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 Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Dallas. Yes. But their role is to take that but then also using the art of MCing to make light and make it accessible. Every funeral has some of the funniest jokes and laughter. That’s the transformative nature of humor and comedy. I think it really heals us and helps us let go. Anger is extremely powerful. And it can transform amazing things. But it also has its obstacles. It sets up walls. The counterbalance to that is laugher. And we have to not be afraid to use that. amb. I study somatics and what happens in the body. It’s like trauma gets stuck in the body, and it just stays there waiting for you until you release it. And I think we always think, oh, that release has to be weeping for days or whatever. But I’ve experienced some of the biggest releases of my life actually in laughter. There’s a collective aspect. Where with crying it’s something you often go off and do alone, laughter you do with others too. In the conversations we’re in about decolonization and taking Indigenous leadership … we have been in this conversation forever, since first contact. At a certain point, if Indigenous people can’t laugh at white folks in their learning process … that seems like one of the ways that y’all are able to stay in relationship. Dallas. I mean, the colonial experience is nothing unique to us as Native people. It’s worldwide. So there’s that connective tissue between all of us. So using that experience, transforming it into something funny and really exposing it for how dysfunctionally funny it is, it helps. It breaks down those barriers between our communities and brings us together. I see something that’s so dysfunctional, I’m like, that shit’s hilarious in its own way. There’s the construct of what a Native man is. What we as Indian people, how we’ve constructed what an Indian man is … is hilarious. And the comedy that we do, that’s probably our biggest target, ourselves. Because we do such hilarious, stupid shit that … let’s call it that, show the absurdity of dysfunction. amb. Yes. And there’s some unlearning that can happen there, right? We don’t have to take ourselves so seriously because so much of this is a construction. And we can reconstruct it.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  It turns out, being present is the most important part of every single experience in my life. It turns out, every other human being is also wired in these ways, entire systems shaped by pain and pleasure. And I can grant others the same autonomy I am learning to wield on my own behalf—how I spend my life is my decision, based on all kinds of data coming from my body. And I can grant others the same level of complexity and contradiction as I am learning to embody—we are all multitudes in process. We get to have boundaries. We get to have longings and articulate them. We can begin to imagine a society coordinated around honest, clearly articulated longings. At the end of the Somatics and Trauma course, I was invited into teacher training, to become part of the community that brings embodiment to new students, new geographies, and social movements. I have been learning and teaching for eight years as of the writing of this book. Last year we brought the course to Detroit for the first time, and it was an incredible experience to share this liberation technology with a place that has given me so much, with people I love and am growing with. It was also thrilling to grow skills with Detroit and midwestern and southern organizers who often get overlooked by efforts based in New York City or the Bay. I can already feel the impact in the community of having more organizers who can feel themselves, who have been practicing returning to center and moving toward longing, all of us organizing ourselves around what we long for rather than what we are against. I believe somatics, in coursework and/or bodywork, is one of the most effective ways to get a group of complex, contradictory humans into alignment with a liberated collective future. Seeing, feeling ourselves, as we are, with agency to shape the future … that’s the miracle. 76 “What Is Somatics?,” Generative Somatics, http://www.generativesomatics.org/content/what-somatics.77 It was much later that I read the book Healing Sex, written by one of my somatics teachers, Staci Haines. It’s really helpful and has all this homework for the reader to do, to learn your landscape of sexual trauma, to move toward healing. I highly recommend it. See Staci Haines, Healing Sex: A Mind-Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2007).Black Woman WildnessA Spell Junauda Petrus Junauda Petrus is a soul sweetener, filmmaker, writer, runaway witch, cosmic bag lady, and cofounder at Free Black Dirt. [image file=image_rsrc3KV.jpg] Some summers ago, I was going through a hard and breathtaking breakup. The kind where I was carrying on crying, listening to Bilal on repeat, puffing all the trees. The fatigue of sadness left me an emo hermit in fetal position in my bed. It was my first relationship with a woman after coming out to myself fully in my early thirties, and my nose may have been a little wide open. Just a little.

