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 Philosophy and Religion in the West (1999)

  3. The raising of Jesus from the dead, in this context, is God’s vindication of Jesus’ mission—confirmation that the man on the cross was not forsaken, but is well-pleasing to God. C. The Body of Christ as Holy Place 1. Far from being insignificant like Socrates’ body, the body of Christ becomes for Christians the site of God’s presence, the holy place where they meet God. 2. Eternal life, for Christianity, means sharing the life of this unique man who once was dead and now lives forever at God’s right hand. 3. The community which shares the life of the resurrected Jesus is called “the body of Christ.” 4. The community’s central ritual, the Eucharist, is an evocation of the body and blood of Christ designed to bring its members to participate in his life. 5. The invisibility of this holy place is the Christian version of Scriptural eschatology: the presence of God in a place where human beings may meet him face to face is a thing awaited and hoped for rather than seen. II. Life in Christ A. The Proclamation of Jesus’ Resurrection from the Dead 1. Some time in the decades after Jesus’ death, his followers (who were originally all Jews) started preaching to Gentiles (i.e., non-Jews) throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. 2. The central element in this preaching was the proclamation that God had raised Jesus from the dead. 3. Those who believed this proclamation were invited to join the church, a community consisting of both Jews and Gentiles. 4. The basic understanding of these congregations was that by believing in the resurrected Jesus they shared in his everlasting life. B. The Church,as the Body of Christ, Shares His Life 1. Unlike Israel (and most ancient religions) the church of Christ was a community whose membership was defined not by ethnicity or civic obligation, but by faith—i.e., the fact that its members believed the proclamation of Christ’s resurrection. 2. Initiation into this community was by the solemn ceremony of baptism, a form of ritual washing indicating a passage from ©1999 The Teaching Company. 38

• From My People (2022)

  On my PBS NewsHour Race Matters series, author Margaret Hagerman told me this: I think that the most important thing that white parents can do is embrace the idea that all children are worthy of their consideration and that we should care about our community. We should think about the collective good. We should focus on how we can help everyone, rather than just focusing on our own child. Even when our segregated schools had to depend on hand-me-down textbooks from the white schools, often with pages missing, when our people couldn’t give us first-class citizenship, they gave us a first-class sense of ourselves. So many of us today are trying to hold on to that important message. Now, in this current moment of twin pandemics—COVID-19 and injustice—I return to John Lewis and his now immortal words, most recently remembered by his civil rights colleague, Andrew Young: that we need to learn to “disagree without being disagreeable.” With my history and John’s in my head and heart, I agree. Mandela’s Birthday and Trayvon Martin’s LossThe New Yorker JULY 18, 2013 The convergence of outrage over the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case in Florida, where I live, and the celebrations of Nelson Mandela’s ninety-fifth birthday in South Africa, my home for many years, brought me back to a story from a time in Mandela’s life when he was on the run. It was 1961. Mandela and other members of the African National Congress had just declared war on the unjust system of apartheid. He had organized the ANC’s underground wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation)—resorting to violent force after, he insisted, all peaceful means of trying to achieve freedom and first-class citizenship for the black majority in South Africa had failed. He was being sought by the police, moving from place to place. On this occasion, he had taken refuge in the home of Wolfie Kodesh, a white supporter. One day, Kodesh got up at 5 a.m. to find that Mandela, a fitness buff from his early days, was dressed in a tracksuit and getting ready to go running. Mandela wrote about it later, simply saying that he “an noyed Wolfie every morning, for I would wake up at five, change into my running clothes, and run on the spot for more than an hour.” But there was more to it. When Kodesh got up for the first time and saw Mandela preparing to run, according to the South African journalist Max du Preez, “He told him that a black man running around a white suburb would look very suspicious and refused to give him the key to the door.” Mandela might give his great-grandchildren the same advice today—even fifty-two years later, and even under different political circumstances—in most of the country’s suburbs, which remain predominantly white.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  I find that with time, with talking about them, our fantasies and our love life get better and better. I wish we’d started talking earlier. [Taped interview] THE LESBIANSThere is nothing consistent about women and fantasy, the reasons and circumstances for it. It varies from woman to woman. And with each individual woman, from night to night and lover to lover. Even with the same lover within the same hour a woman may or may not fantasize, depending on so many things, all the uncharted tides and moons of a woman’s psyche. But lesbians are different. Their whole lives contain an element of fantasy—that they are both their own sex and another. It is my belief, therefore, that lesbians fantasize more often than other women. During sex a lesbian’s fantasies have to be especially active to help make rational to herself her often wildly veering changes of identification between one sex and the other, as she switches from the male to the female role and back again. In Marion’s fantasy, the first in the group that follows, she admits she has to fantasize when she’s actively exciting her girlfriend just so she can be excited too. And even though Marion is the butch lesbian, her favorite part of the fantasy is when Lilly grabs the Ronson dildo and becomes the man, and she, Marion, becomes “just a simple cunt, being fucked by some motorcycle guy.” Most women, I have found, have what they call their “lesbian fantasies” from time to time, that is, sexual fantasies that involve other women. They have these even though their real lives are totally or predominantly heterosexual. Some women accept these images as naturally as their own female anatomy—“of course women think about other women”; for others they raise a question, the possibility of their own latent bisexuality, while still others ponder guiltily over whether thinking about it means they really want it. Women’s secret thoughts of other women; it’s like a mystery within a mystery, and a topic I’d like to save till later. For now, these fantasies are from lesbians, women who accept and/or practice their preferred attraction to women. MarionMarion was born on a farm in North Dakota, and her first name is really Marianne; she changed it to the more sexually ambiguous Marion when she came to an understanding of herself later in life. She has never liked men.

