Hope

Passages

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

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• From The Case for God (2009)

  If atheism was a product of modernity, now that we are entering a “postmodern” phase, will this too, like the modern God, become a thing of the past? Will the growing appreciation of the limitations of human knowledge—which is just as much a part of the contemporary intellectual scene as atheistic certainty— give rise to a new kind of apophatic theology? And how best can we move beyond premodern theism into a perception of “God” that truly speaks to all the complex realities and needs of our time? W Epilogue e have become used to thinking that religion should provide us with information. Is there a God? How did the world come into being? But this is a modern preoccupation. Religion was never supposed to provide answers to questions that lay within the reach of human reason. That was the role of logos. Religion’s task, closely allied to that of art, was to help us to live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there were no easy explanations and problems that we could not solve: mortality, pain, grief, despair, and outrage at the injustice and cruelty of life. Over the centuries people in all cultures discovered that by pushing their reasoning powers to the limit, stretching language to the end of its tether, and living as selflessly and compassionately as possible, they experienced a transcendence that enabled them to affirm their suffering with serenity and courage. Scientific rationality can tell us why we have cancer; it can even cure us of our disease. But it cannot assuage the terror, disappointment, and sorrow that come with the diagnosis, nor can it help us to die well. That is not within its competence. Religion will not work automatically, however; it requires a great deal of effort and cannot succeed if it is facile, false, idolatrous, or self-indulgent. Religion is a practical discipline, and its insights are not derived from abstract speculation but from spiritual exercises and a dedicated lifestyle. Without such practice, it is impossible to understand the truth of its doctrines. This was also true of philosophical rationalism. People did not go to Socrates to learn anything—he always insisted that he had nothing to teach them—but to have a change of mind. Participants in a Socratic dialogue discovered how little they knew and that the meaning of even the simplest proposition eluded them. The shock of ignorance and confusion represented a conversion to the philosophic life, which could not begin until you realized that you knew nothing at all. But even though it removed the last vestiges of the certainty upon which people had hitherto based their lives, the Socratic dialogue was never aggressive; rather, it was conducted with courtesy, gentleness, and consideration. If a dialogue aroused malice or spite, it would fail. There was no question of forcing your interlocutor to accept your point of view: instead, each offered his opinion as a gift to the others and allowed them to alter his own perceptions.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  To keep pace with these fundamental changes, they had been forced to change their religion, their methods of education, and the social and political structures of their society. As they struggled to adapt to their radically altered world, they had abandoned traditional attitudes that seemed, however, to be embedded in the structure of humanity. As the Enlightenment proper drew to an end, some of these were beginning to resurface. Poets, philosophers, and theologians were urging people to recover a more receptive attitude to life. They were questioning the modern dichotomy between the natural and the supernatural and countering the distant Newtonian God with the image of an immanent Spirit. They had revived the idea of mystery. Condorcet, Hume, and Kant had suggested that unknowing was an inescapable part of our response to the world. The Age of Reason was not over, however. Only an elite group of intellectuals had been able to participate in the Enlightenment proper. But a religious movement was about to bring many of its basic assumptions into the mainstream so that they would become essential to the Western outlook. I Atheism n 1790, the Reverend Jedidiah Morse descended on Boston from the rural outreaches of Massachusetts and launched a crusade against Deism, which had just attained the peak of its development in the United States. Hundreds of preachers joined this assault, and by the 1830s, Deism had been marginalized and a new version of Christianity had become central to the faith of America. 1 Known as “Evangelicalism,” its objective was to convert the new nation to the “good news” of the Gospel. Evangelicals had no time for the remote God of the Deists; instead of relying on natural law, they wanted a return to biblical authority, to personal commitment to Jesus, and to a religion of the heart rather than the head. Faith did not require learned philosophers and scientific experts; it was a simple matter of felt conviction and virtuous living. On the frontiers, nearly 40 percent of Americans felt slighted by the aristocratic republican government, which did not share their hardships but taxed them as heavily as the British and bought land for investment without any intention of leaving the comforts of the eastern seaboard. Frontiersmen and frontierswomen were ready to listen to a new kind of preacher who stirred up a wave of revivals known as the Second Great Awakening (1800–35). This Awakening was more politically radical than the first. The ideals of its prophets seemed very different from those of the founding fathers. They were not educated men, and their rough, populist Christianity seemed light-years away from the Deism of Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  In May 2010, I had the immense honor of presenting the results of this experiment directly to His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. A handful of scientists were invited to a private meeting to brief His Holiness on their latest discoveries about the effects of mind-training. After briefly describing to His Holiness the functions of the vagus nerve and the concept of vagal tone, I shared what my team and I had discovered in this most recent study: that vagal tone—which is commonly taken to be as stable an attribute as your adult height—actually improves significantly with mind-training. Here is your evidence-based reason for hope: No matter what your biological capacity for love is today, you can bolster that capacity by next season. For it was those study participants who had been assigned at random to learn loving-kindness meditation who changed the most. They devoted scarcely more than an hour of their time each week to the practice. Yet within a matter of months, completely unbeknownst to them, their vagus nerves began to respond more readily to the rhythms of their breathing, emitting more of that healthy arrhythmia that is the fingerprint of high vagal tone. Breath by breath—loving moment by loving moment—their capacity for positivity resonance matured. Moreover, through painstaking statistical analyses, we pinpointed that those who experienced the most frequent positivity resonance in connection with others showed the biggest increases in vagal tone. Love literally made people healthier. Upward Spirals Unleashed It’s time now to step back from isolated scientific findings and take in the big picture. Recall that your body’s positivity resonance operates within a much larger system. Along with love and all the other positive emotions, this system also includes your enduring resources—your physical health, your social bonds, your personality traits, and your resilience. Having assets like these certainly makes life easier, and more satisfying. In addition, though, such resources also serve as booster shots that increase the frequency and intensity of your micro-moments of positivity resonance. Love built those resources in you, and those resources in turn boost your experiences of love. This is not a simple case of cause and effect. The causal arrow instead runs in both directions at once, creating the dynamic and reciprocal causality that drives self-sustaining trajectories of growth. Through love, you become a better version of yourself. And as your better self, you experience love more readily. It is in this dance between your enduring resources and your micro-moments of love that life-giving upward spirals are born. Looking out from this more encompassing vantage point, let’s revisit the scientific findings I shared with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. By learning how to self-generate love, you can raise your vagal tone. And with higher vagal tone, your attention and actions become more agile, more attuned to the people in your midst.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  As for Jeremy himself, once his classroom climate began to turn around, he began to sleep better. He felt that he had more energy to give. He not only felt better, but his hair stopped falling out. He said to me, “I feel like a far more capable and confident person because of it.” The experience taught him both how and why to be optimistic. He drew on what he learned in TFA and in my course to “overcome probably the most difficult challenge” of his life in ways that have “applicability throughout life.” He called it “incredible” and went on to say, “It is one thing to learn [positive psychology] on paper, and another thing to actually implement it and see real success from it.” After Jeremy shared his and his students’ stories with me during this interview, I shared with him a sketch of the ideas I’d been developing for this book, especially my definition of positivity resonance and its preconditions. As he took in these new ideas, he nodded his head in recognition. He too began to appreciate what I’d picked up back in our sidewalk conversation: that the inner changes he’d made in himself—his rekindled hope, his eagerness to savor and celebrate even the smallest of successes, and most especially, his openness to experiment with new ways to lead—created new connections and resources within his classroom. Drawing on what he’d absorbed all those years earlier about the science of positive emotions, together with the values TFA had instilled in him, Jeremy came to see the abstract idea of “classroom climate” as the accumulation of the many real micro-moments of positivity resonance his students created. It was the energy within these micro-moments—the celebrations and the feelings of connection and camaraderie—that sparked newfound capacity and resilience in these previously lowest-performing students. Jeremy admitted that at first “the kids thought it was lame and stupid to celebrate things.” They had to be exposed to the facts about emotions, like he’d been, before they would buy into the new classroom climate he was trying to instill. Even then, their more positive climate was something that they all had to nurture. “It wasn’t anything quick . . . it wasn’t one person, we all bought into this idea, we all were conscious, we all made an effort, and the fruits of our labor were clearly on display. It was just life changing.” Dear Tisha and Kelly, I’d like to write: Thank you for letting me see how you taught yourselves and your classmates to be so positive. My warmest wishes to you both! Try This Micro-moment Practice: Redesign Your Job Around Love