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

  In religious history, the struggle for peace has been just as important as the holy war. Religious people have found all kinds of ingenious methods of dealing with the assertive machismo of the reptilian brain, curbing violence, and building respectful, life-enhancing communities. But as with Ashoka, who came up against the systemic militancy of the state, they could not radically change their societies; the most they could do was propose a different path to demonstrate kinder and more empathic ways for people to live together. When we come to the modern period, in Part Three, we will, of course, explore the wave of violence claiming religious justification that erupted during the 1980s and culminated in the atrocity of September 11, 2001. But we will also examine the nature of secularism, which, despite its manifold benefits, has not always offered a wholly irenic alternative to a religious state ideology. The early modern philosophies that tried to pacify Europe after the Thirty Years’ War in fact had a ruthless streak of their own, particularly when dealing with casualties of secular modernity who found it alienating rather than empowering and liberating. This is because secularism did not so much displace religion as create new religious enthusiasms. So ingrained is our desire for ultimate meaning that our secular institutions, most especially the nation-state, almost immediately acquired a “religious” aura, though they have been less adept than the ancient mythologies at helping people face up to the grimmer realities of human existence for which there are no easy answers. Yet secularism has by no means been the end of the story. In some societies attempting to find their way to modernity, it has succeeded only in damaging religion and wounding psyches of people unprepared to be wrenched from ways of living and understanding that had always supported them. Licking its wounds in the desert, the scapegoat, with its festering resentment, has rebounded on the city that drove it out. Part One BEGINNINGS 1 Farmers and Herdsmen Gilgamesh, named in the ancient king lists as the fifth ruler of Uruk, was remembered as “the strongest of men—huge, handsome, radiant, perfect.” 1 He may well have existed but soon acquired a legendary aura. It was said that he had seen everything, traveled to the ends of the earth, visited the underworld, and achieved great wisdom. By the early third millennium BCE, Uruk, in what is now southern Iraq, was the largest city-state in the federation of Sumer, the world’s first civilization. The poet Sin-leqi-unninni, who wrote his version of Gilgamesh’s remarkable life in about 1200 BCE, was still bursting with pride in its temples, palaces, gardens, and shops.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Pleasure activism is not about generating or indulging in excess. I want to say this early and often, to myself and to you. Sometimes when I bring up this work to people, I can see a bacchanalia unfold in their eyes, and it makes me feel tender. I think because most of us are so repressed, our fantasies go to extremes to counterbalance all that contained longing. Pleasure activism is about learning what it means to be satisfiable, to generate, from within and from between us, an abundance from which we can all have enough.16 Part of the reason so few of us have a healthy relationship with pleasure is because a small minority of our species hoards the excess of resources, creating a false scarcity and then trying to sell us joy, sell us back to ourselves. Some think it belongs to them, that it is their inheritance. Some think it a sign of their worth, their superiority. On a broad level, white people and men have been the primary recipients of this delusion, the belief that they deserve to have excess, while the majority of others don’t have enough … or further, that the majority of the world exists in some way to please them. And so many of us have been trained into the delusion that we must accumulate excess, even at the cost of vast inequality, in order to view our lives as complete or successful. A central aspect of pleasure activism is tapping into the natural abundance that exists within and between us, and between our species and this planet. Pleasure is not one of the spoils of capitalism. It is what our bodies, our human systems, are structured for; it is the aliveness and awakening, the gratitude and humility, the joy and celebration of being miraculous. So rather than encouraging moderation over and over, I want to ask you to relinquish your own longing for excess and to stay mindful of your relationship to enough. How much sex would be enough? How high would be high enough? How much love would feel like enough? Can you imagine being healed enough? Happy enough? Connected enough? Having enough space in your life to actually live it? Can you imagine being free enough? Do you understand that you, as you are, who you are, is enough? Glossary Why a glossary? Language changes so quickly these days. The right way to speak about people, about identities, about gender, about geography—everything is in motion on a regular basis. I know that in writing this book I am creating something instantly dated. Given that god is change, there are some terms in this book that I want to be super clear about. Bitch is one of my favorite words. When I say it, I mean you are fierce, I love you, wow, that’s the boss, be yourself, yes yes yes.