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

  The infallible word of promise, confirmed by experience, assures us that all corruptions, heresies, and schisms must, under the guidance of divine wisdom and love, subserve the cause of truth, holiness, and peace; till, at the last judgment, Christ shall make his enemies his footstool, and rule undisputed with the sceptre of righteousness and peace, and his church shall realize her idea and destiny as "the fullness of him that filleth all in all." Then will history itself, in its present form, as a struggling and changeful development, give place to perfection, and the stream of time come to rest in the ocean of eternity, but this rest will be the highest form of life and activity in God and for God. § 2. Branches of Church History. The kingdom of Christ, in its principle and aim, is as comprehensive as humanity. It is truly catholic or universal, designed and adapted for all nations and ages, for all the powers of the soul, and all classes of society. It breathes into the mind, the heart, and the will a higher, supernatural life, and consecrates the family, the state, science, literature, art, and commerce to holy ends, till finally God becomes all in all. Even the body, and the whole visible creation, which groans for redemption from its bondage to vanity and for the glorious liberty of the children of God, shall share in this universal transformation; for we look for the resurrection of the body, and for the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness. But we must not identify the kingdom of God with the visible church or churches, which are only its temporary organs and agencies, more or less inadequate, while the kingdom itself is more comprehensive, and will last for ever. Accordingly, church history has various departments, corresponding to the different branches of secular history and of natural life. The principal divisions are: I. The history of missions, or of the spread of Christianity among unconverted nations, whether barbarous or civilized. This work must continue, till "the fullness of the Gentiles shall come in," and "Israel shall be saved." The law of the missionary progress is expressed in the two parables of the grain of mustard-seed which grows into a tree, and of the leaven which gradually pervades the whole lump. The first parable illustrates the outward expansion, the second the all-penetrating and transforming power of Christianity. It is difficult to convert a nation; it is more difficult to train it to the high standard of the gospel; it is most difficult to revive and reform a dead or apostate church.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  But Dobson had on good authority that Trump had recently come “to accept a relationship with Christ.” He was, in Dobson’s words, “a baby Christian.” When it came to Trump’s obvious shortcomings, Dobson urged evangelicals to “cut him some slack.”23 Wayne Grudem, author of the primer on “biblical politics,” had spoken out against Trump in the winter of 2016, but by July he’d penned an essay arguing that voting for Trump was not the lesser of two evils, but rather “a morally good choice.” True, he was egotistical, vindictive, and bombastic. And yes, he was married three times and unfaithful. But none of these things should disqualify him; Trump was “a good candidate with flaws.” He wasn’t racist or misogynistic or anti-Semitic or “anti-(legal) immigrant.” He was “deeply patriotic,” a successful businessman, and he’d “raised remarkable children.” Grudem then went on to list over a dozen policy reasons to support Trump.24 By this point, Trump had announced the selection of Indiana governor Mike Pence as his running mate. Pence, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative evangelical, explained why he’d agreed, “in a heartbeat,” to join the ticket: Trump embodied “American strength,” and he would “provide that kind of broad-shouldered American strength on the global stage as well.” Pence himself might have lacked a certain ruggedness, but he was ready to ride Trump’s broad coattails into the White House. “Broad-shouldered” became Pence’s favorite go-to phrase on the campaign trail, and he would also point to similarities between Trump and Teddy Roosevelt—two men who “dared . . . to make America great.” Other evangelicals voiced the same admiration Pence did.25 Eric Metaxas’s change of heart is a case in point. Early on, when Trump’s candidacy still seemed like a joke, Metaxas had issued a number of satirical tweets mocking Trump’s deficient faith formation. Only after Trump secured the nomination did Metaxas publicly express his support: “With all his foibles, peccadilloes, and metaphorical warts, he is nonetheless the last best hope of keeping America from sliding into oblivion, the tank, the abyss, the dustbin of history, if you will.” Metaxas never looked back. If Hillary Clinton were to be elected, he wagered the country had less than two years before it would cease to exist. “Not only can we vote for Trump, we must vote for Trump.” Metaxas’s endorsement shocked many conservatives who knew him. How could Bonhoeffer’s biographer support a man like Trump? In his own book, after all, he had described Hitler’s rise to power in words that rang eerily familiar: “The German people clamored for order and leadership. But it was as though in the babble of their clamoring, they had summoned the devil himself, for there now rose up from the deep wound in the national psyche something strange and terrible and compelling.” Metaxas agreed that his Bonhoeffer biography invited “some unpleasant parallels w/ the current election,” but not those one might expect.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Some might be tempted to suggest that the risks involved are so great that the best strategy is to avoid any such commitment. Yet other options are available. The writer E. M. Forster, best known for A Room with a View (1908), was also alarmed by the rise of ideologies such as Nazism during the 1930s. What could be done to challenge them? His response was this: ‘There are so many militant creeds that, in self-defence, one has to formulate a creed of one’s own.’ 6 Forster’s argument is that the best way of dealing with a bad creed is not to have no creed, but to develop a better creed – in Forster’s case, ‘belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.’ Our search for truth may begin by identifying what is wrong – but that does not in itself help us determine what is right . We all believe something and need to be clear on what this is, why we believe it is right, and the difference that it makes to the quality and character of our lives. Believing nothing is not a serious option. Meaning and Big Pictures Psychologists have highlighted the importance of human intellectual and emotional wellbeing. We seem to cope better with our complex and messy world if we feel that we can create a sense of order. 7 It’s as if we have some inbuilt desire to find a big picture which helps us feel that we are part of something greater than ourselves, enabling us to position ourselves within this larger map of reality and live accordingly. 8 As the American philosopher Michael Sandel points out, while ‘we may resist such ultimate questions as the meaning of justice and the nature of the good life, what we cannot escape is that we live some answer to these questions – we live some theory – all the time.’ 9 This theory may be implicitly assumed rather than explicitly articulated – but it is there , informing and determining our attitudes and outlook. Human beings have an extraordinary instinct and ability to join up the dots, to weave threads together to construct a pattern, going beyond what can be seen to what we believe lies behind it. This process can – and often does – go wrong: we connect the dots improperly, or fail to realise how much our reasoning is subservient to our desires. We want to trust our closest friends and so deny their failures that others see all too clearly. We want humanity to be good and so blind ourselves to its many defects and wilfully ignore our darker side.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  128 Lecture 23: The Book of Revelation By way of a quick conclusion and summary, I can reaf¿ rm that the Book of Revelation was not written as a blueprint for our own future. It was written in the context of 1 st -century Rome. In that context, the enemy of God was Rome and its emperor was the anti-Christ; they were responsible for the intense suffering that Christians were experiencing. In that context, an author named John wrote an apocalypse. His work was similar to other apocalypses written before him and others written since, ¿ lled with bizarre dreams and strange symbolism, to assure his readers of the ¿ nal sovereignty of God and of his Christ, who would soon bring their suffering to an end. Christians living in a context of intense suffering need to realize that God is ultimately in control and he, rather than the forces of evil aligned against him, will have the last word. Ŷ The Book of Revelation. Brown, Introduction to the New Testament, chap. 37. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction, chap. 27. Collins, Crisis and Catharsis. Pilch, What Are They Saying about the Book of Revelation? 1. In what ways is the apocalyptic worldview found in the Book of Revelation similar to and different from the apocalyptic views of Jesus? Of Paul? How does it compare with the emphases of the Fourth Gospel (which later Christians actually attributed to the same author, John)? Essential Reading Questions to Consider Supplemental Reading 129 2. Many Christians over the centuries have read the Book of Revelation as a blueprint for events that were soon to come and have thus seen it as a source of hope. Is it possible to read the book more historically, as addressed to Christians suffering in the days of Rome and not as a descriptive account of things yet to take place, and still ¿ nd its message inspired by hope? Note: For information about another Teaching Company course on apocalyptic writing, please refer to the end of the Bibliography.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  117 First Peter and the Persecution of the Early Christians Lecture 22 This was the message of hope that many Christians continued to cling on to in the face of sporadic persecution. T hroughout the books of the New Testament, one ¿ nds numerous references to Christians’ suffering. In the last lecture, we saw that the Epistle to the Hebrews was a sermon written to a group of Christians who were experiencing some form of persecution; the author was striving to convince his hearers not to succumb to pressure and leave the church for Judaism In the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus tells his followers that they must take up their crosses if they want to follow him. In the Book of Acts, the early Christian communities are persecuted by the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem. The apostle Paul himself is eventually arrested and put up on charges of disturbing the peace. Nowhere is the theme of Christian suffering more pronounced, though, than in the book of 1 Peter. This book is addressed to Christians living in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey); the word for suffering occurs more often in this short letter than in any other book of the New Testament—even more than Luke and Acts combined. These people were probably former pagans, who have removed themselves from the daily life of the larger community and adopted a stricter set of moral standards for themselves. There has been some kind of public outcry, apparently by those who feel abandoned by their former friends and companions (4:4). The turmoil may have reached the point of mob violence or governmental intervention. The author speaks of the “ ¿ ery ordeal that is taking place among you” (4:12). The author writes his letter both to console those in the community who are suffering and to urge them to maintain their solidarity with one another. On the one hand, he explains that their suffering is natural and to be expected— they are, after all, followers of Christ, who was himself cruci ¿ ed (4:12–13). He urges them, though, to make sure they suffer for doing what is right,

