Pride As Defense

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

  Ferdinand entered a vigorous protest against their use in Spain, when Sixtus, 1484, confirmed the penitentiary’s right; but here also Sixtus was obliged to retreat, at least in part, and Alexander VI. and later Clement VII., 1524, made such letters invalid when they conflicted with the jurisdiction of the Spanish tribunal. Spain was bent on doing things in its own way and won practical independence of the curia.962 The principle, whereby in the old Inquisition the bishops were co-ordinate in authority with the inquisitors or superior to them, had to be abandoned in Spain in spite of the pope’s repeated attempts to apply it. Innocent VIII., 1487, completely subjected the bishops to the inquisitorial organization, and when Alexander, 1494, annulled this bull and required the inquisitors to act in conjunction with the bishop, Ferdinand would not brook the change and, under his protection, the suprema and its agents asserted their independence to Ferdinand. Likewise, in the matter of confiscations of property, the sovereign claimed the right to dictate their distribution, now applying them for the payment of salaries to the inquisitors and their agents, now appropriating them for the national exchequer, now for his own use or for gifts to his favorites. No concern of his reign, except the extension of his dominions, received from Ferdinand more constant and sympathetic attention than the deletion of heresy. With keen delight he witnessed the public burnings as adapted to advance the Catholic faith. He scrutinized the reports sent him by inquisitors and, at times, he expressed his satisfaction with their services by gifts of money. In his will, dated the day before his death, he enjoined his heir, Charles V., to be strenuous in supporting the tribunal. As all other virtues, so this testament ran, "are nothing without faith by which and in which we are saved, we command the illustrious prince, our grandson, to labor with all his strength to destroy and extirpate heresy from our kingdoms and lordships, appointing ministers, God-fearing and of good conscience, who will conduct the Inquisition justly and properly for the service of God and the exaltation of the Catholic faith, and who will also have a great zeal for the destruction of the sect of Mohammed."963 Without doubt, the primary motive in the establishment of the tribunal was with Ferdinand, and certainly with Isabella, religious. There seems at no time to have been any widespread revolt against the procedure of the Inquisition. In Aragon, some mitigation of its rigors and rules was proposed by the Cortes of Barcelona, 1512, such as the withdrawal from the inquisitors of the right to carry weapons and the exemption of women from the seizure of their property, in cases where a husband or father was declared a heretic, but Ferdinand and Bishop Enguera, the Aragonese inquisitor-general, were dispensed by Leo X., 1514, from keeping the oath they had taken to observe the rules.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  “homely” women holding up racist signs: “I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Like the Nobel Prize–winning writer William Faulkner, LBJ knew about the debilitating nature of false poor white pride. As president, he never lost sight of how central class and race were to the fractured culture of the South. 83 Johnson’s promises did not convince his critics on either the left or the right. Malcolm X called him the “head of the Cracker Party.” In 1964, Barry Goldwater’s campaign staff put together a fear-filled movie that showcased disturbing scenes of urban violence, pornography, topless girls, and striptease joints. Johnson’s name was never mentioned, but in the middle of the thirty- minute harangue on “American Decay,” a Lincoln Continental comes speeding across the dusty countryside as beer cans are jettisoned from the half-open window. It was a less-than-subtle caricature of LBJ on an aimless escapade along the perimeter of his Texas ranch, thereby reducing the tall Texan to a common redneck. (Jimmy Carter’s ne’er-do-well brother Billy would later say that a redneck threw his beer cans out the window, while a good ol’ boy did not.) Goldwater’s campaign revived the eugenic theme of moral degeneracy, as it turned the sitting president into a symbol of white trash. LBJ’s Lincoln said something. The larger-than-life president plainly indulged a defiant impulse when he drove around his ranch at high speeds while consuming beer from a paper cup. For one Time photographer, he posed behind the wheel and held up a squealing piglet for view. Taunting reporters was an exhibition of his country humor. 84 The car one was seen in registered class in a very special way in the fifties and sixties and defined transgression as well as belonging. Elvis owned several Cadillacs, a Lincoln, and a Rolls-Royce. But when driven by the wrong class of people, the luxury car only exaggerated the underlying discomfort Americans felt about upward mobility. Nothing better captured this anxiety than the specially built padded seat in Elvis’s favorite Cadillac that was reserved for his pet chimpanzee Scatter. The owners of beautiful vehicles were supposed to display breeding that matched the glossy magazine advertisements readers flipped through. A lower- class man did not look right exploiting the fantasy of freedom by leaving the restraints of an imposed class identity in the rearview mirror. That was Elvis and his chimp. That was LBJ too, at least for those stodgy