• From Philosophy and Religion in the West (1999)

  death to life—from the life of “this age” to the life of the body of Christ. 3. Paul, the most important of the Jews who preached the message of Christ to the Gentiles, taught his congregations to think of themselves as “the body of Christ,” a community whose head was Christ, from whom they drew their life (1 Cor. 12). 4. Hence to believe in Christ and to be baptized was to be “incorporated” into Christ, and to share His life and Spirit. 5. The Gospel of John uses a similar image: Christ is like a vine, and those who believe in Him are like branches who live and grow in Him. 6. Paul uses a bold version of this image to suggest that believers in Christ are “grafted” into the people of Israel, so that Gentiles may share in the covenant between God and His people (Romans 11). 7. Through faith the community of believers thus shares in the life of the risen Jesus and the expectation of a resurrection like His—i.e., the hope of everlasting life. III. The Divine Identity of Jesus A. Jesus as Lord 1. The proclamation that “Jesus is Lord” seems to have been central to early Christian preaching, along with “God raised him from the dead.” 2. This proclamation implies the pre-eminence of Jesus over other heavenly or cosmic powers. 3. When brought into the discourse of the Scriptures of Israel, it implies some kind of unity between Jesus and the LORD God of Israel, such that the honor due to the LORD alone can be given to Jesus too. 4. This is implicit in an early Christian hymn quoted by Paul (in Philippians 2:5–11) which applies to Christ language that had been reserved in the Scriptures for the LORD God of Israel (cf. Isaiah 45:23). 5. The implication at the end (Philippians 2:11) is that glory given to Jesus is glory given to the LORD. B. The Son of Man and the Throne of God ©1999 The Teaching Company. 39

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  This, right here, is an origins tale.58 A deliberate, black, feminist, once upon a time that details one of three preliminary but critical pit stops on my theory-making journey to a black feminist Politics of Pleasure. Part of my current project, “Pleasure Politics” is a multi-pronged effort that includes my dissertation, my public-intellectual work and two years of critical intellectual labor with “The Pleasure Ninjas”: journalist and playwright Esther Armah and Drs. Yaba Blay, Brittney Cooper, Treva B. Lindsey and Kaila Story—a collective I founded in 2013 during my tenure as a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. As black feminist theorists, we’ve made a commitment to reframe the existing narrative about black female sexuality by positioning desire, agency and black women’s engagements with pleasure as a viable theoretical paradigm. “Pleasure Politics” asks: What possibilities can a politics of pleasure offer for black feminist futures? Specifically, how can deepening our understanding of the multivalent ways black women produce, read and participate in pleasure complicate our understanding of black female subjectivities in ways that invigorate, inform and sharpen a contemporary black feminist agenda? Getting to black feminist pleasure is tricky business. As my mentor historian E. Frances White said to me when I initially shared this endeavor, “You, do know that feminists are allergic to pleasure, right?” She was joking. Kind of. This is not to suggest that Black Feminist Thought (BFT) has shied away from the topic of black female sexuality. In fact, holding the United States accountable for a sordid history of legally and culturally sanctioned rape and gender violence against black women has long been a priority in BFT’s agenda. Indeed, a great deal of energy has been spent disputing deeply entrenched and dehumanizing stereotypes—ranging from our uniquely mammified asexuality to our naturally animalistic, wanton and licentious ways. The corrective has been the creation of a black feminist master narrative in which black women’s damaged sexuality takes center-stage as a site of reoccurring trauma—the place where intersecting oppressions can be counted on to meet and violently coalesce. The upside, of course, was a sorely needed, compassionate rendering of the difficult and compromised space black women’s sexuality occupies. The downside has been a mulish inattentiveness to black women’s engagements with pleasure—the complex, messy, sticky, and even joyous negotiations of agency and desire that are irrevocably twinned with our pain. From academia to the blogosphere, we’ve become feminist fluent in theorizing the many ways in which our sexuality has been compromised. We’ve been considerably less successful, however, moving past that damage to claim pleasure and a healthy erotic as fundamental rights. Echoing the sentiments of my fellow Pleasure Ninja, Brittney Cooper: “There is no justice for black women without pleasure.”

