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 Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  pyramid of status groups: Christians from the New World at the top, then West Africans liberated locally (the two groups together became known as the Krio) and finally the indigenous population, who, like the inhabitants of Canaan three millennia before, had not been given any say in God’s territorial gift to these new Children of Israel. It was an unhealthy imbalance in which the seeds of modern troubles were sown for Sierra Leone; the later American initiative in founding an entirely independent West African state of Liberia (from 1822) suffered from the same problem. Sierra Leone did not make money for its proprietors, but it did survive, a rich source of African Christian leadership for all West Africa, from the many Protestant denominations it hosted. Its Krio language, a creative development of English, soon served as a lingua franca throughout the region.21 The colony was also an interesting sign to imperial strategists that European African colonial possessions might usefully extend beyond scattered coastal outposts. From 1808 Sierra Leone was a Crown Colony, base for a remarkable practical extension of the Parliamentary Act abolishing the slave trade, a British naval squadron which intercepted slave ships and freed their captives. The British government was not unaware that this was a useful part of the war effort against the commerce of the Napoleonic Empire, but the work did not stop with Napoleon’s defeat. The navy now combined a moral campaign with the steady extension of British influence. Evangelicals had produced this result, and their continuing agitation sustained British commitment – which, perhaps surprisingly, extended to the British government bringing pressure to bear on Pope Gregory XVI: an Apostolic Letter in 1839 echoed the recent British condemnation of the slave trade.22 Out of this moral crusade emerged the potent idea that the British Crown was a partner with its subjects in the worldwide enterprise of spreading Christian civilization – a theme as useful to imperial subjects as to imperial government.23 A PROTESTANT WORLD MISSION: OCEANIA AND AUSTRALASIA Rather separate from the abolitionist campaign, although likewise led by anglophone Evangelicals, was a sudden upwelling of commitment to worldwide mission. The Moravians had provided the precedent, while doing nothing to challenge slavery (see pp. 746–7); now a similar missionary fervour seized all the mainstream British Protestant Churches. The coincidental rapidity of the first moves is remarkable. Even a catalogue of dates and institutions provokes astonishment – the energetic (not to say driven) Rev. Thomas Coke appointed by the Wesleyan Conference in 1790 as general supervisor of Methodist world

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  was prominent. A highly influential book, Seven Treatises called the practice of Christianity, by one of East Anglia’s principal Puritan ministers, Richard Rogers, was published in 1603; by the time the Massachusetts venture was launched, it had gone through eight editions. One of its highlights was a description of how, twenty years before, Rogers had made a solemn agreement — covenanted — with those of his people in his Essex parish of Wethersfield who were prepared to separate out from the temptations of the world. Their covenant had endured ever since. This was a potent image, and the communities set up in New England were prompt to covenant for their future.8 They were a chosen people, making a treaty with God and with each other. Other words besides ‘covenant’ also inspired people as they leafed through their Bibles in meditation on the cramped and stinking ships of the Atlantic voyage or amid the deep snow of a New England winter. They found themselves in a wilderness, like the Children of Israel, but was this any worse a wilderness than the Church of England under Laud’s leadership? Might they rather be re-entering an Edenic garden, as their home communities had once been, to tend and bring to order and peace? So they named their new settlements Boston, Dedham, Ipswich, Braintree, to begin cultivating and replicating these gardens of godly England which they had lost to the weeds and pollution of Charles I’s religion. Although the New England settlers made their commonwealth much less like Old England than Virginia was intended to be, it is important to re-emphasize that the vast majority were not separatists but Puritans. They wanted a truer form of the established Church, which somehow (perhaps uncomfortably and untidily, like Rogers’s Wethersfield) would also have the characteristics of a Church of the elect. The New England venture was more than wilderness or garden: it was (in the words of Governor Winthrop as his party prepared to sail out from Southampton) ‘a city upon a hill’. This quotation from Matthew 5.14 has become a famous phrase in American self-identity, but Winthrop did not intend to confer a special destiny on the new colony. He meant that like every other venture of the godly, and as in the quotation’s context in Matthew’s Gospel, Massachusetts was to be visible for all the world to learn from it. At such a moment of crisis, with England’s Protestant Church in disarray, those leaving Southampton should be conscious that the eyes of many in England, and perhaps as far away as Transylvania, were upon them.9 The form assumed by the Church of Massachusetts was therefore the paradox of an established Reformed Church with an all-embracing system of parishes like England, but run by local assemblies of the self-selected godly — a form of Church government which was ‘Congregational’, a Latin-derived word first given currency by John Cotton, one of the Church’s early ministers. The early

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  These eventually made spectacular breaches in the earlier barriers to evangelization of the enslaved, and fostered an African-American Christian culture which expresses itself in the fervency of extrovert Evangelical Protestantism rather than in the cooler tones of Anglicanism. Why did the Awakenings succeed so mightily with enslaved Africans where the Anglicans failed? Central to the answer must be the Evangelical demand for a personal choice: that gave dignity to people who had never been offered a choice in their lives, just as the confraternities and saints’ devotion of the Catholic Church provided the opportunity to make religious choices (see pp. 712–14). Related was Methodism’s insistence on complete personal transformation or regeneration, an attractive theme in lives which offered little other hope of dramatic change. Moravians brought song and uninhibited celebration of God’s blood and wounds to people who knew much of both. Moravians also insisted that God was pleased by cheerfulness, a congenial thought in a culture which remembered better than Europeans how to celebrate. And at the centre was the library of