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 Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  I suggest that you begin by reading the entire program all the way through to see where you are headed, then return to work on the first step. Each step will build on the disciplines practiced and the habits acquired in those that have gone before. The effect will be cumulative. Do not skip any of the steps, because each one is an indispensable part of the process. And do not leave a step until the recommended practices have become part of your daily routine. There is no hurry. We are not going to develop an impartial, universal love overnight. These days we often expect things to happen immediately. We want instant transformation and instant enlightenment—hence the popularity of those television makeover shows that create a new garden, a new room, or a new face in a matter of days. But it takes longer to reorient our minds and hearts; this type of transformation is slow, undramatic, and incremental. Each step asks more—and more—and more. If you follow the program step by step, you will find that you are beginning to see the world, yourself, and other people in a different light. *Throughout I use BCE (Before the Common Era) and CE (Common Era), as they are more inclusive than the Christian BC and AD.THE FIRST STEPLearn About CompassionAll twelve steps will be educative in the deepest sense; the Latin educere means “to lead out,” and this program is designed to bring forth the compassion that, as we have seen, exists potentially within every human being so that it can become a healing force in our own lives and in the world. We are trying to retrain our responses and form mental habits that are kinder, gentler, and less fearful of others. Reading and learning about compassion will be an important part of the process and should become a lifetime habit, but it does not stop there. You cannot learn to drive by reading the car manual; you have to get into the vehicle and practice manipulating it until the skills you acquire so laboriously become second nature. You cannot learn to swim by sitting on the side of the pool watching others cavort in the water; you have to take the plunge and learn to float. If you persevere, you will acquire an ability that at first seemed impossible. It is the same with compassion; we can learn about the neurological makeup of the brain and the requirements of our tradition, but until and unless we actually modify our behavior and learn to think and act toward others in accordance with the Golden Rule, we will make no progress.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Kalanithi’s moving narrative of reflection on how we cope with trauma and uncertainty also illuminates an issue that is of recurring importance to thinking about belief. How can we live on the basis of beliefs, when we crave certainties? Kalanithi found himself drawn to seven words of Samuel Beckett: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’22 We are caught in the insoluble enigma of the human situation. We can’t reason our way to infallible truths that are existentially meaningful – but we can’t live fully and authentically without such beliefs. Intellectually, we feel we can’t go on; existentially, we know we have to go on. Kalanithi found that his reaffirmation of a once-rejected Christianity gave him a new lens through which he could see his own situation. The Harvard psychologist William James, who recorded many personal accounts of religious transformation, noted how these often spoke of the world being experienced and encountered in a new way: ‘everything looked new to me, the people, the fields, the cattle, the trees. I was like a new man in a new world.’23 This is about more than a change of opinion about things; it is about the divine transformation of the perceiver – and hence of the appearance of the sensory world, and its practical inhabitation. The whole way of experiencing the world is transformed, affecting the observer’s reason, imagination, emotions and actions. In the case of Christianity, stepping into its ‘big picture’ radically alters our ways of thinking and imagining reality. The Greek word metanoia, used in the New Testament to refer to this re-imagination of reality, is often translated as ‘repentance’. Yet it fundamentally means a rational and imaginative transformation in which we see things afresh in a new light, experience them in a new way, and reappraise them accordingly. ‘Metanoia calls for a fundamental change in human reality through a holistic “change of mind” … a reshaping or “re-forming” of mental structures which is at the same time a new “form” or ”shape” of a human life.’24 The New Testament uses a wide range of images relating to the human capacity to see to describe this change: people’s eyes are healed, that they might see properly; a veil is removed to enable a fuller vision of God and the world. Developing this point, Augustine of Hippo wrote of ‘healing the eyes of the heart in order that God may be seen.’25 In some important way metanoia designates what Kuhn designates as a ‘paradigm shift’26 – a new way of thinking, beholding and experiencing reality which is seen to offer a more satisfactory account of reality than its predecessors. Religious conversion often involves the setting aside of existing understandings of reality, displacing them with a new vision, and relocating the individual within this new imaginative framework which demands new habits of thought and theological visualisation. Perhaps these are best expressed poetically rather than analytically.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  For Ramsey, to act only on the basis of certainties ‘is too high a standard to expect of mortal men, and we must agree that some degree of doubt or even of error may be humanly speaking justified.’ Rather than crying for the moon, we have to be realistic about the limits of human beings and pragmatic about the forms of knowledge that we can achieve – and be willing to live accordingly. Beliefs offer us a map by which we might steer as we navigate an ocean of uncertainties. Perhaps in an ideal world it might be possible to assemble convincing proofs for our fundamental beliefs, so that these convictions could be as certain as the proven truths of mathematics and logic. But we don’t live in that kind of world. We have to get used to the limits of human reasoning, and face up to the kind of world we inhabit and the kind of creatures we really are. The academic philosophical literature, despite its ‘forests of depressingly oblique, hyper-technical and often deeply boring discussions’,8 at least helps us to develop a sense of realism about the dilemma that we face – namely, that neither our need to know nor our desire to be sure secures our ability to know with certainty. There is a tension between our expectations and their outcomes. We don’t have access to methods and criteria that command universal rational assent and deliver secure and certain outcomes. There is no single method for gaining personal knowledge; beliefs can arise and be assessed in many ways. Perhaps that’s why many now speak of the permissibility of beliefs, reassuring us that it’s OK to believe. As the psychologist William James pointed out, the reality of life is that we often need to give answers to our deepest existential questions which go beyond the evidence and what reason can deliver. That’s why we keep on speaking about believing, and resist the fatal trap of fabricating certainties to make sense of our unrealistic expectations. We need to be realistic about what we can hope for, while searching for an existentially habitable space of relative stability amid a troubled ocean of uncertainty. Rovelli’s ‘vast intermediate space’ of ambiguity and uncertainty is not an unknown territory or an unexplored ocean; it has been recognised and inhabited by philosophers, theologians, artists and writers since the classical period, who have found ways of flourishing in its half-lights and coping with its ambiguities – and in doing so, demonstrated the ability of human beings to deal with a complex world. We can learn from them, and put their wisdom to good use today.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  Do not skip any of the steps, because each one is an indispensable part of the process. And do not leave a step until the recommended practices have become part of your daily routine. There is no hurry. We are not going to develop an impartial, universal love overnight. These days we often expect things to happen immediately. We want instant transformation and instant enlightenment—hence the popularity of those television makeover shows that create a new garden, a new room, or a new face in a matter of days. But it takes longer to reorient our minds and hearts; this type of transformation is slow, undramatic, and incremental. Each step asks more—and more—and more. If you follow the program step by step, you will find that you are beginning to see the world, yourself, and other people in a different light. *Throughout I use BCE (Before the Common Era) and CE (Common Era), as they are more inclusive than the Christian BC and AD. THE FIRST STEP Learn About Compassion All twelve steps will be educative in the deepest sense; the Latin educere means “to lead out,” and this program is designed to bring forth the compassion that, as we have seen, exists potentially within every human being so that it can become a healing force in our own lives and in the world. We are trying to retrain our responses and form mental habits that are kinder, gentler, and less fearful of others. Reading and learning about compassion will be an important part of the process and should become a lifetime habit, but it does not stop there. You cannot learn to drive by reading the car manual; you have to get into the vehicle and practice manipulating it until the skills you acquire so laboriously become second nature. You cannot learn to swim by sitting on the side of the pool watching others cavort in the water; you have to take the plunge and learn to float. If you persevere, you will acquire an ability that at first seemed impossible. It is the same with compassion; we can learn about the neurological makeup of the brain and the requirements of our tradition, but until and unless we actually modify our behavior and learn to think and act toward others in accordance with the Golden Rule, we will make no progress. As an initial step, it might be helpful as a symbolic act of commitment to visit www.charterforcompassion.org and register with the Charter for Compassion. The charter is essentially a summons to compassionate action, and the website will enable you to keep up, week by week, with the charter’s progress in various parts of the world. But the charter was a joint document that does not reflect the vision of a particular tradition, so it is important to integrate it with a mythos that will motivate you. No teaching that is simply a list of directives can be effective.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  40 Greek tragedy thus shunned simplistic intellectual resolutions of complex questions, focusing instead on narrating how people learned to deal with suffering. The American philosopher Martha Nussbaum highlights the educative role of suffering in Greek tragedy, in that it helps us to grasp what it means to be human through an explicit ‘acknowledgement of difficult human realities’. 41 Whether suffering is seen as an intellectual problem or not depends on the specific theoretical lens through which it is interpreted. For reasons that we shall explore, the Enlightenment’s emphasis on rational explanation has led to a new emphasis on explaining or rationalising suffering, and particularly on demonstrating the consistency of a philosophical worldview that affirms both the goodness of God on the one hand, and the reality of suffering on the other. As Charles Taylor has argued, this seems to have created the expectation that every aspect of the universe is completely accessible to human reason, so that we are able to comprehend everything rationally. Yet the problem goes much deeper than our unattainable longing to see things with total clarity; we seem to think that a meaningful life is about the evasion of pain. We feel we are entitled to avoid suffering and see its existence as an intellectual scandal. Yet this is an inadequate modern response to an age-old problem. More reliable alternatives are available, as the psychologist Robert Emmons points out: ‘The good life’ is not one that is achieved through momentary pleasures or defensive illusions, but through meeting suffering head on and transforming it into opportunities for meaning, wisdom, and growth, with the ultimate objective being the development of the person into a fully functioning mature being. On this formula for happiness, age-old wisdom and modern science are in agreement. A good example of such older approaches to this riddle of human suffering is found in early Christianity. The New Testament, for example, recognises suffering as a ‘given’, something that was an everyday aspect of life, yet which had been given new dignity and significance through the suffering and death of Christ. The New Testament does not offer any explanations for suffering or see it as necessary to do so. The letters of Paul, which offer the most substantial engagement with suffering, consider suffering to be an integral aspect of existence in the ‘new age’ within which the ‘old age’ still remains an active presence. 