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  discovering the sources of the good life within themselves, not in some outer dogma or dictum, or in some material form. In another very important respect, they were preparing themselves for the life of the future. They were developing a “wisdom of the group,” a self-correcting course of action. When a group is following a charismatic leader, a theoretical or theological dogma, or any human formulation, it is, in the long run, going to be misled. The direction pointed toward by any person or any formulation always contains some error. As time goes on, the direction becomes more and more erroneous, eventually becoming destructive of its own goal. But when a group struggles through to a choice, having heard this need and that demand, this proposal and another that contradicts it, gradually all the data become available and the decision reached is a hard-won harmony of all the ideas, needs, and desires of each and every one. Furthermore, since the decision has been their own, they are continuously open to feedback and can correct the direction as new data occur. This probably represents the most error-proof mode of decision- making that we know. CONCLUSION Our experience with the large ciclos contains important lessons in what the education of the future might be. We learned that in a very short space of time, large groups of people could begin to live in ways more appropriate to our uncertain future. They could develop a participatory mode of decisionmaking that is adaptable to almost any situation and contains its own self-correcting gyroscopic mechanism, as error-free as any decision-making process known. They could develop a sense of community in which respect for others, and cooperation rather than competition, were the keynotes. They could develop a new confidence in themselves, discovering the source of values within themselves, coming to an awareness that the good life is within, not dependent on outside sources. We learned that these changes, so appropriate for living in a disintegrating culture, could be initiated in a short space of time and in a very large group of people, if we ourselves were able to be, in a fashion suitable to that changing world. Not one of these learnings is entirely new, but taken together, they indicate that we have the educational strategy for making these human changes possible, and that this approach is feasible here and now. All in all, our experiences give a challenging hint of what an education for the next century might become. REFERENCES HARMAN, W. W. The coming transfiguration. The Futurist, February 1977, 11(1), 4–12; and April 1977, 11(2), 106+. STAVRIANOS, L. S. The promise of the coming Dark Age. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976. THOMPSON, W. I. Auguries of planetization. Quest, July/August 1977, 1(3), p. 55– 60, 94–95. Part IV LOOKING AHEAD: A PERSON- CENTERED SCENARIO

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  You might be thinking of getting married yourself, rather soon?’‘Oh no,’ I said.‘You’ve no young man?’‘Not one.’That seemed to please her. She said, ‘I am glad. You see, it is just myself and my daughter here, and she is rather an unusual, trusting sort of girl. I wouldn’t like to have young fellers, coming in and out ...’‘There’s no young man,’ I said firmly.She smiled again; then seemed to hesitate. ‘Might I ask - might I - why you are leaving your present address?’ At that I hesitated - and her smile grew smaller.‘To be truthful,’ I said, ‘there was a little bit of unpleasantness with my landlady ...’‘Ah.’ She stiffened a little, and I realised that in telling the truth I had blundered.‘What I mean,’ I began - but I could see her mind working. What did she think? That my landlady had caught me kissing her husband, probably.‘You see,’ she began again, regretfully, ‘my daughter ...’This daughter must be a beauty and a half, I thought - or else a complete erotomaniac - if the mother is so eager to keep her safe and close, away from young men’s eyes. And yet, just as I had been drawn to that mispelt card in the shopkeeper’s window, so, now, there was something about the house and its owner that tugged at me, unaccountably.I took a chance.‘Mrs Milne,’ I said, ‘the fact of it is I have a curious occupation - a theatrical occupation, you could call it - that obliges me sometimes to dress in gentlemen’s suits. My landlady caught me at it, and took against me. I know for certain that, if I live here, I shall never bring a chap over your threshold. You may wonder how I know that, but I can only say, I do. I shan’t ever get behind with my rent; I shall keep myself to myself and you won’t hardly know that I am here at all. If you and Miss Milne will only not object to the sight of a girl in a pair of bags and a neck-tie now and again - well, then I think I might be the lodger you are seeking.’I had spoken in earnest - more or less - and now Mrs Milne looked thoughtful. ‘Gentlemen’s suits, you say,’ she said - not unkindly or incredulously, but with a rather interested air. I nodded, then pulled at the cord of my bag and drew out a jacket — it happened to be the top half of the guardsman’s uniform. I gave it a shake and held it up against myself, rather hopefully. ‘My eyes,’ she said, folding her arms, ‘he’s a beauty, in’ he? Now my little girl would like him.’ She gestured to the door. ‘If you’ll permit me ... ?’ She stepped out on to the landing and gave a shout: ‘Gracie!’ I heard the sound of footsteps below.