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

  Apollinarianism, which sacrificed to the unity of the person the integrity of the natures, at least of the human nature, anticipated the Monophysite heresy, though in a peculiar way, and formed the precise counterpart to the Antiochian doctrine, which was developed about the same time, and somewhat later by Diodorus, bishop of Tarsus (died 394), and Theodore, bishop of Mopsuestia (393–428), and which held the divine and human in Christ so rigidly apart as to make Christ, though not professedly, yet virtually a double person. From this school proceeded Nestorius, the head and martyr of the Christological heresy which bears his name. His doctrine differs from that of Theodore of Mopsuestia only in being less speculative and more practical, and still less solicitous for the unity of the person of Christ.1558 He was originally a monk, then presbyter in Antioch, and after 428 patriarch of Constantinople. In Constantinople a second Chrysostom was expected in him, and a restorer of the honor of his great predecessor against the detraction of his Alexandrian rival. He was an honest man, of great eloquence, monastic piety, and the spirit of a zealot for orthodoxy, but impetuous, vain, imprudent, and wanting in sound, practical judgment. In his inaugural sermon he addressed Theodosius II. with these words: "Give me, O emperor, the earth purified of heretics, and I will give thee heaven for it; help me to fight the heretics, and I will help thee to fight the Persians."1559 He immediately instituted violent measures against Arians, Novatians, Quartodecimanians, and Macedonians, and incited the emperor to enact more stringent laws against heretics. The Pelagians alone, with whose doctrine of free will (but not of original sin) he sympathized, he treated indulgently, receiving to himself Julian of Eclanum, Coelestius, and other banished leaders of that party, interceding for them in 429 with the emperor and with the pope Celestine, though, on account of the very unfavorable reports concerning Pelagianism which were spread by the layman Marius Mercator, then living in Constantinople, his intercessions were of no avail. By reason of this partial contact of the two, Pelagianism was condemned by the council of Ephesus together with Nestorianism. But now Nestorius himself fell out with the prevailing faith of the church in Constantinople. The occasion was his opposition to the certainly very bold and equivocal expression mother of God, which had been already sometimes applied to the virgin Mary by Origen, Alexander of Alexandria, Athanasius, Basil, and others, and which, after the Arian controversy, and with the growth of the worship of Mary, passed into the devotional language of the people.1560

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

  Even before his death, Symeon enjoyed the unbounded admiration of Christians and heathens, of the common people, of the kings of Persia, and of the emperors Theodosius II., Leo, and Marcian, who begged his blessing and his counsel. No wonder, that, with all his renowned humility, he had to struggle with the temptations of spiritual pride. Once an angel appeared to him in a vision, with a chariot of fire, to convey him, like Elijah, to heaven, because the blessed spirits longed for him. He was already stepping into the chariot with his right foot, which on this occasion he sprained (as Jacob his thigh), when the phantom of Satan was chased away by the sign of the cross. Perhaps this incident, which the Acta Sanctorum gives, was afterward invented, to account for his sore, and to illustrate the danger of self-conceit. Hence also the pious monk Nilus, with good reason, reminded the ostentatious pillar saints of the proverb: "He that exalteth himself shall be abased."332 Of the later stylites the most distinguished were Daniel († 490), in the vicinity of Constantinople, and Symeon the younger († 592), in Syria. The latter is said to have spent sixty-eight years on a pillar. In the East this form of sanctity perpetuated itself, though only in exceptional cases, down to the twelfth century. The West, so far as we know, affords but one example of a stylite, who, according to Gregory of Tours, lived a long time on a pillar near Treves, but came down at the command of the bishop, and entered a neighboring cloister. § 38. Pachomius and the Cloister life. On St. Pachomius we have a biography composed soon after his death by a monk of Tabennae, and scattered accounts in Palladius, Jerome (Regula Pachomii, Latine reddita, Opp. Hieron. ed. Vallarsi, tom. ii. p. 50 sqq.), Rufinus, Sozomen, &c. Comp. Tillemont, tom. vii. p. 167–235, and the Vit. Sanct. sub Maj. 14. Though the strictly solitary life long continued in use, and to this day appears here and there in the Greek and Roman churches, yet from the middle of the fourth century monasticism began to assume in general the form of the cloister life, as incurring less risk, being available for both sexes, and being profitable to the church. Anthony himself gave warning, as we have already observed, against the danger of entire isolation, by referring to the proverb: "Woe to him that is alone." To many of the most eminent ascetics anchoretism was a stepping stone to the coenobite life; to others it was the goal of coenobitism, and the last and highest round on the ladder of perfection.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  There is not a solitary refer- ence to it until around 220 C.E., and it does not appear to have been widely circulated for at least another century after that. It was no doubt included in the canon because the orthodox fathers of the fourth century accepted the claims of its author to be Peter, and because it served their purposes in opposing those who promote false teaching. The author goes out of his way to insist that he is none other than Jesus' disciple--a case, perhaps, of protesting too much. Not only does he begin by naming himself"Simeon Peter, a servant and apos- tle of Jesus Christ" (1:1), but he proceeds to recount his own personal experience with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration, where he beheld for himself Jesus' divine glory and heard God's affir- mation of his Son in the voice from heaven (1:17; as we will see, the pseudonymous author of the Apocalypse of Peter also appeals to his "memory" of this event). He assures his reader that he was there to see these things: "We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven, while we were with him on the holy mountain" (1:18). Why does he choose to parade his credentials in this manner? It is proba- bly to convince his readers that he has no need of "cleverly devised myths" to understand Jesus (1:16) since he knows about him firsthand. This reference to myths may intimate some- thing about the author's opponents. They may be early Gnostics, who use their creative mythologies and genealogies to support their "unorthodox" points of view, for the author goes on to attack people who provide idiosyncratic interpretations of Scripture--a favorite activity of the Gnostics, according to the proto-orthodox church fathers: "First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation" (1:21). Moreover, the author's opponents appeal to the writings of the apostle Paul, which by this time are evidently in circula= tion as a collection and are even being considered as "Scripture" other indications that the letter was written long after the apostle's death. As we have previously seen, the Gnostics took a particu- lar liking to Paul as an authority for their views. So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you accoMing to the wisdom given him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters.