42 Paul’s concerns include reassuring his readers that to suffer does not mean that they have been abandoned or rejected by God; that Christ suffered before them, and for them; and that they may look ahead to the hope of a new order, of which they will be part. 43 These views remained central to Christian thinking for the next thousand years.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  13 As we saw earlier, the modern term ‘theory’ derives from the Greek theōria , which means ‘beholding’. The writer Henry Miller, reflecting on the development of his own thought as he wandered through exotic landscapes, once remarked that he found his destination was ‘never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.’ 14 Miller’s comment points to the fact that we inherit or acquire, often without realising it, certain ways of ‘seeing’ the world which we treat as fixed or self-evidently true. Philosophers of science speak of ‘theory-laden observation’, meaning that what we think is a ‘natural’ understanding of the world is often informed and to some extent predetermined by an assumed or presupposed theory. 15 Scientific advance often proceeds by demolishing these assumptions, and replacing them with something more reliable. The first step in theoretical development is to identify our inherited or assumed theories, and subject them to critical examination. Ideological enforcement, however, proceeds by imposing a ‘sound’ or ‘rational’ map that invalidates others, and allows us to see only what the ideologues want us to see, normalising what would once have been seen as strange and perplexing. Theories can too easily prevent us from seeing things fully, by declaring that only the deluded and irrational ‘see’ certain things, which wiser and more theoretically informed individuals know cannot exist, and thus discount any suggestion that they should be taken seriously. This crass intellectual condescension is perhaps an inevitable outcome of modernity’s highly restrictive account of human rationality. We are only allowed to see what our theoretical precommitments permit – what our theoretical maps tell us. The economist E. F. Schumacher highlighted this in his final work, reflecting on how his education constricted his grasp and appreciation of reality. ‘All through school and university I had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance for the conduct of my life.’ His moment of liberation arrived when he realised the solution to this impoverishment. ‘I ceased to suspect the sanity of my perceptions and began, instead, to suspect the soundness of the maps.’ 16 Theories ought to be neutral; all too often they are not. Social conformity often influences us to use intellectual maps that were designed to control us, to limit us, to subjugate us – to persuade us that there is nothing more to reality or life than they allow. Yet other maps are available . One of the most important decisions we can make in life is which map we use to interpret the landscape, and guide us as we journey. The map we use shapes our interpretation and evaluation of many aspects of our physical and social worlds. For example, consider religion.

• From Soaking Wet: Lesbian Sex Stories (2014)

  It was early Friday evening—the first night of a lovers’ weekend I’d planned down to the last detail. The view through the large picture window was of the small lake, the water shining without a single ripple to mar the mirrorlike surface. A lone figure walked along the bank, hands thrust deep into pockets, while the rising wind tore at her pale hair. I swallowed hard and hesitated. Did she want company? Did she need more time to think about us, about whether we still “worked”? That’s what this weekend was all about: a last chance to renew our connection. Or maybe this was good-bye. I could no longer read from her expression what went on inside her head. I wiped my hands along the sides of my thighs and pushed open the glass door that opened onto steps to the path that wound to the narrow beach. Kari didn’t look my way as I approached. Her arms wrapped around her middle as she stared at the water. “No problem getting away?” “No. I had the days.” “Good. Have you unpacked?” At last, she glanced my way. Something in her eyes gave me hope. For the first time in a long time, she met my gaze and really looked at me. I smiled. “Not yet. But would you like a glass of wine before we get settled?” “That and a fire. It’s colder than I thought it would be.” She stepped closer. Her arm settled at my waist and she leaned in to hug me from the side. Kari was the kind to kiss friends on the lips or offer a tight hug, so I couldn’t rely on the gesture to mean anything. I draped an arm around her waist, and we walked slowly back to the cabin. Inside, the fire took me only minutes. I placed several logs and kindling in the grate and as soon as the crackling fire was built, the air inside the cabin lost its crisp edge. I pulled my sweater over my head, and, dressed only in a tank and my jeans, I sat cross-legged on the hearth rug. A glass dangled in front of me. “Thanks,” I murmured. “I was supposed to get that. Sorry.” She sat beside me. “This was a good idea. This weekend.” “Yeah.” I didn’t know what else to say, hoping she’d let me know what had been on her mind. We’d been so busy working, too tired and stretched to hook up, that we’d drifted apart. I didn’t like feeling like I was in this alone—the only one worried that our relationship was on its last legs. Friends had introduced us, knowing that both Kari and I had dated women before and knowing my preference for waiflike blondes. We shared a lot of the same interests, were close to the same age.