Joy

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 Collected Essays (1998)

  At the time that I am speaking of we had not yet even begun to move across the river, into the Bronx. Bill takes me to see my first play, the Orson Welles pro duction of Macbeth, with an all-black cast, at the Lafayette Theater, on 13 2nd Street and Seventh Avenue, in Harl em. I do not remember if I had already read Macbeth. My im pression is that I read the play when Bill told me she was taking me to see it. In any case, before the curtain rose, I knew the play by heart. I don't think that the name, Shakespeare, meant very much to me in those years. I was not yet intimidated by the name that was to come later. I had read a play which took place in Scotland. Bill had not warned me-she may not have known-that Welles had transposed the play to Haiti. I am still about twelve or thirteen. I can be fairly certain about all this, because my lif e changed so violently when I entered the church, and I entered the church around the time of fourteen. When I entered the church, I ceased going to the theater. It took me awhile to realize that I was working in one. 500 THE DEVIL FIND S WO RK There is an enormous difference between the stage and the screen: but I may never be able to be articulate as concerns this difference because the first time I ever really saw black actors at work was on the stage: and it is important to em phasize that the people I was watching were black, like me. Nothing that I had seen before had prepared me for this which is a melancholy comment indeed, but I cannot be blamed for an ignorance which an entire republic had delib erately incul cated. The distance between oneself -the audience-and a screen performer is an absol ute: a paradoxical absolute, masquerad ing as intimacy. No one, for example, will ever really know whether Katharine Hepburn or Bette Davis or Humphrey Bogart or Spencer Tracy or Clark Gable-or John Wayne can, or could, really act, or not, nor does anyone care: acting is not what they are required to do. Their acting ability, so far from being what attracts their audience, can often be what drives their audience away. One does not go to see them act: one goes to watch them be. One does not go to see Humphrey Bogart, as Sam Spade: one goes to see Sam Spade, as Humphrey Boga1't.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  He fe els, so to speak, his own weight, his own value. It is as though he suddenly came out of a dark tunnel and t(mnd himself beneath the open sky. And, in fa ct, in Paris, I began to sec the sky f(>r what seemed to be the first time. It was borne in on me-and it did not make me fe el melan choly-that this sky had been there before I was born and would be there when I was dead. And it was up to me, therc f(>re, to make of my brief opportunity the most that could be made. I was born in New York, but have lived only in pockets of it. In Paris, I lived in all parts of the city-on the Right Bank and the Left, among the bourgeoisie and among les miserables, and knew all kinds of people, from pimps and prostitutes in Pigalle to Egyptian bankers in Neuilly. This may sound ex tremely unprincipled or even obscurely immoral: I fo und it healthy. I love to talk to people, all kinds of people, and al most everyone, as I hope we still know, loves a man who loves to listen. This perpetual dealing with people very different fr om my self caused a shattering in me of preconceptions I scarcely knew I held. The writer is meeting in Europe people who arc not American, whose sense of reality is entirely different fr om his own. They may love or hate or admire or te ar or envy this country-they sec it, in any case, fr om another point of view, and this ti.>rces the writer to reconsider many things he had always taken t(>r granted. This reassessment, which can be very painful, is also very valuable. WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AN AMERIC AN 1 4 1 This freedom, like all freedom, has its dangers and its re sponsibilities. One day it begins to be borne in on the writer, and with great fo rce, that he is living in Europe as an Amer ican. If he were living there as a European, he would be li\'ing on a different and fa r less attracti\'e continent. This crucial day may be the day on which an Algerian taxi driver tells him how it fe els to be an Algerian in Paris. It may be the day on which he passes a cafe terrace and catches a glimpse of the tense, intelligent and troubled fa ce of Alben Camus. Or it may be the day on which someone asks him to explain Little Rock and he begins to fe el that it would be simpler-and, corny as the words may sound, more honor able-to go to Little Rock than sit in Europe, on an American passport, trying to explain it. This is a personal day, a terrible day, the day to which his entire sojourn has been tending.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The minister who spoke could not hope to effect any objective change in the lives of his hearers, and the people did not ex pect him to. All they came to find, and all that he could give them, was the sustenance for another day's journey. Now, King could certainly give his congregation that, but he could also give them something more than that, and he had. It is true that it was they who had begun the struggle of which he was now the symbol and the leader; it is true that it had taken all of their insistence to overcome in him a grave reluctance to stand where he now stood. But it is also true, and it docs not happen often, that once he had accepted the place they had prepared for him, their struggle became absolutely in distinguishable from his own, and took over and controlled his lif e. He suffered with them and, thus, he helped them to 6++ OTH ER ESS AYS suff er. The joy which filled this church, therefore, was