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

  Jerome, who unfortunately was not free from vanity, prided himself not a little upon his learning, and boasted against his opponent Rufinus, that he was "a philosopher, a rhetorician, a grammarian, a dialectician, a Hebrew, a Greek, a Latin, three-tongued," that is, master of the three principal languages of the then civilized world.2102 All these manifold and rare gifts and attainments made him an extremely influential and useful teacher of the church; for he brought them all into the service of an earnest and energetic, though monkishly eccentric piety. They gave him superior access to the sense of the Holy Scriptures, which continued to be his daily study to extreme old age, and stood far higher in his esteem than all the classics. His writings are imbued with Bible knowledge, and strewn with Bible quotations. But with all this he was not free from faults as glaring as his virtues are shining, which disturb our due esteem and admiration. He lacked depth of mind and character, delicate sense of truth, and firm, strong convictions. He allowed himself inconsistencies of every kind, especially in his treatment of Origen, and, through solicitude for his own reputation for orthodoxy, he was unjust to that great teacher, to whom he owed so much. He was very impulsive in temperament, and too much followed momentary, changing impressions. Many of his works were thrown off with great haste and little consideration. He was by nature an extremely vain, ambitious, and passionate man, and he never succeeded in fully overcoming these evil forces. He could not bear censure. Even his later polemic writings are full of envy, hatred, and anger. In his correspondence with Augustine, with all assurances of respect, he everywhere gives that father to feel his own superiority as a comprehensive scholar, and in one place tells him that he never had taken the trouble to read his writings, excepting his Soliloquies and "some commentaries on the Psalms." He indulged in rhetorical exaggerations and unjust inferences, which violated the laws of truth and honesty; and he supported himself in this, with a characteristic reference to the sophist Gorgias, by the equivocal distinction between the gymnastic or polemic style and the didactic.2103 From his master Cicero he had also learned the vicious rhetorical arts of bombast, declamatory fiction, and applause-seeking effects, which are unworthy of a Christian theologian, and which invite the reproach of the divine judge in that vision: "Thou liest! thou art a Ciceronian, not a Christian; for where thy treasure is, there thy heart is also." § 177. The Works of Jerome. The writings of Jerome, which fill eleven folios in the edition of Vallarsi, may be divided into exegetical, historical, polemic doctrinal, and polemic ethical works, and epistles.2104 I. The exegetical works stand at the head. Among these the Vulgata,2105 or Latin version of the whole Bible, Old Testament and New, is by far the most important and valuable, and constitutes alone an immortal service.2106

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  She is not satisfied with marveling from afar at this precious childhood: she tries to revive it in her. She tries to convince herself that her tastes, ideas, and feelings have kept their exceptional freshness. Perplexed, quizzical, and playing with her necklace or twisting her ring, she murmurs: “That’s funny … That’s just how I am … You know? Water fascinates me … Oh! I adore the countryside.” Each preference seems like an eccentricity, each opinion a challenge to the world. Dorothy Parker captured this widespread true-to-life characteristic: She liked to think of herself as one for whom flowers would thrive, who must always have blossoms about her, if she would be truly happy … She told people, in little bursts of confidence, that she loved flowers. There was something almost apologetic in her way of uttering her tender avowal, as if she would beg her listeners not to consider her too bizarre in her taste. It seemed rather as though she expected the hearer to fall back, startled, at her words, crying, “Not really! Well, what are we coming to?” She had other little confessions of affection … always with a little hesitation, as if understandably delicate about baring her heart, she told her love for color, the country, a good time, a really interesting play, nice materials, well-made clothes, and sunshine. But it was her fondness for flowers that she acknowledged oftenest. She seemed to feel that this, even more than her other predilections, set her apart from the general.* The woman eagerly tries to confirm these analyses in her behavior; she chooses a color: “Green is really my color”; she has a favorite flower, perfume, musician, superstitions, and fetishes that she treats with respect; she does not have to be beautiful to express her personality in her outfits and home. The character she portrays is more or less coherent and original according to her intelligence, obstinacy, and depth of alienation. Some women just randomly put together a few sparse and mismatched traits; others systematically create a figure whose role they consistently play: it has already been said that women have trouble differentiating this game from the truth. Around this heroine, life goes on like a sad or marvelous novel, always somewhat strange. Sometimes it is a novel already written. I do not know how many girls have told me they see themselves in Judy of “Dust.”†