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

  95 They spoke of the revolution as a transforming and purifying experience, as if they were purging themselves of a debilitating poison and regaining authenticity. 96 Many felt as though Husain himself were leading them and that Khomeini, like the Hidden Imam, was directing them from afar. 97 On the last night of Ramadan, September 4, vast crowds prostrated themselves in prayer in the streets, but—an important turning point—this time the army did not open fire. Even more significant, the middle classes began to join in the protests, marching with placards reading: “Independence, Freedom and Islamic Government!” 98 At six a.m. on September 8, martial law was declared, but the twenty thousand demonstrators who were already gathering in Jaleh Square did not know it; when they refused to disperse, the soldiers opened fire. As many as nine hundred people may have died that day. 99 That evening Carter called the shah from Camp David to assure him of his support, and the White House, while regretting the loss of life, reaffirmed its special relationship with Iran. The liberty and independence for which the American revolutionaries had fought were clearly not for everybody. On the first three nights of Muharram, men donned the white shroud of the martyr and ran through the streets defying the curfew, while others shouted anti-shah slogans from the rooftops. The BBC estimated that seven hundred people had been killed by the Iranian army and police in these few days alone. 100 Yet still there was no mob violence. On December 9, for six hours a vast procession—at different times numbering between 300,000 and 1.5 million people—wound through the streets of Tehran, walking quietly four abreast. Two million more marched on the day of Ashura itself, carrying green, red, and black flags, representing Islam, martyrdom, and the Shiah. 101 A month later it was all over. The shah and the royal family flew to Egypt, and on February 1, 1979, Khomeini returned to Tehran. His arrival was one of those events, like the storming of the Bastille, that seemed to change the world forever. For committed liberal secularists, it was a dark moment, the triumph of the forces of unreason over rationality. But for many Muslims, Sunni as well as Shii, it seemed a luminous reversal. As he drove through the streets of Tehran, the crowds greeted him as if he were the returned Hidden Imam, confident that a new age had dawned. Taha Hejazi published a poem of celebration, a tremulous hope for the justice that the shah and the international community had denied them: When the Imam returns, Iran—this broken, wounded mother— Will be forever liberated From the shackles of tyranny and ignorance And the chains of plunder, torture and prison.

• From My People (2022)

  Charlayne Hunter-Gault: Black-ish is a comedy, to be sure, but it doesn’t shy away from controversial issues, especially racism, taking on the N-word, biracial Bow, confused about her identity, and going to extremes to fit in with both black and white friends. I want to take you way back to when Black-ish first started. It’s now going into its fourth season. Was there a conscious decision to take on controversial issues, especially like race and racism? Tracee Ellis Ross: Our show is consciously authentic and consciously honest. And a lot of the subject matter that we courageously dive into does end up coming across that way. I think that they are topics that are uncomfortable for people. They are topics that are—need to be unpacked and discussed, and I think that’s why they’re uncomfortable for people. Charlayne Hunter-Gault: I just wonder why they think that these heady issues can be addressed through comedy. Tracee Ellis Ross: When one’s heart is open through laughter, so much more information can be received. I think it’s like giving people their medicine with a spoonful of sugar, you know, or giving your dog its antibiotics in peanut butter, you know? Charlayne Hunter-Gault: Right. Tracee Ellis Ross: So, you can think of our show as peanut butter. It makes things more receivable. There is an ability to have an open heart while receiv ing things. And it makes them digestible in a way that, when you’re getting punched in the face, sometimes, it’s not as easy, because you’re busy defending yourself and protecting yourself. Charlayne Hunter-Gault: I read somewhere—I think it was an interview with Kenya Barris—he said, “Even when digging deeper means arguing among ourselves, this—especially after the 2016 election.” Tracee Ellis Ross: Yes. Charlayne Hunter-Gault: And that was one of the episodes that I thought was so powerful. Tracee Ellis Ross: “Lemons,” yes. I thought it was a really powerful episode. And it did what we often do on our show, which I think is a part of the DNA of our show, in that we don’t answer a question. Charlayne Hunter-Gault: Exactly. Tracee Ellis Ross: One of the ways I like to look at it is, I feel like there’s a lot of things that are on the wallpaper of our lives in this country that we don’t really notice anymore, or we are not forced to think about. And then there’s some of those things that we are forced to think about, but they’re on the wallpaper of our lives, to the point that we don’t always unpack them. We just keep it moving. Charlayne Hunter-Gault: It’s comedy, and yet it’s not always funny, but is that helping an audience to decide some of these complicated issues, you think? Tracee Ellis Ross: We all look at these things from very different points of view, but what we end up with is not division, but connection.

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

  A false rumor was spread that before his journey to Poland he met at Schaffhausen the cardinal of Lorraine on his return from the Council of Trent, and offered to prove twenty-four errors against the Reformed Church. The offer was declined with the remark: "Four errors are enough." The rumor was investigated, but could not be verified. He himself denied it, and one of his last known utterances was: "I wish to be neither a Bullingerite, nor a Calvinist, nor a Papist, but simply a Christian."950 His sceptical views on the person of Christ and the atonement disturbed and nearly broke up the Italian congregation in Zürich. No new pastor was elected; the members coalesced with the German population, and the antitrinitarian influences disappeared. § 130. Caelius Secundus Curio. 1503–1569. Curio’s works and correspondence.—Trechsel, I. 215 sqq., and Wagemann in Herzog,2 III. 396–400 (where the literature is given). Celio Secundo Curione or Curio was the youngest of twenty-three children of a Piedmontese nobleman, studied history and law at Turin, became acquainted with the writings of Luther, Zwingli, and Melanchthon through an Augustinian monk, and labored zealously for the spread of Protestant doctrines in Pavia, Padua, Venice, Ferrara, and Lucca. He barely escaped death at the stake, and fled to Switzerland with letters of recommendation by the Duchess Renata, the friend of Calvin. He received an appointment as professor of eloquence in Lausanne (1543–1547) and afterwards in Basel. He was the father-in-law of Zanchius. He attracted students from abroad, declined several calls, kept up a lively correspondence with his countrymen and with the Reformers, and wrote a number of theological and literary works. He sided with the latitudinarians, and thereby lost the confidence of Calvin and Bullinger; but he maintained his ground in Basel, and became the ancestor of several famous theological families of that city (Buxtorf, Zwinger, Werenfels, Frey). Curio sympathized with Zwingli’s favorable judgment of the noble heathen, and thought that they were as acceptable to God as the pious Israelites. Vergerio, formerly a friend of Curio, charged him with the Pelagian heresy and with teaching that men may be saved without the knowledge of Christ, though not without Christ.951 Curio advanced also the hopeful view that the kingdom of heaven is much larger than the kingdom of Satan, and that the saved will far outnumber the lost.952 Such opinions were disapproved by Peter Martyr, Zanchi, Bullinger, Brenz, John a Lasco, and all orthodox Protestants of that age, as paradoxical and tending to Universalism. But modern Calvinists go further than Curio, at least in regard to the large majority of the saved.953 § 131. The Italian Antitrinitarians in Geneva. Gribaldo, Biandrata, Alciati, Gentile.