the joy achieved by people who have ceased to delude themselves about an intolerable situation, who have found their prayers for a leader miraculously answered, and who now know that they can change their situation, if they will. And, surely, very few people had ever spoken to them as King spoke. King is a great speaker. The secret of his greatness does not lie in his voice or his presence or his manner, though it has something to do with all these; nor docs it lie in his verbal range or felicity, which are not striking; nor does he have any capacity for those stunning, demagogic flights of the imagination which bring an audience cheering to its feet. The secret lies, I think, in his intimate knowledge of the people he is addressing, be they black or white, and in the forthrightness with which he speaks of those things which hurt and baffle them. He docs not offer any easy comfort and this keeps his hearers absolutely tense. He allows them their self-respe ct indeed, he insists on it. "We know," he told them, "that there are many things wrong in the white world. But there arc many things wrong in the black world, too. We can't keep on blaming the white man. There arc many things we must do for ourselves." He suggested what some of these were: "I know none of you make enough money-but save some of it. And there arc some things we've got to face. I know the situation is responsible for a lot of it, but do you know that Negroes are 10 per cent of the population of St. Louis and arc responsible for 58 per cent of its crimes? We've got to face that. And we have to do something about our moral stan dards. And we've got to stop lying to the white man.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  But Cupid being now healed of his wound and Maladie, not able to endure the absence of Psyches, got him secretly out at a window of the chamber where hee was enclosed, and (receiving his wings,) tooke his flight towards his loving wife, whom when he had found, hee wiped away the sleepe from her face, and put it againe into the boxe, and awaked her with the tip of one of his arrows, saying: O wretched Caitife, behold thou wert well-nigh perished againe, with the overmuch curiositie: well, goe thou, and do thy message to my Mother, and in the meane season, I will provide for all things accordingly: wherewithall he tooke his flight into the aire, and Psyches brought her present to Venus.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  We perched for a while by a little shelf, drinking quite fast, feet rocking to the music, more or less silent though I pointed people out to him and he looked and nodded in a factual sort of way, not feeling, perhaps, that it was quite right to rave adulterously about other men. Even so, he was enthralled when Sebastian Smith moved through the crowd at the heart of his own little crowd, who touched, supported and congratulated him. He had come fresh, exhausted, from Sadler’s Wells, was still on the serene, unpunctured high of adoration and acclaim, still sustained, as in some sugary Spanish Assumption, by the pink clouds of triumph and the tumbling black putti of his entourage. Still wearing, too, his leotards (though now with little patent, winking pumps), his torso rising in a naked black triangle to the glitter-sprinkled, ballerina-hefting shoulders. Everyone wanted him to dance, and he came forward, considering it, to the floor’s edge—one foot set before the other as if on a gym bar, the long, taut thighs chafing, all the effort instinctively keeping his body steady, as though it were his discipline to carry a glass of water on his head or to propel without obscene lurching the contents of his high, prancing basket. But he decided against it, paced back to a darkened corner, leaving me with a faint ache of adulation and inadequacy. Phil I found had that look of relished, vulgar curiosity which from time to time reminded me that he was as prone to sudden lusts as the next man. Not for you, dear, I thought, as I gestured ‘Let’s dance’, he carefully finished his drink, and we felt our way through the gay throng. I turned, we sculpted out a little area on the edge of the mass of dancers, and were drunk enough to be dancing already, Phil too (who I thought might selfconsciously jiggle), going into a kind of mood, hardly looking at me and swivelling chunkily to left and right in a tight, fashionable style he must have picked up somewhere. I sprang about in my own reckless way. In a sense we had nothing to do with each other, though I kept an eye on him and grinned with pleasure when his shy dark gaze held mine. Then I would whirl him round once or twice, and hold his handsome head and kiss him clumsily, bumping noses.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The church was very exciting. It took a long time fo r me to disengage myself fr om this excitement, and on the blindest, most visceral level, I never really have, and never will. There is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord. There is still, fo r me, no pathos quite like the pathos of those multicolored, worn, somehow triumphant and transfig ured fa ces, speaking fr om the depths of a visible, tangible, continuing despair of the goodness of the Lord. I have never seen anything to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, fill a church, causing the church, as Lead belly and so many others have testified, to "rock." Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes fe lt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, as they said, "the Word"-when the church and I were one. Their pain and their joy were mine, and mine were theirs-they sur rendered their pain and joy to me, I surrendered mine to them-and their cries of "Amen!" and "Hallelujah!" and "Yes, Lord!" and "Praise His name!" and "Preach it, brother!" sustained and whipped on my solos until we all be came equal, wringing wet, singing and dancing, in anguish and rejoicing, at the f(>ot of the altar. It was, fo r a long time, in spite of�>r, not inconceivably, because of--the shabbiness of my motives, my only sustenance, my meat and drink. I rushed home from school, to the church, to the altar, to be alone there, to commune with Jesus, my dearest friend, who would never fa il me, who knew all the secrets of my heart. Perhaps He did, but I didn't, and the bargain we struck, ac tually, down there at the fo ot of the cross, was that He would never let me find out. He fa iled His bargain. He was a much better Man than I took Him fo r. It happened, as things do, imperceptibly, in DOWN AT THE CROSS many ways at once. I date it-the slow crumbling of my faith, the pulverization of my fo rtress-from the time, about a year after I had begun to preach, when I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, fa tally, with Dostoevski. By this time, I was in a high school that was predominantly Jewish.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Taking into account the church members, Walter’s family, and the people who were constantly stopping at the house to buy sandwiches, dozens of people were able to confirm that Walter could not have committed the murder. That group included a police officer who stopped by the house to buy a sandwich and noted in his police log that he had bought food at McMillian’s house with Walter and a crowd of church folks present. Based on their personal knowledge of Walter’s whereabouts at the time of the Morrison murder, family members, church members, black pastors, and others all pleaded with Sheriff Tate to release McMillian. Tate wouldn’t do it. The arrest had been too long in the making to admit yet another failure. After some discussion, the district attorney, the sheriff, and the ABI investigator agreed to stick with the McMillian accusation. Walter’s alibi wasn’t the only problem for law enforcement. Ralph Myers began to have second thoughts about his allegations against McMillian. He was also facing indictment in the Morrison murder. He’d been promised that he wouldn’t get the death penalty and would get favorable treatment in exchange for his testimony, but it was starting to dawn on him that admitting to involvement in a high-profile murder that he actually had nothing to do with was probably not smart. A few days before the capital murder charges against McMillian were made public, Myers summoned police investigators and told them his allegations against McMillian weren’t true. At this point, Tate and his investigators had little interest in Myers’s recantation. Instead, they decided to pressure Myers to produce more incriminating details. When Myers protested that he didn’t have more incriminating details because, well, the story wasn’t true, the investigators weren’t having it. It’s not clear who decided to put both Myers and McMillian on death row before trial to create additional pressure, but it was a nearly unprecedented maneuver that proved very effective. It is illegal to subject pretrial detainees like Walter and Myers to confinement that constitutes punishment. Pretrial detainees are generally housed in local jails, where they enjoy more privileges and more latitude than convicted criminals who are sent to prison. Putting someone who has not yet been tried in a prison reserved for convicted felons is almost never done. As is putting someone not yet convicted of a crime on death row. Even the other death row prisoners were shocked. Death row is the most restrictive punitive confinement permitted. Prisoners are locked in a small cell by themselves for twenty-three hours a day. Condemned inmates have limited opportunity for exercise or visitation and are held in disturbingly close proximity to the electric chair.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Chapter Sixteen [image file=image_rsrc331.jpg] The Stonecatchers’ Song of SorrowOn May 17, 2010, I was sitting in my office waiting anxiously when the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision: Life imprisonment without parole sentences imposed on children convicted of non-homicide crimes is cruel and unusual punishment and constitutionally impermissible. My staff and I jumped up and down in celebration. Moments later we were inundated with a flood of calls from media, clients, families, and children’s rights advocates. It was the first time the Court had issued a categorical ban on a punishment other than the death penalty. Joe Sullivan was entitled to relief. Scores of people, including Antonio Nuñez and Ian Manuel, were entitled to reduced sentences that would give them a “meaningful opportunity for release.” Two years later, in June 2012, we won a constitutional ban on mandatory life-without-parole sentences imposed on children convicted of homicides. The Supreme Court had agreed to review Evan Miller’s case and the case of our client from Arkansas, Kuntrell Jackson. I argued both cases in March of that year and waited anxiously until we won a favorable ruling. The Court’s decision meant that no child accused of any crime could ever again be automatically sentenced to die in prison. Over two thousand condemned people sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for crimes when they were children were now potentially eligible for relief and reduced sentences. Some states changed their statutes to create more hopeful sentences for child offenders. Prosecutors in many places resisted retroactive application of the Court’s decision in Miller v. Alabama, but everyone now had new hope, including Ashley Jones and Trina Garnett. We continued our work on issues involving children by pursuing more cases. I believe there should be a total ban