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  They may still engage in social conflict for the satisfaction of their pride and vanity provided they can compound their personal ambitions with, and hallow them by, the ambitions of their group, and the pitiful vanities and passions of the individuals who compose the group. The story of Napoleon belongs to modern and not to ancient history. He could bathe Europe in blood for the sake of gratifying his overweening lust for power, as long as he could pose as the tool of French patriotism and as the instrument of revolutionary fervor. The fact that the democratic sentiment, opposed to the traditional absolutisms of Europe, could be exploited to create a tyranny more sanguinary and terrible than those which it sought ostensibly to destroy; and that the dream of equality, liberty and fraternity of the French Revolution could turn so quickly into the nightmare of Napoleonic imperialism is a tragic revelation of the inadequacies of the human resources with which men must try to solve the problems of their social life. The childish vanity of the German Emperor, who wanted a large navy so that he could stand on equal footing with his royal English uncle at naval manœuvres, helped to make the World War inevitable. 3 He would not have been permitted to indulge this vanity however had it not seemed compatible with the prejudices of his people and the economic necessities of a growing empire. Theodore Roosevelt belonged to a little junta which foisted the Spanish-American War upon the American people. The ambition and vanity which prompted him could be veiled and exalted because the will-to-power of an adolescent nation and the frustrated impulses of pugnacity and martial ardor of the pitiful little “men in the street” could find in him symbolic expression and vicarious satisfaction. The need of the modern industrial overlord for raw materials and markets, and rivalry over control of the undeveloped and unexploited portions of the earth are the occasion of modern wars. Yet the ambitions and greed of dominant economic groups within each nation are not the only cause of international conflict. Every social group tends to develop imperial ambitions which are aggravated, but not caused solely, by the lusts of its leaders and privileged groups. Every group, as every individual, has expansive desires which are rooted in the instinct of survival and soon extend beyond it. The will-to-live becomes the will-to-power. Only rarely does nature provide armors of defense which cannot be transmuted into instruments of aggression. The frustrations of the average man, who can never realise the power and the glory which his imagination sets as the ideal, makes him the more willing tool and victim of the imperial ambitions of his group. His frustrated individual ambitions gain a measure of satisfaction in the power and the aggrandisement of his nation.

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

  To ward off his desires, she contrives a ruse worthy of any romantic heroine, and perhaps a little unexpected in a Christian one: “she summoned an utterly gorgeous slave-girl named Euclia who was naturally dissolute.” Euclia consents to the scheme and becomes the substitute bedmate for Aegeates, who for eight months copulates unwittingly with a surrogate wife! Only the moral economy of romance allows the Christian story to sacrifice, without apparent compunction, the sexual honesty of a slave, in the name of salvaging the chastity of a heroine. Needless to say, this detail did not survive the literary scalpel of Gregory, who makes no mention of the scam. 36 The slave Euclia enjoys her temporary promotion, but she is undone by her pride. Tired of her airs, the fellow slaves reveal the plot to their master. Infuriated, he has Euclia’s tongue cut out and her body mutilated. Rather pitifully, he goes to Maximilla in his distress and reiterates his love for her. She rebukes him in a malicious double entendre that served to fuel rather than allay his suspicions. “I love, Aegeates, I do love, but what I love is not of this world.… Let me have my intercourse with this love and take solace only in it.” When Aegeates identifies Andrew as the cause of his troubles, he has the apostle arrested. The proconsul tempts his wife to return to bed by threatening to visit inconceivable torment on Andrew’s body. In the Acts of Andrew the lawful husband, the image of Roman order, has become the villain, and the bond between the apostle and the heroine—a purely chaste bond—is subjected to awful trials. Strengthened by Andrew’s preaching, Maximilla stands firm against Aegeates, and Andrew, after preaching from the gallows, is crucified. This artful romance, then, ends not with the mysterious pleasures of union that regenerate the world but with suffering and separation and hope for a final reunion with God. 37 No piece of the apostolic cycle is so exquisitely framed as a romance as the legend known as the Acts of Paul and Thecla. The story of Paul and Thecla was a detachable part of the larger body of legends that accumulated around the figure of Paul. The Acts of Paul and Thecla are already, in their focus on Thecla as a protagonist, more reminiscent of romance than most apostolic lore. Thecla is directly modeled on the heroines of romance. She is a virgin, the daughter of Theoclia, citizen of Iconium. She is just of marriageable age, engaged to the leading young man of the city, Thamyris.

