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)

  The American philosopher John D. Caputo has been influenced by Heidegger and the postmodern thinker Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) as well as by Derrida. He too advocates “weak thought” and transcendence of the warring polarities of atheism and theism. He sees the limitations of the old Death of God movement but fully endorses the desire of Altizer and Van Buren to deconstruct the modern God. Although he appreciates Tillich’s emphasis on the essentially symbolic nature of religious truth, he is, however, wary of calling God the “ground of being,” since this sets brakes on the process of endless flux and becoming that is essential to life by stabilizing a grounding center of our being.61 Atheist and theist alike should abandon the modern appetite for certainty. One of the problems of the original Death of God movement was that its terminology was too final and absolute. No state of affairs is permanent, and we are now witnessing the death of the Death of God. The atheistic ideas of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud are “perspectives … constructions, and fictions of grammar.” Enlightenment secularism, the objectivist reduction of religion to something other than itself—say, to a distorted desire for one’s mommy, or to a way of keeping the ruling authorities in power—is one more story told by people with historically limited imaginations, with contingent conceptions of reason and history, of economics with labour, of nature and human nature, of desire, sexuality, and women, and of God, religion, and faith.62 The Enlightenment had its own rigors. Postmodernity should be “a more enlightened Enlightenment, that is, no longer taken in by the dream of Pure Objectivity.”63 It should open doors “to another way of thinking about faith and reason” in order to achieve “a redescription of reason that is more reasonable than the transhistorical Rationality of the Enlightenment.”64 So how does Caputo see God? Following Derrida, he would describe God as the desire beyond desire.65 Of its very nature, desire is located in the space between what exists and what does not; it addresses all that we are and are not, everything we know and what we do not know. The question is not “Does God exist?” any more than “Does desire exist?” The question is rather “What do we desire?” Augustine understood this when he asked, “What do I love when I love my God?” and failed to find an answer. Like Denys and Aquinas, Caputo does not see negative theology as a deeper, more authoritative truth. It simply emphasizes unknowing—”in the sense that we really don’t know!”66 For Caputo, “religious truth is truth without knowledge.”67 He has adapted Derrida’s différance to create his “theology of the event,” distinguishing between a name, such as “God,” “Justice,” or “Democracy,” and what he calls the event, that which is “astir” in that name, something that is never fully realized. But the “event” within the name inspires us, turns things upside down, making us weep and pray for what is “to come.”

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

  It was worth shooting for. If Blue Ribbon went bust, I’d have no money, and I’d be crushed. But I’d also have some valuable wisdom, which I could apply to the next business. Wisdom seemed an intangible asset, but an asset all the same, one that justified the risk. Starting my own business was the only thing that made life’s other risks—marriage, Vegas, alligator wrestling—seem like sure things. But my hope was that when I failed, if I failed, I’d fail quickly, so I’d have enough time, enough years, to implement all the hard-won lessons. I wasn’t much for setting goals, but this goal kept flashing through my mind every day, until it became my internal chant: Fail fast. In closing I told Johnson that if he could sell 3,250 pairs of Tigers by the end of June 1966—completely impossible, by my calculations—I would authorize him to open that retail outlet he’d been harassing me about. I even put a PS at the bottom, which I knew he’d devour like a candy treat. I reminded him that he was selling so many shoes, so fast, he might want to speak to an accountant. There are income tax issues to consider, I said. He fired back a sarcastic thanks for the tax advice. He wouldn’t be filing taxes, he said, “because gross income was $1,209 while expenses total $1,245.” His leg broken, his heart broken, he told me that he was also flat broke. He signed off: “Please send encouraging words.” I didn’t. SOMEHOW, JOHNSON HIT the magic number. By the end of June he’d sold 3,250 pairs of Tigers. And he’d healed. Thus, he was holding me to my end of the bargain. Before Labor Day he leased a small retail space at 3107 Pico Boulevard, in Santa Monica, and opened our first-ever retail store. He then set about turning the store into a mecca, a holy of holies for runners. He bought the most comfortable chairs he could find, and afford (yard sales), and he created a beautiful space for runners to hang out and talk. He built shelves and filled them with books that every runner should read, many of them first editions from his own library. He covered the walls with photos of Tiger-shod runners, and laid in a supply of silk-screened T-shirts with Tiger across the front, which he handed out to his best customers. He also stuck Tigers to a black lacquered wall and illuminated them with a strip of can lights—very hip. Very mod. In all the world there had never been such a sanctuary for runners, a place that didn’t just sell them shoes but celebrated them and their shoes. Johnson, the aspiring cult leader of runners, finally had his church. Services were Monday through Saturday, nine to six. When he first wrote me about the store, I thought of the temples and shrines I’d seen in Asia, and I was anxious to see how Johnson’s compared. But there just wasn’t time.