on housing children under the age of eighteen with adults in jails or prisons. We filed cases seeking to stop the practice. I am also convinced that very young children should never be tried in adult court. They’re vulnerable to all sorts of problems that increase the risk of a wrongful conviction. No child of twelve, thirteen, or fourteen can defend him- or herself in the adult criminal justice system. Wrongful convictions and illegal trials involving young children are very common. A few years earlier, we won the release of Phillip Shaw, who was fourteen when he was improperly convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole in Missouri. His jury was illegally selected, excluding African Americans. I argued two cases at the Mississippi Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the convictions and sentences of young children were illegal. Demarious Banyard was a thirteen-year-old who had been bullied into participating in a robbery that resulted in a fatal shooting in Jackson, Mississippi. He was given a mandatory death-in-prison sentence after his jury was illegally told that he had to prove his innocence beyond a reasonable doubt and the State introduced impermissible evidence. He was resentenced to a finite term of years and now has hope for release.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  It is according to this vision that we become most like unto God, and participators of His bliss: since God understands His substance by His essence, and this is His bliss. Wherefore it is said (1 Jo. 3:2): When He shall appear, we shall be like to Him; because we shall see Him as He is. And (Luke 22:29, 30) our Lord said: I dispose to you, as My Father hath disposed to Me, a banquet, that you may eat and drink at My table in My kingdom. Now these words cannot be understood as referring to the food and drink of the body, but to that which is taken from the table of Wisdom, of which Wisdom says (Prov. 9:5): Eat my bread and drink the wine which I have mingled for you. Accordingly, to eat and drink at God’s table is to enjoy the same bliss as that which makes God happy, and to see God as He sees Himself. CHAPTER LII THAT NO CREATED SUBSTANCE CAN BY ITS NATURAL POWER ARRIVE AT SEEING GOD IN HIS ESSENCEHOWEVER it is not possible for any created substance to attain, by its own power, to this way of seeing God. For that which is proper to the higher nature cannot be acquired by a lower nature, except through the action of the higher nature to whom it properly belongs: thus water cannot become hot except through the action of heat. Now to see God in His essence is proper to the divine nature, since to operate through its own form is proper to the operator. Therefore no intellectual substance can see God in the divine essence, unless God Himself bring this about. Again. A form proper to A does not become B’s except through A’s agency: because an agent produces its like by communicating its form to another. Now it is impossible to see the divine substance unless the divine substance itself become the form by which the intellect understands, as we have proved. Therefore no created substance can attain to that vision, except through the divine agency. Besides. If any two things have to be united together so that one be formal and the other material, their union must be completed by an action on the part of the one that is formal, and not by the action of the one that is material: because the form is the principle of action, whereas matter is the passive principle. Now in order that the created intellect see God’s substance, the divine essence itself must be united to the intellect as an intelligible form, as we have proved. Therefore no created intellect can attain to this vision except through the divine agency.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  GREGORY. (Hom. 13. in Ev.) By which He girds Himself, that is, prepares for judgment. THEOPHYLACT. Or, He will gird Himself, in that He imparts not the whole fulness of blessings, but confines it within a certain measure. For who can comprehend God how great He is? Therefore are the Seraphims said to veil their countenance, because of the excellence of the Divine brightness. It follows, and will make them to sit down; for as a man sitting down causes his whole body to rest, so in the future coming the Saints will have complete rest; for here they have not rest for the body, but there together with their souls their spiritual bodies partaking of immortality will rejoice in perfect rest. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. He will then make them to sit down as a refreshment to the weary, setting before them spiritual enjoyments, and ordering a sumptuous table of His gifts. PSEUDO-DIONYSIUS. (Dion. in Ep. ad Tit.) The “sitting down” is taken to be the repose from many labours, a life without annoyance, the divine conversation of those that dwell in the region of light enriched with all holy affections, and an abundant pouring forth of all gifts, whereby they are filled with joy. For the reason why Jesus makes them to sit down, is that He might give them perpetual rest, and distribute to them blessings without number. Therefore it follows, And will pass over (transiens) and serve them. THEOPHYLACT. That is, Give back to them, as it were, an equal return, that as they served Him, so also He will serve them. GREGORY. (Hom. 13. in Ev.) But He is said to be passing over, when He returns from the judgment to His kingdom. Or the Lord passes to us after the judgment, and raises us from the form of His humanity to a contemplation of His divinity. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. Our Lord knew the proneness of human infirmity to sin, but because He is merciful, He docs not allow us to despair, but rather has compassion, and gives us repentance as a saving remedy. And therefore He adds, And if he shall come in the second watch, &c. For they who keep watch on the walls of cities, or observe the attacks of the enemy, divide the night into three or four watches. GREGORY. (ubi sup.) The first watch then is the earliest time of our life, that is, childhood, the second youth and manhood, but the third represents old age. He then who is unwilling to watch in the first, let him keep even the second. And he who is unwilling in the second, let him not lose the remedies of the third watch, that he who has neglected conversion in childhood, may at least in the time of youth or old age recover himself.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This is the fr eedom that one hears in some gospel songs, fo r example, and in jazz. In all jazz, and especially in the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Ameri cans sing them-sounding, in both cases, so helplessly, de fe nselessly fa tuous that one dare not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from which issue their brave and sexless little voices. Only people who have been "down the line," as the song puts it, know what this music is about. I think it was Big Bill Broonzy who used to sing "I Feel So Good," a really joyful song about a man who is on his way to the railroad station to meet his girl. She's coming home. It is the singer's incredibly moving exuberance that makes one realize how leaden the time must have been while she was gone. There is no guarantee that she will stay this time, either, as the singer clearly knows, and, in fa ct, she has not yet ac tually arrived. Tonight, or tomorrow, or within the next five minutes, he may very well be singing "Lonesome in My Bed room," or insisting, "Ain't we, ain't we, going to make it all right? Well, if we don't today, we will tomorrow night." White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes, but they suspect that the fo rce is sensual, and they are terrified of sensuality and do not any longer understand it. The word "sensual" is not intended to bring to mind quivering dusky maidens or priapic black studs. I am referring to something much simpler and much less fa n ciful. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the fo rce of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day fo r America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless fo am rubber that we have substituted fo r it. And I am not being frivolous now, either.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  We went to the prison office to collect Walter’s possessions: his legal materials and correspondence with me, letters from family and supporters, a Bible, the Timex watch he was wearing when he was arrested, and the wallet he had had with him back in June 1987 when his nightmare began. The wallet still had $23 in it. Walter had given to other death row prisoners his fan, a dictionary, and the food items he had in his cell. I saw the warden peering at us from his office as we collected Walter’s things, but he didn’t come out. A few guards watched as we walked out the front gate of the prison. Lots of people were still gathered outside. I saw Mrs. Williams. Walter went up to her and gave her a hug. When their embrace released, she looked over and winked at me. I couldn’t help but laugh. Men in their cells could see the crowd outside and started shouting encouragement to Walter as he walked away. We couldn’t see them from outside the prison, but their voices rang out just the same—the voices were haunting because they were disembodied, but they were full of excitement and hopefulness. One of the last voices we heard was a man shouting, “Stay strong, man. Stay strong!” Walter shouted back, “All right!” As he walked to the car, Walter raised his arms and gently moved them up and down as if he meant to take flight. He looked at me and said, “I feel like a bird, I feel like a bird.” Chapter Twelve [image file=image_rsrc32X.jpg] Mother, MotherOn a cool, crisp mid-March evening, Marsha Colbey stepped out onto the streets of New York City in an elegant royal blue gown with her husband beside her. She had dreamed of a moment like this for years. She took in the sights and sounds with great curiosity as they strolled down the busy sidewalks. Enormous buildings stretched to the sky in the distance while raucous traffic whizzed through Greenwich Village streets. The clusters of New York students and artisans paid them no mind as they made their way through Washington Square Park. She noticed an amateur jazz trio laboring through standards on a park corner. It all seemed like something out of a movie. A white woman from a poor rural Alabama town, Marsha had never been to New York, but she was about to be honored at a dinner with two hundred guests. It was all exciting, but she was experiencing something unusual as she made her way to the venue. She soon sorted out what she was feeling. Freedom. She was wandering the streets of the world’s most dazzling city with her husband, and she was free. It was a glorious feeling. Everything in the last three months since her release had been magical. It was beyond what she would have imagined even before she was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole at the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Reply to Objection 3: These varieties of movement that are taken from the distinction between above and below, right and left, forwards and backwards, and from varying circles, are all comprised under either straight and oblique movement, because they all denote discursions of reason. For if the reason pass from the genus to the species, or from the part to the whole, it will be, as he explains, from above to below: if from one opposite to another, it will be from right to left; if from the