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

  instructor, NASA might consider him to be among the best candidates of them all. In March 1961, Borman came to a crossroads. NASA was looking to bring on a second group of astronauts and asked top Navy and Air Force pilots to apply. If he had any interest in going into space, now was the time to strike. Borman didn’t thrill to the idea of riding on rockets or exploring the cosmos or even stepping on the Moon. The instant celebrity conferred on astronauts seemed a distraction to him. And yet only NASA could deliver him onto a new battlefield, where technology and futuristic flying machines could help determine whether democracy or Communism prevailed. With the Cold War growing hotter every day, he could think of no more important place to do his part than on the frontier of space. He talked to Susan. He told her he had a chance to help America, and to make history, but it would require undertaking a new life and unknown risks. Susan answered as she always had: They were a team and she would support him. A short time later, he submitted his application to NASA, joining more than two hundred other highly qualified hopefuls. He endured exams—physical and psychological—and several rounds of cuts as NASA trimmed its list of finalists to about eighty, then to thirty- two. Finally, in the fall of 1962—eighteen months after he first put his name in the hat—Borman became one of the agency’s nine new astronauts, selected from America’s best to go where mankind had only dreamed of going. — NASA introduced its second group of astronauts to the public at the University of Houston on September 17, 1962. Soon to be dubbed the New Nine by the press, they included James Lovell and Neil Armstrong. All nine had been test pilots and had studied aeronautical engineering. All were married and had children. From the moment he stood beside these men, Borman could tell he was among a rare group, talented and competitive beyond any he’d met. The new astronauts became instant celebrities. As with the Original Seven, each received a contract with Life magazine and Field Enterprises

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

  To Anders’s amazement, he was asked to report, along with about a hundred others, to Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, for a physical. There, he was put through a battery of tests, not just physical but psychological. Near the end of the process, only twenty-eight finalists remained. Anders had to appear before the so-called Murder Board, a group of final interviewers that included current astronauts, Chris Kraft, and a doctor. He had little trouble with the questions from the space people. The doctor was another matter. “Well, Captain Anders,” the man said, “your record looks pretty good. But we’re worried about this concussion you had in the past.” Anders had never suffered a concussion. Could the doctor be trying to trip him up? Test him? Or maybe the doctor had another applicant’s records and believed he was interviewing a different candidate. Anders’s mother had taught him never to lie. But she’d also reminded him that he needn’t always blurt out the full truth, either. On the spot, he formulated an answer. “Sir, I’ve never been bothered by a concussion.” “Bothered” was the key word. That was true. On his thirtieth birthday—October 17, 1963—the phone rang in the Anders home. Valerie handed him the receiver. It was Deke Slayton calling with a job offer. Anders never did figure out if the doctors had been looking at the wrong guy’s records. And as Slayton offered him a job, he was much too happy to care. — NASA assigned each of its new astronauts to a specialty. Anders focused on radiation and environmental controls—cabin pressure, temperature, carbon dioxide, and so on. He also focused on potholes. After complaining about the condition of the roads near his new house, the town council named him street commissioner, a job he would hold, concurrent with his job as astronaut, for the next two years. Early in training, Anders gravitated toward two of his fellow new astronauts, Walt Cunningham and Rusty Schweickart. All three men had

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

  were doing liberation theology.18 It was not easy for the Church hierarchy in Latin America to move beyond both a long alliance with elite Creole Catholic culture and a political outlook still generally conservative and authoritarian, but there were enough clerics capable of making a new assessment of the significance of lay militancy in earlier popular Catholicism among the Cristeros and analogous lay movements throughout the continent. That provided the momentum for an episcopal conference called to Medellín in Colombia in 1968, whose participants sought to call the Church ‘to the fulfilment of the redeeming mission to which it is committed by Christ’. Active in the preparation of the bishops’ discussions at Medellín was a Peruvian theologian who combined university teaching with the work of a parish priest in a slum area of the Peruvian capital, Lima, Gustavo Gutiérrez. He later popularized a phrase first used by a further episcopal conference at Puebla in 1979, in the presence of the recently elected Pope John Paul II: a ‘preferential option for the poor’ in the Church’s construction of its mission. This had been foreshadowed in the statements of the Medellín Conference, which had looked forward to a redistribution of world resources which would give ‘preference to the poorest and most needy’.19 In one seminal book, A Theology of Liberation, which had started life as a lecture in Peruvian discussions around Medellín, and in many subsequent works, Gutiérrez employed a phrase for purposeful action guided by theory, praxis. To theologians of classical Catholic training, this word had a ready and negative resonance, because Karl Marx had used it to indicate a philosophy inseparable from action – but that was only half the truth. As the Greek term for structured activity by free men, it was the word embedded in the original Greek title of a book of the New Testament, and of its many subsequent imitators beyond the biblical canon, the Acts of the Apostles. It is notable that in Gutiérrez’s discussion of poverty, he did not look back, as did some liberation theologians, to the history of Christian purposeful poverty since the first monks and hermits of the Church, as an act of solidarity with those who had not chosen to be poor. Having surveyed the biblical discussion of poverty, he simply declared material poverty as a ‘subhuman situation’ and ‘scandalous condition’, and dismissed notions of spiritual poverty as unhelpful diversions.20 While Catholics in Latin America were discovering new meanings for justice and equality for the powerless, Protestants in the United States turned a century of black struggle for equal political rights into an interracial campaign to make a reality of the civil war emancipation of enslaved African-Americans. Even in the worst times when white supremacists distorted the democracy of the Southern States, some white Evangelical Protestants in the South were capable of standing