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

  8 These events inspired a new apocalyptic spirituality without which it is impossible to understand the early Christian movement. Crucial to this mind-set was the perennial philosophy: events on earth were an apokalupsis, an “unveiling” that revealed what was simultaneously happening in the heavenly world. As they struggled to make sense of current events, the authors of these new scriptures believed that while the Maccabees were fighting the Seleucids, Michael and his angels were battling the demonic powers that supported Antiochus. 9 The book of Daniel, a historical novella composed during the Maccabean wars, was set in Babylonia during the Jewish exile. At its center was the Judean prophet Daniel’s vision of four terrifying beasts, representing the empires of Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and finally, Antiochus’s Seleucid Empire, the most destructive of all. But then, “coming on the clouds of heaven,” Daniel saw “one like the son of man” representing the Maccabees. Unlike the four bestial empires, their rule would be just and humane, and God would give them “an eternal sovereignty which shall never pass away.” 10 Once they had achieved imperial rule, alas, the Hasmoneans’ piety was unable to sustain the brute realities of political dominance, and they became as cruel and tyrannical as the Seleucids. At the end of the second century BCE, a number of new sects sought a more authentically Jewish alternative; Christianity would later share some of their enthusiasms. To initiate their disciples, all these sects set up systems of instruction that became the closest thing to an educational establishment in Jewish society. Both the Qumran sect and the Essenes—two distinct groups that are often erroneously identified—were attracted toward an ethical community life: meals were eaten together, ritual purity and cleanliness were stressed, and goods were held in common. Both were critical of the Jerusalem temple cult, which, they believed, the Hasmoneans had corrupted. Indeed, the Qumran commune beside the Dead Sea regarded itself as an alternative temple: on the cosmic plane, the children of light would soon defeat the sons of darkness, and God would build another temple and inaugurate a new world order. The Pharisees were also committed to an exact and punctilious observance of the biblical law. We know very little about them at this date, however, even though they would become the most influential of these new groups. Some Pharisees led armed revolts against the Hasmoneans but finally concluded that the people would be better off under foreign rule.