books which was the Bible, in which readers could suddenly find themselves walking into a particular book and recognizing their own life. Where Catholic enslaved peoples in the Caribbean or Iberian America had saints, Protestant American enslaved people had texts which gave them stories and songs. They sang about the biblical stories which made them laugh and cry, in some of the most compelling vocal music ever created by Christians, ‘Negro Spirituals’: a fusion of the Evangelical hymn tradition of the Awakenings with celebratory rhythms and repetitions remembered from days of African freedom. What might the Bible-readers choose? For people made slaves, the Bible contained the experience of Israel’s exile and desolation, in the prophets and psalms. A captive people escaped and entered a promised land (and the deliverer Moses, like St Patrick, brooked no nonsense from snakes). The Saviour was a poor man, whipped and executed, who died for all and rose again. There were thrones for the downtrodden people at the end of time. In other words, there was justice. It was irrelevant that many of these themes had inspired the English to cross the Atlantic a century before, only to become the colonial people who oppressed the African-American; this was a discovery anew, forged painfully out of the acquisition of literacy by a minority of privileged or freed people. How could they not accept such a vulnerable, all-powerful Saviour? They sang of him: Poor little Jesus boy Made him to be born in a manger

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  imitation, but it also represents an optimistic pole of the Christian spectrum of beliefs in human worth, potential and capacity, because if Jesus had a whole human nature, it must by definition be good, and logically all human nature began by being good, whatever its subsequent corruptions. This was a contrast with the savage pessimism that has often emerged from Latin Western Christianity, following Augustine of Hippo’s emphasis on original sin (see pp. 306–9). That outlook continued to illuminate the theology of the Church of the East. It was unimpressed and uninhibited by the condemnations which such teachings had received in the imperial Church around 400, and equally unimpressed by the imperial Church’s later condemnation of the monk and spiritual writer Evagrius Ponticus (see pp. 209–10). Much of Evagrius’s work is now preserved only in Syriac translation, the Greek originals having been deliberately destroyed.46 Isaac, a seventh-century monk from Qatar who briefly held the resonant title Bishop of Nineveh, took up the notion which Evagrius had derived from the writings of that audacious Alexandrian Origen that in the end all will be saved. He saw divine love even in the fire of Hell, which prepared humanity for a future ecstasy: out of it the wealth of His love and power and wisdom will become known all the more – and so will the insistent might of the waves of His goodness. It is not [the way of] the compassionate Maker to create rational beings in order to deliver them over mercilessly to unending affliction … for things of which He knew even before they were fashioned.47 In the writings of Isaac’s successor in the eighth century, the monk John of Dalyatha, the Syriac emphasis on bodily penance was pressed to an extreme as forming a road back to the original purity of human nature. John proclaimed that through humility and contemplation (especially while prostrate), a monk could unite his purged nature not simply with all creation, but also with his creator, to achieve a vision of the glory of God himself: ‘in the same way that fire shows its operation to the eyes, so God shows his glory to rational beings who are pure’. John went so far as to deny that a layperson could experience the mystical union with God which resulted from such self-purging: ‘Christ cannot live with the world … but always, he comes to the soul’s home and visits her to live in her, if she is empty of all that is of the world.’ As so often in the history of Christianity, when mystics try to explain their experience of transcendence, the results are not just difficult for those beyond to understand, but seem to overstep the mark between creator and created. John’s teachings were condemned by a synod of the Church of the East soon after his death, but they continued to hold a fascination for mystics, and much of what he said would be echoed in later

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  in The Descent of Man: all the races agree in so many unimportant details of structure and in so many mental peculiarities, that these can be accounted for only through inheritance from a common progenitor; and a progenitor thus characterized would probably have deserved to rank as man.93 There has been no intellectually serious scientific challenge to Darwin’s general propositions since his time. The modern conservative Christian (and Islamic) fashion for Creationism is no more than a set of circular logical arguments, and Creationist ‘science’ has been unique among modern aspirations to scientific systems in producing no original discoveries at all. From the 1860s, the idea of evolution gained wide acceptance among the educated public of the Western world, which was still overwhelmingly Christian in outlook and belief. Darwinian theory fitted the Hegelian scheme of an evolutionary universe, and far from seeming unremittingly bleak, it chimed in with the optimism about the possibility of human progress which was widespread in the vigorous and expansive society of the industrial revolutions. Many Protestant theologians began constructing a new natural theology which saw evolution as a gradual unfolding of God’s providential plan (see Plates 42 and 43). James McCosh, an Ulsterman appointed president of that powerhouse of Reformed Protestantism, Princeton University, in 1868, did not allow his enthusiasm for the revivalist movements of Ulster and America to chill his friendly reception of Darwin’s work.94 Equally, by the end of the nineteenth century, the Anglican Communion was headed by an Archbishop of Canterbury, Frederick Temple, who in earlier years had presented a series of lectures in Oxford on the relation between religion and science which depended on the assumption that evolution was basic truth.95 More fundamentally challenging to the authority of the Christian Churches than the discoveries of nineteenth-century science was the reassessment of the Christian Bible, which now spread beyond the various scepticisms of earlier radical Christianity and the Enlightenment into the mainstream of the Western Church. French Maurist monks and French Huguenots between them had provided the scholarly tools in the seventeenth century when they edited medieval and ancient texts with scrupulous concern for forgery and contextual dating. German biblical scholars followed them with increasing tenacity over the next hundred years, and the impulse to stand back from the Bible and scrutinize it afresh was much encouraged by Hegel’s evolutionary approach to human affairs. Since Hegel saw the Christian God as an image of Absolute Spirit, the stories about God in the Bible must also be images of greater truths which lay behind them. The biblical narratives could be described as myths, and that put