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

  Perhaps the reverberations of the crisis were least felt inside the monastery, which possessed the cultural resources to maintain ancient styles of moral philosophy indifferent to the transformations of the external world. In the ascetic literature we find an ethics of the sexual body that, despite its novelty, seems to extend backward in time across the centuries. Here we encounter the vital legends of the monastic fathers, like Paphnutius, who once believed that he had vanquished the demonic impulses that tempted his flesh. His pride earned him a visitation from an angel of the Lord, who warned him how incomplete his spiritual transformation remained. “Go, take a most beautiful naked virgin, and if holding her you feel that the tranquility of your heart remains undisturbed and your peace is untouched by fleshly burnings,” then only might he vaunt his spiritual accomplishment. If this was an unusual proposal for an angel to make, we are quickly informed that it worked its effects without having to be tried literally, as the humility of Paphnutius was restored. In stories like these we see how intimately the array of cosmic beings had settled into ancient conversations about sexual desires; but the psychological assumptions and moral imagination of such lore draws on centuries of tradition. We remember that Epictetus had imagined a philosopher confronted with the temptations of a willing girl; the Stoic imagined victory in such a scenario as a rational decision to discount the impulses of pleasure. Epictetus frankly admitted that you could cut off the penis but never cut out desire. In the ascetic literature of late antiquity, we see the fulfillment of the trajectory promised already by Clement of Alexandria, that Christian sexual morality, in its purest expression, would not conquer desire but eliminate it. 2 We meet the story of Paphnutius and the virgin in the Conferences of John Cassian, a later contemporary of Augustine who did more than anyone to translate the lessons of eastern asceticism into a western tradition of cenobitic monasticism. Although Foucault’s work on ancient Christianity was cut short by his death, it is evident from the published fragments that he intended to treat Cassian’s thought as the quintessence of late antique sexual morality. This would have been both a canny and an idiosyncratic choice. Cassian outlines, with the prescriptive clarity of an institutional founder, the place of sexual austerity within a communal monastic regimen. For Cassian, chastity was one element in a complex of interrelated virtues through which the monk sought extraordinary personal transformation. The pursuit of chastity entailed a demanding regimen to control both “the heat of the body” and the “motion of the soul.” For Cassian, the monk could transcend sexual desire only by reaching a state of exalted love for his own purity; to resist pleasure was mere abstinence, but to rebuild the self as a creature untouched by its temptations was true chastity.

• From The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 4: Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700) (1984)

  The marriage ethic of the church was permitting widows and widowers to remarry, when according to the Montanists the demand of monogamy, stated in the phrase "husband of one i Tim.3:2 wife," forbade multiple marriage in series as well as in parallel, as indeed it had for some earlier Christian writers Heim.Mand.4.4 (SC 53:162) such as Hermas. The church was growing lax in the enforcement of fasting, but the Montanists insisted that the rapid approach of the end demanded greater strictness Tett.Jejun.17.7 (CCSL , r . rr r _ . ° . . , . 2:1276) than ever in fasting. These questions, together with issues Tert.Fug.1.1 (CCSL 2:1135) like flight from martyrdom and penitential discipline, formed the principal emphasis of the new prophecy. With a sternness and zeal that has tended to characterize the moral reformers of the church more than its doctrinal or theological reformers, Montanism called the church to repent, for the kingdom of God was now finally at hand. This would seem to have been the quality in Montanism that attracted men like Tertullian, whose writings are one of our few primary sources for Montanist teaching. His reliability as such a source constitutes a major prob lem. On the one hand, his Montanism dated from a period almost two generations later than the origins of the movement; and it is almost axiomatic that two genera tions can and usually do alter the character and emphasis of a movement considerably. On the other hand, Tertul lian himself was obviously a man of such strong mind and will as to support the conjecture that he changed Montanism at least as much as he was changed by it. This seems certainly to have been the case with his eschatology, and it may well be true throughout his theology. Not for its theological novelty, if any, was he drawn to it, but for its moral zeal, so that, in Bon- wetsch's apt formulation, "what he had previously de manded as a consequence of a pietistic and rigoristic conception of Christianity, he now required as a Mon- Bonwetsch (1881) 119 tanist on the basis of divine authority." Nevertheless, when it comes to the question of the doctrinal significance of Montanism, it is upon Tertullian's testimony that we must rely in great measure, testing it as well as we can against the other scraps of information that are available.