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

  The great migration of nations marks a turning point in the history of religion and civilization. It was destructive in its first effects, and appeared like the doom of the judgment-day; but it proved the harbinger of a new creation, the chaos preceding the cosmos. The change was brought about gradually. The forces of the old Greek and Roman world continued to work for centuries alongside of the new elements. The barbarian irruption came not like a single torrent which passes by, but as the tide which advances and retires, returns and at last becomes master of the flooded soil. The savages of the north swept down the valley of the Danube to the borders of the Greek Empire, and southward over the Rhine and the Vosges into Gaul, across the Alps into Italy, and across the Pyrenees into Spain. They were not a single people, but many independent tribes; not an organized army of a conqueror, but irregular hordes of wild warriors ruled by intrepid kings; not directed by the ambition of one controlling genius, like Alexander or Caesar, but prompted by the irresistible impulse of an historical instinct, and unconsciously bearing in their rear the future destinies of Europe and America. They brought with them fire and sword, destruction and desolation, but also life and vigor, respect for woman, sense of honor, love of liberty—noble instincts, which, being purified and developed by Christianity, became the governing principles of a higher civilization than that of Greece and Rome. The Christian monk Salvian, who lived in the midst of the barbarian flood, in the middle of the fifth century, draws a most gloomy and appalling picture of the vices of the orthodox Romans of his time, and does not hesitate to give preference to the heretical (Arian) and heathen barbarians, "whose chastity purifies the deep stained with the Roman debauches." St. Augustin (d. 430), who took a more sober and comprehensive view, intimates, in his great work on the City of God, the possibility of the rise of a new and better civilization from the ruins of the old Roman empire; and his pupil, Orosius, clearly expresses this hopeful view. "Men assert," he says, "that the barbarians are enemies of the State. I reply that all the East thought the same of the great Alexander; the Romans also seemed no better than the enemies of all society to the nations afar off, whose repose they troubled. But the Greeks, you say, established empires; the Germans overthrow them. Well, the Macedonians began by subduing the nations which afterwards they civilized. The Germans are now upsetting all this world; but if, which Heaven avert, they, finish by continuing to be its masters, peradventure some day posterity will salute with the title of great princes those in whom we at this day can see nothing but enemies." § 3. The Nations of Mediaeval Christianity. The Kelt, the Teuton, and the Slav.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Oh you queens, you queens! among the hills and happy greenwood of this land of yours, shall the foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; and in your cities shall the stones cry out against you, that they are the only pillows where the Son of Man can lay his head?108 It would almost seem that Ruskin’s mind has grown confused and that he is addressing his cold and obdurate child mistress in the language of Bethel chapel. That salvation of the world he is assured should come from its subject women is a concoction of nostalgic mirage, regressive, infantile, or narcissistic sexuality, religious ambition, and simplistic social panacea. It is the very stuff of the age’s pet sentimental vapors, enshrined in notions such as “the angel in the house,” “the good woman who rescues the fallen,” etc. It is the fabric of dreams. But the dreams of an age are part of its life, although perhaps as often a foretaste of its death. By comparison, Mill’s conclusion seems not only more rational but full of a new and promising vigor. He urges the complete emancipation of women not only for the sake of the “unspeakable gain in happiness to the liberated half of the species, the difference to them between a life of subjection to the will of others and a life of rational freedom,”109 but also for the enormous benefit this would confer on both sexes, on humanity: “We have had the morality of submission and the morality of chivalry and generosity; the time is now come”110 for “the most fundamental of the social relations” to be “placed under the rule of equal justice.”111 In Mill’s tones one hears the precursor of revolution; in Ruskin’s only reaction tactfully phrased. In the 1860s Ruskin’s muddled gallantry was in every mouth, but by 1920 Mill’s clear voice had prevailed. Engels and Revolutionary Theory I THE HISTORICAL PARADIGM Nearly as important as the political breakthrough, that actual change in the quality of their lives which a gradual, painful, and finally partial or conditional emancipation realized for women in the sexual revolution, was the work of the revolutionary theorists who passed beyond agitation to provide an analysis of the past and a new model for the future. Such theorists could give coherence and ideological support to the disputes of the day, otherwise the product of resentment or prejudice. Capable of seeing the events of the present in a historical perspective, they could provide direction for change otherwise the product of unconscious forces. The major theorists were Chernyshevsky, Mill, Engels, Bebel, and Veblen. Much of what they said is still relevant to a sexual revolution and therefore still speaks to us today.112