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

  In Meridian, Alice Walker illuminates the ways in which individuality, especially women's individual freedom, and community are not antithetical or diametrical entities. Through her characterization of Meridian, she demonstrates the convergence, rather than disjuncture, of black women's autonomy in relation to the community at large. Instead of the community serving merely and problematically as a source of entrapment or marginalization for women, it, as Walker illumines, significantly provides a space for women's agency and choice, be it with regard to mothering and/or participating in revolutionary work. In so doing, Walker "takes into account the dynamics of collective identity along with the demands that social codes place upon the group, and she considers the structure of personal identity with its [...] social relations, especially family."35 Moreover, she destabilizes the very meanings and functions of the individual and collective, and their relational aspects to various conventional institutions and social relations: particularly family, motherhood, and community. To this end, she creates transformative and liberatory spaces, not without complications and complexities, for black women as well as generations of blacks. [image file=img/page0156_0000.svg] If post-civil rights black women authors limn the nexus of racialized gender and sexual transgression, employing erotic characterizations and theatricalities of desire, Eva's Man does just this. Yet, it goes even farther, exceeding the limit and traversing the boundaries in ways unparalleled in other texts examined in this book. It engages the radical sexual dimension, as well as contests the regulation of female sexuality through men, as does Sula. Like Loving Her, it refuses to privilege heterosexual intimacy, marked by male dominance, as a singular and solitary option; and, much like Meridian, it critiques silence-especially in the form of dissemblance (or the politics surrounding black women's sexuality)-as insidious. Even with these connections, Eva's Man is far more aggressive: it agitates; is crude and, at times, simultaneously titillating, pornographic, and offensive; and is both uncensored and unrelenting in its violence, sexual language, imagery, and tone. In fact, Jones's language, her calculated use of the sexually explicit (quasi-pornographic), operates as a direct contestation-a means to overturn-racialized Victorianism. Published during the sexual revolution, the novel reflects the ideological and sociosexual politics of the moment in its effort to liberate sex and libidinal forces from not only repression, but conservatism in terms of morality and what one might engage in during the sex act. Sensibilities undergirding the novel reflect the sociocultural and legal advances in the sexual realm, namely in the arena of the pornographic and public obscenity.

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

  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? It’s time we faced facts: If we’re going to succeed, or fail, we should do so on our own terms, with our own ideas—our own brand. We posted two million in sales last year… none of which had anything to do with Onitsuka. That number was a testament to our ingenuity and hard work. Let’s not look at this as a crisis. Let’s look at this as our liberation. Our Independence Day. “Yes, it’s going to be rough. I won’t lie to you. We’re definitely going to war, people. But we know the terrain. We know our way around Japan now. And that’s one reason I feel in my heart this is a war we can win. And if we win it, when we win it, I see great things for us on the other side of victory. We are still alive, people. We are still. Alive.” As I stopped speaking I could see a wave of relief swirl around the table like a cool breeze. Everyone felt it. It was as real as the wind that used to swirl around the office next to the Pink Bucket. There were nods, murmurs, nervous chuckles. We spent the next hour brainstorming about how to proceed, how to hire contract factories, how to play them against one another for the best quality and price. And how were we going to fix these new Nikes? Anyone? We adjourned with a jovial, jittery, elated feeling. Johnson said he wanted to buy me a cup of coffee. “Your finest hour,” he said. “Ach,” I said. “Thanks.” But I reminded him: I just told the truth. As he had in Chicago. Telling the truth, I said. Who knew?

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

  me, but also part of me. Waiting for me, but also hiding from me. That might sound a little high-flown, a little crazy. But that’s how I felt back then. Or maybe I didn’t. Maybe my memory is enlarging this eureka moment, or condensing many eureka moments into one. Or maybe, if there was such a moment, it was nothing more than runner’s high. I don’t know. I can’t say. So much about those days, and the months and years into which they slowly sorted themselves, has vanished, like those rounded, frosty puffs of breath. Faces, numbers, decisions that once seemed pressing and irrevocable, they’re all gone. What remains, however, is this one comforting certainty, this one anchoring truth that will never go away. At twenty-four I did have a Crazy Idea, and somehow, despite being dizzy with existential angst, and fears about the future, and doubts about myself, as all young men and women in their midtwenties are, I did decide that the world is made up of crazy ideas. History is one long processional of crazy ideas. The things I loved most—books, sports, democracy, free enterprise—started as crazy ideas. For that matter, few ideas are as crazy as my favorite thing, running. It’s hard. It’s painful. It’s risky. The rewards are few and far from guaranteed. When you run around an oval track, or down an empty road, you have no real destination. At least, none that can fully justify the effort. The act itself becomes the destination. It’s not just that there’s no finish line; it’s that you define the finish line. Whatever pleasures or gains you derive from the act of running, you must find them within. It’s all in how you frame it, how you sell it to yourself. Every runner knows this. You run and run, mile after mile, and you never quite know why. You tell yourself that you’re running toward some goal, chasing some rush, but really you run because the alternative, stopping, scares you to death. So that morning in 1962 I told myself: Let everyone else call your idea crazy... just keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t even think about stopping until you get there, and don’t give much thought to where “there” is. Whatever comes, just don’t stop. That’s the precocious, prescient, urgent advice I managed to give myself, out of the blue, and somehow managed to take. Half a century later, I believe it’s the best advice—maybe the only advice—any of us should ever give. PA RT O N E Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that. —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