• From Escape (2007)

  The fact of our birth meant we were precious spirits—one in a million—and when the last days came, we would be the ones who would be lifted up to heaven in the rapture. So by the time you’re born into the FLDS culture, you’ve already won a lottery of sorts. You’re a spirit chosen to do God’s work on earth, which is priceless. When God gives one of his children so much, it carries a lot of responsibility. Over and over we’re told, “Where much is given, much is required.” So while I thought it was strange and uncomfortable when people stared at me, I did not feel embarrassed. I was one of the pure and select. I looked down on the people who thought I looked strange. They were wicked and less evolved. Tammy insisted on sitting next to Merril on the flight from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. Cathleen and I sat two seats behind them. We changed planes in Los Angeles. Merril had two empty seats on either side of him, and after Tammy grabbed one, I took the other. This infuriated Cathleen, who took an empty seat next to Tammy. But she felt like the outsider and started pouting and sniveling. Merril made some snide remark and Cathleen stormed to the back of the plane where there were empty seats. Soon we could hear her sobbing. The other passengers stared at us and tried to fathom our strange behavior. The several other couples from Colorado City pretended nothing was amiss out of respect for Merril. Tammy felt victorious now that Cathleen had been reduced to tears and exiled to the back of the plane. Then Tammy took aim at me. How could I abandon my sister wife? How could I be so selfish and inconsiderate? I ignored her until that became impossible and then I blurted out that I had no intention of babysitting Cathleen. Merril started to laugh. It was the first time he seemed engaged with any aspect of the trip since his tearful parting with Barbara. It was a long flight. The drama continued almost nonstop. I put on my headphones and watched the movie. During this era in the FLDS, some people had TVs in their homes, and it was not uncommon to occasionally go to movies in theaters. While I had contact with the outside world in some limited ways—mostly through school and college—being on a plane was unusual to me. But when we finally touched down in Honolulu I was exhausted. Merril and I walked off the plane together and someone came up to us and threw leis around our necks. A tourist photographer took our picture. Tammy barged in and said that she and Cathleen were also part of the couple. She insisted that another picture be taken of the four of us together.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  Home for the gigantic Green family has long been a collection of decrepit trailers plunked down on ten acres of desert in Juab County’s desolate Snake Valley, way out toward the Nevada line, a hundred miles from the nearest paved road. Green has modestly christened this little kingdom Greenhaven. Unlike most polygamists, who conscientiously avoid outside scrutiny, Green has an insatiable thirst for publicity. He and his wives have opened their lives to numerous print journalists and have eagerly appeared on such television shows as Judge Judy, Jerry Springer, Queen Latifah, Sally Jessy Rafael, and Dateline NBC. They decided to seek this media attention, Green explained in a public statement, after he woke up one morning and “heard a voice say to me, ‘Don’t hide your light under a bushel, but let your light so shine before men so that they will see your good words and glorify your Father in Heaven.’ I told my wives what I had heard and that I understood from it that God wanted us to be an example that plural marriage can work. . . . We are not ashamed of our beliefs, and we are certainly not ashamed of our family. . . . We just want people to realize that polygamists are not a threat, we are not fanatics, we are not criminals.” Unfortunately for Tom Green, Juab County attorney David O. Leavitt—the younger brother of Utah governor Mike Leavitt—happened to turn on his television one night in 1999 to see Green boasting of his young wives on Dateline NBC. Although Leavitt had long known about Green’s polygamous colony out in the west desert, until he saw Green holding forth in prime time, he’d had no intention of prosecuting him. As a child Leavitt had had friends who were the offspring of polygamists, and his own great-grandfather had married a plurality of wives. In 1993, when Leavitt was fresh out of law school and working as a public defender, he’d even defended a polygamist, and won, by arguing that the religious freedom guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution overruled state laws criminalizing plural marriage. But then Leavitt saw Green bragging on national television that he had married all of his current wives when they were mere girls. One of them was only thirteen when he, at age thirty-seven, got her pregnant. According to Utah statute, when an adult male has sex with a thirteen-year-old child, a first-degree felony has been committed. “Tom Green at first blush appeared to be someone that no one should bother,” Leavitt explained to reporter Pauline Arrillaga of the Associated Press in November 2000. “But this is a man who has taken thirteen- and fourteen-year-old children, deprived them of any education, married them, impregnated them, required the state to pay the bill, and has raped a thirteen-year-old girl.” Five months after the Dateline show aired, Leavitt filed charges against Green, who was supporting his oversize family by drawing welfare checks.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Chapter 6I Know I’m a Good Guy, But . . .On a foggy summer morning, I met Liam, eighteen, for breakfast at a San Francisco café. He had just graduated high school and was heading to college in North Carolina. He was a slender, studious-looking boy with dark hair and oversize plastic glasses—if it weren’t for the trail of hickeys on his neck, a souvenir from the previous night’s hookup, I would never have pegged him as a player. Liam described himself as “athletic but not varsity material.” That’s why, he figured, his surest route to respect once he got to high school was to hook up with as many girls as possible. “There was a hierarchy among guys at my school,” he explained, “and it was completely based on sports, looks, who you’re friends with, and your sex life—and on those things alone. Personality? Not really. Maybe if you’re a funny guy, then you’re ‘the funny guy,’ whatever. So bragging about how many girls I’d hooked up with, joking about it, was definitely a way to gain status. And I did that, I admit it.” When we met, his “body count” was fifty-one. “I only had sex with four of them, though,” he said. “Mostly it was making out. But I did go further than that with a lot. And that got me so much status in every aspect of my life. Doing it was physically pleasurable, too, of course, but it was more about buying into the general culture. It was, absolutely, a competition with other guys.” The secret to Liam’s success, he said, was all about confidence, or at least the appearance of it. “Even in places like the Bay Area, which is super liberal, super feminist, super all about female empowerment, when it gets down to business, there’s still the expectation that the guy will make the first move or nothing is going to happen. It’s fine some of the time, but I think what’s not really talked about is that guys get really nervous, too, and being intimate with someone can be nerve-racking for both parties. So the reality is that confidence is mostly artificial: it’s just about telling yourself, ‘I’m confident,’ and acting on that. It’s not necessarily actual confidence.”