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska’s genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed. Although no one will ever accuse me of being much of a science student, one thing I learned from science classes is that energy is never created and never destroyed. And if Alaska took her own life, that is the hope I wish I could have given her. Forgetting her mother, failing her mother and her friends and herself—those are awful things, but she did not need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, “Teenagers think they are invincible” with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don’t know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail. So I know she forgives me, just as I forgive her. Thomas Edison’s last words were: “It’s very beautiful over there.” I don’t know where there is, but I believe it’s somewhere, and I hope it’s beautiful. some last words on last words In the years since Looking for Alaska was published, I have learned many last words. Sometimes readers share with me the last words of their family members or friends. (One grandfather told his grandson: “There’s a pot of coffee on,” while dying of a massive heart attack.) And I often hear of new last words from prominent people—Steve Jobs, for instance, said, “Oh wow oh wow oh wow.” My interest in last words began as a child when I learned the final words of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, respectively the second and third presidents of the United States. Adams’s mind turned to his longtime political rival at the end. He said, “Thomas Jefferson still survives.” But in fact, Jefferson had died a few hours earlier on the same day, July 4th, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the American Declaration of Independence.

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

  I asked, since they had stopped talking. “No, dear, just old gossip,” Frieda said, drily. “I see you’re getting to know everybody in town,” Agnes said brightly, sitting forward with a preliminary smile. I looked up to see Frieda frowning at her. “We were just saying how much better Eudora looks these days,” Frieda said, with finality, and changed the subject. “Do you kids want café or helada ?” It bothered me that Frieda sometimes treated me like her peer and confidante, and at other times like Tammy’s contemporary. Later, I walked Frieda and Tammy home, and just before I turned off, Frieda said off-handedly, “Don’t let them razz you about Eudora, she’s a good woman. But she can be trouble.” I pondered her words all the way up to the compound. That spring, McCarthy was censured. The Supreme Court decision on the desegregation of schools was announced in the english newspaper, and for a while all of us seemed to go crazy with hope for another kind of america. Some of the café con leche crowd even talked about going home. SUPREME COURT OF U. S. DECIDES AGAINST SEPARATE EDUCATION FOR NEGROES. I clutched the Saturday paper and read again. It wasn’t even a headline. Just a box on the lower front page. I hurried down the hill towards the compound. It all felt monumental and confusing. The Rosenbergs were dead. But this case which I had only been dimly aware of through the NAACP’s Crisis , could alter the whole racial climate in the states. The supreme court had spoken. For me. It had spoken in the last century, and I had learned its “separate but equal” decision in school. Now something had actually changed, might actually change. Eating ice cream in Washington, D. C. was not the point; kids in the south being able to go to school was. Could there possibly, after all, be some real and fruitful relationship between me and that malevolent force to the north of this place? The court decision in the paper in my hand felt like a private promise, some message of vindication particular to me. Yet everybody in the Plaza this morning had also been talking about it, and the change this could make in american life. For me, walking hurriedly back to my own little house in this land of color and dark people who said negro and meant something beautiful, who noticed me as I moved among them—this decision felt like a promise of some kind that I half-believed in, in spite of myself, a possible validation. Hope. It was not that I expected it to alter radically the nature of my living, but rather that it put me actively into a context that felt like progress, and seemed part and parcel of the wakening that I called Mexico . It was in Mexico that I stopped feeling invisible.

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

  didn’t get upset or ask her husband to reconsider his mission. She thought, as she often did, This is the life we’ve signed up for. In August 1968, Anders told Valerie that he was going to the Moon. 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