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

  This last line was wholly truthful. It was worth shooting for. If Blue Ribbon went bust, I’d have no money, and I’d be crushed. But I’d also have some valuable wisdom, which I could apply to the next business. Wisdom seemed an intangible asset, but an asset all the same, one that justified the risk. Starting my own business was the only thing that made life’s other risks—marriage, Vegas, alligator wrestling—seem like sure things. But my hope was that when I failed, if I failed, I’d fail quickly, so I’d have enough time, enough years, to implement all the hard-won lessons. I wasn’t much for setting goals, but this goal kept flashing through my mind every day, until it became my internal chant: Fail fast. In closing I told Johnson that if he could sell 3,250 pairs of Tigers by the end of June 1966—completely impossible, by my calculations—I would authorize him to open that retail outlet he’d been harassing me about. I even put a PS at the bottom, which I knew he’d devour like a candy treat. I reminded him that he was selling so many shoes, so fast, he might want to speak to an accountant. There are income tax issues to consider, I said. He fired back a sarcastic thanks for the tax advice. He wouldn’t be filing taxes, he said, “because gross income was $1,209 while expenses total $1,245.” His leg broken, his heart broken, he told me that he was also flat broke. He signed off: “Please send encouraging words.” I didn’t. SOMEHOW, JOHNSON HIT the magic number. By the end of June he’d sold 3,250 pairs of Tigers. And he’d healed. Thus, he was holding me to my end of the bargain. Before Labor Day he leased a small retail space at 3107 Pico Boulevard, in Santa Monica, and opened our first-ever retail store. He then set about turning the store into a mecca, a holy of holies for runners. He bought the most comfortable chairs he could find, and afford (yard sales), and he created a beautiful space for runners to hang out and talk. He built shelves and filled them with books that every runner should read, many of them first editions from his own library. He covered the walls with photos of Tiger-shod runners, and laid in a supply of silk-screened T-shirts with Tiger across the front, which he handed out to his best customers. He also stuck Tigers to a black lacquered wall and illuminated them with a strip of can lights—very hip. Very mod. In all the world there had never been such a sanctuary for runners, a place that didn’t just sell them shoes but celebrated them and their shoes. Johnson, the aspiring cult leader of runners, finally had his church. Services were Monday through Saturday, nine to six.

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

  Some of my descriptions of love may have even drawn you to balk: Do I really need to call that moment of positive connection I just had with my coworker love ? Was that love I just felt when I shared a smile with a complete stranger? Using the L-word to describe these sorts of connections makes you uneasy, uncomfortable. You’d prefer not to see them that way. Why not just say that you “got along” or “enjoyed each other’s company”? Does it really do any good to call this nonexclusive stuff love ? Obviously, I think it does. The scientific understanding of love and its benefits offers you a completely fresh set of lenses through which to see your world and your prospects for health, happiness, and spiritual wisdom. Through these new lenses you see things that you were literally blind to before. Ordinary, everyday exchanges with colleagues and strangers now light up and call out to you as opportunities—life-giving opportunities for connection, growth, and health, your own and theirs. You can also see for the first time how micro-moments of love carry irrepressible ripple effects across whole social networks, helping each person who experiences positivity resonance to grow and in turn touch and uplift the lives of countless others. These new lenses even change the way you see your more intimate relationships with family and friends. You now also see the rivers of missed opportunities for the true love of positivity resonance. You now know how to connect to and love these cherished people in your life more and better. Viewing love as distinct from long-standing relationships is especially vital as people increasingly face repeated geographical relocations that distance families and friends. Falling in love within smaller moments and with a greater variety of people gives new hope to the lonely and isolated among us. Love, I hope you see, bears upgrading. I’m not worried about any surface resistance to using the L-word. The terminology you use is not what matters. What matters is that you recognize positivity resonance when it happens as well as the abundant opportunities for it, and that, more and more frequently, you seek it out. I offer the next chapter, on the biology of love, to stimulate an even deeper appreciation for how much your body needs, craves, and was designed to thrive on this life-giving form of connection. CHAPTER 3 Love’s Biology THE SOUL MUST ALWAYS STAND AJAR, READY TO WELCOME THE ECSTATIC EXPERIENCE. —Emily Dickinson It’s all too tempting, especially in Western culture, to take your body to be a noun, a thing. Sure, it’s a living thing, but still, like other concrete things that you can see and touch, you typically describe your body with reference to its stable physical properties, like your height, your weight, your skin tone, your apparent age, and the like. A photo works well to convey these attributes.