• From Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1997)

  Let us now examine whether any of these three theories, devised to explain the evolution of animal signals, can also explain features of human bodies. But we first need to ask whether our bodies possess any such features requiring explanation. Our first inclination might be to assume that only stupid animals require genetically coded badges, like a red dot here and a black stripe there, in order to figure out each other’s age, status, sex, genetic quality, and value as a potential mate. We, in contrast, have much bigger brains and far more reasoning ability than any other animal. Moreover, we are uniquely capable of speech and can thereby store and transmit far more detailed information than any other animal can. What need have we of red dots and black stripes when we routinely and accurately determine the age and status of other humans just by talking to them? What animal can tell another animal that it is twenty-seven years old, receives an annual salary of $125,000, and is second assistant vice president at the country’s third largest bank? In selecting our mates and sex partners, don’t we go through a dating phase that is in effect a long series of tests by which we accurately assess a prospective partner’s parenting skills, relationship skills, and genes? The answer is simple: nonsense! We too rely on signals as arbitrary as a widowbird’s tail and a bowerbird’s crest. Our signals include faces, smells, hair color, men’s beards, and women’s breasts. What makes those structures less ludicrous than a long tail as grounds for selecting a spouse—the most important person in our adult life, our economic and social partner, and the coparent of our children? If we think that we have a signaling system immune to cheating, why do so many people resort to makeup, hair dyes, and breast augmentation? As for our supposedly wise and careful selection process, all of us know that when we walk into a room full of unfamiliar people, we quickly sense who attracts us physically and who doesn’t. That quick sense is based on “sex appeal,” which just means the sum of the body signals to which we respond, largely unconsciously. Our divorce rate, now around 50 percent in the United States, shows that we ourselves acknowledge the failure of half of our efforts to select mates. Albatrosses and many other pair-bonded animal species have much lower “divorce” rates. So much for our wisdom and their stupidity!

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  those parts of their heritage that they see as favorable and wish to keep, jettisoning what unpleasant truths they would prefer to forget. The same impulses would soon be used to refashion the redneck and embrace white trash as an authentic heritage. It was moonshiners known for trippin’ whiskey and outrunnin’ the law who started the rough and wild sport of stock car racing. By the seventies, with money from Detroit automobile companies and celebrity drivers, an outlaw sport had become NASCAR, the tamer pastime of arriviste middle-class Americans. Meanwhile, country crooners Johnny Russell and Vernon Oxford released the hit singles “Rednecks, White Socks, and Blue Ribbon Beer” (1973) and “Redneck! (The Redneck National Anthem)” (1976). Vernon Oxford defined “redneck” as “someone who enjoys country music and likes to drink beer.” In 1977, the year Elvis died, the new queen of country rock music, Dolly Parton, was featured in the elite fashion magazine Vogue. “Redneck chic” (the cleaned-up redneck) reached Hollywood in the 1981 film Urban Cowboy, in which Jersey boy John Travolta took on the role of hard-hat- wearing, honky-tonk-loving Texas two-stepper Buford Davis. In 1986, Ernest Matthew Mickler’s White Trash Cooking was published, celebrating low-down lingo and rural recipes. When Mickler, a country singer as well as a caterer, gave his book to his seventy-two-year-old aunt, she remarked, “Well, that’s what they call us, ain’t it?” 14 The transition to white trash acceptance or accommodation was not as smooth as it might seem. While Dolly Parton made over-the-top “floozydom” fashionable, and combined the burlesque of blonde bombshells Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield with Daisy Mae of Li’l Abner fame, her public identity did not escape the taint of white trash degradation. “You have no idea how much it costs to make someone look this cheap,” Parton told a reporter in 1986. The Hollywood blockbuster Deliverance lacked even an ounce of delicacy, but offered up instead one of the most devastating portraits of rude hillbillies since the eugenics movement faded from view. White middle-class readers of the novel and film audiences wrote fan mail to author James Dickey, praising the four intrepid Atlanta adventurers as if they were old-time pioneers overcoming wilderness dangers while escaping the clutches of white trash savages. A former student of Dickey’s wrote fawningly to his mentor, apparently oblivious to the dehumanizing tone of his letter. He was an ardent backwoods hiker, he said, “though I carry no bow and there are no rednecks awaiting me at the top for me to stalk and kill.” He could not differentiate, in moral terms, between the thrill of taking on the mountains and the thrill of sending mountain men to their deaths. 15