cause to the effect, it will be backwards and forwards; if it be about accidents that surround a thing near at hand or far remote, the movement will be circular. The discoursing of reason from sensible to intelligible objects, if it be according to the order of natural reason, belongs to the straight movement; but if it be according to the Divine enlightenment, it will belong to the oblique movement as explained above (ad 2). That alone which he describes as immobility belongs to the circular movement. Wherefore it is evident that Dionysius describes the movement of contemplation with much greater fulness and depth. Whether there is delight in contemplation?Objection 1: It would seem that there is no delight in contemplation. For delight belongs to the appetitive power; whereas contemplation resides chiefly in the intellect. Therefore it would seem that there is no delight in contemplation. Objection 2: Further, all strife and struggle is a hindrance to delight. Now there is strife and struggle in contemplation. For Gregory says (Hom. xiv in Ezech.) that “when the soul strives to contemplate God, it is in a state of struggle; at one time it almost overcomes, because by understanding and feeling it tastes something of the incomprehensible light, and at another time it almost succumbs, because even while tasting, it fails.” Therefore there is no delight in contemplation. Objection 3: Further, delight is the result of a perfect operation, as stated in Ethic. x, 4. Now the contemplation of wayfarers is imperfect, according to 1 Cor. 13:12, “We see now through a glass in a dark manner.” Therefore seemingly there is no delight in the contemplative life. Objection 4: Further, a lesion of the body is an obstacle to delight. Now contemplation causes a lesion of the body; wherefore it is stated (Gn. 32) that after Jacob had said (Gn. 32:30), “‘I have seen God face to face’ . . . he halted on his foot (Gn. 32:31) . . . because he touched the sinew of his thigh and it shrank” (Gn. 32:32). Therefore seemingly there is no delight in contemplation. On the contrary, It is written of the contemplation of wisdom (Wis. 8:16): “Her conversation hath no bitterness, nor her company any tediousness, but joy and gladness”: and Gregory says (Hom. xiv in Ezech.) that “the contemplative life is sweetness exceedingly lovable.”

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Th e two will be united in her spiritual rebirth.  When she is baptized, she reveals that the name by which she was famous throughout Antioch, “Margarito,” “Pearl,” was merely a stage name. In fact her parents had named her Pelagia. Under her true name she is baptized and receives the holy mysteries. As the assembly rejoices, Satan himself appears, glowering at the baptismal party. He berates Nonnos and then Pelagia herself. He takes the guise of a jilted lover, humiliated by Pelagia’s betrayal. Pelagia, whose bridehood is now vouchsafed to Christ, crosses herself and turns away her old companion. He tempts her again, by night, but she resists and confesses her allegiance to her heavenly marriage cham- ber. Th e scenes do not generate much compelling spiritual drama, but as a transposition of romantic tropes they are at least clever. Pelagia bequeaths her estate to Nonnos, who instructs the church’s steward, following Mosaic law, not to allow the wages of the prostitute to cross the threshold of the church. Instead the money is distributed directly to orphans and widows. Pelagia manumits her slaves, urging them to free themselves from “slavery to the sin of this world.” Th e crowds marvel at her very public transformation, and many of her fellow prostitutes are inspired to follow her example.  Pelagia’s days of public fame are behind her. She takes a hair shirt and woolen robe from Nonnos, and by night, dressed as a man, she leaves the city. No one saw her depart. Th ree years later the author of the life, Jacob, went to Jerusalem on pilgrimage. Nonnos told him to fi nd a monk named Pela- gius, a eunuch. Jacob fi nds him living in a cell on the Mount of Olives, wasted by asceticism, with cavernous eyes. Jacob does not recognize the shell of skin and bones before him as the once- famous actress. Pelagius has achieved, through gruesome self- mortifi cation, a state beyond biological sex, transcending male or female. When Pelagius dies, crowds gather for the burial of the recluse. Anointing the body, the clergy of Jerusalem realize that Pelagius was a woman. She is buried on the Mount of Olives. Indeed, the sepulture of Pelagia provides a reminder that the stories of penitent prostitutes do not simply belong to a closed world of monastic literature. In the 570s a western pilgrim visiting the holy land reported, among the other ROMANCE IN THE LATE CLASSICAL WORLD  sights encountered on his journey, the tomb of Pelagia. Her memory be- longed to a vibrant world of pop u lar Christian imagination. Indeed, a tomb of Pelagia can still be visited in Jerusalem today, a numinous site sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. A custom is remembered at the site, by which a curious penitent may try to step through a cramped passage in the tomb, to test whether forgiveness for one’s sins has been granted.