• From Educated (2018)

  I worked through the Old Testament next, then I read Dad’s books, which were mostly compilations of the speeches, letters and journals of the early Mormon prophets. Their language was of the nineteenth century—stiff, winding, but exact—and at first I understood nothing. But over time my eyes and ears adjusted, so that I began to feel at home with those fragments of my people’s history: stories of pioneers, my ancestors, striking out across the American wilderness. While the stories were vivid, the lectures were abstract, treatises on obscure philosophical subjects, and it was to these abstractions that I devoted most of my study. In retrospect, I see that this was my education, the one that would matter: the hours I spent sitting at a borrowed desk, struggling to parse narrow strands of Mormon doctrine in mimicry of a brother who’d deserted me. The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand. —BY THE TIME THE SNOW on the mountain began to melt, my hands were thickly callused. A season in the junkyard had honed my reflexes: I’d learned to listen for the low grunt that escaped Dad’s lips whenever he tossed something heavy, and when I heard it I hit the dirt. I spent so much time flat in the mud, I didn’t salvage much. Dad joked I was as slow as molasses running uphill. The memory of Tyler had faded, and with it had faded his music, drowned out by the crack of metal crashing into metal. Those were the sounds that played in my head at night now—the jingle of corrugated tin, the short tap of copper wire, the thunder of iron. I had entered into the new reality. I saw the world through my father’s eyes. I saw the angels, or at least I imagined I saw them, watching us scrap, stepping forward and catching the car batteries or jagged lengths of steel tubing that Dad launched across the yard. I’d stopped shouting at Dad for throwing them. Instead, I prayed. I worked faster when I salvaged alone, so one morning when Dad was in the northern tip of the yard, near the mountain, I headed for the southern tip, near the pasture. I filled a bin with two thousand pounds of iron; then, my arms aching, I ran to find Dad. The bin had to be emptied, and I couldn’t operate the loader—a massive forklift with a telescopic arm and wide, black wheels that were taller than I was. The loader would raise the bin some twenty-five feet into the air and then, with the boom extended, tilt the forks so the scrap could slide out, raining down into the trailer with a tremendous clamor. The trailer was a fifty-foot flatbed rigged for scrapping, essentially a giant bucket. Its walls were made of thick iron sheets that reached eight feet from the bed.

