religion,” he boasts to Heinlein. “It just abolishes it.… It’s science, boy, science.” He makes a vague reference to the research he’s performing on children. “This hellbroth I cooked up works remarkably well on kids,” he remarks. “Took a scared little kid that was supposed to be stupid and was failing everything and worked on him about thirty-five hours just to make sure. That was last month. So now he turns up this afternoon with all A’s and all of a sudden reading Shakespeare.” He was also noting improvement in himself, both in his work and in his recovered sexual powers. “I am cruising on four hours sleep a night. But the most interesting thing is, I’m up to eight comes. In an evening, that is.” Heinlein was eager for details. Hubbard responded by outlining what he would later call the Tone Scale. It describes the range of human emotional states, from one to four. At bottom, there is Apathy, then Anger. These lower tones were governed by the unconscious, which Hubbard says should be called the “ reactive mind.” The third level, which was as yet untitled, is the normal state for most of humanity; and the fourth is a condition of happiness and industriousness. Hubbard’s experimental technique aimed at raising an individual out of the lower tones and into the superior state of the fourth tone. His method, as he described it to Heinlein, was to drain off the painful experiences and associations that an individual has accumulated in his lifetime. Once that’s done, “astonishing results take place.” Asthma, headaches, arthritis, menstrual cramps, astigmatism, and ulcers simply disappear. There is a huge boost in competence.

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

  James Kelly and Barton Stone railed against the aristocratic clergy who tried to force the erudite faith of Harvard on the people. Enlightenment philosophers had insisted that people must have the courage to throw off their dependence on authority, use their natural reason to discover the truth, and think for themselves. Now the revivalists insisted that American Christians could read the Bible without direction from upper-class scholars. When Stone founded his own denomination, he called it a “declaration of independence”: the revivalists were bringing the modern ideals of democracy, equality, freedom of speech, and independence to the folk in an idiom that uneducated people could make their own. This Second Awakening may have seemed retrograde to the elite, but it was actually a Protestant version of the Enlightenment. Demanding a degree of equality that the American ruling class was not yet ready to give them, the revivalists represented a populist discontent that it could not safely ignore. At first, this rough, democratic Christianity was confined to the poorer Americans, but during the 1840s Charles Finney (1792–1875) brought it to the middle classes, creating an “evangelical” Christianity based on a literal reading of the gospels. Evangelicals were determined to convert the secular republic to Christ, and by the mid-nineteenth century, evangelicalism had become the dominant faith of the United States.50 Without waiting for guidance from the government, from about 1810 these Protestants began to work in churches and schools and established reform associations that mushroomed in the northern states. Some campaigned against slavery, others against liquor; some worked to end the oppression of women and other disadvantaged groups, others for penal and educational reform. Like the Second Great Awakening, these modernizing movements helped ordinary Americans to embrace the ideal of inalienable human rights in a Protestant package. Their members learned to plan, organize, and pursue a clearly defined objective in a rational way that empowered them against the establishment. We in the West tend to evaluate other cultural traditions by measuring them against the Enlightenment: the Great Awakenings in America show that people can reach these ideals by another, specifically religious route.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Now, as he was struggling financially and artistically, Deborah suggested he consider writing the script as a movie. “ You’ll win an Academy Award,” she told him. Haggis contacted his friend Robert Moresco, who had been a writer on Haggis’s series EZ Streets . He told Moresco, “I don’t think anybody’s going to make this, but it’s a great story.” The two men began working in Haggis’s home office, next to the laundry room. They wrote a first draft in two weeks. Haggis decided to call it Crash . The title refers to a fender bender that sets off a chain of events, revealing the contradictory elements of the characters and the city they inhabit. In the dizzying seconds after the collision an LAPD detective suddenly realizes what’s missing in his life. “It’s the sense of touch,” he says in the movie’s opening lines. “In LA no one touches you.… We’re always behind metal and glass. Think we miss that touch so much, we crash into each other just to feel something.” Haggis insists on turning his heroes into villains and vice versa, such as the racist white cop who molests a tony, upper-class black woman in one scene, then saves her life in another. Haggis felt that by exploring such complexities he was teasing out the dark and light threads of his own personality. For the next year and a half, he struggled to get the movie green-lit. He was still a first-time movie director, and that posed an obstacle. Moreover, the script called for an ensemble cast with no single starring role—always an obstacle in Hollywood. Haggis finally interested a producer, Bob Yari, who agreed to make the movie for $10 million if Haggis could assemble a star-studded cast. Don Cheadle was the first to sign on, both as an actor and a producer, and his name added credibility to the project. Matt Dillon and Tony Danza came aboard. Heath Ledger and John Cusack agreed to work for scale, as everyone did. Still, the project dragged on. Finally, Haggis was told the movie was a go. He then sent the script to John Travolta and Kelly Preston, who he thought would be perfect as the district attorney and his wife. “ That’s great, because now we really need them,” one of the producers, Cathy Schulman, told him the next day. Heath Ledger had dropped out and Cusack was not far behind. Once again, the movie would need more big-name stars to get the financing. Haggis immediately sent a note to Preston, telling her he was withdrawing his offer. As a matter of pride, he felt it was wrong to use his friends in such a way—especially other Scientologists. Preston was miffed, since he had failed to explain his decision. But without two more signature names the movie was back in limbo. Haggis was about to lose Cheadle as well, because he was scheduled to make Hotel Rwanda . Yari finally told Haggis to shut the production down.