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

  Yet still Labor refused to annex the territories. After the October War of 1973, when Egypt and Syria invaded Sinai and the Golan Heights and were repelled only with great difficulty, a group of Kookists, rabbis, and hawkish secularists formed Gush Emunim, the “Bloc of the Faithful.” A pressure group rather than a political party, its objective was nothing less than “the full redemption of Israel and the entire world.”71 As a “holy people,” Israel was not bound by UN resolutions or international law. Gush’s ultimate plan was to colonize the entire West Bank and transplant hundreds of thousands of Jews into the occupied territories. To make their point, they organized hikes and rallies in the West Bank, and on Independence Day 1975 nearly twenty thousand armed Jews attended a West Bank “picnic,” marching militantly from one location to another.72 The Gush experienced their marches, battles with the army, and illegal squats as rituals that brought them a sense of ecstasy and release.73 The fact that they attracted so much secularist support showed that they were tapping into nationalistic passions that were felt just as strongly by Israelis who had no time at all for religion. They could also draw on the Western tradition of natural human rights that had long declared that an endangered people—and after the October War, who, they asked, could deny that Israelis were endangered?—were entitled to settle in “vacant” land. Their sacred task was to ensure that it was truly “empty.” When the Likud party led by Menachem Begin defeated Labor in the 1977 elections and declared its commitment to Israeli settlement on both sides of the Jordan, Kookists believed that God was at work. But the honeymoon was short-lived. On November 20, 1977, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt made his historic journey to Jerusalem to initiate a peace process, and the following year Begin and Sadat, two former terrorists, signed the Camp David Accords: Israel would return the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in exchange for Egypt’s formal recognition of the State of Israel. Observing this unexpected development, many Western people concluded that secular pragmatism would prevail after all.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  If you want to continue the encounter and your lover is still game, start slow. Move within the boundaries you need. But it’s really important to know that you deserve pleasure. Experiences where you can be triggered and recover, which usually come after doing healing work at a somatic and/or therapeutic level, help to reset your system to know that you can enjoy the connections you choose to and reclaim your freedom and pleasure inside of spaces absent of harm. Hot and Heavy Homework Make an intimate trigger map. This map is just for you. Draw a mug-sized circle in the center with two to three concentric circles around it. The center circle represents a full trigger, and as you move out from the center, there can be things that are painful to remember but have less of a full body impact. Fill it in: Are there certain touches or experiences that you know can completely hijack your system? Those go in the center. You can leave it empty if you don’t actually get triggered in that way. Experiences that make you extremely uncomfortable can go in the middle ring, and so on. The more clarity you have on what pushes your buttons, the more informed and empowered you can be in navigating pleasurable sexual experiences with others. 56 This essay first appeared as adrienne maree brown, “I Want You, but I’m Triggered: Finding Pleasure When Trauma and Memory Collide,” January 24, 2018, Bitch Media (blog), https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/i-want-you-im-triggered/finding-pleasure-when-trauma-and-memory-collide.57 If it’s nonconsensual, there are options: https://www.wikihow.com/Prevent-a-Potential-Rape.Strategic CelibacyRecently there’s been a lot of back and forth about the line between bad sex and rape.58 For some people, this public dialogue has made us look back at our own intimate lives with new eyes.59 What did we want to happen? What actually happened? Why did it happen? Was it harmful? Were we harmed? Did we ever discuss it? Why or why not? There’s a world of work to be done—people with any sort of privilege in intimate situations have to stop denying what they know, stop pushing past no, stop waiting for mouths to say no when bodies have already expressed it, stop getting off on power expressed as sexual access and harm. But I think we all need to ask ourselves: Have I been complicit in continuing harmful patterns of sex that blur the line? I’ve been getting really interested inside this inquiry about a slightly different question: how many of us are trapped in a politically regressive loop of desire?

• 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 My People (2022)

  And that’s the shift in consciousness that needs to take—you know, personal transformation and social transformation happen together. But then it has to be institutionalized with action. And one of the things that needs to be happening is, because of redlining and segregation and prejudice, we have areas of concentrated poverty all across this country. To me, this won’t be fixed until the school I visited in Detroit a few months ago, which was all African American, where three percent of kids were reading on grade level, this won’t be fixed until that’s fixed. And so getting involved in the things that join us together, the things we love together. We love our kids. And if we can focus on African American education, education for poor people, that’s part of the solution, not just police reform. We love our work. If we can give common work, so there’s a little more economic equality in this country. And then we love our neighborhoods. The people who are doing the best work are in the neighborhood. I was talking about Watts recently. And there’s an organization there, Sisters of Watts. And they have been living in Watts their whole lives. They know what Watts needs. Outside groups don’t know what Watts needs. But if we got money to them, and resources and power to them, they actually know what to do. And so getting money right to the grass roots, to the people who can’t write grants because they’re too busy, that, to me, is how you build up a neighborhood. And the neighborhood is the unit of change here. Charlayne Hunter-Gault: Tell me about the Weavers and how they fit into your solution for unity. David Brooks: Yes. So, for years and years, it seemed like, every problem, every column I was writing and every appearance I did with Mark [Shields] was about social isolation, social disconnection, and polarization. And I realized—this is a problem underlying a lot of other problems. But it’s also being solved at the local level by community builders, who I call Weavers. And they’re creating connection. They’re bridging divides. They’re creating a better country, and they’re finding a better way to live. So, for example, in Chicago, in a neighborhood called Englewood, which is a tough neighborhood, there’s a woman who lives there named Asiaha Butler. And Asiaha was going to move out of Englewood because she had a daughter and she was afraid for her safety. And she was going to go to Atlanta. And she had booked the moving company and everything. On the day before she was going to move out, she looked across the street at an empty lot, and there was a little girl in a pink dress playing with broken bottles. And she turns to her husband and says, “We’re not moving out.

• 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,