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

  Yet the pure spirit of Christianity could by no means be polluted by this. On the contrary it retained even in the darkest days its faithful and steadfast confessors, conquered new provinces from time to time, constantly reacted, both within the established church and outside of it, in the form of monasticism, against the secular and the pagan influences, and, in its very struggle with the prevailing corruption, produced such church fathers as Athanasius, Chrysostom, and Augustine, such exemplary Christian mothers as Nonna, Anthusa, and Monica, and such extraordinary saints of the desert as Anthony, Pachomius, and Benedict. New enemies and dangers called forth new duties and virtues, which could now unfold themselves on a larger stage, and therefore also on a grander scale. Besides, it must not be forgotten, that the tendency to secularization is by no means to be ascribed only to Constantine and the influence of the state, but to the deeper source of the corrupt heart of man, and did reveal itself, in fact, though within a much narrower compass, long before, under the heathen emperors, especially in the intervals of repose, when the earnestness and zeal of Christian life slumbered and gave scope to a worldly spirit. The difference between the age after Constantine and the age before consists, therefore, not at all in the cessation of true Christianity and the entrance of false, but in the preponderance of the one over the other. The field of the church was now much larger, but with much good soil it included far more that was stony, barren, and overgrown with weeds. The line between church and world, between regenerate and unregenerate, between those who were Christians in name and those who were Christians in heart, was more or less obliterated, and in place of the former hostility between the two parties there came a fusion of them in the same outward communion of baptism and confession. This brought the conflict between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, Christ and antichrist, into the bosom of Christendom itself. §23. Worldliness and Extravagance.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Bethany and I suspect that the real active ingredient runs deeper than merely the end-of-the-day reflection. We speculate that the daily question serves as a subtle cue that reminds people that each of their social interactions is indeed an opportunity for something more than just an exchange of goods or information. With this in mind, people may begin to approach each interaction with a bit more presence, aiming to cultivate heartfelt connection rather than miss out on it. This speculation merits direct test, because it’s also possible that people don’t change their behaviors at all, but simply become more sensitive to the positive connections that already exist for them, more likely to notice and prioritize them. I encourage you to try this exercise out for yourself. A small shift in attention like this could well lead to large changes in your overall health and well- being. Try This Micro-moment Practice: Reflect on Your Social Connections Each night, for a few weeks, review your entire day and call to mind the three longest social interactions you had that day. Thinking of these three interactions all together, consider how true each of the following two statements is for you: • During these social interactions, I felt “in tune” with the person/s around me. • During these social interactions, I felt close to the person/s. Rate the truth of these two statements on a scale from 1 to 7, on which 1=not at all true, and 7=very true. You may record your responses anywhere, for instance in a notebook or computer spreadsheet that you create. Or you can use the online recording tools on the website that accompanies this book by visiting www.PositivityResonance.com. One benefit of recording your responses online is that you can also choose to rate your emotions each day, and thereby, as the weeks progress, you can see whether your positivity ratio rises in step with your greater attention to social connections. Donna’s Story Not long ago, I shared this preliminary finding on the impact of merely reflecting on social connections with Donna, a friend of mine who for years has been trying out new tools for increasing well-being. At the time, Donna had been facing a series of setbacks and disappointments at work and had lost some close, work-based friendships. Being single, she also felt emotionally isolated. With her stress levels at an all-time high, she was losing sleep, feeling lethargic, and had little remaining self-confidence. She was feeling her absolute worst at a time when she needed a lot of strength just to get through a workday. Over breakfast, I shared with her that Bethany and I had serendipitously stumbled upon what we thought might be a bouillon cube version of our loving-kindness interventions: a condensed, minute-long thought exercise that might well yield comparable results. Having tried out several other positive psychology interventions, Donna was immediately curious. She asked more about the technique.

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

  When, after a long interruption caused by a change of professional duties and literary labors, I returned to the favorite studies of my youth, I felt the necessity, before continuing the History to more recent times, of subjecting the first volume to a thorough revision, in order to bring it up to the present state of investigation. We live in a restless and stirring age of discovery, criticism, and reconstruction. During the thirty years which have elapsed since the publication of my separate "History of the Apostolic Church," there has been an incessant activity in this field, not only in Germany, the great workshopof critical research, but in all other Protestant countries. Almost every inch of ground has been disputed and defended with a degree of learning, acumen, and skill such as were never spent before on the solution of historical problems. In this process of reconstruction the first volume has been more than doubled in size and grown into two volumes. The first embraces Apostolic, the second post-Apostolic or ante-Nicene Christianity. The first volume is larger than my separate "History of the Apostolic Church," but differs from it in that it is chiefly devoted to the theology and literature, the other to the mission work and spiritual life of that period. I have studiously avoided repetition and seldom looked into the older book. On two points I have changed my opinion—the second Roman captivity of Paul (which I am disposed to admit in the interest of the Pastoral Epistles), and the date of the Apocalypse (which I now assign, with the majority of modern critics, to the year 68 or 69 instead of 95, as before).1 I express my deep obligation to my friend, Dr. Ezra Abbot, a scholar of rare learning and microscopic accuracy, for his kind and valuable assistance in reading the proof and suggesting improvements. The second volume, likewise thoroughly revised and partly rewritten, is in the hands of the printer; the third requires a few changes. Two new volumes, one on the History of Mediaeval Christianity, and one on the Reformation (to the Westphalian Treaty and the Westminster Assembly, 1648), are in an advanced stage of preparation. May the work in this remodelled shape find as kind and indulgent readers as when it first appeared. My highest ambition in this sceptical age is to strengthen the immovable historical foundations of Christianity and its victory over the world. Philip Schaff Union Theological Seminary, New York, October,1882 FROM THE PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION ——————————— Encouraged by the favorable reception of my "History of the Apostolic Church," I now offer to the public a History of the Primitive Church from the birth of Christ to the reign of Constantine, as an independent and complete work in itself, and at the same time as the first volume of a general history of Christianity, which I hope, with the help of God, to bring down to the present age.

• From We Were Here (2011)

  WE WERE HERE CaptionMax Page 25 3/23/2011 1:58:06 PAUL (VO) (CONT’D) They just couldn’t get traction to continue to stigmatize people with AIDS. 1:58:12 DANIEL (VO) AIDS organizations were just popping up everywhere. 1:58:13 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on protest banner) San Francisco AIDS Foundation 1:58:16 DANIEL (VO) (CONT’D) I mean, that was-- It was called the San Francisco model. I think one of the reasons the San Francisco model worked... 1:58:20 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on protest banner) AIDS HEALTH PROJECT 1:58:21 DANIEL (VO/ON) (CONT’D) was ‘cause of the size of San Francisco and because of Castro Street itself, that there was a center. San Francisco, people came here not for career. They came here because they wanted to live here. 1:58:37 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on protest banner) FIGHTING FOR OUR LIVES 1:58:39 DANIEL (VO/ON) (CONT’D) And when AIDS came along, the community was sort of inherent in that, that all it needed was the AIDS epidemic to really make it coalesce. 1:58:50 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on protest banners) Pets Are Wonderful Support P.A.W.S. PAWS 1:58:51 DANIEL (VO) (CONT’D) You know, whether it was taking care of people’s pets if- when they were in the hospital, or bringing them food, like Open Hand. Everybody wanted to do something. 1:58:55 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on archival photo) PROJECT OPEN HAND Founder, Ruth Brinker 1:59:00 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on protest banner) BCA SF BLACK COALITION WE WERE HERE CaptionMax Page 26 3/23/2011 ON AIDS 1:59:01 DANIEL (VO) (CONT’D) It was a way the community came together in an amazing way that-- You know, politics had never done that. 1:59:05 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on archival photo) PROJECT inform founder, Martin Delaney 1:59:09 DANEIL (CONT’D) And it brought together the women’s community, the gay women’s community and the gay male community in ways that had certainly never happened before. 1:59:19 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on newspaper) WOMEN FIGHTING THE EPIDEMIC Sentinel 1:59:21 PAUL (VO/ON) Again and again, in every situation, every circumstance, there’s lesbians there leading the fight. All the women had friends who were gay guys who were sick. I was walking up Castro Street one day to- to my apartment, and in the early days of these ter- horrible tests, people would become anemic, severely anemic. 1:59:41 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on headline clip) Community Blood Drives Reinstated in Castro 1:59:42 PAUL (VO/ON) (CONT’D) There was also a blood shortage because of the HIV in- in blood. Lesbians weren’t at risk for HIV and- and could donate blood and did. And so I’m walking up Castro Street, and I see a poster. And I believe it was from the lesbian caucus of the Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club. And it said, our boys need blood. 1:59:59 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on flyer) OUR PWAs NEED BLOOD Women’s Day Blood Drive, August 22 Lesbians: Help Solve an urgent crisis in our community. Stand with our sister & brothers in fighting the AIDS epidemic. 2:00:00 PAUL (VO) (CONT’D) Lesbian caucus blood drive for people with AIDS, San

• From We Were Here (2011)

  WE WERE HERE CaptionMax Page 34 3/23/2011 do is figure out how we’re doing on prevention, and we were able to turn that around. So the likelihood that more and more people were being infected eh, had- had been changed. 2:17:14 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on headline clip) Major Drop in Infections Encouraging S.F. AIDS Study 2:17:14 PAUL (VO) (CONT’D) So less despair, less sense of absolute crisis. 2:17:20 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on buttons and banner) STOP AIDS PROJECT 2:17:20 PAUL (VO) (CONT’D) We’re now getting into a sense of maybe there’s a place to go here. 2:17:26 GUY (VO/ON) Some things seemed to be working. I’m not saying that there was a cure, but there was a slowdown. You know, people weren’t dropping like flies anymore. Some people were uh, hangin’ on. And there was this one guy, he was in a wheelchair. He used to come by on a bicycle, and then he was in a wheelchair, and then he had a patch over his eye. And I really hated to look at him because I remember when this guy used to come by on his bicycle and buy flowers for his sister. And we would just laugh and everything, and I couldn’t laugh at him anymore because he was coming by in the wheelchair, and it was like he was almost on his way out, and I just thought, God, where are you? Look at what’s happening. And he was one of the first who, the next time I saw him, he wasn’t in a wheelchair. He was walking. He had a cane. And then the next time I saw him, he didn’t have that eye patch on anymore. And then, hey, I swear to you, yesterday I saw him at my flower stand, on his bicycle, and he was back. He wasn’t back like he was in the beginning, but, you know, I’m not the way I was twenty years ago either. (laughs) But he was there and he had gone through the storm. And he had weathered the storm, and his spirit was just as bright and effervescent as it was in the beginning. 2:19:11 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on headline clip) Multidrug use suppresses HIV in the long-term 2:19:13 PAUL (VO/ON) The Washington Post came out with a headline, and it showed death from AIDS, and it was a graph going down.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  Not only does this interrupt Meridian's thoughts of infanticide, but it introduces and eventually radicalizes her to the civil rights movement, black struggles for equality and sociopolitical subjectivity. Moreover, it helps redefine "blackness"-locating it within the sociopolitical realm of agency with regard to enfranchisement and existential freedom-and rescues black people from the mythology of a pathologized and/or criminalized past. With a newer sense of racial consciousness and political awareness, Meridian, "after the bombing" (80), volunteers at a local movement office and is later radicalized, becoming an active participant in protests, demonstrations, and freedom marches. Walker problematizes, as well as humanizes, civil rights by illuminating the human element-foregrounding the personal struggles, the faces, black people's dogged determination to attain freedom and equality-in the face of legal rhetoric. This she further achieves in her essay in the civil rights journal Perspectives, wherein she ruminates on "civil rights" as more than simply nomenclature, language, and terminology: "It has no music, it has no poetry. It makes one think of bureaucrats rather than of sweaty faces, eyes bright and big for Freedom!, marching feet." Moreover, "the term `Civil Rights' could never adequately express black people's revolutionary goals because it could never adequately describe our longings and our dreams" and "because, as a term, it is totally lacking in color. In short, although I value the civil rights movement itself, I have never liked the term" namely because it "did not evolve out of black culture but rather out of American Law. As such, it is a term of limitation. It speaks only to physical possibilities-necessary and treasured, of course-but not of the spirit."33 In her participation in racial/communal uplift and black freedom struggles, Meridian produces and "gives birth" to new opportunities for communities and generations of blacks-disenfranchised and otherwise. She helps to create for them possibilities of racial/sociopolitical equality, as well as greater senses of consciousness and knowledge of their existence in society and the world. This is not to say that the movement is an idealized liberatory experience for Meridian or that she did not confront particular politics that, at times, marginalized her. Yet, it still provides her with a space-unlike the conservative and restrictive community from which she came-in which to achieve selfhood, subjectivity, awareness of her condition, and agency in the face of systematic oppression. For, as Walker asserts, "[t]o know is to exist: to exist is to be involved, to move about, to see the world with [one's] own eyes. This, at least, the Movement has [done].""

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  In the days ahead, in other articles I clipped, Bowerman was even more effusive, calling Pre “the best runner I’ve ever had.” Bowerman’s assistant, Bill Dellinger, said Pre’s secret weapon was his confidence, which was as freakish as his lung capacity. “Usually,” Dellinger said, “it takes our guys twelve years to build confidence in themselves, and here’s a young man who has the right attitude naturally.” Yes, I thought. Confidence. More than equity, more than liquidity, that’s what a man needs. I wished I had more. I wished I could borrow some. But confidence was cash. You had to have some to get some. And people were loath to give it to you. Another revelation came that summer via another magazine. Flipping through Fortune I spotted a story about my former boss in Hawaii. In the years since I’d worked for Bernie Cornfeld and his Investors Overseas Services, he’d become even richer. He’d abandoned Dreyfus Funds and begun selling shares in his own mutual funds, along with gold mines, real estate, and sundry other things. He’d built an empire, and as all empires eventually do it was now crumbling. I was so startled by news of his downfall that I dazedly turned the page and happened on another article, a fairly dry analysis of Japan’s newfound economic power. Twenty- five years after Hiroshima, the article said, Japan was reborn. The world’s third-largest economy, it was taking aggressive steps to become even larger, to consolidate its position and extend its reach. Besides simply outthinking and outworking other countries, Japan was adopting ruthless trade policies. The article then sketched the main vehicle for these trade policies, Japan’s hyper-aggressive sosa shoga. Trading companies. It’s hard to say exactly what those first Japanese trading companies were. Sometimes they were importers, scouring the globe and acquiring raw materials for companies that didn’t have the means to do so. Other times they were exporters, representing those same companies overseas. Sometimes they were private banks, providing all kinds of companies with easy terms of credit. Other times they were an arm of the Japanese government. I filed away all this information. For a few days. And the next time I went down to First National, the next time Wallace made me feel like a bum, I walked out and saw the sign for Bank of Tokyo. I’d seen that sign a hundred times before, of course, but now it meant something different. Huge pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Dizzy, I walked directly across the street, straight into the Bank of Tokyo, and presented myself to the woman at the front desk. I said I owned a shoe company, which was importing shoes from Japan, and I wanted to speak with someone about doing a deal. Like the madam of a brothel, the woman instantly and discreetly led me to a back room. And left me. After two minutes a man walked in and sat down very quietly at the table. He waited. I waited.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Like the atman in the Upanishads, which was identical with the Brahman as well as being the deepest core of the individual self, what we call “God” is fundamental to our existence. So a sense of participation in God does not alienate us from our nature or the world, as the nineteenth-century atheists had implied, but returns us to ourselves. Like Bultmann, however, Tillich did not regard the experience of being as an exotic state. It was not distinguishable from any of our other affective or intellectual experiences, because it pervaded and was inseparable from them, so it was inaccurate to say “I am now having a ‘spiritual’ experience.” An awareness of God did not have a special name of its own but was fundamental to our ordinary emotions of courage, hope, or despair. Tillich also called God the “ultimate concern;” like Bultmann, he believed that we experience the divine in our absolute commitment to ultimate truth, love, beauty, justice, and compassion—even if it requires the sacrifice of our own life. The Jesuit philosopher Karl Rahner (1904–84), who had been Heidegger’s pupil, dominated Catholic thought in the mid-twentieth century. He insisted that theology was not a set of dogmas handed down mechanically as self-evidently true. These teachings must be rooted in the actual conditions in which men and women lived, reflecting the manner in which they knew, perceived, and experienced reality. People did not come to know what God was by solving doctrinal conundrums, proving God’s existence, or engaging in an abstruse metaphysical quest, but by becoming aware of the workings of their own nature. Rahner was advocating a version of what the Buddha had called “mindfulness.” When we struggle to make sense of the world, we constantly go beyond ourselves in our search for understanding. Thus every act of cognition and every act of love is a transcendent experience because it compels us to reach beyond the prism of selfhood. Constantly, in our everyday experience, we stumble against something that takes us beyond ourselves, so transcendence is built into the human condition. Rahner stressed the importance of mystery, which was simply an aspect of humanity. The transcendent is not an add-on, something separate from normal existence, because it simply means “to go beyond.” When we know, choose, and love other beings in this world, we have to go outside ourselves; when we try to get beyond all particular beings, we move toward what lies beyond words, concepts, and categories. That mystery, which defies description, is God. Religious doctrines were not meant to explain or define the mystery; they were simply symbolic. A doctrine articulates our sense of the ineffable and makes us aware of it.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  What the pill thus provides, she posits, is choice: the fundamental agency and ownership of her body-or "at least some of the major events in her life"-and it also gives women the space, in terms of opportunity and temporality, to fight against systematic oppression and for liberation in these and other areas." Cade argues that a right to choice is a powerful conduit toward liberation and racial/gender/sexual empowerment for not only black women but the community as well. The very ideologies that W.E.B.Du Bois articulated nearly a half century earlier in his (then) radically progressive polemic "The Damnation of Women," in which he avers that racial advancement and liberation should be predicated not on "our idiotic conventions" but on women's right to education and motherhood, sexual and reproductive agency, at their own discretion, reverberate in Cade's assessment." Du Bois's polemic resonates, too, in Shirley Chisholm's 1969 reflection on "the abortion question," women's reproductive rights, access to safe contraceptive devices, and the necessity for the end of compulsory pregnancy-which, as she notes, is an issue affecting not only women but America at large. At the crux of these discourses are reproductive rights as they relate to larger issues of racialized gender, freedom, and (sexual) liberation, and also the fact that equality itself necessitates equity in the social and sexual terrain simultaneously-or, it necessitates one's sexual citizenship: the fundamental right to orchestrate, dictate, and define the terms of one's (adult) sexual life in accordance with one's desires and with respect to one's privacy.57 What becomes transparent in terms of black sexual politics and sociosexual dynamics within the black community of the era is that black sexuality, intimacy, and desire constituted something with far greater complexity and liberalism, to evoke the word in its broadest sense, than how society and history alike have written it. Instead of black sexuality as steeped in a conservatism at the crux of which was an inauthentic heterosexism and homophobia (based on a religious or fundamentalist tradition), the black sexual revolution embodied a complexity that spans a continuum, not only in terms of the varied sexual expressions, loving, or sex purely for sex's sake; but also in its multifaceted effort to narrate and iterate the varieties of black sexual expressions and experiences. In this regard, this articulation of racial/sexual sensibilities and identities typifies the extent to which, when we engage or speak of race, in this particular case "blackness," we also "always already" speak "about gender, sexuality, and class" in an "intricately negotiated amalgam" of these intersecting dynamics.58

• From We Were Here (2011)

  WE WERE HERE CaptionMax Page 35 3/23/2011 And it basically said cocktail proves effective against HIV/AIDS. 2:19:25 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on newspaper) Bay Area Reporter No obits 2:19:26 PAUL (VO) (CONT’D) This means that AIDS work as we know it is transformed. 2:19:34 TITLE Between 1994 and 1997, the number of yearly AIDS deaths in San Francisco declined from 1592 to 422. 2:19:42 TITLE By that point, 15,548 San Franciscans had died in the epidemic. 2:19:49 DANIEL (VO/ON) I remember my friend Ben saying in the old days that he would never go to Costco and buy one of those big things of toilet paper, ‘cause he didn’t think he’d ever use it all up. And now he can. (chuckles) That’s the difference. I would never take a commission more than five or six months out, ‘cause I didn’t think I’d be able to finish it. Now I’ll take a commission that’s, you know, a year out. And now I have a partner whom I love and whom I hope to be with for a very, very long time, and so I’m imagining a future. I’m allowing myself to imagine a future. And that’s- that’s scary, too. There are still- I can-- I mean, I can feel it right now. There’s like butterflies in my stomach. It’s like I’m hoping. I’m feeling that hope again. And I could lose it, and I have to remember that, ‘cause, you know, you get sick and, bam. You just sink right down again. 2:20:46 ED (VO/ON) My friend John, who has studied Buddhism, talks about this metaphor of people who have been through some huge experience of loss, who cannot find their way back, if you will, to the land of the living. But they still walk the Earth, hungry, hungry for connection, hungry for some way to regain a sense of life and balance and that-- I- I do, when I walk through the Castro sometimes, I see- I see people who haven’t been able to do that, and that’s something that could have easily happened to me, in that I could have, you know, become one of those hungry ghosts. And, luckily for me, uh, it changed. I met someone, and I encountered life again. Here was this man walking down the street, and thank God I got it