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

  The Founding Fathers, however, belonged to the gentry, and their ideas were far from typical; most Americans were Calvinists who could not relate to this rationalist ethos. Reluctant initially to break with Britain, not all the colonists joined the struggle, but those that did were motivated as much by the millennial myths of Christianity as by the Founders’ ideals. During the revolution, secularist ideology blended creatively with the religious aspirations of the majority in a way that enabled Americans with very divergent beliefs to join forces against the might of England. When ministers spoke of the importance of virtue and responsibility in government, they helped people make sense of Sam Adams’s fiery denunciations of British tyranny.32 When the Founders spoke of “liberty,” they used a word charged with religious meaning.33 Timothy Dwight, Jonathan Edwards’s grandson and president of Yale University, predicted that the revolution would usher in “Immanuel’s land”;34 the Connecticut preacher Ebenezer Baldwin argued that liberty, religion, and learning had been driven out of Europe and moved to America, where Jesus would establish his kingdom; and Provost William Smith of Philadelphia maintained that the colonies were God’s “chosen seat of Freedom, Arts and Heavenly Knowledge.” John Adams saw the English settlement of America as part of God’s plan for the world’s enlightenment,35 and Thomas Paine was convinced that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation such as the present hath not happened since the days of Noah.”36 This exaltation, though, was laced with hatred for the enemies of God’s kingdom. After the passing of the Stamp Act (1765), patriotic songs portrayed its perpetrators—Lords Bute, Grenville, and North—as the minions of Satan, and during political demonstrations their pictures were carried alongside effigies of the devil. When George III granted religious freedom to the French Catholics in the Canadian territory, he was denounced by the American colonists as the ally of Antichrist; and even the presidents of Harvard and Yale saw the War of Independence as part of God’s design for the overthrow of Catholicism.37 This virulent sectarian hostility enabled the colonists to separate themselves definitively from the Old World, for which many still felt a strong residual affection; hatred of Catholic “tyranny” would long remain a crucial element in American national identity. The Founders may have been followers of Locke, but “religion” had not yet been banished from the colonies; had it been so, the revolution might not have succeeded.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  He pressed a book into Haggis’s hands. “ You have a mind,” Logan said. “This is the owner’s manual.” Then he demanded, “Give me two dollars.” The book was Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health , by L. Ron Hubbard, which was published in 1950. By the time Logan pushed it on Haggis, the book had sold more than two million copies throughout the world. Haggis opened the book and saw a page stamped with the words “Church of Scientology.” “Take me there,” he said to Logan. At the time, there were only a handful of Scientologists in the entire province of Ontario. By coincidence, Haggis had heard about the organization a couple of months earlier, from a friend who had called it a cult. That interested Haggis; he considered the possibility of doing a documentary film about it. When he arrived at the church’s quarters in London, it certainly didn’t look like a cult—two young men occupying a hole-in-the-wall office above Woolworth’s five-and-dime. As an atheist, Haggis was wary of being dragged into a formal belief system. In response to his skepticism, Logan showed him a passage by Hubbard that read: “ What is true is what is true for you. No one has any right to force data on you and command you to believe it or else. If it is not true for you, it isn’t true. Think your own way through things, accept what is true for you, discard the rest. There is nothing unhappier than one who tries to live in a chaos of lies.” These words resonated with Haggis. Although he didn’t realize it, Haggis was being drawn into the church through a classic, four-step “dissemination drill” that recruiters are carefully trained to follow. The first step is to make contact, as Jim Logan did with Haggis in 1975. The second step is to disarm any antagonism the individual may display toward Scientology. Once that’s done, the task is to “ find the ruin”—that is, the problem most on the mind of the potential recruit. For Paul, it was a turbulent romance. The fourth step is to convince the subject that Scientology has the answer. “ Once the person is aware of the ruin, you bring about an understanding that Scientology can handle the condition,” Hubbard writes. “It’s at the right moment on this step that one … directs him to the service that will best handle what he needs handled.” At that point, the potential recruit has officially been transformed into a Scientologist. Paul responded to every step in an almost ideal manner. He and his girlfriend took a course together and, shortly thereafter, became Hubbard Qualified Scientologists, one of the first levels in what the church calls the Bridge to Total Freedom. HAGGIS WAS BORN in 1953, the oldest of three children. His father, Ted, ran a construction company specializing in roadwork—mostly laying asphalt and pouring sidewalks, curbs, and gutters.