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  The origins of this movement are complex, including the growing social power of the middle classes, the rise of self-governing urban communities, a demand to use the vernacular rather than Latin in preaching and worship, and a return to simpler and more biblical ways of Christian thinking. Eventually it led to the emergence of various forms of Protestantism, and the loss of unity within western Christianity. Many scholars feel that this fragmentation was not necessary, in that the difficulties could have been resolved.34 While there is little chance that the situation will now be reversed, there is growing interest in rebuilding relationships across these denominational divides. Recent ecumenical dialogues between these communities of belief may not have led to their reunion, but have at least led to an increase in mutual understanding and lessening of tensions. Yet the Reformation illustrates how beliefs can have social functions, serving as boundary markers between communities. The doctrine of justification by faith alone came to define the boundaries between Protestantism and Catholicism in the sixteenth century – a convenient theological litmus test which reduced these two complex and variegated religious communities to a set of binaries.35 For Martin Luther, the ‘article of justification’ defined whether the Christian Church stood firm or fell apart. It thus was a point of coalescence for Protestantism, and a line of demarcation from Catholicism. Why is this point important? Because it illustrates the dual function of beliefs – to unite people into communities on the one hand, and divide them on the other. Beliefs are not purely divisive; where they do lead to divisions, they were often responsible for the unity that existed beforehand. The challenge is for the wise to give thought to how these dual aspects of belief can be managed. It is natural for humans to believe and to form communities; this problem is located deep within the human condition, and is not going to go away. While there is much more that needs to be said about the interplay of beliefs and communities, we need to bring our reflections on this theme to a close. I will conclude by considering the following: if belief is inevitable in life, how can we, whether as individuals or communities, be reassured that we have chosen wisely in what we believe, given that we cannot prove these beliefs? Conclusion: Living in a World of UncertaintyWho can we trust? What can we trust? These are among the most difficult and cognitively demanding tasks that we face in everyday life. We look for individuals who are smart, honest and dependable – just as we seek beliefs that are trustworthy and enable us to flourish. My argument in this book is that belief is natural, reasonable and has the potential for good. To deny it is simply to diminish us as human beings.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  NEW It is in this era, from 1951 onwards to be precise, that I must abandon any spurious claim to historical objectivity, having become a participant observer in events. What Philip Larkin’s verse does not capture is how unexpected the subsequent social and religious changes seemed at the beginning of the 1960s. In the USA, the 1950s have been viewed as another Protestant ‘Great Awakening’, with Church membership increasing from 50 per cent of the population in 1940 to almost 70 per cent in 1960: actual church attendance peaked at around half the American population in 1955. The two decades after the Second World War seemed peculiarly promising for mainstream Protestantism worldwide. It was possible to see the destruction of Nazism as a victory for the values of liberty and democracy much prized by anglophone Protestant societies – so long as one did not leave too much space on the moral high ground for Soviet Russia’s part in Hitler’s defeat. Certainly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that accompanied the foundation of the United Nations in the late 1940s emerged from the same circle of liberal Protestants who had been active in developing ecumenical ties between Churches over the previous half-century. [2] The Atlantic Isles shadowed this north American profile in general ecclesiastical optimism. In 1959 the Anglican Bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson (soon to be notorious for disturbing British theological certainties) could assure his confirmation candidates that they were ‘at a time when great things are afoot’ in the Church: ‘I believe that in England we may be at a turning of the tide. Indeed, in Cambridge, where I have recently come from, I am convinced that the tide has turned.’ [3] In the Republic of Ireland, now fully independent of the United Kingdom, a different cultural history underlay the unrivalled hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church in the 1950s. It was personified by the formidable figure of Archbishop John McQuaid in Dublin, assiduously courted by successive Irish governments and by President de Valera himself. The Republic, sheltered by neutrality in the Second World War, had changed little after Independence in its Edwardian rural poverty. Over thirty years from the break with the British Empire, its Protestant population had plummeted, the lost Protestant Ascendancy visually symbolized across the Irish landscape by ruined gentry houses and derelict Church of Ireland parish churches. Outside the Protestant remnant, McQuaid and his lieutenants ruthlessly maintained Catholic family and clerical life in the image of Vatican I, and made sure that the Censorship of Publications Board protected the whole population from sexual filth. [4] Success bred ecclesiastical self-confidence, yet in the case of mainstream Protestantism, that meant a continuing openness to what might need modification in moral pronouncements. In the United Kingdom, there was general public surprise in the 1950s that influential clergy of the Church of England (and rather more hesitantly, the Church of Scotland) would consider the decriminalization of homosexuality.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  28. St Peter’s Seminary, Cardross (Argyll and Bute) was planned for clergy training in the glory-days of the Scottish Catholic Church in the 1950s, and eventually designed in a self-confident Brutalist architectural idiom. Concrete Quarterly commented in 1967 that ‘the timber-lined bedrooms are comparable with those of a comfortable hotel, and better designed than most.’ The collapse in numbers entering the priesthood rapidly rendered it redundant; it closed in 1980 and is now a poignant ruin. One of the reasons for that long-drawn-out result was the divisive effect of this issue on the theological parties that had emerged worldwide in the nineteenth-century Anglican Communion. Both Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics now fissured between traditionalists and those sympathetic to change, and that has endured into subsequent fights, notably around attitudes to homosexuality. There has never been an exact transference: it is notable that a few female Evangelical bishops still fail to notice that the same theological arguments propelling them to consecration to the episcopate apply just as much to accepting homosexual relationships on equal terms, while the same inconsistency is perceptible among some gay Anglo-Catholics who still deplore the ordination of women while gratefully accepting the liberalization that has helped them organize their lives as they would wish. Indeed, for obvious historical reasons, conservative Anglo-Catholics have never been as convincing or full-throated opponents of gay equality as conservative Evangelicals, despite usually voting in the same direction when Church legislative bodies have proposed change. Campaigns for gay rights were the logical fulfilment of Bishop Charles Gore’s prophecy on contraception (above, Chapter 18), though not a result he would have sought. The first impulse of gay Christians in the West, like African Americans in eighteenth-century north America or African Independent Churches in subsequent centuries, was to found their own Church communities, free of condescension or worse from the existing Churches. So, in 1968, Troy Perry, a former Pentecostal pastor, gathered a little congregation, at first in his own home in Huntington Park, a low-income suburb of Los Angeles. Perry chose to call his congregation the ‘Metropolitan Community Church’ (MCC). The carefully neutral description additionally reflected a consistent characteristic of the emerging gay liberation movement: as with self-assertions of identity throughout Western history, it was easier to make one’s own choice amid the relative anonymity of an urban setting. The MCC ethos remained Bible-based in a Pentecostal fashion, though from the beginning a diverse sacramental flavour was mixed in by Perry’s insistence on the centrality of a weekly Eucharist. He performed the first public same-sex wedding of the modern age in 1969, and after many difficulties in finding a place to worship, the congregation gained its first permanent building in 1971 – the victim of arson within two years. Conservative Evangelical hostility was predictable and vocal, often wildly misrepresenting the reality of the MCC. Interestingly it echoed the anger that Evangelicals had expressed towards Pentecostalism in general at the beginning of the century, and for a similar reason: the MCC looked too infuriatingly similar to Evangelical revivalism for comfort, so much of the vitriol was directed to alerting those who might have been tempted by its devotional style to the moral dangers that the community offered. Evangelicals had some reason for their alarm: the MCC grew at a rate that Evangelicals or Pentecostalists could only envy, having within five years of its foundation achieved 40 congregations with 13,000 members. Over the following half-century MCC congregations have emerged in hundreds of different contexts, still largely urban, across at least thirty-seven different countries. [11] Just as in the days of slavery in America, other gay Christians were determined to make their presence felt within existing denominations. Roman Catholics, inspired by Vatican II, were pioneers, with pastoral counselling groups founded by clergy that turned into more public witness and campaign organizations: Dignity from 1969 in the USA and, in the UK, Quest from 1973. Hardly surprisingly the Quakers were early pioneers as well, in the UK founding the Friends’ Homosexual Fellowship that same year. The next logical step was to try for a more ecumenical approach, witnessed by the creation of the Gay Christian Movement in 1976. The name was significantly male-centred, and the early ethos of GCM was predominantly Anglo-Catholic or liberal Anglican. In an organization notable for strongly fought internal debate, it took nearly a decade for a renaming as the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement. Since 2017 the recognition of further complexities in queer identities have brought a name that is a more inclusive as well as theological proclamation: OneBodyOneFaith. [12] A TIME FOR JUDGING

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  It may be juxtaposed with recent words of challenge and comfort to fellow Jesuits from a Catholic priest well-placed to have a perspective on recent decades of world history: ‘do our contemporaries not fear that Christians and indeed believers of all faiths are just this, an uncontained movement of reaction and resentment, furious at the freedoms and liberations of the modern age?…the gospel is no spectre of retribution. It is flesh and bones.’ [51]

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘This, then, is the tale of my misfortunes. As you have heard, there are two things I must obtain if I am to have my husband. And I know of no one who can help me to obtain them except yourself, if it is true, as I have been led to believe, that my husband the Count is deeply in love with your daughter.’ ‘I know not, madam, whether the Count is in love with my daughter,’ replied the gentlewoman. ‘He claims to be, certainly, but how will this make it easier for me to assist you?’ ‘I will tell you,’ said the Countess, ‘but first of all I want to explain how I intend to repay your assistance. I see that your daughter is beautiful and of marriageable age, but it seems, both from what I have been told and from the evidence of my own eyes, that the impossibility of making a good marriage for her compels you to keep her at home. I therefore propose to reward your services by promptly supplying her, from my own resources, with whatever dowry you think she needs for an honourable marriage.’ The lady, being destitute, was attracted by this offer. But she was also proud of spirit, and she replied: ‘Pray explain to me, madam, in what way I can assist you. If it is honourable for me to further your plans, I shall be glad to do so, and afterwards you may reward me in whatever way you please.’ Whereupon the Countess said: ‘What I require you to do is to send some trustworthy person to inform my husband, the Count, that your daughter is prepared to place herself entirely at his disposal, but only on condition that he proves to her that his love is as deep and genuine as he claims; this she will never believe until he sends her the ring which he wears upon his hand and to which she understands that he is deeply attached. If he sends her the ring, you will hand it over to me, and then you will send him a message to the effect that your daughter is ready to do his bidding, and you will cause him to come here in secret and, all unsuspecting, lie with me instead of your daughter. Perhaps by the grace of God I shall become pregnant, and later on, with my husband’s ring on my finger and my husband’s child in my arms, I will regain his love and live with him as a wife should live with a husband. And it will all be thanks to you.’