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  These display flights were of two types. Some were direct “beeline” flights between saplings, with the bird flipping around in midair so that when he landed he would be facing inward toward the court for his return flight. The series of beeline flights would continue for up to twenty seconds. During these displays, the male sometimes perched momentarily on a sapling with his azure-blue rump and white fore crown showing boldly. In the alternative “bumblebee” flight displays, the male flew back and forth between two saplings, springing off the branches as soon as he touched them and hovering in the air with his body held nearly vertical, his wings beating in a rapid whirr. This gave the rather eerie visual impression of a multicolored ball hovering between the saplings at knee height above the ground. In many days of observation, I saw two probable female visits. I say “probable,” because all young male manakins have green plumage like the females. In neither case was I able to observe a copulation, which would have confirmed the sex of the visitor. Marc Théry made later observations of the same species in French Guiana. He observed that females follow the male around the court during several to-and-fro flights and then alight on a small horizontal perch on the court edge. The male then flies up and mounts the female in copulation. — After starting my observations of the White-fronted Manakin, I alternated mornings of watching them at their leks with the search for other manakin species elsewhere in the park. I soon found the male White-crowned Manakin (Dixiphia pipra), which is coal black with a bright white crown and bright red eyes, and I observed it for several days. It took a little longer to find the Tiny-tyrant Manakin (Tyranneutes virescens), a truly diminutive and amazingly nondescript olive-green bird with an oft-hidden, tiny central yellow crown stripe that weighs in at only seven grams—or about as much as one and two-thirds teaspoons of salt. The male sings a soft, hiccuping little trill from a thin branch about three to five yards high. The first time I found a male singing, he was so motionless and inconspicuous that it took me ten minutes to spot the bird, even though he was perched in plain sight. I enjoyed my sightings of these birds, but because the display behaviors of both the White-crowned and the Tiny-tyrant Manakin had already been described by David Snow in the early 1960s, I was still determined to find the mysterious White-throated Manakin.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  The fifty-year trend of annual increases in the jail and prison population in the United States that began in the 1970s has ended. In the last five years, we have seen declines in the number of people jailed or imprisoned in America, although our nation still has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. In the last ten years, twenty states have banned life imprisonment without parole sentences for children, and nearly one thousand people who were condemned to die in prison for crimes they were accused of committing when they were children have been released. It is the great joy of my career these days that I frequently travel and have someone come up to me and say, “Hey man, I’m one of your guys! I was a juvenile lifer who was supposed to die in prison, but now I’m here with you.” We then usually embrace. The encounter changes my day and lifts my spirits in ways that are hard to measure. Many of the young people you’ll read about in this book have since been released. Some even work on my staff now. But there have been worrisome developments, too. In 2020, after several heartbreaking killings of unarmed Black people by police attracted international attention, there seemed to be a new appreciation of the racial bias that undermines the administration of justice in the United States. In the midst of a global pandemic, police violence sparked protests and an unprecedented focus on confronting racial injustice that compromises our nation’s legal system. Today, however, a bitter backlash has emerged and many states have retreated from efforts to overcome the problems created by racial bias. Some states have passed laws to restrict educators from teaching about our history of racial bigotry and discrimination. Books about Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. have been banned by school boards. Programs and initiatives designed to improve racial and gender diversity have been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. The politics of fear and anger has re-emerged, and narratives that fuel bigotry, violence, and hate seem to gain ever more prominence on social media and in the public sphere.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Reply to Objection 3: God bestows many things on us out of His liberality, even without our asking for them: but that He wishes to bestow certain things on us at our asking, is for the sake of our good, namely, that we may acquire confidence in having recourse to God, and that we may recognize in Him the Author of our goods. Hence Chrysostom says [*Implicitly [Hom. ii, de Orat.: Hom. xxx in Genes. ]; Cf. Caten. Aur. on Lk. 18]: “Think what happiness is granted thee, what honor bestowed on thee, when thou conversest with God in prayer, when thou talkest with Christ, when thou askest what thou wilt, whatever thou desirest.” Whether prayer is an act of religion?Objection 1: It would seem that prayer is not an act of religion. Since religion is a part of justice, it resides in the will as in its subject. But prayer belongs to the intellective part, as stated above [3013](A[1]). Therefore prayer seems to be an act, not of religion, but of the gift of understanding whereby the mind ascends to God. Objection 2: Further, the act of “latria” falls under a necessity of precept. But prayer does not seem to come under a necessity of precept, but to come from the mere will, since it is nothing else than a petition for what we will. Therefore prayer seemingly is not an act of religion. Objection 3: Further, it seems to belong to religion that one “offers worship end ceremonial rites to the Godhead” [*Cicero, Rhet. ii, 53]. But prayer seems not to offer anything to God, but to. ask to obtain something from Him. Therefore prayer is not an act of religion. On the contrary, It is written (Ps. 140:2): “Let my prayer be directed as incense in Thy sight”: and a gloss on the passage says that “it was to signify this that under the old Law incense was said to be offered for a sweet smell to the Lord.” Now this belongs to religion. Therefore prayer is an act of religion. I answer that, As stated above ([3014]Q[81], AA[2],4), it belongs properly to religion to show honor to God, wherefore all those things through which reverence is shown to God, belong to religion. Now man shows reverence to God by means of prayer, in so far as he subjects himself to Him, and by praying confesses that he needs Him as the Author of his goods. Hence it is evident that prayer is properly an act of religion.