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

  Monsieur de Corville, worthy of his country's highest posts, attained to them, and, whatever were his honors, he employed them for no end but to bring happiness to the people, glory to his master, whom, "although a minister," he served well, and fortune to his friends. O you who have wept tears upon hearing of Virtue's miseries; you who have been moved to sympathy for the woe-ridden Justine; the while forgiving the perhaps too heavy brushstrokes we have found ourselves compelled to employ, may you at least extract from this story the same moral which determined Madame de Lorsange! May you be convinced, with her, that true happiness is to be found nowhere but in Virtue's womb, and that if, in keeping with designs it is not for us to fathom, God permits that it be persecuted on Earth, it is so that Virtue may be compensated by Heaven's most dazzling rewards.

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

  The Antiochians likewise took all pains to gain the emperor to their side, and transmitted to him a creed which sharply distinguished, indeed, the two natures in Christ, yet, for the sake of the unconfused union of the two (ajsuvgcuto" e{vwsi"), conceded to Mary the disputed predicate theotokos. The emperor now summoned eight spokesmen from each of the two parties to himself to Chalcedon. Among them were, on the one side, the papal deputies, on the other John of Antioch and Theodoret of Cyros, while Cyril and Memnon were obliged to remain at Ephesus in prison, and Nestorius at his own wish was assigned to his former cloister at Antioch, and on the 25th of October, 431, Maximian was nominated as his successor in Constantinople. After fruitless deliberations, the council of Ephesus was dissolved in October, 431, Cyril and Memnon set free, and the bishops of both parties commanded to go home. The division lasted two years longer, till at last a sort of compromise was effected. John of Antioch sent the aged bishop Paul of Emisa a messenger to Alexandria with a creed which he had already, in a shorter form, laid before the emperor, and which broke the doctrinal antagonism by asserting the duality of the natures against Cyril, and the predicate mother of God against Nestorius.1588 "We confess," says this symbol, which was composed by Theodoret, "that our Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, is perfect God and perfect man, of a reasonable soul and body subsisting;1589 as to his Godhead begotten of the Father before all time, but as to his manhood, born of the Virgin Mary in the end of the days for us and for our salvation; of the same essence with the Father as to his Godhead, and of the same substance with us as to his manhood;1590 for two natures are united with one another.1591 Therefore we confess one Christ, one Lord, and one Son. By reason of this union, which yet is without confusion,1592 we also confess that the holy Virgin is mother of God, because God the Logos was made flesh and man, and united with himself the temple [humanity] even from the conception; which temple he took from the Virgin. But concerning the words of the Gospel and Epistles respecting Christ, we know that theologians apply some which refer to the one person to the two natures in common, but separate others as referring to the two natures, and assign the expressions which become God to the Godhead of Christ, but the expressions of humiliation to his manhood."1593 Cyril assented to this confession, and repeated it verbally, with some further doctrinal explanations, in his answer to the irenical letter of the patriarch of Antioch, but insisted on the condemnation and deposition of Nestorius as the indispensable condition of church fellowship.