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

  in the deceptively farcical Irish-made television sitcom Father Ted, was mixed with real fury. Whether the effects will spread into the rest of the Catholic world remains to be seen.73 FREEDOM: PROSPECTS AND FEARS As John Paul’s capacity to exercise his pontificate was progressively destroyed by Parkinson’s disease, the consequences of his greatest achievement, hastening the collapse of repressive and unrepresentative Communist governments, continued to transform Christian fortunes in Eastern Europe and Russia. A renaissance of life in the Orthodox Churches was first borne along on the massive recovery of morale and self-confidence in the Catholic Church behind the Iron Curtain. During the years in which the will to survive drained away from the self-styled ‘People’s Democracies’, Catholicism had the advantage of looking to the power and international prestige of the Vatican beyond the reach of the Communists. Given the precarious position of the Oecumenical Patriarch, not to mention ongoing tensions between the Phanar and the Moscow Patriarchate, the Orthodox enjoyed no comparable ally. The impact of John Paul II’s first papal visit to Poland was repeated in parallel occasions elsewhere. In Communist-run Czechoslovakia, it is instructive to compare successive celebrations of anniversaries connected with the pioneers of Slav Christianity, Cyril/Constantine and Methodios (see pp. 460–64). The first came in the regimented atmosphere of 1963–4, marking eleven hundred years since the brothers’ arrival in Great Moravia. Carefully organized by the Communist state authorities, it was all very academic and low key, with public exhibitions emphasizing the pair’s role as teachers and cultural ambassadors rather than bringers of Christianity. The second in 1985 commemorated eleven centuries since the death of Methodios, and this time the celebrations were firmly in the hands of the Roman Catholic Church, which presided triumphantly over a concourse of around a quarter of a million of the faithful at Methodios’s tomb-shrine in the former Moravian capital, Velehrad.74 No mass gathering like it had been seen in Czechoslovakia since the aborted hopes of a popular reformed Communist regime in the 1968 ‘Prague Spring’ – and there was little that the government could do about it apart from feebly restricting the official guest list. The next such outpouring of popular enthusiasm would be Czechoslovakia’s ‘Velvet Revolution’ four years later. When that swift and bloodless overthrow of Czechoslovakia’s Communist regime was complete at the end of 1989, a remarkable festivity took place in St

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

  Then came Gaudium et Spes (‘Joy and Hope’), an attempt to place the Church in the context of the modern world: [T]his Second Vatican Council, having probed more profoundly into the mystery of the Church, now addresses itself without hesitation, not only to the sons of the Church and to all who invoke the name of Christ, but to the whole of humanity. For the council yearns to explain to everyone how it conceives of the presence and activity of the Church in the world of today … The People of God believes that it is led by the Lord’s Spirit, Who fills the earth. Motivated by this faith, it labours to decipher authentic signs of God’s presence and purpose in the happenings, needs and desires in which this People has a part along with other men of our age. For faith throws a new light on everything, manifests God’s design for man’s total vocation, and thus directs the mind to solutions which are fully human. The whole statement breathed the happy confidence, already expressed in Pope John’s opening address, that the Church need not fear opening discussions with those outside its boundaries, rather than lecturing them. So much else tumbled open in conciliar statements, much of it discovered earlier by the separated Protestant brethren of the Western Church: the value of vernacular liturgy, an adventurous engagement with the previous two centuries of biblical scholarship, an openness to ecumenism, an affirmation of the ministry of laypeople. There was also open apology to the Jewish people for their sufferings at the hands of Christians in Nostra aetate (‘In our age’), which in its final draft bluntly dismissed the traditional Christian idea that the Jewish people had committed deicide – the killing of God. One bishop amidst the crowds who found the whole proceedings thoroughly uncongenial and dismayingly chaotic, and whose vote was consistently in the small minority against such statements as Gaudium et Spes, was a Pole who during the council’s sessions became Archbishop of Cracow, Karol Wojtyla. Also expressing his private disapproval of what he saw as the facile sunniness of Gaudium et Spes was one of the attendant German theologians, Professor Josef Ratzinger.9 By the time these crucial documents were agreed and promulgated by the papacy, John XXIII was dead. Even before the council had opened he had been diagnosed with cancer. He was to live only a few months more as the revolutionary programme unfolded, but the momentum which he had fostered brought a swift election of Cardinal Montini as Pope Paul VI and a resumption of the council’s sittings. Pope Paul was determined to maintain the pace of change, but as he pressed on with the reforms, and later conscientiously implemented them, he repeatedly displayed a quality which his impish predecessor had once characterized as ‘un po’ amletico’ – ‘a bit like Hamlet’.10 The man who had seemed so exceptionally open to change in the Vatican of Pius XII now agonized about how far change should go. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the pontiff had doubts about the collegiality of all bishops, and in order to win the

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  You’ll just tell him you’ve got a big piece going to press. He’ll understand. You could use a friendly presence. You might even confide in him. Tell him some of your problems. Alex is a man familiar with trouble. “Have you ever considered getting an MBA?” he asks. He has taken you to a steakhouse off Seventh Avenue, a smoky place favored by Times reporters and other heavy drinkers. He is dropping ashes on his steak, which lies cold and untouched. Already he has informed you that it is impossible to get a good steak anymore. Beef isn’t what it used to be; they force-feed the cattle and inject them with hormones. He is on his third vodka martini. You are trying to stretch your second. “I’m not saying necessarily go into business. But write about it. That’s the subject now. The guys who understand business are going to write the new literature. Wally Stevens said money is a kind of poetry, but he didn’t follow his own advice.” He tells you there was the golden age of Papa and Fitzgerald and Faulkner, then a silver age in which he played a modest role. He thinks we’re now in a bronze age, and that fiction has nowhere to go. It can run but it can’t hide. The new writing will be about technology, the global economy, the electronic ebb and flow of wealth. “You’re a smart boy,” he says. “Don’t be seduced by all that crap about garrets and art.” He flags down two more martinis, even though your second has yet to run dry. “I envy you,” he says. “What are you—twenty-one?” “Twenty-four.” “Twenty-four. Your whole life ahead of you. You’re single, right?” First you say no, and then yes. “Yes. Single.” “You’ve got it made,” he says, although he has just informed you that the world you are going to inherit will have neither good beef nor good writing. “My liver’s shot,” he adds. “My liver’s gone to hell and I’ve got emphysema.” The waiter comes with the drinks and asks about Alex’s steak, if there is anything wrong, if he would prefer something else. Alex says there’s nothing particularly wrong with it and tells him to take it away. “You know why there’s so much homosexuality now?” he says after the waiter is gone. You shake your head. “It’s because of all the goddamned hormones they inject into the beef. An entire generation’s grown up on it.” He nods and looks you straight in the eye. You assume a thoughtful, manly expression. “So, who are you reading these days,” he asks. “Tell me who the young hotshots are, the up-and-comers.” You mention a couple of your recent enthusiasms, but presently his attention drifts away and his eyelids flutter. You revive him by asking about Faulkner, with whom he shared an office in Hollywood for a couple of months in the forties. He tells you about a high-speed three-day carouse soaked with bourbon and studded with bons mots.