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  1. Discuss the ways in which the plagues in the time of Justinian and in the 14 th century fundamentally altered the course of history. Suggested Reading Questions to Consider We see the same combination of human romantic love and religious longing in Petrarch’s poetry as we do in that of Dante, yet with Petrarch, there is a turn much more toward the classical than the Catholic. © iStockphoto/Thinkstock. 250 Lecture 34: The Great Plague 2. How does the inquisition appear from this distance as a desperate effort to exercise control in a world that refused to conform to the desire of the papacy to control it? 251 Corruption and the Beginnings of Reform Lecture 35 T hroughout its history, Christianity has had the ability to generate reform movements based on the conviction that its high ideals were being compromised by actual practice. Early monasticism, for example, can be seen as a form of organized resistance to what the monks perceived to be the compromised position of the church after Christianity became the imperial religion. Later, such popes as Gregory VII and Innocent III worked for the reform of the clergy and fought the practice of simony. In this lecture, however, we consider the sort of corruption those reforms could not touch: the deep and systemic dysfunction in late-medieval Christianity and the first efforts at structural—as distinct from moral—reform. Christendom in the Middle Ages • Given the chaotic state of the West during the migration of nations in the 4 th and 5 th centuries, the medieval synthesis is remarkable both for its stability and its comprehensiveness. o If we mark the starting date for this synthesis as the coronation of Charlemagne in 800, Catholic culture shaped Europe for some 800 years. o This culture gathered a bewildering variety of warring tribes and diverse languages into a single coherent civilization from Poland to England, from Italy and Spain to Scandinavia. o Coherence was achieved not least by the use of a single language (Latin), a single creed, and a single religious authority (the pope). • For all the tensions and corruptions that it created, the political dance between pope and emperor (and, later, between pope and kings) provided a fundamental stability to society and mutual legitimation of both institutions.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Only the platform with the stone armchair remained. Over the black abyss into which the walls had gone, a boundless city lit up, dominated by gleaming idols above a garden grown luxuriously over many thousands of moons. The path of moonlight so long awaited by the procurator stretched right to this garden, and the first to rush down it was the sharp-eared dog. The man in the white cloak with blood-red lining rose from the armchair and shouted something in a hoarse, cracked voice. It was impossible to tell whether he was weeping or laughing, or what he shouted. It could only be seen that, following his faithful guardian, he, too, rushed headlong down the path of moonlight. ‘I’m to follow him there?’ the master asked anxiously, holding the bridle. ‘No,’ replied Woland, ‘why run after what is already finished?’ ‘There, then?’ the master asked, turning and pointing back, where the recently abandoned city with the gingerbread towers of its convent, with the sun broken to smithereens in its windows, now wove itself behind them. ‘Not there, either,’ replied Woland, and his voice thickened and flowed over the rocks. ‘Romantic master! He, whom the hero you invented and have just set free so yearns to see, has read your novel.’ Here Woland turned to Margarita: ‘Margarita Nikolaevna! It is impossible not to believe that you have tried to think up the best future for the master, but, really, what I am offering you, and what Yeshua has asked for you, is better still! Leave them to each other,’ Woland said, leaning towards the master’s saddle from his own, pointing to where the procurator had gone, ‘let’s not interfere with them. And maybe they’ll still arrive at something.’ Here Woland waved his arm in the direction of Yershalaim, and it went out. ‘And there, too,’ Woland pointed behind them, ‘what are you going to do in the little basement?’ Here the sun broken up in the glass went out. ‘Why?’ Woland went on persuasively and gently, ‘oh, thrice-romantic master, can it be that you don’t want to go strolling with your friend in the daytime under cherry trees just coming into bloom, and in the evening listen to Schubert’s music? Can it be that you won’t like writing with a goose quill by candlelight? Can it be that you don’t want to sit over a retort like Faust, in hopes that you’ll succeed in forming a new homunculus? There! There! The house and the old servant are already waiting for you, the candles are already burning, and soon they will go out, because you will immediately meet the dawn. Down this path, master, this one! Farewell! It’s time for me to go!’ ‘Farewell!’ Margarita and the master answered Woland in one cry. Then the black Woland, heedless of any road, threw himself into a gap, and his retinue noisily hurtled down after him.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  23. Óscar Romero: Voice for the People Romero’s Early Life and Education Óscar Romero was born in the small town of Ciudad Barrios, El Salvador, in 1917. His father, Santos, was a government telegraph operator posted there when he met and married Guadalupe, a schoolteacher and the daughter of a local landowner. They were a happy, busy family with seven children, relatively secure and prosperous. Óscar and his siblings attended the local school, which went through the third grade. When he proved especially bright, his family paid the teacher to continue tutoring him in more advanced work. He also picked up Morse code and typing from his father, a precursor to his later interest in communications. Óscar was also devout and loved to spend time in the church. He was offered a half scholarship to a pre-seminary school in the city of San Miguel. He threw himself into the life of the school and quickly became a top pupil. Paying the other half of Óscar’s tuition strained the family finances, so his father appreciated that he was able to pay it in coffee beans rather than in cash. But during the Great Depression, coffee prices were so badly depressed that many farmers, including his father, mortgaged their land—and eventually lost it. The government’s losses were also heavy, and they stopped paying their employees. The family took in boarders to help make ends meet. Santos began to drink heavily. Óscar began working with his brothers at a gold mine, earning enough to cover his school expenses, and he graduated in 1935. His plan had been to continue studying at the small seminary in San Miguel, but when the Spanish Civil War broke out, the seminary was forced to close. Óscar returned to Ciudad Barrios to work and wait. Two years later, he was invited to study at the Jesuit seminary at San Salvador, the capital city. He was just settling in there when he learned that his father had died and his mother had suffered a stroke. Óscar felt even more pressure to earn a salary that would help his family. He jumped at the chance for a scholarship to study in Rome at the Pontifical Latin American College. He enjoyed exploring the city and the camaraderie with his 173

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  “Nah, me and my boo are gonna work things out. We’ve been together too long to break up. All we need is more time to grow, and everything will be straight between us. Our relationship is gonna go back to the way things used to be,” Mikala said, like she was trying to convince herself even more than she wanted to convince Chastity. Her friend laughed. “If you say so, but that sure wouldn’t be me. If a man can’t do me right in the bedroom with some good dick, then he ain’t gettin’ nuthin’ but a one-way ticket outta my front door. I need a nigga that knows how to work that Magic Stick! That is, unless he knows how to eat the pussy good enough to make me cum. Then I might let him stay for a while.” “C, you are so nasty. Let me worry about me and my man. I’m about to bounce. I’ma see you tomorrow, homey.” “Aight, have it your way. If you need me to hook you up with one of my sexperts, let me know. I’ma get up with you tomorrow, though,” Chastity responded, and hung up the phone. Mikala and Chastity had been best friends since middle school. They were both fine dark-skinned sisters, but Chastity was shorter than Mikala by about four inches, even though her long legs made her seem taller than she was. Chastity had a slim figure, but what she lacked in the ass department she more than made up for with her C-cup breasts. She was the more outgoing and off-the-hook of the two. She was open about her sexuality and made it clear that she loved to get her freak on. Men were her primary preference, but she wasn’t too shy to fool around with a woman if one came along that sparked her interest. She wasn’t slutty about how she carried herself, but she was blunt enough to tell a man what she wanted up front when it came to having sex. If a man wanted to be with her then he had better bring his A game to the bedroom or she would let him know his skills were whack. She kept at least three male playthings on hand at all times, so when one of them acted up she always had some backup dick waiting on the side.