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

  Given the calculated efforts toward black racial uplift, and the ideological and sociopolitical contexts undergirding them, sentiments such as those expressed in the 1894 issue of Woman's Era are emblematic, to say the least, of a progressive and radical approach to the role of black women, as well as a competing discourse on black women's positionalities. Diverging from constructions of black womanhood monolithically or exclusively within the realm of the domestic, the quotation used as this chapter's epigraph challenges narrow conceptualizations that relegate black women to a domestic position, if even for uplift purposes. Rather, it advocates "alternatives" for black women: options and choices beyond, not myopically or exclusively constituted by, marriage, motherhood, and traditional familial trajectories. Anna Julia Cooper, widely known for her advocacy of and commitment to racial uplift, recognized women's positionality in racial progress as integral. "Only the Black Woman," as she eloquently asserted, "can say when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me."5 What Cooper's position on the role of women illuminates, whether in specific or broader terms, is the nexus of black womanhood-unencumbered by marginalization, restrictive dictates, disenfranchisement, violence, and gender conventions within the confines of the domestic sphere-and black racial and sociopolitical progress. Racial progress, that is, was contingent upon, rather than inhibited by, women and their access to education, protection, enfranchisement, and progressive politics neither punctuated by marginalization and female gender deference nor characterized by rigid, limited, or patriarchal perspectives. As Unbought and Unbossed is invested in the historical, ideological, and sociopolitical dynamics governing black womanhood and the representational, this inaugural chapter provides a lens, historic and contextual, by which to explore the shifting paradigms of black womanhood and prescriptions for women in the early era: emblematized by the classical black female script and "alternatives" (as "new world black and new world woman," as explicated in the discussion that follows), as these evolve and operate in post-i96os (con)texts. I am particularly vested in the nexus of the script and postmodern modalities of black womanhood; second, in those instances wherein women's roles and positionalities are not contingent upon particular racialized dictates; and, third, those "alternatives"-to allude to the opening epigraph-to prescribed conventionality and how these are treated, broached, and/or subverted in post-civil rights black women's literary and cultural production. I turn, to this end, to the post-196os novels of black women to examine how black women writers like Toni Morrison, whose work is the central focus of this chapter, revisit, subvert, or defamiliarize prescriptive tenets and positionalities for women predicated on (outmoded) Victorian and racialized constructs. Or, framed yet another way, I examine how Morrison deploys such postmodern techniques as disruption, (de)fragmentation, and (re) inscriptions with regard to black women's bodies and sexuality to gesture toward a postmodern "new world" (female) blackness.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  To sum it up, there were numerous motivating factors behind the persecution of the early Christians. Principally, the persecutions were being driven by the sense that Christians had offended the gods, and that they were a more immoral presence in society. Occasionally, the mob reaction against Christians was taken to the authorities, who acted in what they saw to be the best interests of their people, their society, and tried to make Christians recant their beliefs, or pay the horrific consequences. In our next lecture, we will consider how Christians themselves reacted to their hostile reception, persecution, and martyrdoms. 193 Lecture Thirteen Christian Reactions to Persecution Scope: In this lecture, we try to understand how Christians reacted to their Il. 104A persecution at the hands of pagan mobs and local authorities. We will see that many Christians recanted their faith in the face of persecution, but many others stayed faithful to what they believed to be the truth. We will use the moving tale of the passion of Perpetua and Felicitas and the letters of Ignatius of Antioch to guide our reflections. From these texts, we will see that many Christians were willing to face torture and death because they believed that doing so would ensure them an afterlife of eternal bliss, whereas those who refused to accept the faith would face eternal torment. Moreover, some Christians believed that in suffering martyrdom, they were imitating the example set for them by Christ, their Lord. Outline In the previous lecture, we saw some of the reasons for the violent opposition to Christians throughout the empire. A. Christians were seen as a threat to society because they refused to worship the state gods. Disasters that struck could be seen by pagans, then, as divine retribution for cities that harbored such “atheists.” Moreover, Christians were thought to be morally reprehensible and, therefore, socially dangerous. Christians, of course, denied that they were dangerous, and many of them refused to recant their beliefs even in the face of violent opposition and concerted official efforts. In this lecture, we will shift from considering the persecution from the pagan perspective (why did pagans act this way?) to the Christian perspective (how did Christians react to their opposition?). We have already seen that some Christians recanted of their faith in the face of violent opposition. ITI. This is clearly stated in the letter of the Christians of Vienne and Lyons. It can also be seen in the Martyrdom of Polycarp in the story of Quintus, a Christian who voluntarily offered himself as a martyr, until he became terrified of the consequences and recanted. We know of some Christian groups who opposed martyrdom on theological grounds—that Christ died precisely so that his followers would not have to do so. These Christians maintained that it was God’s will to do (in bad faith) what the authorities insisted on and, thus, live. It is difficult to know how many Christians recanted or pretended to recant in the face of physical torment.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Today, when science itself is becoming less determinate, it is perhaps time to return to a theology that asserts less and is more open to silence and unknowing. Here, perhaps, dialogue with the more thoughtful Socratic forms of atheism can help to dismantle ideas that have become idolatrous. In the past, people were often called “atheists” when society was in transition from one religious perspective to another: Euripides and Protagoras were accused of “atheism” when they denied the Olympian gods in favor of a more transcendent theology; the first Christians and Muslims, who were moving away from traditional paganism, were persecuted as “atheists” by their contemporaries. When we have eaten a strong-tasting dish in a restaurant, we are often offered a sorbet to cleanse our palate so that we can taste the next course properly. An intelligent atheistic critique could help us to rinse our minds of the more facile theology that is impeding our understanding of the divine. We may find that for a while we have to go into what mystics called the dark night of the soul or the cloud of unknowing. This will not be easy for people used to getting instant information at the click of a mouse. But the novelty and strangeness of this negative capability could surprise us into awareness that stringent ratiocination is not the only means of acquiring knowledge. It is not only a poet like Keats who must, while waiting for new inspiration, learn to be “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” But is there no way of grounding commitment to the unknown and indefinable God? Are we doomed to the perpetual regression of postmodern thought? Perhaps the only viable “natural theology” lies in religious experience. By this, of course, I do not mean fervid emotional piety. We have seen that in the past scholars and spiritual directors had little time for this religious positivism. Instead of seeking out exotic raptures, Schleiermacher, Bultmann, Rahner, and Lonergan have all suggested that we should explore the normal workings of our minds and notice how frequently these propel us quite naturally into transcendence. Instead of looking for what we call God “outside ourselves” (foris) in the cosmos, we should, like Augustine, turn within and become aware of the way quite ordinary responses segue into “otherness.” We have seen how the inherent finitude of language was regularly exploited by teachers like Denys to make the faithful aware of the silence we encounter on the other side of speech. It has been well said that music, which, as we saw at the beginning of this book, is a “definitively” rational activity, is itself a “natural theology.”7 In music the mind experiences a pure, direct emotion that transcends ego and fuses subjectivity and objectivity.

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

  It’s time we faced facts: If we’re going to succeed, or fail, we should do so on our own terms, with our own ideas—our own brand . We posted two million in sales last year… none of which had anything to do with Onitsuka. That number was a testament to our ingenuity and hard work. Let’s not look at this as a crisis. Let’s look at this as our liberation. Our Independence Day. “Yes, it’s going to be rough. I won’t lie to you. We’re definitely going to war, people. But we know the terrain. We know our way around Japan now. And that’s one reason I feel in my heart this is a war we can win. And if we win it, when we win it, I see great things for us on the other side of victory. We are still alive, people. We are still. Alive.” As I stopped speaking I could see a wave of relief swirl around the table like a cool breeze. Everyone felt it. It was as real as the wind that used to swirl around the office next to the Pink Bucket. There were nods, murmurs, nervous chuckles. We spent the next hour brainstorming about how to proceed, how to hire contract factories, how to play them against one another for the best quality and price. And how were we going to fix these new Nikes? Anyone? We adjourned with a jovial, jittery, elated feeling. Johnson said he wanted to buy me a cup of coffee. “Your finest hour,” he said. “Ach,” I said. “Thanks.” But I reminded him: I just told the truth. As he had in Chicago. Telling the truth, I said. Who knew? JOHNSON WENT BACK to Wellesley for the time being, and we turned our attention to the Olympic track-and-field trials, which in 1972 were being held, for the first time ever, in our backyard: Eugene. We needed to own those trials, so we sent an advance team down to give shoes to any competitor willing to take them, and we set up a staging area in our store, which was now being ably run by Hollister. As the trials opened we descended on Eugene and set up a silk-screen machine in the back of the store. We cranked out scores of Nike T-shirts, which Penny handed out like Halloween candy. With all that work, how could we not break through? And, indeed, Dave Davis, a shot-putter from USC, dropped by the store the first day to complain that he wasn’t getting free stuff from either Adidas or Puma, so he’d gladly take our shoes and wear them. And then he finished fourth. Hooray! Better yet, he didn’t just wear our shoes, he waltzed around in one of Penny’s T-shirts, his name stenciled on the back. (The trouble was, Dave wasn’t the ideal model. He had a bit of a gut. And our T-shirts weren’t big enough. Which accentuated his gut. We made a note.