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Ed White had been a West Point graduate, a devoted husband and father, and a committed patriot. He didn’t screw around with muscle cars or other women. Which was to say he was just like Frank. After eighteen months investigating the fire, testifying before Congress, and working on the Apollo command module redesign, Borman was offered the chance to be the commander of Apollo 8, man’s first lunar mission. The flight was full of risks and unknowns, but it was where Borman had been pointing since he first soloed a single-engine airplane over the skies of Tucson. He hadn’t known how that flight would end, either, but his instructor, Miss Bobbie, had believed he could go anywhere. Now, when he told Deke Slayton he would go to the Moon, he believed it, too. Chapter Six [image file=Image00007.jpg] JUST FOUR MONTHSAstronauts scheduled to fly to the Moon in just four months should have been training in NASA’s command module simulator, a ground-based model of the real thing. But, like most everything else connected to Apollo 8’s new mission, it wasn’t yet ready. Borman, Lovell, and Anders settled on what their responsibilities would be for the mission, each according to his own experience and to his role on the flight. Borman would focus on the boosters and abort systems, the trajectory, and piloting the spacecraft. As commander, he would also be in charge during the flight, overseeing the crew and assuming responsibility for mission success. Lovell would be the command module pilot, in charge of navigation. He would use the spacecraft’s sextant, an optical instrument similar to those used on board sailing ships through the centuries, to measure angles between the Sun, Moon, and stars. (Primary navigation would be done by computers and Mission Control personnel, but Lovell needed to navigate, too, in case of technical failure on the ground or a complete loss of communications.) He would also map lunar landmarks and scout candidate areas for future landings. To learn the new guidance system, Lovell needed to spend time at MIT’s Draper Lab, where he would practice sighting stars by focusing on the bright white light coming from atop a tall insurance building across the Charles River. Anders would be the systems engineer, responsible for understanding how the highly complex spacecraft functioned. He had to master every switch, dial, lever, and gauge in the command module, where the astronauts would live for six days. He needed to have a thorough understanding of the service module attached to its base, which housed the systems for electric power and life support, and propellants essential to making the journey. There were thousands of intricate parts and connections and operations, and Anders had to make sure they all worked. He would also be in charge of photography, chronicling the flight on still and movie film. To this end, Anders fought to bring a 250 millimeter Zeiss Sonnar telephoto lens aboard. It was giant and heavy, but he had a feeling he’d need it.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  monotheists of whatever views taking shelter in his colony. He also tried to maintain friendly relations with Native Americans. Soon Pennsylvania came to have a rich mix not simply of English Protestants, but also Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, Lutherans and the descendants of radical Reformation groups of mainland Europe who were fleeing from Roman Catholic intolerance in central Europe (see p. 647). Among the latter, the Old Order Amish from Switzerland have done their best ever since to freeze their communal way of life as it was when they first arrived in the early eighteenth century.28 All this diversity proved destructive for Penn’s original vision of a community run according to the ideals of the Friends. Under pressure from the English government, Pennsylvania’s assembly even disenfranchised Catholics, Jews and non-believers in 1705.29 Soon good relations with the native population were also badly compromised. Pennsylvania nevertheless fostered a consistent hatred of slavery among Friends, a development of great future significance for all Christians (see p. 869). It set another notable example: no one religious group could automatically claim exclusive status, unlike nearly all other colonies where a particular Church continued to claim official advantages even if it was a minority. This was the first colony to evolve the characteristic pattern of religion of the modern United States of America: a pattern of religious denominations, none claiming the exclusive status of Church, but making up slices in a Protestant ‘cake’ which together adds up to a Church. Anglicanism did manage to strengthen its position in the southern English American colonies after Charles II’s restoration (even in cosmopolitan New York), gaining established status in six out of the eventual thirteen. However, the origins of so many colonies in religious protest against the Church of England back home guaranteed that Anglicanism would never fully replicate its full English privileges in North America. Established churches might have been able to resist the growing pluralism better if they had more effectively set up their structures of government, but virtually everywhere except Massachusetts, the colonies suffered a shortage of clergy in the first formative century, and lay leaders of local religion were generally less inclined to take an exclusive view of what true religion might be than professionally trained clerics. In this they were aided by a strong consideration swaying many promoters of colonies: religious coercion discouraged settlement and was therefore economically bad for struggling colonial ventures. Reformation Europe had known religious toleration; now religious liberty was developing. Toleration is a grudging concession granted by one body from a position of strength; liberty provides a situation in which all religious groups compete on an equal basis. We have already seen precedents:

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  After dinner one night, he walked her to a jewelry store, where they admired a selection of engagement rings. “Do you like that one?” Lovell asked. “Do you want me to have one of those?” she replied. “After seven years, I don’t want anything else,” he said. Lovell tore into his final year at Annapolis. Only fifty in the class of nearly eight hundred would be assigned to flight school right away, and finishing strong depended in part on the quality of one’s senior thesis. Most played it safe, writing on naval history or tactics, but Lovell took a leap into the theoretical. Working long into the nights, and with Marilyn as his typist, he put together a study of the development of the liquid-fuel rocket engine, a paper that didn’t just analyze the state of the art but made predictions that sounded more Jules Verne than midshipman. “The big day for rockets is still coming,” he wrote, “the day when science will have advanced to the stage when flight into space is reality and not a dream. That will be the day when the advantage of rocket power—simplicity, high thrust, and the ability to operate in a vacuum—will be used to best advantage.” Even in 1952, talking about combustion in a vacuum could seem ridiculous to the uninformed. But Lovell’s vision never wavered. When the paper came back it was marked A minus. Lovell graduated at the top of the class on June 6, 1952. Later that day, he and Marilyn were married at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church in Annapolis. As he’d long hoped, Lovell was chosen to attend the Navy’s flight training program. He returned to Pensacola, this time as an officer (ensign), not a midshipman. A year after they arrived, Marilyn gave birth to the couple’s first child, Barbara. Two months later, in February 1954, Lovell earned his wings and was ordered to the Naval Air Station at Moffett Field in California, a few miles from Palo Alto. He was assigned to VC-3, a squadron that supplied fighter pilots trained in night operations to aircraft carriers in the Pacific. Few assignments tightened a flier’s throat like landing a jet on a darkened deck just a few hundred yards long in the dead of night—a tiny moving runway on roiling seas. Small errors could become deadly mistakes. One moonless night in early 1955, after launching from the deck of the USS Shangri-La in an F2H Banshee jet fighter off the coast of Japan, Lovell embarked on his first combat exercise over foreign waters. Bad weather had prevented takeoff for the last of the four fliers in Lovell’s patrol. The jets that had already launched were ordered to circle the ship until they burned down their fuel, then land. Cloud cover forced the Banshees to stay just 1,500 feet above the choppy seas. Lovell banked to join his teammates in formation, but when he reached the rendezvous point he was alone.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Anders, who believed he’d never be given the chance to walk on the Moon, accepted a job at the National Aeronautics and Space Council, in Washington, D.C., a body chaired by the vice president of the United States and devoted to establishing the country’s space policy. (Anders took the job on one condition: that he retain his astronaut status in case a miracle occurred and Deke Slayton gave him a walk on the Moon.) Lovell had been advanced in the cycle to command Apollo 13. For his part, Borman had become a special adviser to Eastern Airlines. Following a successful landing mission by Apollo 12 in November 1969, Apollo 13 launched, with Lovell as its commander, on April 11, 1970. That flight, however, never made it to the lunar surface. Near the Moon, an oxygen tank exploded, severely damaging the service module and disabling the command module’s power and oxygen supply. Two hundred thousand miles from Earth, and unable to safely fire the SPS engine, Lovell and his crewmates, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise, were in grave danger of being stranded in space forever. Tapping wells of ingenuity, creativity, and courage, Mission Control and the crew cobbled together a solution. They would use the lunar module for electrical power and thrust, repurposing it to keep themselves alive and to regain a free-return trajectory that would whip them around the Moon and return them to Earth. The world prayed for the astronauts as they sped home in their freezing spacecraft, while Lovell used the experience he gained from restoring Apollo 8’s disrupted orientation during its own return to nurse the disabled Apollo 13 back to Earth. No one knew whether the command module’s heat shield had been too severely damaged by the explosion to survive reentry. In the end, Apollo 13 made it back safely, one of the great rescues in history. No one at NASA, least of all Lovell, failed to recognize that the crew had been saved by the lunar module’s secondary role as a lifeboat. It was this lack of a lifeboat that had haunted so many who’d feared flying Apollo 8 to the Moon. If the explosion aboard Apollo 13 had occurred during Apollo 8, Borman, Lovell, and Anders would never have come home. Five days after Apollo 13’s return, the first Earth Day observance was held, a series of demonstrations, celebrations, and rallies to protect the environment. Apollo 8’s Earthrise photo was used as the movement’s symbol. Some suggested it was Apollo 8 itself—man’s first look at his home planet, and at its thin, fragile atmosphere—that launched the environmental movement. NASA made four more manned trips to the Moon after Apollo 13, all of which successfully landed crews on the surface. Collectively, the astronauts on the Apollo missions returned almost 842 pounds of lunar soil and rock, samples that continue to form the bedrock upon which our understanding of the solar system’s origins is based.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Though the mission would be rushed, it seemed to her like an opportunity. She couldn’t escape the feeling that America was in very bad shape. She’d seen the endless television coverage of race riots, Vietnam protests, and assassinations, and asked herself, Where is our turning point? Where are we going to find hope? As a stay-at-home mom with no help, Valerie was busy from morning to night, taking care of her five children, mowing the lawn, trying to make ends meet on her husband’s military salary—she had little time to figure out how to save America. But she knew that the chance for Apollo 8 to rise to a near-impossible challenge could be a positive statement in the country’s crushingly negative year. Not long after Bill began training for Apollo 8, Valerie ran into George Low at a social event. They didn’t speak of the new mission, but Valerie could see in Low’s eyes that he had reservations about Apollo 8, that he’d contemplated what a huge step this was for NASA, that he knew how much could go wrong. She felt for him. What a difficult position he must be in, she thought, to be responsible for all this . As the launch date for Apollo 8 grew nearer, Anders had even less than the usual eleven minutes per week to give to each of his children. On one rare day off, he woke his family early and took them to water-ski behind the tiny boat he owned, one with a 40-horsepower motor. In a few weeks, he would be riding an engine 4 million times more powerful than that, but for now, it was all the power he needed, enough to last for an entire day. Chapter Ten [image file=Image00007.jpg] HOW’S FIFTY-FIFTY?Thanksgiving was just three days away, and less than four weeks remained until the scheduled launch of Apollo 8. While most Americans got ready to celebrate the holiday, Borman, Lovell, and Anders were hard at work with the SimSup. The focus during these pre-Thanksgiving sessions would be on two key aspects of the flight. The first, Lunar Orbit Insertion (LOI), would come when the spacecraft arrived at the Moon and fired its Service Propulsion System (SPS) engine in order to slow down enough to be captured by lunar gravity and go into orbit around the Moon. The second, Trans Earth Injection (TEI), would come when the spacecraft fired that same engine to pick up enough speed to leave lunar orbit and head back to Earth. Both of these critical maneuvers would occur around the far side of the Moon, completely out of touch with the engineers on Earth who might catch any equipment malfunctions or slip-ups by the crew. More than almost anything else, it was TEI that worried the astronauts, controllers, engineers, and NASA officials.