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  It may be that a second wave of the sexual revolution might at last accomplish its aim of freeing half the race from its immemorial subordination—and in the process bring us all a great deal closer to humanity. It may be that we shall even be able to retire sex from the harsh realities of politics, but not until we have created a world we can bear out of the desert we inhabit. 107 Civil Rights was undoubtedly a force, for second-generation feminists were, like their predecessors, inspired by the example of black protest. The disenchantment of women in the New Left with the sexist character of that movement provided considerable impetus as well.Afterword REBECCA MEAD In the fall of 2014 Time magazine published a list of words that, it proposed, should be banned—a click-bait compilation of terms and phrases that had become so buzzy and catchy that they had proliferated into cringe-inducing overuse. Among them were: “bae,” a term of endearment; “disrupt,” a Silicon Valley cliché; “literally,” when used to mean “figuratively”; and “feminist.” About this last selection, the magazine asked, “When did it become a thing that every celebrity had to state their position on whether this word applies to them, like a politician declaring a party? Let’s stick to the issues and quit throwing this label around like ticker tape at a Susan B. Anthony parade.”1 The magazine assumed a familiarity with a pop-cultural context in which the label of feminist had recently become a singular badge of honor. Taylor Swift, the best-selling country/pop singer, had announced her realization that she had been “taking a feminist stance” without being aware that she was doing so, while Lena Dunham, the creator of the innovative television show Girls, had increasingly used her public platform not to make self-deprecating comments about herself but to advocate for Planned Parenthood. The apogee of pop-cultural incorporation of the term was surely the moment when the singer Beyoncé, in a performance at the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards, appeared framed before a massive screen emblazoned with the word “feminist.” The nadir, perhaps, was when fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld contrived a show in Paris in which models dressed in Chanel’s spring 2015 ready-to-wear collection paraded down a catwalk carrying protest signs bearing slogans such as “History Is Her Story” and “Women’s Rights Are More Than Alright!”

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  But how does this way of seeing the world come about? Hauerwas points to the need to be ‘trained to see’ the world in a Christian manner. ‘We do not come to see just by looking, but by disciplined skills developed through initiation into a narrative.’ 19 We see ourselves as part of this ongoing narrative. It is not just a narrative, but our story as a community – a narrative that we allow to enfold and inform our life story. For C. S. Lewis, the Christian narrative is primary; Christian creeds are secondary. The narrative invites participation; the creeds invite reflection. Creeds articulate the core themes of this narrative and describe the framework of beliefs that it conveys; yet they cannot convey either its imaginative appeal or its subjective impact. For Lewis, it is important to step inside this narrative and inhabit it. Both Judaism and Christianity (which, despite their significant divergences, share many important points of connection), see themselves as communities grounded in identity-giving stories, which are retold within the community to affirm their distinct identities, recall their histories, and to give them hope for the future. Take the story of the exodus of the people of Israel from Egypt, which plays a particularly important role in shaping the sense of distinctiveness and identity of Jewish communities. This narrative set out the origins of Israel as a people, explained their distinctiveness, and offered hope. While the historical details of the exodus remain unclear and are at points contested, its cultural memory and perceived significance for Judaism are affirmed and consolidated through the annual Passover Seder. Yet this foundational narrative is not simply something that is told again and again, as if it were merely a favourite family story. This story is expressed ritually in an annual meal, which adds depth, detail and imaginative engagement to a narrative performance. Human beings are not simply social creatures, nor are they simply story-telling creatures; they are also creatures who use rituals as ways of creating, expressing and internalising meaning. As the anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas points out, rituals are ‘seemingly senseless acts’ that end up making life worth living. 20 Outsiders may find the rituals of a community puzzling, even unintelligible. Yet the logic of a ritual is embedded within a community of belief, which can see and make the vital connections that an outsider would find puzzling, irrational, or alienating (think of E. M. Forster’s ‘othering’ of the ritual celebrating the birth of Krishna in the Hindu village of Mau in his novel A Passage to India ). The participants in the Friday evening ritual meal are encouraged to feel as if they are leaving the captivity of Egypt. A centrepiece of the meal is the following question, traditionally asked by a child: ‘Why is this night different from all other nights?’