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

  It would be nice to help them avoid the typical discouragements. I’d tell them to hit pause, think long and hard about how they want to spend their time, and with whom they want to spend it for the next forty years. I’d tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt. I’d like to warn the best of them, the iconoclasts, the innovators, the rebels, that they will always have a bull’s-eye on their backs. The better they get, the bigger the bull’s-eye. It’s not one man’s opinion; it’s a law of nature. I’d like to remind them that America isn’t the entrepreneurial Shangri-La people think. Free enterprise always irritates the kinds of trolls who live to block, to thwart, to say no, sorry, no. And it’s always been this way. Entrepreneurs have always been outgunned, outnumbered. They’ve always fought uphill, and the hill has never been steeper. America is becoming less entrepreneurial, not more. A Harvard Business School study recently ranked all the countries of the world in terms of their entrepreneurial spirit. America ranked behind Peru. And those who urge entrepreneurs to never give up? Charlatans. Sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius. Giving up doesn’t mean stopping. Don’t ever stop. Luck plays a big role. Yes, I’d like to publicly acknowledge the power of luck. Athletes get lucky, poets get lucky, businesses get lucky. Hard work is critical, a good team is essential, brains and determination are invaluable, but luck may decide the outcome. Some people might not call it luck. They might call it Tao, or Logos, or Jñāna, or Dharma. Or Spirit. Or God. Put it this way. The harder you work, the better your Tao. And since no one has ever adequately defined Tao, I now try to go regularly to mass. I would tell them: Have faith in yourself, but also have faith in faith. Not faith as others define it. Faith as you define it. Faith as faith defines itself in your heart. In what format do I want to say all this? A memoir? No, not a memoir. I can’t imagine how it could all fit into one unified narrative. Maybe a novel. Or a speech. Or a series of speeches. Maybe just a letter to my grandkids. I peer into the dark. So maybe there is something on my bucket list after all? Another Crazy Idea.