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  Let the heretics be drawn from the hedges, be extracted from the thorns. Stuck in the hedges, they do not want to be compelled [cogi]: “We will enter when we want to.” But that is not the Lord’s command. He said, “Compel them to come in.” Use compulsion outside, so freedom can arise once they are inside. (S 112.8) Brown recognizes that this was not just an excuse cooked up as a cover for what was happening. Wrong by later and better standards, Augustine’s view nonetheless grew out of deepening convictions at several levels. For one thing, it reflected his stress on the importance of the will. Faith was not simply an intellectual process. The will must be summoned. But the power of habit, of consuetudo, can imprison the will. The network of habit indurated by the Donatists’ feuds with Catholics made it impossible for them to meet with, debate, or listen to inherited foes. To break that deadlock would be, Augustine came to hope, a way of freeing Donatists to hear, at least, what had been sealed out of their consciousness. That is why Augustine stressed that the aim should be use of the laws for teaching the truth in love. The pedagogue’s aim is “instruction under hardship” (per molestias eruditio, P 118.2). Forcing people to listen is only the first step in a discipline that stresses that word’s etymology (disciplina from discere, to learn). Stubbornness and pride can create the kind of socialis necessitudo, the partnership in crime, that Augustine felt in his own youthful gang of the pear theft, or in Adam’s solidarity with Eve. That bond must be broken to get a fair hearing from its prisoners. Brown points out that few inquisitors are going to have Augustine’s scruples and restraint; but Augustine came close to finding his ideal partner in Marcellinus, the tribune sent by the emperor Honorius to deal with Donatist resistance in 410. In response to heightened violence from the hut people, Catholics had gone to Ravenna asking Honorius to deny violent people the sanctuary given them by Donatist bishops. Marcellinus was given the task of bringing together the whole body of Catholic and Donatist bishops in a Confrontation (Conlatio) to decide which side, if either, was heretical under the old laws. Though a Catholic himself, Marcellinus conducted this great showdown—held at the Baths of Gargillius in Carthage—in an exemplary way. “Patient under every test, he moderated the debates with authority, never rude but also never weak, with a lawyerly respect for the rules and for everyone’s rights” (Monceaux 4.423).

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  I, however,’ Koroviev went on chattering, ‘have known people who had no idea, not only of the fifth dimension, but generally of anything at all, and who nevertheless performed absolute wonders in expanding their space. Thus, for instance, one city-dweller, as I’ve been told, having obtained a three-room apartment on Zemlyanoy Val, transformed it instantly, without any fifth dimension or other things that addle the brain, into a four-room apartment by dividing one room in half with a partition. ‘He forthwith exchanged that one for two separate apartments in different parts of Moscow: one of three rooms, the other of two. You must agree that that makes five. The three-room one he exchanged for two separate ones, each of two rooms, and became the owner, as you can see for yourself, of six rooms—true, scattered in total disorder all over Moscow. He was just getting ready to perform his last and most brilliant leap, by advertising in the newspapers that he wanted to exchange six rooms in different parts of Moscow for one five-room apartment on Zemlyanoy Val, when his activity ceased for reasons independent of him. He probably also has some sort of room now, only I venture to assure you it is not in Moscow. A real slicker, you see, ma’am, and you keep talking about the fifth dimension!’ Though she had never talked about the fifth dimension, and it was Koroviev himself who kept talking about it, Margarita laughed gaily, hearing the story of the adventures of the apartment slicker. Koroviev went on: ‘But to business, to business, Margarita Nikolaevna. You’re quite an intelligent woman, and of course have already guessed who our host is.’ Margarita’s heart thumped, and she nodded. ‘Well, and so, ma’am,’ Koroviev said, ‘and so, we’re enemies of any sort of reticence and mysteriousness. Messire gives one ball annually. It is called the spring ball of the full moon, or the ball of the hundred kings. Such a crowd! . . .’ here Koroviev held his cheek as if he had a toothache. ‘However, I hope you’ll be convinced of it yourself. Now, Messire is a bachelor, as you yourself, of course, understand. Yet a hostess is needed,’ Koroviev spread his arms, ‘without a hostess, you must agree . . .’ Margarita listened to Koroviev, trying not to miss a single word; she felt cold under her heart, the hope of happiness made her head spin. ‘The tradition has been established,’ Koroviev said further, ‘that the hostess of the ball must without fail be named Margarita, first, and second, she must be a native of the place. And we, you will kindly note, are travelling and at the present moment are in Moscow. We found one hundred and twenty-one Margaritas in Moscow, and, would you believe it,’ here Koroviev slapped himself on the thigh with despair, ‘not one of them was suitable! And, at last, by a happy fate . . .’

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

  Above all, the author feels it to be a great privilege that he has been able to realize the hope which Dr. Philip Schaff expressed in the last years of his life, that his History of the Christian Church which, in four volumes, had traversed the first ten centuries and, in the sixth and seventh, set forth the progress of the German and Swiss Reformations, might be carried through the fruitful period from 1050–1517. David S. Schaff. The Western Theological Seminary, Pittsburg. [1] THE DECLINE OF THE PAPACY AND THE PREPARATION FOR MODERN CHRISTIANITY.FROM BONIFACE VIII. TO MARTIN LUTHER. A.D. 1294-1517. THE SIXTH PERIOD OF CHURCH HISTORY. § 1. Introductory Survey. The two centuries intervening between 1294 and 1517, between the accession of Boniface VIII. and the nailing of Luther’s Ninety-five Theses against the church door in Wittenberg, mark the gradual transition from the Middle Ages to modern times, from the universal acceptance of the papal theocracy in Western Europe to the assertion of national independence, from the supreme authority of the priesthood to the intellectual and spiritual freedom of the individual. Old things are passing away; signs of a new order increase. Institutions are seen to be breaking up. The scholastic systems of theology lose their compulsive hold on men’s minds, and even become the subject of ridicule. The abuses of the earlier Middle Ages call forth voices demanding reform on the basis of the Scriptures and the common well-being of mankind. The inherent vital energies in the Church seek expression in new forms of piety and charitable deed. The power of the papacy, which had asserted infallibility of judgment and dominion over all departments of human life, was undermined by the mistakes, pretensions, and worldliness of the papacy itself, as exhibited in the policy of Boniface VIII., the removal of the papal residence to Avignon, and the disastrous schism which, for nearly half a century, gave to Europe the spectacle of two, and at times three, popes reigning at the same time and all professing to be the vicegerents of God on earth. The free spirit of nationality awakened during the crusades grew strong and successfully resisted the papal authority, first in France and then in other parts of Europe. Princes asserted supreme authority over the citizens within their dominions and insisted upon the obligations of churches to the state. The leadership of Europe passed from Germany to France, with England coming more and more into prominence. The tractarian literature of the fourteenth century set forth the rights of man and the principles of common law in opposition to the pretensions of the papacy and the dogmatism of the scholastic systems. Lay writers made themselves heard as pioneers of thought, and a practical outlook upon the mission of the Church was cultivated. With unexampled audacity Dante assailed the lives of popes, putting some of St. Peter’s successors into the lowest rooms of hell.

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

  germ of his doctrinal system is contained in his great confession that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God.765 A short creed indeed, with only one article, but a fundamental and all-comprehensive article, the corner-stone of the Christian church. His system, therefore, is Christological, and supplements the anthropological type of James. His addresses in the Acts and his Epistles are full of the fresh impressions which the personal intercourse with Christ made upon his noble, enthusiastic, and impulsive nature. Christianity is the fulfilment of all the Messianic prophecies; but it is at the same time itself a prophecy of the glorious return of the Lord. This future glorious manifestation is so certain that it is already anticipated here in blessed joy by a lively hope which stimulates to a holy life of preparation for the end. Hence, Peter eminently deserves to be called "the Apostle of hope."766 I. Peter began his testimony with the announcement of the historical facts of the resurrection of Jesus and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and represents these facts as the divine seal of his Messiahship, according to the prophets of old, who bear witness to him that through his name every one that believes shall receive remission of sins. The same Jesus whom God raised from the dead and exalted to his right hand as Lord and Saviour, will come again to judge his people and to bring in seasons of refreshing from his presence and the apokatastasis or restitution of all things to their normal and perfect state, thus completely fulfilling the Messianic prophecies. There is no salvation out of the Lord Jesus Christ. The condition of this salvation is the acknowledgment of his Messiahship and the change of mind and conduct from the service of sin to holiness.767 These views are so simple, primitive, and appropriate that we cannot conceive how Peter could have preached differently and more effectively in that early stage of Christianity. We need not wonder at the conversion of three thousand souls in consequence of his, pentecostal sermon. His knowledge gradually widened and deepened with the expansion of Christianity and the conversion of Cornelius. A special revelation enlightened him on the question of circumcision and brought him to the conviction that "in every nation he that fears God and works righteousness, is acceptable to him," and that Jews and Gentiles are saved alike by the grace of Christ through faith, without the unbearable yoke of the ceremonial law.768 II. The Epistles of Peter represent this riper stage of knowledge. They agree substantially with the teaching of Paul. The leading idea is the same as that presented in his addresses in the Acts: Christ the fulfiller of the Messianic prophecies, and the hope of the Christian. Peter’s christology is free of all speculative elements, and simply derived from the impression of the historical and risen Jesus.