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Jerusalem, although the first of a series of prophets known as Isaiah is contradictory on this, both condemning the Temple and its sacrificial routine, and also finding an intense spiritual experience of Yahweh amid its ceremonies.25 Such inconsistency is less important than the common feature of such prophecy: rather than attacking individuals, it indicts all society. Previous prophets, especially those at the royal Court, had been employed to curse foreigners and invoke peace for the nation. The eighth-century prophets had scant message of peace for Israel. If any consolation could be offered, it was in the survival of no more than a few. So the first Isaiah, against the dire background of Assyrian attacks on Judah in the later eighth century, imitated Elijah by enacting prophecy in a name and called his child Shear-jashub, ‘A remnant shall return’.26 By all the rules of ancient statecraft, the fact of external threat and eventual conquest should have erased Israel’s national identity and religion, as sooner or later it repeatedly erased every other national identity created by a state structure in the Middle East. Uniquely in Israel, this was not the case. The nation’s commitment to Yahweh, probably forged out of very miscellaneous materials, survived the destruction first of the northern kingdom and then finally, in 586 BCE, of the southern kingdom as well. This achievement owed much to the insights of the prophets of Judah and Israel. Either through their individual genius or through divine revelation, the eighth-century prophets understood the international situation, with its constant threats of annihilation by Assyrian military might, and perceived that the only thing which could save their people from long-term annihilation was that obedience to Yahweh for which Elijah and his fellow prophets had fought in the previous century. And Yahweh was powerful enough to decide the course of history – occasionally these prophets were prepared to proclaim that he was lord of universal history and of nations beyond their own. It was an astonishing claim for this people who were apparently helpless before the great empires of their day: … many peoples shall come, and say: ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD [Yahweh], to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths’. For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide for many peoples;

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  After all, didn’t they know what it was like to be oppressed? Sometimes we’d pass Black women on Eighth Street— the invisible but visible sisters— or in the Bag or at Laurel’s, and our glances might cross, but we never looked into each other’s eyes. We acknowledged our kinship by passing in silence, looking the other way. Still, we were always on the lookout, Flee and I, for that telltale flick of the eye, that certain otherwise prohibited openness of expression, that definiteness of voice which would suggest, I think she’s gay. After all, doesn’t it take one to know one ? I was gay and Black. The latter fact was irrevocable: armor, mantle, and wall. Often, when I had the bad taste to bring that fact up in a conversation with other gay-girls who were not Black, I would get the feeling that I had in some way breached some sacred bond of gayness, a bond which I always knew was not sufficient for me. This was not to deny the closeness of our group, nor the mutual aid of those insane, glorious, and contradictory years. It is only to say that I was acutely conscious—from the ID “problem” at the Bag on Friday nights to the summer days at Gay Head Beach where I was the only one who wouldn’t worry about burning—that my relationship as a Black woman to our shared lives was different from theirs, and would be, gay or straight. The question of acceptance had a different weight for me. In a paradoxical sense, once I accepted my position as different from the larger society as well as from any single sub-society—Black or gay—I felt I didn’t have to try so hard. To be accepted. To look femme. To be straight. To look straight. To be proper. To look “nice.” To be liked. To be loved. To be approved. What I didn’t realize was how much harder I had to try merely to stay alive, or rather, to stay human. How much stronger a person I became in that trying. But in this plastic, anti-human society in which we live, there have never been too many people buying fat Black girls born almost blind and ambidextrous, gay or straight. Unattractive, too, or so the ads in Ebony and Jet seemed to tell me. Yet I read them anyway, in the bathroom, on the newsstand, at my sister’s house, whenever I got a chance. It was a furtive reading, but it was an affirmation of some part of me, however frustrating. If nobody’s going to dig you too tough anyway, it really doesn’t matter so much what you dare to explore.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  When the chance came in 1789 to change the world, many looked to a future where love would dissolve traditional corruption and constraints on human potential. Events did not quite turn out that way. The reason why is hinted at in the expansive paradox contained in Rousseau’s doctrine of a ‘General Will’, the consent of the generality of society, whose urge to seek equality is irresistible and the embodiment of right: ‘whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing other than that he shall be forced to be free … for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to the nation, secures him against all personal dependence’.66 Rousseau’s own personal life had already suggested the shortcomings of his love ethic: he consigned his five children to a foundling hospital, and his visit to Britain to stay with David Hume turned into a saga of exploitation of Hume’s hospitality and friendship, which in turn provoked an unwonted deviousness in that normally serene philosopher.67 Alongside the gleeful and publicity-seeking assaults on the Church and Christianity from philosophes came a more profound challenge from an academic far to the north in the University of Königsberg, Immanuel