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

  how I distracted myself, soothed myself, in times of stress. My father liked sports, too. Sports were always respectable. For these and a dozen other reasons I expected my father to greet my pitch in the TV nook with a furrowed brow and a quick put-down. “Haha, Crazy Idea. Fat chance, Buck.” (My given name was Philip, but my father always called me Buck. In fact he’d been calling me Buck since before I was born. My mother told me he’d been in the habit of patting her stomach and asking, “How’s little Buck today?”) As I stopped talking, however, as I stopped pitching, my father rocked forward in his vinyl recliner and shot me a funny look. He said that he always regretted not traveling more when he was young. He said a trip might be just the finishing touch to my education. He said a lot of things, all of them focused more on the trip than the Crazy Idea, but I wasn’t about to correct him. I wasn’t about to complain, because in sum he was giving his blessing. And his cash. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, Buck. Okay.” I thanked my father and fled the nook before he had a chance to change his mind. Only later did I realize with a spasm of guilt that my father’s lack of travel was an ulterior reason, perhaps the main reason, that I wanted to go. This trip, this Crazy Idea, would be one sure way of becoming someone other than him. Someone less respectable. Or maybe not less respectable. Maybe just less obsessed with respectability. The rest of the family wasn’t quite so supportive. When my grandmother got wind of my itinerary, one item in particular appalled her. “Japan!” she cried. “Why, Buck, it was only a few years ago the Japs were out to kill us! Don’t you remember? Pearl Harbor! The Japs tried to conquer the world! Some of them still don’t know they lost! They’re in hiding! They might take you prisoner, Buck. Gouge out your eyeballs. They’re known for that—your eyeballs.” I loved my mother’s mother, whom we all called Mom Hatfield. And I understood her fear. Japan was about as far as you could get from Roseburg, Oregon, the farm town where she was born and where she’d lived all her life. I’d spent many summers down there with her and Pop Hatfield. Almost every night we’d sat out on the porch, listening to the croaking bullfrogs compete with the console radio, which in the early 1940s was always tuned to news of the war. Which was always bad. The Japanese, we were told repeatedly, hadn’t lost a war in twenty-six hundred years, and it sure didn’t seem they were going to lose this one, either. In battle after battle, we suffered defeat after defeat. Finally, in 1942, Mutual Broadcasting’s Gabriel Heatter opened his nightly radio report with a shrill cry.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  But his ideas were extremely evocative and influenced a generation of Christian theologians. Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) insisted that God must be de-objectified and that the scriptures did not convey factual information but could be understood only if Christians involved themselves existentially with their faith. “To believe in the cross of Christ does not mean to concern ourselves … with an objective event,” he explained, “but rather to make the cross our own.” 55 Europeans had lost the sense that their doctrines were mere gestures toward transcendence. Their literalist approach showed a complete misunderstanding of the purpose of myth, which is “not to present an objective picture of the world as it is. … Myth should be interpreted not cosmologically but … existentially.” 56 Biblical interpretation could not even begin without personal engagement, so scientific objectivity was as alien to religion as to art. Religion was possible only when people were “stirred by the question of their own existence and can hear the claim that the text makes.” 57 A careful examination of the Gospels showed that Jesus did not see God as “an object of thought or speculation” but as an existential demand, a “power that constrains man to decision, who confronts him in the demand for good.” 58 Like Heidegger, Bultmann understood that the sense of the divine was not something to be comprehended once and for all; it came to us repetitively, by constant attention to the demands of the moment. He was not speaking of an exotic mystical experience. Having lived through the Nazi years, Bultmann knew how frequently, in such circumstances, men and women are confronted by an internal requirement that seems to come from outside themselves and which they cannot reject without denying what is most authentic to them. God was, therefore, an absolute claim that drew people beyond self-interest and egotism into transcendence. Paul Tillich (1886–1965) was born in Prussia and served as an army chaplain in the trenches during the First World War, after which he suffered two major breakdowns. Later he became a professor of theology at the University of Frankfurt but was expelled by the Nazis in 1933 and emigrated to the United States. He saw the modern God as an idolatry that human beings must leave behind. The concept of a “Personal God,” interfering with natural events, or being “an independent cause of natural events” makes God a natural object beside others, an object among others, a being among beings, maybe the highest, but nevertheless, a being. This indeed is not only the destruction of the physical system but even more the destruction of any meaningful idea of God.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  It was going to be gladiatorial combat. She, this 22-year-old woman, was going to fight this very vicious Egyptian. “My clothes were stripped off, and suddenly, I was a man.” She had become a man in this vision. “My seconds began to rub me down with oil, as they are wont to do before a contest, and I saw the Egyptian, on the other side, rolling in the dust.” I guess those were two different ways to make your body slippery for your opponent. “Next, there came forth a man of marvelous stature.” There was a huge giant who came into the arena with a wand, and a green branch, and this apparently was a vision of Christ coming to the arena, and he said that if the Egyptian defeated her, he would slay her with the sword, but she defeated him, she would receive the branch. Then, he withdrew. “We drew close to one another, and began to let our fists fly,” so that she was fighting this Egyptian. “My opponent tried to get hold of my feet, but I kept striking him in the face with the heels of my feet. Then, I was raised up into the air, and I began to pummel him without, as it were, touching the ground.” I can’t read this anymore without thinking of The Matrix. This is exactly like those scenes in The Matrix, exactly what was going on here in this dream. “Then when I noticed there was a lull, I put my two hands together, linking the fingers of one hand those of the other, and I got hold of his head. He fell flat on his face, and I stepped on his head.” She ended up defeating him. 203 Then, Christ came back, and gave her the branch of peace. “Then, I awoke. I realized that it was not with wild animals that would fight, with the devil, and I knew that I would win the victory.” Egyptians are always portrayed in biblical narratives as, of course, the enemy of the people of God, and so, this was an Egyptian, the enemy, who, in fact, was the devil, and she saw that she was going to overcome this Egyptian. She became a man. That was a theme in many these of these early martyrdoms, that to be a real man meant to be courageous. The word in Greek for “courageous,” in fact, is the translation for “being a man,” and so, she took on male characteristics, so that she could fight this Egyptian, progress to victory, and then onto God. The account of Perpetua’s death in the arena was then narrated by the editor, who took her diary and incorporated the diary into the longer martyrology. It has been popular through the ages down until today. You can obviously still buy this and read it. It is quite interesting.

• 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)