• From The Greatest Controversies of Early Christian History (2013)

  29 o At the end of time, all people would be raised from the dead, and if they had sided with God and suffered as a result, they would be rewarded. If they had sided with the powers of evil, they would be judged and annihilated.  The fourth tenet was imminence. Jewish apocalypticists believed that they were living at the end of time; God would intervene very soon to overthrow the forces of evil. This was a message of hope for people who were suffering: Hold on just a little while longer, and God’s intervention will come.  Many people today continue to hold apocalyptic views to some extent. Within Christian evangelicalism and fundamentalism, it’s widely thought that Jesus will return soon in ful fi llment of prophecies. Indeed, in every generation of Christians, there have been those who maintained that the end was imminent. o Christians who have held this belief have two things in common: They have all based their views on the Bible, and they have all been completely wrong. But we can trace the expectation that we are living at the end of the world to the beginning of Christianity and the apocalyptic Jews. o The reason for this is that the Dead Sea Scrolls were especially infl uential among early Christians. Even though Jesus is never mentioned in the scrolls, the views found in the scrolls—the Jewish apocalyptic idea—in many ways in fl uenced later Christians who arose out of Judaism. o Many authors of the New Testament subscribed to apocalyptic views, just as the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls did, expecting that the end of the age was to come soon with the judgment of God against his enemies. 30 Lecture 4: Is Jesus in the Dead Sea Scrolls? Fitzmyer, Responses to 101 Questions on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Flint and Vanderkam, The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Vanderkam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today. Vermes, ed. and trans., The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English. 1. What strikes you as the most important features of the Dead Sea Scrolls? 2. Why might the apocalyptic views of the Dead Sea Scrolls be signi fi cant for understanding the historical Jesus? Suggested Reading Questions to Consider

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  You ask if anybody wants anything from the outer world. Megan gives you money for a bagel. On the way out you see Alex Hardy standing in front of the water cooler staring into the aquamarine glass. He looks up, startled, and then, seeing it’s only you, he says hello. He turns back to the water cooler and says, “I was just thinking it could use some fish.” Alex is a Fiction Editor Emeritus, a relic from the early days, a man who speaks of the venerable founders by their nicknames. He started out as an office boy, made his rep as a writer of satiric sketches of Manhattan high life that abruptly stopped appearing for reasons which are still the subject of speculation, and became an editor. He discovered and encouraged some of the writers you grew up on, but he has not discovered anybody in years and his main function seems to be as the totem figure of Continuity and Tradition. Only one story has emerged from his office in the time you have been on the staff. No one can say whether his drinking is a function of his decline or whether it is the other way around. You expect cause and effect are inextricable in these cases. Mornings he is thoughtful and witty, if somewhat ravaged. In the afternoons he sometimes wanders down to the Department of Factual Verification and waxes nostalgic. You believe he likes you, insofar as he likes anyone. He attached detailed memos to several of your short-story submissions, critiques both blunt and encouraging. He took your work seriously, although the fact that it ended up on his desk was perhaps an indication that it was not taken seriously in the Department of Fiction. You are fond of this man. While others view him as a sunken ship, you have a fantasy: Under his tutelage, you begin to write and publish. His exertion on your behalf renews his sense of purpose. You become a team, Fitzgerald and Perkins all over again. Soon he’s promoting a new generation of talent—your disciples—and you’re evolving from your Early to your Later Period. “The old crew would have thought of that,” he says. “Siamese fighting fish in the water cooler.” You try to think of a retort along the lines of “a scale off the fish that bit you,” but it doesn’t quite come. “Where are you headed?” “Lunch,” you say, before you can think better of it. The last time you told Alex you were on your way to lunch you needed a stretcher to get you back to the office. He consults his watch. “Not a bad idea. Mind if I join you?” By the time you compose an excuse it seems too late, indeed rude, to say that you’re meeting a friend. You don’t have to match him drink for drink. You don’t have to drink anything, although one wouldn’t kill you. One pop would cut neatly through this headache.

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  Introductions, brief confusion about whether everyone has met. Allagash tells you, with a deprecating roll of his eyes, that Vicky is studying Philosophy at Princeton. He introduces you as a literary cult celebrity whose name has not yet reached the provinces. “Hate to dash out again. But I said seven-thirty and Inge thought I said ten. So she’s still in media dress, as we say. Got to get crosstown and pick her up. But let’s by all means meet for dinner.” He consults his watch. “Let’s say nine-thirty. Better make it ten. Ten o’clock at Raoul’s. Don’t forget.” He slips a glass vial into your pocket while he’s kissing Vicky. Then he’s gone in a wake of camel’s hair. Vicky seems confused by her cousin’s hospitality. “Did you catch all that?” “More or less.” You know you will not see Tad for the rest of the night. “He said seven-thirty and his date thought he said ten?” “It’s a common mistake.” “Well,” she says, putting her book in her purse. This could have been a very awkward situation, but she’s taking it in stride. “What now?” Allagash has bribed you with a piece of the rock. You could invite her back to your place to share the booty, but somehow you think not. Although you suppose she would appreciate it, you’d like to see if it’s possible to get through an evening without chemicals for a change. Hear yourself and another person talk without Speedy Gonzales South American accents. You ask her if she wants to stay for another drink, and she asks what you want to do. Eventually you ascend the stairs to the street. You think of Plato’s pilgrims climbing out of the cave, from the shadow world of appearances toward things as they really are, and you wonder if it is possible to change in this life. Being with a philosopher makes you think. You linger at the edge of Sheridan Square to watch an acrobat ride a unicycle across a tightrope strung between the fences. A teenager in the crowd turns to Vicky and says, “He did that between the towers of the World Trade Center.” “Can you imagine,” a woman asks. “Sounds like my job,” you say. When the acrobat passes the hat you throw in a buck. You walk west, without any firm destination in mind. Vicky is telling you about her work. She’s in her third year of graduate school, came in for an NYU conference at which she will read a rebuttal to an article entitled: “Why There Are No People.” The evening is cool. You find yourself walking the Village, pointing out landmarks and favorite townhouses. Only yesterday you would have considered such a stroll too New Jersey for words, but tonight you remember how much you used to like this part of the city. The whole neighborhood smells of Italian food. The streets have friendly names and cut weird angles into the rectilinear map of the city.

• From Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life (2005)

  191 Reading a great book means sitting down with the book and allowing it to speak. It will speak to us only if we open our minds, which we can do only through meditation—the fi nal step to wisdom. Wisdom is ultimately a source of freedom. As long as people read great books, they can have insights that lead them to freedom. In a commencement address at Harvard, Solzhenitsyn pointed out a danger. People today are fl ooded with such a wealth of books and information that they are in danger of losing the truth. A great thinker may have ideas that can save the country, but unless that work is picked up by the media or a publishing house, people will remain unaware of it. Some great books have been written and ignored until times and values changed and people were willing to return to them. Walden created little stir when fi rst published. After about 100 years, people began reading it and saw in Thoreau’s love of nature a challenge to our destruction of the environment. Although Gandhi was well known, Martin Luther King fi rst learned about Gandhi in a theological seminary. He recognized that Gandhi’s satyagraha, his steadfastness in truth, was key to overthrowing an evil system that had paralyzed the moral fi ber of this country. Martin Luther King, like Gandhi and Solzhenitsyn, exhibited the sense of justice, moral fortitude, and moderation that comes from wisdom to transform society. We can all change our lives in small ways and in grand ways as long as we accept the fundamental premise that life is about the individual and as long as we are willing to learn, are willing to make mistakes and admit them, exhibit the ability to redeem ourselves—in an individual sense, not in a theological sense—and never give up. ■ Aristotle, Poetics. Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art? Essential Reading Supplementary Reading 192 Lecture 36: Lessons from the Great Books 1. How, at the end of our course, would you defi ne a great book? 2. Which of the books we have discussed would you say was once a great book but now no longer speaks to us or our moral values? Questions to Consider 193 Timeline B.C. 3000................................................. Birth of civilization in the Near East and Egypt 2500................................................. Pyramids of Giza in Egypt 2500................................................. Indus Valley civilization in India 2000................................................. Stonehenge 1760................................................. Shang Dynasty in China, fi rst historical dynasty, with writing and bronze artworks 1500................................................. Aryan invasion of India 1295–1225....................................... Ramses II, pharaoh of Egypt; historical context for the Exodus 1250................................................. Trojan War 1027–56........................................... Zhou Dynasty in China, political context for Confucius (551–479) 1000................................................. Beginning of Sanskrit literature 563–483........................................... Buddha 550–531........................................... Persian Empire rules the Middle East 490–404........................................... Golden age of Athenian democracy 336–323........................................... Alexander the Great

• From What Are Biblical Values? (2019)

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by the LORD . The ideal is a world of modest self-sufficiency where each family has its own vine and fig tree. This state of affairs can be brought about only by divine intervention. The prophets are not revolutionaries. But by enunciating this eschatological vision, the prophets hold up a goal that can guide society. FROM JUSTICE TO CHARITY In the late Second Temple period, the view of poverty and injustice changed. We still find denunciations of the rich and powerful, especially in apocalyptic literature, but we also find a new emphasis on almsgiving as an expression of righteousness.28 In fact, the Hebrew word tsedaqah— which with mishpat was part of the word-pair “justice and righteousness,” the basic vocabulary of justice in the Hebrew Bible—came to mean simply “almsgiving.” We find this shift already in the second century BCE in the Book of Daniel, chapter 4 , where Daniel tells Nebuchadnezzar to “atone for your sins by almsgiving and for your iniquity by mercy to the poor.”29 Ben Sira, a little before Daniel in the early second century BCE, tells his readers to “help the poor for the commandment’s sake, and in their need do not send them away empty-handed” (29:9).30 Moreover, he advises his readers to Lay up your treasure according to the commandments of the Most High, and it will profit you more than gold. Store up almsgiving in your treasury, and it will rescue you from every disaster. (29:11–12) Similarly, Tobit, who may be roughly contemporary with Ben Sira, expressed his righteousness by giving food to the hungry, offering clothes to the naked, and burying the dead (1:17). He also charges his son to give alms from your possessions, and do not let your eye begrudge the gift when you make it. Do not turn your face away from anyone who is poor, and the face of God will not be turned away from you. If you have many possessions, make your gift from them in proportion; if few, do not be afraid to give according to the little you have. So you will be laying up a good treasure for yourself against the day of necessity. For almsgiving delivers from death and keeps you from going into the Darkness. Indeed, almsgiving, for all who practice it, is an excellent offering in the presence of the Most High. (4:7–11) Neither Ben Sira nor Tobit was laying up treasure for the hereafter. Both supposed that one could acquire credit with the Lord for this life. Tobit, ironically, was blind when he gave this advice to his son, but he had not lost hope that his good deeds would be rewarded.

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

  an anonymous and casually inflicted death. A large question mark hovered over the worldwide empires created by France, Britain and their satellites during the previous three centuries. British and French prestige in East Asia had been wrecked by Japan’s conquests, and France’s still more by German occupation; once again, questions arose among colonial peoples as to what benefits they might now gain from their part in a war created originally in Europe. The only power whose streets and fields remained unmarked by war and whose treasury was not empty was the United States of America. In one of the most imaginative and generous international deals in recorded history, although also with an eye to upstaging rival saviours from the Communist East, the USA’s Marshall Plan began the financing of a recovery programme for Europe which undoubtedly saved the European peoples from falling into new frustration, nihilism or willingness to listen to demagogues, in the fashion that had so poisoned the interwar years.74 This was a moment comparable to the results of the devastation of Eastern Christianity in fourteenth-century Asia by plague, Mongol destructiveness and Islamic advance (see pp. 275–7). Since that great shift, the centre of Christian activity and decision-making had been Europe. Now, although the historic power centres were still sited by the inertia of history in Istanbul, Moscow and Rome, a clear-sighted observer might recognize not only that Orthodoxy was weaker than at any stage in its existence, but that Western Christianity in its Protestant and Catholic forms was flourishing more in America, Africa and Asia than in Europe. It was certainly true that as Europe painfully pulled away from its nadir, its churchgoing benefited for more than a decade from the weary desire to find some normality and decency after the nightmare. So churches became fuller in Britain in the 1950s. Anglican theology and literary creativity had rarely seemed so impressive or cosmopolitan, and the Church of England’s Evangelical wing was returning from an edgy marginality, with the aid of public missions led by one of the more thoughtful American evangelists, the young Southern Baptist Billy Graham. Roman Catholicism too was steadily becoming a contender for acceptance in British national life – in other words, it was becoming less immigrant and Irish and more middle class. In the newly declared Irish Republic, Catholicism had never been so popular or all-embracing in national life, with no sense that there might be anything amiss – that was for the future.75 Pius XII presided over a Catholic Church which continued vigorously to grow throughout the world. He did his best to recognize that Europe was changing through its post-war rebuilding; he gave his whole-hearted support to the formation of Christian Democratic parties, to take a full part in the chastened democratic politics now virtually unquestioned west of what was being called

• From What Are Biblical Values? (2019)

  In the Gospels, Luke is the one that gives most prominence to social concerns.25 Luke sets the tone for his Gospel in the first chapter, with the Magnificat , the hymn of thanks and praise put on the lips of Mary. After expressing thanks to God for what he has done for Mary herself, the hymn continues: He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. (1:51–53) The hymn strikes themes that are familiar from the Hebrew Bible. In 1 Samuel, Hannah, the mother of Samuel, celebrated her pregnancy: The LORD makes poor and makes rich; he brings low, he also exalts. He raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor. (2:7–8) The hymns in both Testaments express the desires of the poor and lowly, typically in terms of simple reversal: cast down the mighty and raise up the lowly. We find very similar aspirations in some of the Jewish apocalyptic literature close to New Testament times, especially in the books of Enoch. The Similitudes of Enoch , which probably dates from around the time of Jesus, promises that a heavenly figure called “that Son of Man” will raise the kings and the mighty from their couches and thrones, “loosen the reins of the strong,” and overturn kings from their thrones and kingdoms (1 Enoch 46:4–5). The inequality between the mighty and the lowly, and the resentment that it breeds, is obviously a big part of the problem. The use of the perfect tense in the Magnificat is evidently proleptic. The rich and the mighty were not actually overthrown in Judea in the time of Jesus, and neither were the hungry filled. We know that when Judea had a famine in the time of Herod the Great (25–24 BCE), the king had ornaments of gold and silver from his palace converted into coinage to buy grain from Egypt.26 During another famine, in the reign of the emperor Claudius (41–54 CE), Queen Helena of Adiabene, who had converted to Judaism, bought supplies from Egypt and distributed them in Judea.27 The latter famine is noted in the Book of Acts (11:27–8). The disciples in Antioch took up a collection for the believers in Judea. Throughout much of the first century, banditry was a problem in Judea and Galilee, and this, too, was a sign of desperate need.28 The Magnificat is an expression of hope rather than of fact, but it acknowledges the problem of social inequity. Luke has Jesus pick up similar themes at the beginning of his public career. We are told that he came to his hometown of Nazareth on the Sabbath and stood up to read in the synagogue.

• From Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life (2005)

  151 brought despotism. The Germans, Italians, and Spanish came to understand that they had unique cultures. The fi nest minds of the day, including Fichte and Hegel, put forth the belief that every civilization was unique and that each people, having de fi ned itself as a nation, should develop its culture in its own way. This belief was strongest in Germany. With this new thinking came revulsion at some of the ideals of the Enlightenment, which had taught that men and women were creatures of reason. From the new perspective of romanticism, men and women were creatures of impulse; the irrational plays an important role in human life. People can try to suppress their emotions under a veneer of reason, but the emotions will break free. While the Enlightenment sought to control nature, romanticism celebrated nature as uncontrollable and saw it as a source of eternal renewal for humanity. The Enlightenment had celebrated classical Greece and Rome, but romanticism believed that the Middle Ages, when France and Germany had come into being, had been a time of true enlightenment. Christianity took on new meaning during the Romantic era. The life and the suffering of Jesus were idealized. Some people turned back to the Catholic Church as a repository of faith and wisdom. Goethe observed and absorbed the ideas of both the Enlightenment and romanticism. He is unique and stands in neither age. The second part of Faust opens in the wilds of nature in the spring. Faust, shattered by the death of Gretchen and his own abandonment of her, is with his comrade, the devil. At the opening of Part II of Faust, elves, the helpers of mankind, have pity on the man of sorrows, whether he is good or evil. In Part I, Faust draws back from suicide at Easter. It is no coincidence that Dante carries The Divine Comedy, his story of redemption, through Easter week. Orwell’s 1984 begins the story of Winston Smith in April. The two parts of Faust are linked by spring and the renewal of the earth. At this time of year, the man of sorrows—both Christ and Everyman, whether he is good or evil—can be pitied and helped. Faust can renew himself, take charge of his life, and become responsible again. The devil asks him what he is doing, and Faust replies that he is gaining strength from nature. The devil tells Faust that they must make a living and suggests that they go to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor. Until 1806, when Napoleon abolished

• From What Are Biblical Values? (2019)

  (The demise of the sea in Revelation 21:1 is due to its symbolic, mythological significance, not to any ecological concern.) Revelation does not suggest that the envisioned world can be brought about by human endeavor. Insofar as it is a hoped-for ideal, however, we might reasonably be expected to strive toward it. Concern for the preservation of the earth is less prominent in the New Testament than in the Old. The New Testament writers were swept up in the enthusiasm of their new revelation and believed that this world would soon pass away. The eschatological framework of the New Testament, however, must be recognized as a mythic construct, not something that can be accepted as factual from a modern perspective. Statements about the future do not convey factual information but rather express hopes and fears. The idea of new creation is important as an ideal of renewal, but its relevance to modern environmental concerns is only indirect. At no point, however, does the New Testament suggest that humanity is free to “rape the planet,” as Ann Coulter enthusiastically put it. In fact, the New Testament does not even repeat the commandment of Genesis to increase and multiply and fill the earth. Rather, the teaching of Jesus implies that human beings should not be concerned to accumulate wealth in barns but should live a carefree life like the birds and the flowers. The prospect of an imminent ending undermines the rationale for human acquisitiveness and thereby also undermines the motivation for raping the planet. CHAPTER SIX Slavery and Liberation S LAVERY , the condition where human beings are owned, bought, and sold by other people, is arguably the most degrading condition known to humanity. Much of the appeal of the story of Israel in the Bible is that it begins with slavery in Egypt and proceeds to liberation by the power of God. This is, to be sure, the story of a specific people, at a specific time in history, but already in the Hebrew Bible it was seen as paradigmatic, a story that offers hope of “a new Exodus” in other times and places.1 It has been appropriated repeatedly down through history, by Puritans and Boers, Zionists and black South Africans, and African Americans in the United States. In modern times, it has given rise to a new approach to theology, called Liberation Theology. (Liberation Theology is a movement that originated in South America but enjoyed broad sympathy in Europe and North America in the last quarter of the twentieth century.)2 Despite occasional protestations that the story applies only to Israel,3 other people have found that it resonates with their experience.4 The relevance of the Bible to the modern world depends on analogical use, and any such use presupposes that biblical stories provide paradigms that can be used in analogical situations.

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

  seen a sudden and unexpected revival, bringing new recruits and new hope, albeit sometimes accompanied by an ultra-traditional attitude to the modern world. A major element in this on Mount Athos was the restoration of full community life to most monasteries after centuries when monks had tended to live individually, not generally as hermits, but pursuing their own spiritual paths.92 What remains to be seen is how this other-worldly spirituality and emphasis on an ancient liturgy can find a constructive relationship with modernity. We have seen how the Churches of the Eastern Rite and beyond found their cultures constrained in succession by two unsympathetic powers: from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire and its outliers and the Islamic monarchy of Iran, and then, in the twentieth, the short- lived but far more hostile power of Soviet Communism. Paradoxically, these oppressions were also shelters from pressing theological problems – what, in a different context, the poet Constantine Cavafy called ‘a kind of solution’ – for the Churches were mostly too preoccupied with survival to look beyond their walls.93 The Western Church in its Protestant and Catholic forms had struggled with various degrees of success to find a way of addressing children of the Enlightenment – efforts frequently scorned by the Orthodox. Out of all Eastern Churches only the Russian Orthodox Church in the last years of the tsars had much chance to do this. Now that the Orthodox cannot escape the task, the effects on Eastern Christianity will be interesting. The stories of contemporary Russia and Serbia suggest some initial misjudgements. Some may find it depressing that after seeing the collapse of traditional European Christendom, so many Christianities are still entwined with the politics of the powerful, but it is surely inevitable that any potential source of power will fascinate fallen humanity, and that religion is as likely to bring a sword as peace. The writers of Genesis who composed the story of Cain and Abel showed wisdom in recounting the first act of worship of God as immediately followed by the first murder. While no state liberated from Soviet control decided fully to re-establish a Christian Church, the Christian Right in the United States continues to play a part in American politics which is an unmistakable bid for Christian hegemony in the nation, and there are signs of a possible new Constantinian era elsewhere. In 1991 President Frederick Chiluba of Zambia, member of a Pentecostal Church and elected freely and fairly to power on a programme of reform, became the first ruler of a post-colonial African state to declare his country ‘a Christian nation’, submitting ‘the Government and the entire nation of Zambia to the Lordship of Jesus Christ’. Although Chiluba reluctantly stepped down from further contests for the presidency in 2001, his reputation badly sullied by his conduct in office, no

• From Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life (2005)

  57 Job teaches several lessons. Evil is a reality. In the face of evil—whether confronting oneself or someone else—we must not justify the evil but stand up to it and demand an accounting. A set of universal values exists. The comforters of Job come from a variety of far-off regions to show that these values are in demand everywhere. Indeed, these values are touchstones of absolute goodness, because if absolute evil exists, absolute good must also exist. These values include the following: • Justice: Job demands justice. He believes that the Golden Rule is important. • Courage: As in the Iliad and Gilgamesh, courage is a fundamental human value in the Book of Job. Courage is the willingness to stand up and say what is just and true. • Moderation: Despite all his suffering, Job remains moderate. Moderation consists of knowing when justice has been transformed into simple legality and when courage has been replaced by brutality. • Wisdom: Wisdom is the knowledge to recognize what justice, courage, and moderation are. The Book of Job does not seek to impart erudite learning but instead gives wisdom to apply these values to daily life. Wisdom is not necessarily a happy concept. In the Oresteia, as in the Book of Job, wisdom comes only through suffering. These values do not necessarily make a happy world, but they help make a world in which we stand forth and make a statement. How do we read the Bible? Translations always put someone between the reader and the author. The King James Version of the Bible represents an eloquent translation of the magni fi cent language and poetry of Job and the Psalms. The King James Version of the Bible is one of two great achievements that came from a committee (the other being the U.S. Constitution). King James wanted the translation to be as free of doctrinal statements as possible. The committee that created the translation knew Greek and Hebrew and was working during the age of Shakespeare, an era when the English language had reached perfection in fl exibility and eloquence. The modern obsession with 58 Lecture 10: Book of Job improvements has resulted in new and modern—but inferior—translations. These translations are inferior in their accuracy, as well as their beauty. The King James Version of the Bible is written in language that ennobles the soul. ■ Book of Job. Kallen, Book of Job as Greek Tragedy. Wright and Fuller, The Book of the Acts of God, pp. 190–205. 1. Do you fi nd the resolution of Job to be satisfactory? 2. Have the late 20th and early 21st centuries produced their own equivalents to wisdom literature? Essential Reading Supplementary Reading Questions to Consider