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Because it’s normal. Because it’s realistic. Belief is as natural to human beings as it is necessary for their wellbeing. We have to deal with humanity as it is, as ‘moral believing animals’, 14 shaped in ways we do not fully understand by our evolutionary past and cultural present, rather than as the universalised logical or rational calculating machines envisaged by the Age of Reason, which held what turned out to be a forlorn hope of clear and certain answers to our deepest questions. This kind of algorithmic reasoning may work well in the domain of logic. Yet human existence demands engagement with aspects of life characterised by ambiguity, uncertainty and complexity – such as medical diagnosis and forensic examination. 15 Questions of meaning and moral value lie even further beyond the scope of mechanical reasoning, not least on account of their deeply subjective significance. Information, as Susan Sontag points out, is ‘always, by definition, partial, incomplete, fragmentary’. 16 In both clinics and courts of law, human judgement is of critical importance in creating trustworthy syntheses of the partial and fragmentary – a judgement that rests on wisdom, in the form of long experience and reflection in coping with such complex questions. The process of reflection is an art , and its outcomes are beliefs . In his Dark Materials trilogy, Philip Pullman develops one of the most creative – though oblique – critiques of mechanical models of human reasoning. Pullman introduces us to the ‘alethiometer,’ a complex rational calculating machine, ‘very like a clock, or a compass’, which delivers secure readings of reality once the symbols of its three wheels are correctly set to frame the question being asked. Yet the alethiometer can only be read correctly by a small group of people who have developed the art of doing so – including the central character of the trilogy, Lyra Silvertongue, who is initially able to use the device intuitively. Puzzled by the device’s behaviour, Lyra asks Farder Coram whether it is functioning properly. ‘It’s working all right, Lyra. What we don’t know is whether we’re reading it right. That’s a subtle art.’ 17 Answering life’s great questions is indeed an art, a skill that has to be acquired, transcending mechanistic and algorithmic ways of thinking or understandings of human rationality, and alert to the importance of interpretation and the inevitability of ambiguity. How might we find such habitable beliefs? Bernard Lonergan’s ‘dangerous voyage of exploration’ and Carlo Rovelli’s ‘vast intermediate space’ of ambiguity and uncertainty help us imagine a voyage of exploration for an existentially habitable island in a vast ocean of possibilities – a place of safety in which we can hope to flourish and become the people we are meant to be. Such islands already exist, and we do not need to invent them.

• From My People (2022)

  Now, seven years and more than a million registered black voters later, John Lewis is beginning to see a meshing of the two philosophies of black power and coalition politics. Blacks in the South are gaining political strength—there are now more than 1,000 black elected officials in the eleven states of the Old Confederacy—but they are doing it in conjunction with whites. Mr. Lewis, who now heads the nonprofit Voter Education Project in Atlanta, the major organization registering and educating black voters in the South, was interviewed here last week on his way to a conference of black mayors in Tuskegee, Alabama, this weekend. Explaining his rather circuitous route, Mr. Lewis said: “I’m here trying to convince the people with the financial resources that we need that what’s happening in the South is good for the rest of the country.” What is happening, he said, is “a revolution—not as dramatic as the sixties, but a registration of more than three and a half million black voters, larger numbers of black elected officials, and a new breed of white politician. “Within the next eight to ten years,” he continued, “blacks are going to be elected to some of the highest offices. Georgia, Mississippi, the Carolinas are going to be sending several blacks to Congress to join the few who are there now. “Now, many of those congressional committees are dominated by Southerners. As blacks continue to register, they’re going to have to go. And even if whites still head a few of those committees, they’ll be responding in a different way. And the politics of the South will change the politics of the country.” Mr. Lewis, who picked cotton as a boy in Alabama and was jailed and constantly harassed on freedom rides and sit-ins as a young man, believes that it was that era, those experiences that make him hopeful. Mr. Lewis said that in his travels for the Voter Education Project he was running into the people he knew as sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the early sixties. “These people are forty and fifty years old now, and they’re the ones who are getting ready to run for office. As they listen to the whites talk about the disgrace of national politics, these black people are saying they’re sick of it. And it’s almost like ‘I told you so.’ “And the whites are losing interest because they’ve lost faith in the national scene, and they’re turning to the blacks as a kind of last hope. They’re saying, ‘They’re the ones who’ve been excluded from this system; maybe if they get in they’ll be better.’” Mr. Lewis went on to say that they were right. Mr. Lewis also said that the South had “killed the politics of race.” Despite racial overtones in the Atlanta mayoral race, in which a black was elected, he said, blacks helped elect a white woman over a black man to the City Council.

• From The Art of Memoir

  However often fiction has served as a fig leaf for lived, remembered experience, the form doesn’t promise veracity of event. As I turn a novel’s pages, a first-person narrator may seduce me, but the fact that it’s all made up and not actually outlived oddly keeps me from drawing courage outside the book’s dream. The deep, mysterious sense of identification with a memoirist who’s confessed her past just doesn’t translate to a novelist I love, however deliciously written the work. I’m embarrassed to confess this, because it sounds so naive —“identifying” with someone I’ve never met, a peddler of pages who profits from my buying her act. I sound like the guy at a strip club who thinks the dancers really fancy him. I once heard Don DeLillo quip that a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them. In this, memoir purports to grow more organically from lived experience. When I asked a class of undergrads what they liked about memoir, I heard them echo the no-doubt-naive sentiment that they drew hope from the mere fact of a writer living past a bad juncture to report on it. “It’s a miracle he even survived!” was written on many papers. The telling has some magic power for them, as it does for me. “Tell it,” the soldiers in Vietnam begged Michael Herr, and in Dispatches, he told it. This confidence of mine in most memoirs’ veracity is viewed as gullible, I know. Of course, there’s artifice to the relationship between any writer and her reader. Memoir done right is an art, a made thing. It’s not just raw reportage flung splat on the page. Most morally ominous: from the second you choose one event over another, you’re shaping the past’s meaning. Plus, memoir uses novelistic devices like cobbling together dialogue you failed to record at the time. To concoct a distinctive voice, you often have to do a poet’s lapidary work. And the good ones reward study. You’re making an experience for a reader, a show that conjures your past— inside and out—with enough lucidity that a reader gets way more than just the brief flash of titillation. You owe a long journey, and