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  If not now, eventually, this was something I would have to face. If not cancer, then somehow, I would have to examine the terms and means as well as the whys of my survival — and in the face of alteration. So much of the work I did, I did before I knew consciously that I had cancer. Questions of death and dying, dealing with power and strength, the sense of “What am I paying for?” that I wrote about in that paper, were crucial to me a year later. “Uses of the Erotic” was written four weeks before I found out I had breast cancer, in 1978 . Adrienne: Again, it’s like what you were saying before, about making the poems that didn’t exist, that you needed to have exist. Audre: The existence of that paper enabled me to pick up and go to Houston and California; it enabled me to start working again. I don’t know when I’d have been able to write again, if I hadn’t had those words. Do you realize, we’ve come full circle, because that is where knowing and understanding mesh. What understanding begins to do is to make knowledge available for use, and that’s the urgency, that’s the push, that’s the drive. I don’t know how I wrote the long prose piece I have just finished, but I just knew that I had to do it. Adrienne: That you had to understand what you knew and also make it available to others. Audre: That’s right. Inseparable process now. But for me, I had to know I knew it first — I had to feel. * This interview, held on August 30, 1979 in Montague, Massachusetts, was edited from three hours of tapes we made together. It was commissioned by Marilyn Hacker, the guest editor of Woman Poet: The East (Women-In-Literature, Reno, Nevada, 1981), where a portion of it appears. The interview was first published in Signs , vol. 6, no. 4 (Summer 1981). * The First Cities (Poets Press, New York, 1968). * New York Head Shop and Museum (Broadside Press, Detroit, 1974), pp. 52–56. * Cables to Rage (Paul Breman, Heritage Series, London, 1970). * First published in From a Land Where Other People Live (Broadside Press, Detroit, 1973), and collected in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1982), pp.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  People were telling me constantly that advertising was important, that advertising was the next wave. I always rolled my eyes. But if icky photos and made-up words—and Johnson, posed seductively on a couch—were slipping into our ads, I needed to start paying more attention. “I’ll give you two bucks an hour,” I told this starving artist in the hallway at Portland State. “To do what?” she asked. “Design print ads,” I said, “do some lettering, logos, maybe a few charts and graphs for presentations.” It didn’t sound like much of a gig. But the poor kid was desperate. She wrote her name on a piece of paper. Carolyn Davidson. And her number. I shoved it in my pocket and forgot all about it. HIRING SALES REPS and graphic artists showed great optimism, and I didn’t consider myself an optimist by nature. Not that I was a pessimist. I generally tried to hover between the two, committing to neither. But as 1969 approached, I found myself staring into space and thinking the future might be bright. After a good night’s sleep, after a hearty breakfast, I could see plenty of reason for hope. Aside from our robust and rising sales numbers, Onitsuka would soon be bringing out several exciting new models, including the Obori, which featured a feather-light nylon upper. Also, the Marathon, another nylon, with lines sleek as a Karmann Ghia. These shoes will sell themselves, I told Woodell many times, hanging them on the corkboard. Also, Bowerman was back from Mexico City, where he’d been an assistant coach on the U.S. Olympic team, meaning he’d played a pivotal role in the U.S. winning more gold medals than any team, from any nation, ever. My partner was more than famous; he was legendary. I phoned Bowerman, eager to get his overall thoughts on the Games, and particularly on the moment for which they would forever be remembered, the protest of John Carlos and Tommie Smith. Standing on the podium during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” both men had bowed their heads and raised black-gloved fists, a shocking gesture, meant to call attention to racism, poverty, human rights abuses. They were still being condemned for it. But Bowerman, as I fully expected, supported them. Bowerman supported all runners. Carlos and Smith were shoeless during the protest; they’d conspicuously removed their Pumas and left them on the stands. I told Bowerman I couldn’t decide if this had been a good thing or a bad thing for Puma. Was all publicity really good publicity? Was publicity like advertising? A chimera? Bowerman chuckled and said he wasn’t sure. He told me about the scandalous behavior of Puma and Adidas throughout the Games. The world’s two biggest athletic shoe companies—run by two German brothers who despised each other—had chased each other like Keystone Kops around the Olympic Village, jockeying for all the athletes. Huge sums of cash, often stuffed in running shoes or manila envelopes, were passed around.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  I never thought I’d see it in my lifetime, a U.S. president in the Forbidden City, touching the Great Wall. I thought of my time in Hong Kong. I’d been so close to China, and yet so far. I thought I’d never have another chance. But now I thought, One day? Maybe? Maybe. At last Kitami made his move. He returned to Oregon and asked for a meeting, at which he requested that Bowerman be present. To make that easier for Bowerman, I suggested Jaqua’s office down in Eugene as the site. When the day came, as we were all filing into the conference room, Jaqua grabbed my arm and whispered, “Whatever he says, you say nothing.” I nodded. On one side of the conference table were Jaqua, Bowerman, and I. On the other side were Kitami and his lawyer, a local guy, who didn’t look like he wanted to be there. Plus, Iwano was back. I thought he might have half-smiled at me, before remembering that this wasn’t a social call. Jaqua’s conference room was bigger than ours in Tigard, but that day it felt like a dollhouse. Kitami had asked for the meeting, so he kicked it off. And he didn’t beat around the bonsai tree. He handed Jaqua a letter. Effective immediately, our contract with Onitsuka was null and void. He looked at me, then back to Jaqua. “Very very regret,” he said. Furthermore, insult to injury, he was billing us $17,000, which he claimed we owed for shoes delivered. To be exact, he demanded $16,637.13. Jaqua pushed the letter aside and said that if Kitami dared to pursue this reckless course, if he insisted on cutting us off, we’d sue. “You cause this,” Kitami said. Blue Ribbon had breached its contract with Onitsuka by making Nike shoes, he said, and he was at a loss to understand why we’d ruined such a profitable relationship, why we’d launched this, this, this— Nike . That was more than I could bear. “I’ll tell you why—” I blurted. Jaqua turned on me and shouted: “Shut up, Buck!” Jaqua then told Kitami that he hoped something could still be worked out. A lawsuit would be highly damaging to both companies. Peace was prosperity. But Kitami was in no mood for peace. He stood, motioned to his lawyer and Iwano to follow. When he got to the door, he stopped. His face changed. He was about to say something conciliatory. He was preparing to offer an olive branch. I felt myself softening toward him. “Onitsuka,” he said, “like to continue use Mr. Bowerman… as consultant.” I pulled on my ear. Surely I hadn’t heard him correctly. Bowerman shook his head and turned to Jaqua, who said that Bowerman would henceforth consider Kitami a competitor, aka a sworn enemy, and would help him in no way whatsoever. Kitami nodded. He asked if someone could please drive him and Iwano to the airport. I TOLD JOHNSON to get on a plane.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  To do something during life, on even the humblest scale if nothing more is within reach, towards bringing this consummation ever so little nearer, is the most animating and invigorating thought which can inspire a human nature. 91 This rather than any belief in the supernatural was the religion of the future; working for their fellow human beings would fill the void described by Nietzsche. But this vision of hope required an act of faith. The American Civil War (1861–65) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) had both revealed the horror of warfare in the industrial age, when the exact sciences were applied to weaponry to devastating effect. Yet the nation- states of Europe seemed in thrall to Freud’s death wish. After the Franco-Prussian War, they began an arms race that led to the carnage of the First World War (1914–18), apparently regarding warfare as a Darwinian necessity in which only the fittest would survive. At whatever cost to itself or others, the modern state must build the biggest army and create the most destructive weapons. The British writer I. F. Clarke has shown that between 1871 and 1914, it was unusual to find a single year in which a novel or story looking forward to a terrifying future war did not appear in some European country. 92 The “next great war” loomed as a fearful but unavoidable ordeal, from which the nation would emerge with renewed strength and vigor. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the British poet and novelist Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) poignantly expressed the modern predicament. In “The Darkling Thrush,” dated December 31, 1900, he expressed the bleak desolation of the human spirit excluded from traditional ways of arriving at a sense of life’s meaning. He described the “sharp features” of the wintry landscape as “the century’s corpse;” it seemed to Hardy that “every spirit upon earth seemed fervourless as I.” Suddenly, an aged thrush—”frail, gaunt and small”—began to sing, flinging his soul upon the growing gloom. As he listened to this “full hearted evensong,” Hardy could only reflect, with a calm, sad acceptance: So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembl’d through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware. 93 A Unknowing t the Second International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris in 1900, the German mathematician David Hilbert (1862–1943) confidently predicted a century of unparalleled scientific progress. There were just twenty-three outstanding problems in the Newtonian system, and once these had been solved, our knowledge of the universe would be complete. There appeared to be no limit to the modern Western achievement. In nearly all fields, artists, scientists, and philosophers seemed to anticipate a brave new world. “In or about December 1910, human nature changed,” wrote the British novelist Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) after visiting the startling exhibition of French postimpressionist painters.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  “What plane?” he said. “The next plane,” I said. He arrived the following morning. We went for a run, during which neither of us said anything. Then we drove to the office and gathered everyone into the conference room. There were about thirty people there. I expected to be nervous. They expected me to be nervous. On any different day, under any other circumstances, I would have been. For some reason, however, I felt weirdly at peace. I laid out the situation we faced. “We’ve come, folks, to a crossroads. Yesterday, our main supplier, Onitsuka, cut us off.” I let that sink in. I watched everyone’s jaw drop. “We’ve threatened to sue them for damages,” I said, “and of course they’ve threatened to file a lawsuit of their own. Breach of contract. If they sue us first, in Japan, we’ll have no choice but to sue them here in America, and sue fast. We’re not going to win a lawsuit in Japan, so we’ll have to beat them to the courthouse, get a quick verdict here, to pressure them into withdrawing. “Meanwhile, until it all sorts out, we’re completely on our own. We’re set adrift. We have this new line, Nike, which the reps in Chicago seemed to like. But, well, frankly, that’s all we’ve got. And as we know, there are big problems with the quality. It’s not what we hoped. Communications with Nippon Rubber are good, and Nissho is there at the factory at least once a week, trying to get it all fixed, but we don’t know how soon they can do it. It better be soon, though, because we have no time and suddenly no margin for error.” I looked down the table. Everyone was sinking, slumping forward. I looked at Johnson. He was staring at the papers before him, and there was something in his handsome face, some quality I’d never seen there before. Surrender. Like everyone else in the room, he was giving up. The nation’s economy was in the tank, a recession was under way. Gas lines, political gridlock, rising unemployment, Nixon being Nixon—Vietnam. It seemed like the end times. Everyone in the room had already been worrying about how they were going to make the rent, pay the light bill. Now this. I cleared my throat. “So… in other words,” I said. I cleared my throat again, pushed aside my yellow legal pad. “What I’m trying to say is, we’ve got them right where we want them.” Johnson lifted his eyes. Everyone around the table lifted their eyes. They sat up straighter. “This is—the moment,” I said. “This is the moment we’ve been waiting for. Our moment. No more selling someone else’s brand. No more working for someone else. Onitsuka has been holding us down for years. Their late deliveries, their mixed-up orders, their refusal to hear and implement our design ideas—who among us isn’t sick of dealing with all that?

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  1980 We all gathered in the conference room and Chang gave us his bio. He was born in Shanghai, and raised in opulence. His grandfather was the third-largest soy sauce manufacturer in northern China, and his father had been the third-highest-ranking member of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. When Chang was a teenager, however, the revolution came. The Changs fled to the United States, to Los Angeles, where Chang attended Hollywood High. He often thought he’d go back, and his parents did also. They kept in close touch with friends and family in China, and his mother remained extremely close with Soong Ching-ling, the godmother of the revolution. In the meantime Chang attended Princeton, and studied architecture, and moved to New York. He landed a job at a good architectural firm, where he worked on the Levittown project. Then he set up his own firm. He was making decent money, doing good work, but bored stiff. He wasn’t having any fun, and he didn’t feel he was accomplishing anything real. One day a Princeton friend complained about being unable to get a visa for Shanghai. Chang helped his friend get the visa, and helped him set up appointments with business contacts, and found that he enjoyed it. Being an emissary, a go-between, was a better use of his time and talents. Even with his help, Chang cautioned, getting into China was extremely difficult. The process was laborious. “You can’t just apply for permission to visit China,” he said. “You have to formally request that the Chinese government invite you. Bureaucracy doesn’t begin to describe it.” I closed my eyes and pictured, somewhere on the other side of the world, a Chinese version of the bureau-kraken. I also thought of the ex-GIs who’d explained Japanese business practices to me when I was twenty-four. I’d followed their advice, to the letter, and never regretted it. So, under Chang’s direction, we put together a written presentation. It was long. It was almost as long as Werschkul on American Selling Price, Volume I. We, too, had it bound. Often we asked each other: Is anyone actually going to read this thing? Oh well, we said. This is how Chang says it’s done. We sent it off to Beijing without hope. AT THE FIRST Buttface of 1980 I announced that, though we’d gained the upper hand with the Feds, it might go on forever if we didn’t do something bold, something outrageous. “I’ve given this a lot of thought,” I said, “and I think what we need to do is... American Selling Price ourselves.” The Buttfaces laughed. Then they stopped laughing and looked at each other. We spent the rest of the weekend kicking it around. Was it possible? Nah, it couldn’t be. Could we? Oh, no way. But... maybe? We decided to give it a try. We launched a new shoe, a running shoe with nylon uppers, and called it One Line.