Kant. He was a total contrast to Rousseau: no whiff of scandal came out of a very private single life, and no open deviation from the Lutheran Pietism of his parents. Yet he shaped the way that the West did its thinking through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the effect of his work was to reduce still further the place that a historical Christian faith and its institutions might have in the concerns of Western culture. It was he who in a short essay of 1784 gave the most celebrated answer to a question about this new movement posed by one of his Berlin contemporaries, ‘What is Enlightenment?’: ‘Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity’.68 Determined to use the mechanist method of Newton to rebuild philosophy, analysing observed phenomena in order to create clarity of definition, Kant argued like Descartes from the existence of individual consciousness rather than from the givenness of a God found in revelation. He developed the questions about human consciousness posed by David Hume; he denied that it was possible to prove the existence of the self even by Descartes’ formulation ‘I think, therefore I am.’ He could say that the mind orders everything which it experiences, and that somehow it has a set of rules by which it can judge those experiences. These rules enable the mind to order the information which it receives about space and time within the universe. Yet the rules themselves come before any experience of space and time, and it is impossible to prove that these rules are true. All that can be said is that they are absolutely necessary to ordering what we perceive and giving it a quality we can label objectivity.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  As launch neared, Susan hosted a cocktail party, with many NASA folks in attendance. During a quiet moment, she pulled Chris Kraft aside. “Chris, I’d really appreciate it if you’d level with me,” Susan said. “I really, really want to know what you think their chances are.” “You really mean that, don’t you?” Kraft asked. “Yes. And you know I do. I really want to know.” Kraft respected Susan. He thought she deserved an honest answer, and he did not want to sugarcoat things for her. Often, during meetings about Apollo 8, George Mueller had pushed a piece of paper in front of Kraft and other senior NASA managers and asked them to estimate the probability of success at each phase of the flight; doing that would then yield the chances of success for the total mission. Kraft had been amazed to find his estimate to be within 1 percent of George Low’s, and it’s the one he gave Susan as she looked him in the eye with her question. “How’s fifty-fifty?” he said. To Kraft, that seemed a hopeful number, given that the crew would be accomplishing so many new things at once: the first to fly the Saturn V, the first to journey to the Moon, and the first to confront the other myriad new challenges involved. In fact, Kraft had misunderstood Susan’s question. He thought she was asking about the odds of a successful mission, in which its objectives were met and the spacecraft and systems performed as designed. He and Low had figured those odds to be about 56 percent. If he’d understood that Susan was asking about the crew’s chances of surviving the mission, he would have placed the odds higher. And yet Susan, who believed her husband had no chance of coming home alive, was happy with a fifty-fifty shot that Frank would live. “Good,” she told Kraft, “that suits me fine.” That night, when Susan talked to Frank, she told him the cocktail party had been lovely. — In the first days of December, a new issue of Time magazine hit the

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Rasputin’s murder did not remedy the dire situation. ‘Parastatal’ organizations – local councils, representatives of business, the Red Cross – had been increasingly filling the gap left by the government’s maladministration, and it was a combination of their leadership and the terrible toll of death in the war which finally forced abdication on the Tsar in March 1917; a Provisional Government followed.10 For the Orthodox Church, it was a moment of opportunity. It is a tribute to the renewal and reflection that had been going on in the Church over the previous decades, as part of Russia’s development of grass- roots representative institutions, that Church leaders now acted so swiftly and with such vision. By August a council of bishops, clergy and lay-people had gathered in Moscow to make decisions for the whole Church, something unprecedented in Russia’s history. They elected the first patriarch for two centuries, since Peter the Great had brought an end to the patriarchate. Tikhon Bellavin was a bishop who had spent nine years in the United States, where he had been responsible for the setting up of institutional structures for the Orthodox Church; many of his proposals might now be brought back to this newly representative Church in Russia. A swathe of reforming measures was agreed: laywomen were accorded unprecedented opportunities in the Church’s activity and administration, and the council even gave time to sending messages of friendship to the Church of England.11 Yet as Patriarch Tikhon was elected, in the background was the sound of gunfire and bombardment: the Kremlin was under attack from Bolshevik socialists. The Provisional Government in St Petersburg (now Russified as Petrograd) had made no great effort to end the war, and popular disillusion with its rule gave the Bolsheviks their chance to seize power in October. They made peace with the central European emperors to consolidate their own power against a broad coalition of opposition. The Bolsheviks were not fighting tsarist autocracy: that had already been dismantled. They saw themselves as instituting a new world order, and such visions are rarely conducive to tolerance of the past, or indeed of any contrary opinion. Their attitude was summed up in the words of Boris Pilnyak, a Russian novelist who, like so many other idealists of the Bolshevik Revolution, was eventually executed by those who turned the revolution into Stalin’s Russia: Our Revolution is a rebellion in the name of the conscious, rational, purposeful and dynamic principle of life, against the elemental, senseless biological automism of life: that is, against the peasant roots of our old Russian history, against its aimlessness, its non-technological character, against the holy and idiotic philosophy of Tolstoy’s Karataev in War and Peace.12 For the Bolsheviks, the Church was the embodiment of the society which they