  THE SPRING FLOWERS were up by the time our lawyers and government officials had settled on a number: $9 million. It still sounded way too high, but everyone told me to pay it. Take the deal, they kept saying. I spent an hour staring out my window, mulling. The flowers and the calendar said it was spring, but that day the clouds were eye-level, dishwater gray, and the wind was cold. I groaned. I grabbed the phone and dialed Werschkul, who had taken the role of lead negotiator. “Let’s do it.” I told Carole Fields to cut the check. She brought it to me for my signature. We looked at each other and of course we were both thinking about the time I’d written that check for $1 million, which I couldn’t cover. Now I was writing a check for $9 million, and there was no way it was going to bounce. I looked at the signature line. “Nine million,” I whispered. I could still remember selling my 1960 MG with racing tires and a twin cam for eleven hundred dollars. Like yesterday. Lead me from the unreal to the real. THE LETTER ARRIVED at the start of summer. The Chinese government requests the pleasure of a visit… I spent a month deciding who would go. It has to be the A Team, I thought, so I sat with a yellow legal pad in my lap, making lists of names, scratching them out, making new lists. Chang, of course. Strasser, naturally. Hayes, surely. I notified everyone who was going on the trip to get their papers and passports and affairs in order. Then I spent the days leading up to our departure reading, cramming on Chinese history. The Boxer Rebellion. The Great Wall. Opium Wars. Ming dynasty. Confucius. Mao. And darned if I was going to be the only student. I made a syllabus for all members of our traveling party. In July 1980 we boarded a plane. Beijing, here we come. But first, Tokyo. I thought it would be a good idea to stop there along the way. Just to check in. Sales were starting to grow again in the Japanese market. Also, Japan would be a nice way to ease everyone into China, which was going to be a challenge for all of us. Baby steps. Penny and Gorman—I’d learned my lesson. Twelve hours later, walking the streets of Tokyo, alone, my mind kept spinning back to 1962. My Crazy Idea. Now I was back, on the verge of taking that idea into a mammoth new market. I thought of Marco Polo. I thought of Confucius. But I also thought of all the games I’d seen through the years—football, basketball, baseball—when one team had a big lead in the final seconds, or innings, and relaxed. Or tightened. And therefore lost. I told myself to stop looking back, keep my gaze forward.

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

  In the same period North America, English and Protestant in its prevailing character, but presenting an asylum for all the nations, churches, and sects of the old world, with a peaceful separation of the temporal and the spiritual power, comes upon the stage like a young giant full of vigor and promise. Thus we have, in all, nine periods of church history, as follows: First Period: The Life of Christ, and the Apostolic church. From the Incarnation to the death of St. John. A.D. 1–100. Second Period: Christianity under persecution in the Roman empire. From the death of St. John to Constantine, the first Christian emperor. A.D. 100–311. Third Period: Christianity in union with the Graeco-Roman empire, and amidst the storms of the great migration of nations. From Constantine the Great to Pope Gregory I. A.D. 311–590. Fourth Period: Christianity planted among the Teutonic, Celtic, and Slavonic nations. From Gregory I. to Hildebrand, or Gregory VII. A.D. 590–1049. Fifth Period: The Church under the papal hierarchy, and the scholastic theology. From Gregory VII. to Boniface VIII. A.D. 1049–1294. Sixth Period: The decay of mediaeval Catholicism, and the preparatory movements for the Reformation. From Boniface VIII. to Luther. A.D. 1294–1517. Seventh Period: The evangelical Reformation, and the Roman Catholic Reaction. From Luther to the Treaty of Westphalia. A.D. 1517–1648. Eighth Period: The age of polemic orthodoxy and exclusive confessionalism, with reactionary and progressive movements. From the Treaty of Westphalia to the French Revolution. A.D. 1648–1790. Ninth Period: The spread of infidelity, and the revival of Christianity in Europe and America, with missionary efforts encircling the globe. From the French Revolution to the present time. A.D. 1790–1880.

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

  The concept of sexual citizenship is one approach for framing a racial history of sexuality. Sexual citizenship means the adult right to organize one's sexual life and household as one desires, and to have one's privacy respected and recognized [...]. I [...] reassess the ways adult men and women organized their households and lives, employing the concept sexual citizenship to consider the ways they challenged the prescriptions for respectability.' Chateauvert's explication of citizenship from a sexual vantage point is revealing, as it calls attention to sexual subjectivity not contingent upon institutions, like marriage, or entities that would otherwise sanction sex; and it also delineates the nexus of race and sexual freedom, as it relates to efforts to exceed respectability, a historic and methodical practice confronting blacks and overshadowing their sexual politics. Whereas sexuality was sanctioned exclusively within the context of marriage-and individuals performing sex outside of those boundaries were penalized (as social policies and some laws indicate)-Chateauvert redefines the function of sexuality, as well as one's right to express it outside of narrow confines. What she postulates in terms of sexual citizenship, and the freedom to express one's sexual character as the inherent right of all citizens, is provocative; and these very notions of sexual agency and diversity within a black context are, in part, what Gloria Naylor foregrounds in The Women of Brewster Place, wherein she addresses black sexual behavior in the era of the sexual revolution, and how sexuality, race, and citizenship imbricate in the lives of black women. Through a literary context in which these dynamics are inscribed and enacted in each of the vignettes of her text, Naylor effectively illuminates the ways in which each of her characters negotiates her sexuality, whether in vexed or tenuous circumstances. Moreover, she demonstrates the degree to which the issue becomes not so much whether the sexual revolution has bypassed black people-to revert to my treatment in the introduction-but, rather, the notion that "the new black reality commands not only greater attention," but also a "new politics of sexuality," to evoke poet-scholar June Jordan, for liberation that is transformative. "No Young Woman Wants an Empty Bed": Transgressive Black Women and Sexuality in The Women of Brewster Place