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Objection 3: Further, according to Augustine (De Consensu Evang. ii, 27), just as there is a fast “of sorrow,” so is there a fast “of joy.” Now it is most becoming that the faithful should rejoice spiritually in Christ’s Resurrection. Therefore during the five weeks which the Church solemnizes on account of Christ’s Resurrection, and on Sundays which commemorate the Resurrection, fasts ought to be appointed. On the contrary, stands the general custom of the Church. I answer that, As stated above ([3486]AA[1],3), fasting is directed to two things, the deletion of sin, and the raising of the mind to heavenly things. Wherefore fasting ought to be appointed specially for those times, when it behooves man to be cleansed from sin, and the minds of the faithful to be raised to God by devotion: and these things are particularly requisite before the feast of Easter, when sins are loosed by baptism, which is solemnly conferred on Easter-eve, on which day our Lord’s burial is commemorated, because “we are buried together with Christ by baptism unto death” (Rom. 6:4). Moreover at the Easter festival the mind of man ought to be devoutly raised to the glory of eternity, which Christ restored by rising from the dead, and so the Church ordered a fast to be observed immediately before the Paschal feast; and for the same reason, on the eve of the chief festivals, because it is then that one ought to make ready to keep the coming feast devoutly. Again it is the custom in the Church for Holy orders to be conferred every quarter of the year (in sign whereof our Lord fed four thousand men with seven loaves, which signify the New Testament year as Jerome says [*Comment. in Marc. viii]): and then both the ordainer, and the candidates for ordination, and even the whole people, for whose good they are ordained, need to fast in order to make themselves ready for the ordination. Hence it is related (Lk. 6:12) that before choosing His disciples our Lord “went out into a mountain to pray”: and Ambrose [*Exposit. in Luc.] commenting on these words says: “What shouldst thou do, when thou desirest to undertake some pious work, since Christ prayed before sending His apostles?”

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  He looked at me for an instant with a serious expression, and then we both broke out simultaneously in wild laughter. I wasn’t sure I should be laughing, but Joe was laughing, which made me think it was okay. Honestly, I couldn’t help it. In a few seconds we were both in hysterics. He was rocking in his wheelchair from side to side with laughter, clapping his hands. I couldn’t stop laughing, either; I was trying hard to stop but failing. We looked at each other as we laughed. I watched Joe, who laughed like a little boy, but I saw the lines in his face and even the emergence of a few prematurely gray hairs on his head. I realized even while I laughed that his unhappy childhood had been followed by unhappy, imprisoned teenage years followed by unhappy incarceration through young adulthood. All of a sudden it occurred to me what a miracle it was that he could still laugh. I thought about how wrong the world is about Joe Sullivan and how much I wanted to win his case. We both finally calmed down. I tried to speak as sincerely as I could manage. “Joe, it’s a very, very nice poem.” I paused. “I think it’s beautiful.” He beamed at me and clapped his hands. Chapter Fifteen [image file=image_rsrc330.jpg] BrokenWalter’s decline came quickly. The moments of confusion got longer and longer. He started forgetting things he had done just a few hours earlier. The details of his business slipped away from him, and managing work became complicated in ways he couldn’t understand, which depressed him. At some point I went over his records with him, and he’d been selling things at a fraction of their worth and losing a lot of money. A film crew from Ireland came to Alabama to make a short documentary about the death penalty that would feature Walter’s case and the cases of two other Alabama death row prisoners. James “Bo” Cochran had been released after spending nearly twenty years on Alabama’s death row; a new trial was awarded after federal courts reversed his conviction because of racial bias during jury selection. At his new trial, a racially diverse jury found him not guilty of murder, and he was freed. The third man featured in the film, Robert Tarver, also adamantly maintained his innocence. The prosecutor later admitted that his jury had been illegally selected in a racially discriminatory manner, but courts refused to review the claim because the defense lawyer failed to make an adequate objection, so Tarver was executed.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  In saying these words shee came to me to bed, and embraced me sweetly, and so wee passed all the night in pastime and pleasure, and never slept until it was day: but we would eftsoones refresh our wearinesse, and provoke our pleasure, and renew our venery by drinking of wine. In which sort we pleasantly passed away many other nights following.