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  “I really, really want to know what you think their chances are.” “You really mean that, don’t you?” Kraft asked. “Yes. And you know I do. I really want to know.” Kraft respected Susan. He thought she deserved an honest answer, and he did not want to sugarcoat things for her. Often, during meetings about Apollo 8, George Mueller had pushed a piece of paper in front of Kraft and other senior NASA managers and asked them to estimate the probability of success at each phase of the flight; doing that would then yield the chances of success for the total mission. Kraft had been amazed to find his estimate to be within 1 percent of George Low’s, and it’s the one he gave Susan as she looked him in the eye with her question. “How’s fifty-fifty?” he said. To Kraft, that seemed a hopeful number, given that the crew would be accomplishing so many new things at once: the first to fly the Saturn V, the first to journey to the Moon, and the first to confront the other myriad new challenges involved. In fact, Kraft had misunderstood Susan’s question. He thought she was asking about the odds of a successful mission, in which its objectives were met and the spacecraft and systems performed as designed. He and Low had figured those odds to be about 56 percent. If he’d understood that Susan was asking about the crew’s chances of surviving the mission, he would have placed the odds higher. And yet Susan, who believed her husband had no chance of coming home alive, was happy with a fifty-fifty shot that Frank would live. “Good,” she told Kraft, “that suits me fine.” That night, when Susan talked to Frank, she told him the cocktail party had been lovely. —In the first days of December, a new issue of Time magazine hit the newsstands. The cover image, set against a brilliant blue sky, showed two space travelers, one American, the other Soviet, sprinting toward the cratered lunar surface. Four words appeared on the cover: RACE FOR THE MOON . The story inside summarized NASA’s plans to send Apollo 8 to the Moon and the Soviets’ push to send Zond 7 before the Americans could launch. Even at this late date, with just days remaining until the Soviet launch window opened on December 8, the race was too close to call. In Moscow, the Soviets appeared to be celebrating early. Already, they had named a seventy-mile-wide crater on the far side of the Moon, photographed by Zond 6, in honor of two Soviet scientist brothers. In Florida, Anders was doing some naming of his own. Working from photos taken by unmanned spacecraft, he began assigning names to several of the most interesting and prominent craters never before seen by human eyes, ones he expected to see during his flight. Whether the International Astronomical Union would accept those designations once the crew had actually seen the craters remained to be determined.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  message of the conference into more permanent conversations. Charles Brent was a missionary bishop in the then American-ruled Philippines: he proposed a series of discussions and conferences which would consider issues of ‘Faith and Order’ – that is, what the Church believed and how it structured itself. This would help to clarify its mission in new settings, but it would have the potential to produce a coherent reaction to all that the Enlightenment had meant for Christian self-understanding, for good or ill, and such conclusions might reveal new ways of healing ancient wounds within Christianity. The Swedish Lutheran Primate, Archbishop Nathan Söderblom, concentrated on the other challenge facing the Churches in this age of dislocation and anxiety: the exploration of credible guidelines for being a Christian in modern society. Stockholm was the setting for the first conference on ‘Life and Work’ in 1925: another formidable task of organization for the indefatigable Oldham. Notably, a few representatives of Orthodoxy were in attendance, and their numbers grew despite the gulf in understanding which separated them from Protestant or even Anglican views of what constituted the Church.82 These two movements eventually amalgamated in 1948 into the World Council of Churches, which, with its acquisition of an imposing headquarters in Switzerland and a central Secretariat, seemed to be bidding to become the Christian equivalent of the new United Nations, the organization created in 1945 in succession to the discredited League of Nations. Indeed, to an extent seldom remembered until recent years, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which the United Nations proclaimed in 1948 was the product of the same ecumenical liberal Protestant nexus of clerics and laypeople which looked back to the Edinburgh Missionary Conference.83 Simultaneously Anglicanism was asserting its own place in the centre of ecumenical discussions, although the outcomes of its initiatives revealed a variety of drawbacks. From the 1920 Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops, there was heard what has been called ‘probably the most memorable statement of any Lambeth Conference’.84 The bishops seem to have been shocked by the traumatic experience of the war into producing a document rather un-Anglican in its dramatic tone, one of those rare examples of official Church pronouncements which might be called prophetic. It was an Appeal to all Christian People to seek ‘a Church, genuinely Catholic, loyal to all Truth, and gathering into its fellowship all “who profess and call themselves Christians,” within whose visible unity all the treasures of faith and order, bequeathed as a heritage by the past to the present, shall be possessed in common’.85 The problem was how to make any sense of the various responses. Many in the English Free Churches were enthusiastic, but they spent the rest of the century making little headway in the face of a constantly confused Anglican reaction to

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  English Protestants, chiefly Anglicans, were at the forefront of a hard-fought struggle, way in advance of popular opinion, which led eventually to the limited decriminalization of male same-sex activity in 1967. Central to their work was the patient scholarship and advocacy of a canon of Wells Cathedral, Derrick Sherwin Bailey, a genial family man with an enthusiasm for railways which suggested the normal harmless eccentricity of Anglican clergy rather than a dangerous revolutionary spirit. Members of the British establishment beyond the Church’s theological or clerical circles found all this agitation very odd, but were caught sufficiently off guard to allow the change in the law.43 What liberal English Christians were seeking to do was actively to separate the law of the land from Christian moral prescriptions. Many, especially clergy of Anglo- Catholic sympathies, had been disgusted by the debacle caused by the Church’s established status in its attempted Prayer Book revision of 1927–8, and wanted to liberate the Church in its divine mission by disentangling it from official power structures.44 They were acknowledging, even furthering and celebrating, the death of Christendom, with a conviction that beyond it there lay better prospects for Christianity. Behind this optimism, which might now seem quixotic, there echoed texts of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in letters and papers written during his imprisonment before his execution in 1945: not a theological system but a series of fugitive observations about the future of Christianity, conceived in circumstances of dire isolation and in fear of death, with German society collapsing around him. Bonhoeffer anticipated themes of liberation theology such as the suffering God and the transformed Church, but with a different thrust, in seeing humanity as ‘coming of age’: ‘God is teaching us that we must live as men who can get along very well without him … God allows himself to be edged out of the world and on to the cross.’ Bonhoeffer criticized his friend and mentor Karl Barth for ‘a positivist doctrine of revelation which says in effect “take it or leave it”’, but he still offered his own prophecy of hope and affirmation to Christianity cut loose from its practice of religion: ‘The day will come when men will be called again to utter the word of God with such power as will change and renew the world. It will be a new language, which will horrify men, and yet overwhelm them by its power.’45 Bonhoeffer, a prophet of a renewal whose outlines were not clear to him, bequeathed this idealism and anticipation to the theology of the 1960s, with a multitude of effects and fractures to come. One notes that Bonhoeffer and his English translators in the 1950s still unselfconsciously used the language of maleness when describing the future. Part of the coming revolution would render that idiom quaintly old-fashioned, because above all the 1960s in Europe and America witnessed a profound shift

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  exploring Korean tradition and culture. So minjung theologians in recent years have explored the Korean past to find appropriate forms for a fully involved citizenship. They look with interest to the revolutionary Donghak movement, which, in the same era as the Taiping in China, sought to synthesize religion and reform for Korea. They offer people who are in danger of being too proud of their own new success Jesus’s call to principled action, which can be seen as a praxis for Korea: ‘If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me’.25 For at the heart of all these movements was a meditation on the powerlessness of the crucified Christ, and on the paradox that this powerlessness was the basis for resurrection: freedom and transformation. Christian art created in the twentieth century (beyond run-of-the-mill devotional objects) has interestingly shifted away from old priorities: even in Catholic art, the Madonna and Child appear less often, and there is a greater stress on Christ on the Cross. Against the background of power struggles which had laid empires low and ruined so many lives in two world wars and beyond, much Christian experience thus resonated with the themes of crucified weakness and the tiny scale of the mustard seed before it becomes a great tree. Protestants had discovered ecumenism in their relative failures in small villages in India. Catholics discovered liberation theology in small communities of ordinary people in Latin America. They were often facing as dire threats from military power as the Mexican Cristeros before them, and with what little schooling the Church could provide, they turned to the Bible to help them understand their situation. They have come to be described by the inelegant terms (which have not translated well from Iberian languages) ‘basic ecclesiastical communities’ or ‘base groups/communities’. Poor people throughout the global south recognized the experiences of Latin Americans and civil rights marchers in their own. They likewise looked for political liberation, but the historic context in Africa and Asia was very different from that in Latin America. From Dakar to Djakarta, the 1940s and 1950s had witnessed rapid disintegration in the enormous colonial empires built up by European colonial powers in the nineteenth century – Africa’s decolonization was a particular surprise. Although the United States was initially very ready to encourage Europe’s shattered powers to shed their colonies after 1945, no one expected the virtually universal withdrawal which emerged at the end of the 1950s, postponed only by special circumstances in southern Africa. When one young liberal Catholic Belgian academic in 1956 published a work proposing that the Belgian Congo might suitably be given independence on the centenary of its cession to King Leopold in 1885, his book provoked a storm of ridicule and fury in Belgium. In fact the Congo’s independence came four years after its

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  At the Anders home, Valerie scrambled to round up her five children, seating them atop the toy box in the playroom where the family kept their new color TV. Joining them were Bill’s aunt and uncle, several family friends, and the wives of some of the other astronauts (Bill’s parents were at home in San Diego to watch the launch). Valerie tried to stay in the moment, absorbing everything, even the fear, full of hope. Among those watching the countdown from behind a giant window at the Launch Control Center at the Cape was backup crew member Neil Armstrong, who couldn’t get over the moxie NASA had shown in conceiving the mission. The Saturn V had never been flown with men aboard and had suffered profound problems on its second and most recent test. To put a crew on that rocket now, and to point that crew at the Moon, seemed astonishingly aggressive—and wonderful—to him. Just twenty minutes remained until launch. For miles along the Cape, thousands of cars and motorcycles and buses and campers jammed the beaches and roadways, a quarter of a million people standing on hoods or in sand or on one another’s shoulders, craning their necks for a view of the rocket, passing binoculars back and forth, checking their watches every few seconds. An eighty-year-old woman from South Dakota, who’d traveled in her son’s trailer to witness the launch, said, “Those men, what they will do! And I have lived to see it. I am still alive to see it.” “T minus 7 minutes, 30 seconds and counting, still aiming toward our planned lift-off time,” King told a riveted nation. In the morning light, the view from the spacecraft became clearer. For several minutes, Anders watched a mud dauber wasp build a nest on the capsule window. At T minus 5 minutes, the access arm and loading area pulled away from the spacecraft and retracted. At Mission Control in Houston, Chris Kraft stared at a giant color screen that was broadcasting a view of the spacecraft. He had always considered launch to be the riskiest part of manned spaceflight, and that was true even with proven rockets. Now, feeling scared to death, he watched as his agency prepared to catapult three good men from the planet aboard the most powerful machine ever built, despite the fact that this machine had never lifted a living thing, not even a mealworm, off the ground. At T minus 3 minutes, 6 seconds, computers took over full checkout of