• From My People (2022)

  Led by Hosea, the demonstrators began to chant, “We want Cohen,” and Hosea turned from the second-string officials and told the crowd: “You might as well get comfortable,” and before he had finished a young boy in gray trousers and a green shirt had taken off his tennis shoes, rolled up his soiled brown jacket into a headrest, and stretched out on the floor. As he closed his eyes, the crowd, led by Hosea, began singing “Woke Up This Morning with My Mind Set on Freedom.” In between songs the crowd would chant “We want Cohen.” An elderly lady from New Orleans, who after the march obviously had little strength left to stand and yell and chant, simply shook her head in time with whatever she happened to be hearing at the moment. The more pressure the officials put upon Hosea to relent, the stronger the support from the crowd. Given the demonstrators’ vote of confidence, he began to rap. “I never lived in a democracy until I moved to Resurrection City. But it looks like the stuff is all right.” “Sock soul, brother!” the people yelled. “Out here,” he continued, “they got the gray matter to discover a cure for cancer, but can’t.” “Sock soul, brother!” Then, to the tune of the song “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round,” Hosea led the group in singing, “Ain’t Gonna Let the Lack of Health Facilities Turn Me ’Round.” And at the end of the song—something like three hours after the demonstrators had demanded to see Cohen—the word spread through the auditorium: “Cohen’s on the case.” Demonstrators who had spread throughout the building buttonholing anybody and everybody who looked important, demanding that they “go downstairs and get Cohen,” filed back into the auditorium. And as Cohen appeared, an exultant cheer rose from the demonstrators—not for Cohen but for the point that they had won. Before Cohen spoke, Huitt came to the microphone. He looked relieved. “I’d just like to say, before introducing the secretary, that I haven’t heard preaching and singing like that since I was a boy. Maybe that’s what wrong with me.” The crowd liked that and showed it. “Get on the case, brother,” someone called. And as clenched black fists went into the air—a gesture that had come to stand for “Silence!” and succeeded in getting it—Cohen spoke: “Welcome to your auditorium,” he said, managing a smile. He proceeded to outline his response to the demonstrators’ demands, which included changing the state-by-state system of welfare to a federally controlled one. When he had finished, he introduced a very polished, gray-haired, white matron sitting next to him as “our director of civil rights.” A voice of a Negro woman in rags called out to her: “Get to work, baby.” The second demonstration I attended was at the Justice Department.

• From My People (2022)

  That’s partly what made me what I am today.” In 1994, just as the country was preparing to become a nonracial democracy, serious violence broke out in Zuma’s home region, now called KwaZulu-Natal, where Zulus, the largest ethnic group in the country, make up most of the population. Hundreds of people were killed there in disputes between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party, which had taken up arms to demand a measure of self-rule for the region. Zuma went there to help defuse the conflict. Frank Mdlalose, who was the national chairman of the IFP, traveled throughout the region with him. “We spoke to our different groups and told them there is to be peace,” Mdlalose recalled. Zuma “was charming, clear, soft-spoken, and laughed quite easily.” By the end of the year, Zuma, who can get by in most of the country’s eleven official languages, had earned a reputation as a conciliator and was elected national chair of the ANC, replacing Mbeki, who had moved up to become deputy president under Mandela. That year, I asked the outgoing president, F. W. de Klerk, whether he was going to miss the supremacy of the National Party. He responded that it would not be out of office for long. He wasn’t the only one who believed that liberation movements often fail at governing. Mandela sought to heal the social wounds of apartheid. Mbeki sought to transform an economy that had stalled and that he believed was designed to perpetuate inequality. In 1996, as deputy president, Mbeki, with Trevor Manuel, the finance minister, introduced a program for financial liberalization. By the time Mbeki took over the presidency, in 1999—he appointed Zuma as his deputy—the economy had started to improve, aided by increased international investment and a boom in commodity prices. The government reduced the national deficit from 3.8 percent of GDP in 1997–98 to 1.5 percent in 2004–05, and ushered in the longest period of uninterrupted growth in the country’s history. A black middle and upper class soon appeared, with the more conspicuous consumers earning the nickname Black Diamonds. Only 8 percent of the seats on the Johannesburg stock exchange are owned by blacks, but the showrooms of Mercedes-Benz and BMW are fully integrated; so are the exclusive shops in the increasingly upscale malls, and so are the previously all-white neighborhoods, which are still gated, because criminals don’t discriminate. “Everybody was anticipating a racial war in 1994,” Adam Habib, a former activist who is now deputy vice chancellor of the University of Johannesburg, said. We were sitting on his back veranda in a prosperous, leafy neighborhood, overlooking a lovely swimming pool. “Sixteen years later, there’s been no killing. There is no racial war. There are racial tensions surfacing every now and then, in part because of the nature of economic inequality.” Habib then described his son’s fully integrated and racially mixed public school. “These kids are growing up in a new environment,” he said.