• 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)

  Chapter 34 The next day I cast an appraising eye upon my companions: those four girls ranged from twenty-five to thirty years of age; although bestialized and besotted by misery and warped by excessive drudgery, they still had the remnants of beauty; their figures were handsome, and the youngest, called Suzanne, still had, together with charming eyes, very fine hair; Roland had seized her in Lyon, he had deflowered her, and after having sworn to her family he would marry her, he had brought her to this frightful chateau, where she had been three years his slave, and during that period she had been especially singled out to be the object of the monster's ferocities: by dint of blows from the bull's pizzle, her buttocks had become as calloused and toughened as would be cow's hide dried in the sun; she had a cancer upon her left breast and an abscess in her matrix which caused her unspeakable suffering; all that was the perfidious Roland's achievement; each of those horrors was the fruit of his lecheries. It was she who informed me Roland was on the eve of departing for Venice if the considerable sums he had very recently shipped to Spain could be converted into letters of credit he needed for Italy, for he did not want to transport his gold east across the Alps; never did he send any in that direction: it was in a different country from the one he had decided to inhabit that he circulated his false coins; by this device, rich to be sure but only in the banknotes of another kingdom, his rascalities could never be detected in the land where he planned to take up his next abode. But everything could be overthrown within the space of an instant and the retirement he envisioned wholly depended upon this latest transaction in which the bulk of his treasure was compromised. Were Cadiz to accept his false piasters, sequins, and louis, and against them send him letters negotiable in Venice, Roland would be established for the rest of his days; were the fraud to be detected, one single day would suffice to demolish the fragile edifice of his fortune. "Alas!" I remarked upon learning these details, "Providence will be just for once. It will not countenance the success of such a monster, and all of us will be revenged...." Great God I in view of the experience I had acquired, how was I able thus to reason!

• From Between Us

  I also started to look outward for answers on emotions, because this is closer to how people from many other cultures think about emotions. I conducted research in Japan, Korea, Turkey, and Mexico, and among immigrants from these countries to the United States, the Netherlands, and Belgium. Many of these individuals talk about emotional events as taking place between people, while de-emphasizing inner feelings—another reason to follow emotion’s tracks outwards. In Between Us, I will introduce you to this radically different way of thinking about our emotions: one that ties them to our position in the world, our relationships with others, and to the sociocultural contexts in which we participate. I will show how your emotions engage you with, and make you part of, the communities in which you live. I will reveal how emotions are OURS as much as they are MINE. Adopting this perspective on emotions will enrich your emotional life, adding to your understanding of your own and other people’s emotions. It will make transparent the many ways in which our feelings make us social and connect us to others. An OURS perspective on emotions does not so much replace as supplement the MINE model of emotion. Perhaps most important is that an OURS model of emotions provides us with tools to understand and navigate the differences in emotions across cultures, genders, generations, ethnic and racial groups, socioeconomic groups, and even between individuals with different personal histories (as was the case for my parents and me). This understanding may have never been more important than it is today. As our societies grow increasingly multicultural, our business organizations, schools, courtrooms, and health institutions are meeting points for different groups and cultures. Emotions are the currency of many of these intercultural encounters, yet we do not all use the same currency. Understanding how the emotions of each of us are tied to our respective social and cultural contexts will allow us to respectfully communicate about, and even resonate with, differences in emotions. Between Us helps to resolve differences—even clashes—between individuals from different groups and cultures. Undeniably, my motivation to write this book was strengthened by growing nationalism, xenophobia, white supremacy, racism, and religious intolerance in the United States, Western Europe, and beyond. But more of an incentive still has been that people with the best intentions—people who want to be inclusive—believe that to say that people from other groups or cultures have different emotions is equivalent to denying their humanity. If you are one of these people, I hope to convince you of the opposite.