• From Three Women (2019)

  sloaneSloane Ford has very long, very beautiful hair the color of chestnuts. An improbably warm tone of brown, but she doesn’t dye it. She’s thin and in her early forties but her face is like a sorority girl’s; it has the look of making out. She goes to the gym more often than she eats lunch with other mothers. She both does and doesn’t look like a woman people gossip about. She appears genuine, if sly, and says things like, I am intrigued by the politics of service. She means the way a dining experience is a microcosm for the dynamics of familiars and strangers coming together, under conditions in which one side of the encounter is somewhat indentured to the other, at least for the course of several hours. She gives the impression of not knowing she’s being looked at. In certain light she can appear so self-assured that it can be frightening, and one might be very aware of setting her off. At other times she’s very giving, so as to appear almost small, so that friends might endeavor never to upset her. The confluence of both is striking and has the result of drawing one to her. Sloane is married to a man named Richard, who is not as handsome as she is beautiful. They have two daughters, equine and vibrant like their mother; and a third child, Lila, Richard’s daughter from his first relationship. As a family they are bound very neatly and yet there is also a porousness, the sort of friendly distance that enables each member of the family to be his or her own person. They live in Newport, on Rhode Island’s Narrangansett Bay, where great Georgian houses line the rocky coast, on a crowded but lovely street where summer people buy bluefish pâté and Carr’s and lobster from the fish market. Richard and Sloane own a restaurant a few blocks inland from the boats that knock quietly in the harbor. He’s the chef and she’s the front of the house. She’s perfect for the position, the sort of woman who can wear ankle-length dresses and not get lost in them. Their summer is busy, as it is for everyone on the island. Summer is the time to make all the money they can because the colder months are seedless. In January and February the residents must batten down the hatches, stay inside with their family and their earnings, eating the kale pesto that they have preserved. During the colder months the residents are also better able to concentrate on the children, their routines, school and recitals and sports. But Sloane is a woman who doesn’t talk about her children, or at least not in the same way as some other women, whose lives revolve around tiny schedules.

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  In his opposition to Pelagius and Julian, to their circle of wealthy scholars who claimed to be living perfect Christian lives, Augustine voiced the daily concerns of his own community of far-from-perfect Christians. He pitted their common sense against Julian’s boasted mastery of Aristotelian categories, then contrasted his own flock’s faith with Julian’s reason: “With cocked head and smiling face you dismiss the mob, which you say is not up to the fine distinctions” of a genius like yourself (U 2.36, 51). Brown (385) finds something demagogic in Augustine’s appeal to the mob against snobs. But we have to remember that he was dealing with a man who had ridiculed “Punic [Phoenician] donkeys” and Augustine as the chief “donkey tender.” It is true that there was a clash of temperaments here, as well as of tenets, a large difference in social tone. Adolf Harnack, the great historian of dogma, said of Augustine and Julian: “To appreciate the uncommon qualities of two such worthy adversaries is to wish that Nature could have combined them into one man—what a man that would be.” In this slugging match, both Julian and Augustine ended up rather punch-drunk. Each scored points that later backfired. There is a tragic hopelessness in their dreary round of repeated arguments: AUGUSTINE: If there is no original sin, why does your church baptize babies? JULIAN: If babies are unbaptized, do they go to hell? AUGUSTINE: If baptism does not save, why did Pelagius make it the central act of Christian life? Or the celebrated argument on nature versus grace: JULIAN: If God created nature good, why does He have to rescue it all the time with last-minute graces? AUGUSTINE: Isn’t God intervening all the time, even in the order of nature? JULIAN: What room does that leave for human responsibility and virtue? On this last controversy, the Dominican scholar François Réfoulé has argued that Julian anticipated the great Dominican master, Thomas Aquinas, in drawing a bright line between nature and grace. That kind of division was against the whole tenor of Augustine’s thought. He held that God is always creating, instant by instant; is illuminating the mind, even in “natural” thought, about spiritual things; is creating a mysterious echo of the Trinity in every intellectual creature, even Satan. Making a man live in the first place is as miraculous as making Lazarus live again. Changing water to wine by the growth and harvesting of grapes is just a “slower” miracle than that at Cana. Every spring is a resurrection. The wonders of nature always astonished Augustine. The last book of The City of God, written when he was seventy-one, is a long series of “ooh”s and “ah”s at creation’s surprises, hints of the great surprise to come in heaven. When he was young, the exhilaration of escaping the Manichean view of evil made Augustine celebrate existence in its lowest forms: