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

  In the attempt to make good this judgment, these recent writers not only have laid stress upon "the good old times,"—a description which the people of the 16th century would have repudiated,1351 — but have resorted to the defamation of the German Reformer’s character, setting aside the contemporaries who knew him best, and violently perverting Luther’s own words. Imbart de la Tour, the most recent French historian of this school, on reaching the year 1517, exclaims, "The era of peaceful reforms was at an end; the era of religious revolution was about to open."1352 Lefèvre d’Etaples was not alone when he uttered the famous words: — The signs of the times announce that a reformation of the Church is near at hand and, while God is opening new paths for the preaching of the Gospel by the discoveries of the Portuguese and the Spaniards, we must hope that He will also visit His Church and raise her from the abasement into which she has now fallen. The Philosophy of Christ,—the name which Erasmus gave to the Gospel in his Paraclesis, prefixed to his edition of the New Testament,—was to a large degree covered over by the dialectical theology of the Schoolmen. What men needed was the Gospel and the bishop of Isernia, preaching at the Fifth Lateran council in its 12th session, spoke better than he knew when he exclaimed: "The Gospel is the fountain of all wisdom, of all knowledge. From it has flowed all the higher virtue, all that is divine and worthy of admiration. The Gospel, I say the Gospel." The words were spoken on the very eve of the Reformation and the council of the Middle Ages failed utterly to offer any real remedy for the religious degeneracy. The Reformer came from the North, not from Rome and as from another Nazareth. The angel of God had to descend again and trouble the waters and a single personality touched in conscience proved himself mightier than the wisdom of theology and wiser than the rulers of the visible Church. Remarkable the Middle Ages were for their bold enterprises in thought and action and they are an important part of the history of the Church. We acknowledge our debt, but their superstitions and errors we set aside as we move on in the pathway of a more intelligent devotion and broader human, sympathies, towards an age when all who profess the Gospel shall unite together in the unity of the faith in the Son of God. Remarkable the Middle Ages were for their bold enterprises in thought and action and they are an important part of the history of the Church. We acknowledge our debt, but their superstitions and errors we set aside as we move on in the pathway of a more intelligent devotion and broader human, sympathies, towards an age when all who profess the Gospel shall unite together in the unity of the faith in the Son of God.

• 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 Going Clear (2013)

  Jastrow suggested that Scientology’s critics often had a vested interest. He pointed to psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, drug makers, pharmacies—“all those people who make a living and profit and pay their mortgages and pay their college educations and buy their cars, et cetera, et cetera, based on people not being well.” “Who advertise in the newspapers and on television, more than any other advertisers,” Archer added. “But this is a collateral issue, darling, in terms of what I’m talking about,” Jastrow continued. “For the first time in America’s experience with war, there are more mental illnesses from Iraq and Afghanistan than physical illnesses,” he said, citing a recent article in USA Today. “So mental illnesses become a big business.” Drugs merely mask mental distress, he said, whereas “Scientology will solve the source of the problem.” The medical and pharmaceutical industries are “prime funders and sponsors of the media,” he said, and therefore might exert “influence on people telling the whole and true story about Scientology just because of the profit motive.” He said that only Scientology could help mankind right itself. “What else is there that we can hang our hopes on?” “That’s improving civilization,” Archer added. “Is there some other religion on the horizon that’s going to help mankind?” Jastrow asked. “Just tell me where. If not Scientology, where?” ANNE ARCHER BEGAN STUDYING with Katselas in 1974, two years after her son Tommy Davis was born. She was the exceptionally beautiful daughter of two successful actors. Her father, John Archer, was best known during the 1930s and 1940s as the voice introducing the radio drama The Shadow. (“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows,” he said at the beginning of the program.) He went on to appear in more than fifty films. Her mother, Marjorie Lord, played Danny Thomas’s wife on the popular television show Make Room for Daddy. With such a bloodline, it might be expected that Archer would be aiming toward stardom, but when she entered the Beverly Hills Playhouse she was coming off a television series (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) that she didn’t respect and that had been canceled after a single season. She was a young mother in a dissolving marriage and an actor with diminishing career prospects. Katselas had a transformative effect. Like so many others, Archer was magnetized by this ebullient Greek, with his magnificent beard and his badgering, teasing, encouraging, and infuriating personality. He was one of the most inspiring people Archer had ever met. Where had he acquired such wisdom? Some of the other students told her that Katselas was a Scientologist, so she decided to try it out.

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

  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.” Martha, who was an arch-jade, and, being used to this decoy, had her cue perfect, made me a kind of half curtsy, and asked me to walk up with her; and accordingly showed me a neat room, two pair of stairs backwards, in which there was a handsome bed, where Martha told me I was to lie with a young gentlewoman, a cousin of my mistress, who she was sure would be vastly good to me.

• 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

• From Between Us

  Many psychological and anthropological explanations for cultural differences in emotions come down to saying that people in other cultures mislabel or misattribute their feelings, or alternatively hide them—the assumption being that their “real” feelings are more like ours. As will become clear in later chapters, the very concern for the real, deep, inner feelings of an individual may itself be exclusive to WEIRD cultures. When we communicate, we should do so in the expectation of finding differences, not only similarities. We should also expect to have to explain our own emotions, as they are neither natural nor universal. When I first presented this idea to a group of scholars a few years back, some responded with distress. How can we ever hope to connect to each other, if our emotions do not even line up? Their response made me aware of the idealism that often hides behind the assumption that emotions are universal. 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. Chapter 2 . . . . . . . . . EMOTIONS: MINE OR OURS? THE PIXAR MOVIE INSIDE OUT (RELEASED IN 2015) CASTS FIVE emotions—Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger—that live inside the mind of a little girl, Riley Anderson, and compete with each other to guide her actions. The movie is delightful, and delivers several wise lessons. Here I want to focus on its portrayal of emotions themselves: In each person’s mind, the same emotions are hiding, awaiting an opportunity to act in their own typical ways. Each emotion is represented by its own little figurine, their essence, and with a set of fixed properties.

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

  Walk, I say to myself, walk, walk, be courageous; if the mighty scorn the weak, there is an omnipotent God Who shields the latter and Who never abandons them. My head crowded with these ideas, I advance with a stout heart and before night closes I find myself in a cottage four leagues from the chateau. Some money remained to me, my needs were attended to, in a few hours I was rested. I left at daybreak and, renouncing all plans to register old or new complaints with the authorities, I asked to be directed toward Lyon; the road was pointed out to me and on the eighth day I reached that city, very weak, suffering much, but happy and unpursued; once arrived, I turned all my thoughts to recovery before striking out for Grenoble where, according to one of my persistent notions, happiness awaited me. One day my eye fell upon a gazette printed in some distant place; what was my surprise to behold crime crowned once again and to see one of the principal authors of my miseries arrived at the pinnacle of success. Rodin, the surgeon of Saint-Michel, that infamous wretch who had punished me with such cruelty for having wished to spare him the murder of his daughter, had just, the news-paper declared, been named First Surgeon to the Empress of Russia with the considerable emoluments accompanying that post. May he prosper, the villain, I muttered to myself, may he be so whilst Providence so wills it; and thou, unhappy creature, suffer, suffer uncomplainingly, since it is decreed that tribulations and pain must be Virtue's frightful share; no matter, I shall never lose my taste for it. But I was far from done with these striking examples of the triumph of vice, examples so disheartening for Virtue, and the flourishing condition of the personage whose acquaintance I was about to renew was surely to exasperate and amaze me more than any other, since it was that of one of the men at whose hands I had endured the bloodiest outrages.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Two of Haggis’s friends died from overdoses, and he had a gun pointed in his face a couple of times. “I was a bad kid,” he admitted. “I didn’t kill anybody. Not that I didn’t try.” He also acted as a stage manager in the ninety-nine-seat theater his father created in an abandoned church for one of his stagestruck daughters. On Saturday nights, Paul would strike the set of whatever show was under way and put up a movie screen. In that way he introduced himself and the small community of film buffs in London to the works of Bergman, Hitchcock, and the French New Wave. He was so affected by Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up that in 1974 he decided to become a fashion photographer in England, like the hero of that movie. That lasted less than a year, but when he returned he still carried a Leica over his shoulder. Back in London, Ontario, he fell in love with a nursing student named Diane Gettas. They began sharing a one-bedroom apartment filled with Paul’s books on film. He thought of himself then as “a loner and an artist and an iconoclast.” His grades were too poor to get into college. He could see that he was going nowhere. He was ready to change, but he wasn’t sure how. Such was Paul Haggis’s state of mind when he joined the Church of Scientology. LIKE EVERY SCIENTOLOGIST, when Haggis entered the church, he took his first steps into the mind of L. Ron Hubbard. He read about Hubbard’s adventurous life: how he wandered the world, led dangerous expeditions, and healed himself of crippling war injuries through the techniques that he developed into Dianetics. He was not a prophet, like Mohammed, or divine, like Jesus. He had not been visited by an angel bearing tablets of revelation, like Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. Scientologists believe that Hubbard discovered the existential truths that form their doctrine through extensive research—in that way, it is “science.” The apparent rationalism appealed to Haggis. He had long since walked away from the religion of his upbringing, but he was still looking for a way to express his idealism. It was important to him that Scientology didn’t demand belief in a god. But the figure of L. Ron Hubbard did hover over the religion in suggestive ways. He wasn’t worshipped, exactly, but his visage and name were everywhere, like the absolute ruler of a small kingdom. L. Ron Hubbard in the 1960s There seemed to be two Hubbards within the church: the godlike authority whose every word was regarded as scripture, and the avuncular figure that Haggis saw on the training videos, who came across as wry and self-deprecating.

• From Between Us

  During the last two decades, particularly in many Northern European countries, the formal expectation has become that minorities fully participate in the new culture within five years of arrival. In my native country, the Netherlands, an “integration test” was introduced. The discussion around this test has overtones of assimilation: if “they” want to stay here, they need to become part of our lifestyle. I will return to this expectation in chapter 8, but it suffices to say here that five years is almost certainly not enough for “emotional acculturation”; any expectation to the contrary would be psychologically naïve. My dad once reflected that it took our Sephardic Jewish ancestors more than a century to get acclimatized to Amsterdam, their new home, after they had fled from the Spanish Inquisition in the first half of the seventeenth century. “How can we expect new immigrants to do it in five years?,” he wondered. Our research proves him right: when it comes to emotions, only the third generation of immigrants becomes indistinguishable from the majority. Lest you think this would not hold true in the big “melting pot” of the United States, we started our research there, and we have no reason to assume that the process of emotional fit is fundamentally different. Studies with first-generation Korean American adults in the United States show very similar patterns to the ones obtained with the representative sample of Belgian middle schools; on average, first-generation immigrants do not achieve an emotional fit with the white American norm, but later generations do.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  The people who were drawn to Dianetics were young to middle-aged white-collar Protestants who had a pronounced interest in science fiction. Some were motivated by the prospect of employment in this booming new field. Others were truth seekers, often veterans of other movements and cults that were responding to the dislocations of the era. And then there were those who had heard the legend of the heroic Navy officer who had been blinded and crippled by the war, who had healed himself through Dianetic techniques. Like Hubbard, they sought a cure. Society and science had let them down. Through Dianetics, they hoped to be lifted up, enlightened, restored, and made whole. One of the contradictory features of Dianetics is the fact that Hubbard continually referred to the powers of Clears, but as yet he had not actually produced a single one for inspection. Among other powers, a Clear “has complete recall of everything which has ever happened to him or anything he has ever studied. He does mental computations such as those of chess, for example, which a normal would do in half an hour, in ten or fifteen seconds.” Such claims presumed that there was already a sizable population of Dianetic graduates with exceptional abilities, and Hubbard’s readers naturally wondered where they were. In August 1950, Hubbard presented the “World’s First Clear” at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Sonia Bianca, a very nervous physics student from Boston, was brought to the stage. Hubbard claimed that through Dianetics, Bianca had attained “full and perfect recall of every moment of her life.” The audience began peppering her with questions, such as what she had had for breakfast eight years before, or what was on this page of Hubbard’s book, or even elemental formulas in physics, her area of specialty. She was incapable of responding when someone asked the color of Hubbard’s necktie, when he briefly had his back turned to her. It was a very public fiasco. Hubbard would not announce another Clear for sixteen years. One of his disillusioned acolytes later concluded that the concept of clearing was just a gimmick to dramatize the theory of Dianetics. “The fact is that there were never any clears, as he had described them,” Helen O’Brien, Hubbard’s top executive in the United States, wrote. “There were randomly occurring remissions of psychosomatics.” Meanwhile, his bigamous marriage to Sara was careening toward a spectacular conclusion.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Today is the third day of Kwanza, and the principle for today is Ujima — collective work and responsibility — the decision to build and maintain ourselves and our communities together and to recognize and solve our problems together. Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation. For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth. And it is never without fear — of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now that if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective. And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own. For instance, “I can’t possibly teach Black women’s writing — their experience is so different from mine.” Yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another, “She’s a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?” Or, “She’s a lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?” Or again, “This woman writes of her sons and I have no children.” And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other. We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  The official reason why and the actual reason why may be very different, but it is a fact. I was struck by the sight of many people, even children, walking through the parks after sundown. Earlier, when I had first come to Moscow from the airport, I had noticed quite heavy steady traffic, but there did not appear to be a traffic jam or great delay although this was the time when most people were coming home from work. It seemed quite an achievement in a city of eight million people, and I thought Moscow must be handling her problems of urban transportation in a new and creative way. Of course, when I saw the Metro, I realized why. Not only are the stations spotlessly clean, but the trains are quick and comfortable, and I’d never really thought that it could be an actual joy to ride on the subways. VII It will take a while and a lot of dreams to metabolize all I’ve seen and felt in these hectic two weeks. I haven’t even discussed the close bonding I felt with some of the African writers and how difficult it was to get to know others. I have no reason to believe Russia is a free society. I have no reason to believe Russia is a classless society. Russia does not even appear to be a strictly egalitarian society. But bread does cost a few kopecs a loaf and everybody I saw seemed to have enough of it. Of course, I did not see Siberia, nor a prison camp, nor a mental hospital. But that fact, in a world where most people — certainly most Black people — are on a breadconcern level, seems to me to be quite a lot. If you conquer the bread problem, that gives you at least a chance to look around at the others. So, for all of the double messages I received (and there were many — because of the places in which I stayed, because of a kind of both deference and unpleasantness that I received as an American, and because no matter how much is said and done, America still appears to have some kind of magic over many countries), no matter what the shortcomings were, there is enthusiasm about the people that I met in Russia, particularly the people I met in Uzbekhistan. And I recognize some of the contradictions and problems that they have. I am deeply suspicious of the double messages that kept coming and of the fact that when they are finished with you (and by they, I mean the government), when they are finished with you, they drop you and you can fall very far. So what’s new? I also am intrigued by the idea that there are writers who are paid to be writers and that they survive and they wield considerable power.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  And we have learned to deal across those differences with the urgency of all oppressed subordinates. All of us have had to learn to live or work or coexist with men, from our fathers on. We have recognized and negotiated these differences, even when this recognition only continued the old dominant/subordinate mode of human relationship, where the oppressed must recognize the masters’ difference in order to survive. But our future survival is predicated upon our ability to relate within equality. As women, we must root out internalized patterns of oppression within ourselves if we are to move beyond the most superficial aspects of social change. Now we must recognize differences among women who are our equals, neither inferior nor superior, and devise ways to use each others’ difference to enrich our visions and our joint struggles. The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference. The old definitions have not served us, nor the earth that supports us. The old patterns, no matter how cleverly rearranged to imitate progress, still condemn us to cosmetically altered repetitions of the same old exchanges, the same old guilt, hatred, recrimination, lamentation, and suspicion. For we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression, and these must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions which are a result of those structures. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. As Paulo Freire shows so well in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, * the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships. Change means growth, and growth can be painful. But we sharpen self-definition by exposing the self in work and struggle together with those whom we define as different from ourselves, although sharing the same goals. For Black and white, old and young, lesbian and heterosexual women alike, this can mean new paths to our survival. We have chosen each other and the edge of each others battles the war is the same if we lose someday women’s blood will congeal upon a dead planet if we win there is no telling we seek beyond history for a new and more possible meeting. ** * Paper delivered at the Copeland Colloquium, Amherst College, April 1980. * From “Rape: A Radical Analysis, An African-American Perspective” by Kalamu ya Salaam in Black Books Bulletin, vol. 6, no. 4 (1980). * Seabury Press, New York, 1970. ** From “Outlines,” unpublished poem. The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism * Racism. The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance, manifest and implied.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  As we arm ourselves with ourselves and each other, we can stand toe to toe inside that rigorous loving and begin to speak the impossible — or what has always seemed like the impossible — to one another. The first step toward genuine change. Eventually, if we speak the truth to each other, it will become unavoidable to ourselves. * An abbreviated version of this essay was published in Essence, vol. 14, no. 6 (October 1983). I wish to thank the following women without whose insights and support I could not have completed this paper: Andrea Canaan, Frances Clayton, Michelle Cliff, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Clare Coss, Yvonne Flowers, Gloria Joseph, Adrienne Rich, Charlotte Sheedy, Judy Simmons and Barbara Smith. This paper is dedicated to the memory of Sheila Blackwell Pinckney, 1953–1983. ** From a poem by Dr. Gloria Joseph. *Unpublished paper by Samella Lewis. * From “Letters from Black Feminists, 1972–1978” by Barbara Smith and Beverly Smith in Conditions: Four (1979). * From The I Ching. ** From “Nigger” by Judy Dothard Simmons in Decent Intentions (Blind Beggar Press, P.O. Box 437, Williamsbridge Station, Bronx, New York 10467, 1983). * From The I Ching. * This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, New York, 1984). * From The I Ching. * From “Every Woman Ever Loved A Woman” by Bernice Johnson Reagon, song performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock. * From The I Ching. Grenada Revisited: An Interim Report * THE FIRST TIME I came to Grenada I came seeking “home,” for this was my mother’s birthplace and she had always defined it so for me. Vivid images remained of what I saw there and of what I knew it could become. • Grand Anse Beach was a busy thoroughfare in the early, direct morning. Children in proper school uniforms carrying shoes, trying to decide between the lure of a coco palm adventure to one side and the delicious morning sea on the other, while they are bound straightforward to well-worn chalky desks. • The mended hem of the print dress the skinny old woman wore, swinging along down the beach, cutlass in hand.