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 The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  are not naturally resistant but quite predictable. You know how they’ll respond to your great idea—they’ll love it. In fact, they need you and your work more than you need them. They should seek you out. The emphasis is not on what you need to do to succeed but on what you feel you deserve. You can foresee a lot of attention coming your way with this project, but if you fail, other people must be to blame, because you have gifts, your cause is the right one, and only those who are malicious or envious could stand in your way. We can call this psychological disease grandiosity . As you feel its effects, the normal realistic proportions are reversed—your self becomes larger and greater than anything else around it. That is the lens through which you view the task and the people you need to reach. This is not merely deep narcissism (see chapter 2), in which everything must revolve around you. This is seeing yourself as enlarged (the root of the word grandiosity meaning “big” or “great”), as superior and worthy of not only attention but of being adored. It is a feeling of being not merely human but godlike. You may think of powerful, egotistical leaders in the public eye as the ones who contract such a disease, but you would be very wrong in that assumption. Certainly we find many influential people, such as Michael Eisner, with high-grade versions of grandiosity, where the attention and accolades they receive create a more intense enlargement of the self. But there is a low-grade, everyday version of the disease that is common to almost all of us because it is a trait embedded in human nature. It stems from our deep need to feel important, esteemed by people, and superior to others in something. You are rarely aware of your own grandiosity because by its nature it alters your perception of reality and makes it hard to have an accurate assessment of yourself. And so you are unaware of the problems it might be causing you at this very moment. Your low- grade grandiosity will cause you to overestimate your own skills and abilities and to underestimate the obstacles that you face. And so you will take on tasks that are beyond your actual capacity. You will feel certain that people will respond to your idea in a particular way, and when they don’t, you will become upset and blame others. You may become restless and suddenly make a career change, not realizing that grandiosity is at the root—your present work is not confirming your greatness and superiority, because to be truly great would require more years of training and the development of new skills. Better to quit and be lured by the possibilities a new career offers, allowing you to entertain fantasies of greatness. In this way, you never quite master anything. You may have dozens of great

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  When Dean and Jason and I would sit around in the parking lot, I felt earthy and real, like a guy out of a movie. They both came from wealthy families whose lives didn’t revolve around church. I felt cool when I was with them, very sophisticated, as if I were going to play at Wimbledon the next week, sipping wine and signing autographs after the match. Dean and I were serving as copresidents of the church youth group at the time. Dean never took any of it seriously. He took being president seriously but not the stuff about spirituality, not the stuff about metaphysical things taking place in your life. I’d try to get him to go to church camp, but he never wanted to. Camp was at the end of the summer, and it was too close to the school year, and if he went to camp, he’d feel convicted and it would take him a good two months to start drinking again, so he never went. One time, right after I got back from camp, Dean bought two cases of beer and had me stay over at his house. He said I had to get drunk to get over the initial guilt so I could have a good time at all the fall parties. I drank about a case all by myself. Dean and I walked over to the city park and shot baskets under the moon, staggering and swearing because we could never hit the rim. I didn’t mind the drinking, mostly. Dean was about the best friend a guy could have. He really cared about people, I think, and so did Jason for that matter. They just liked to have a good time like anybody. With me, though, it was different. I really wanted to please God. I mean, I sort of wanted to please God. I felt like God had done something personal and real in my life. I also felt that I should probably try staying sober for a while, being copresident of the youth group and all. One night while hanging out by the tennis courts, Jason pulled out a pretty-good-size bag of weed. Dean hardly smoked the stuff. He hated the taste and said it never got him high. I had never tried it, but that night Jason was pretty insistent on all of us giving it a go. I wasn’t big on the idea. I had already had about five beers and was feeling pretty drunk. I had heard you shouldn’t mix those things. Dean started packing Jason’s pipe, and Jason got pretty excited, so I told him I’d take a hit.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  I have the golden touch. Those with heightened grandiosity will try to create the legend that they have never really failed. If there were failures or setbacks in their career, it was always the fault of others who betrayed them. U.S. Army general Douglas MacArthur was a genius at deflecting blame; to hear him say it, in his long career he had never lost a battle, although in fact he had lost many. But by trumpeting his successes and finding endless excuses, such as betrayals, for his losses, he created the myth of his magical battlefield powers. Grandiose leaders inevitably resort to such marketing magic. Related to this is the belief that they can easily transfer their skills —a movie executive can become a theme park designer, a businessman can become the leader of a nation. Because they are magically gifted, they can try their hand at anything that attracts them. This is often a fatal move on their part, as they attempt things beyond their expertise and quickly become overwhelmed with the complexity and chaos that come from their lack of experience. In dealing with such types, look carefully at their record and notice how many glaring failures they have had. Although people under the influence of their grandiosity will probably not listen, publicize the truth of their record in as neutral a manner as possible. I’m invulnerable. The grandiose leader takes risks. This is what often attracts attention in the first place, and combined with the success that often attends the bold, they seem larger than life. But this boldness is not really under control. They must take actions that create a splash in order to keep the attention coming that feeds their high self-opinion. They cannot rest or retreat, because that would cause a lapse in publicity. To make things worse, they come to feel invulnerable because so many times in the past they have gotten away with risky maneuvers, and if they faced setbacks, they managed to overcome them through more audacity. Furthermore, these daring activities make them feel alive and on edge. It becomes a drug. They need bigger stakes and rewards to maintain the feeling of godlike invulnerability. They can work twenty hours a day when under this form of pressure. They can walk through fire. In fact they are rather invulnerable, until that fatal hubristic maneuver in which they finally go too far and it all crashes down. This could be MacArthur’s grandiose tour of the United States after the Korean War, in which his irrational need for attention became painfully apparent; or Mao’s fatal decision to unleash the Cultural Revolution; or Stan O’Neal, CEO of Merrill Lynch, sticking with mortgage-backed securities when everyone else was getting out, essentially destroying one of the oldest financial institutions in the country. Suddenly the aura of being invulnerable is shattered. This occurs because their decisions are determined not by rational considerations but by the need for attention and glory, and eventually

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  As I stand to go he stands with me, points to a tree growing from a hole in the sidewalk— See that tree? I’m responsible for that. I made a call, got the city to plant it. My tree. Beautiful tree, I say. And these steps, he says, pointing to where we were sitting, I had them replaced. My steps. Nice steps, I say. He walks me to my car, points to the tree beside it— That tree too —he’s leaning into my window now, if I were to pull away I would drag him with me— even though it’s not in front of my door. I was feeling generous .

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  I have the golden touch. Those with heightened grandiosity will try to create the legend that they have never really failed. If there were failures or setbacks in their career, it was always the fault of others who betrayed them. U.S. Army general Douglas MacArthur was a genius at deflecting blame; to hear him say it, in his long career he had never lost a battle, although in fact he had lost many. But by trumpeting his successes and finding endless excuses, such as betrayals, for his losses, he created the myth of his magical battlefield powers. Grandiose leaders inevitably resort to such marketing magic. Related to this is the belief that they can easily transfer their skills —a movie executive can become a theme park designer, a businessman can become the leader of a nation. Because they are magically gifted, they can try their hand at anything that attracts them. This is often a fatal move on their part, as they attempt things beyond their expertise and quickly become overwhelmed with the complexity and chaos that come from their lack of experience. In dealing with such types, look carefully at their record and notice how many glaring failures they have had. Although people under the influence of their grandiosity will probably not listen, publicize the truth of their record in as neutral a manner as possible. I’m invulnerable. The grandiose leader takes risks. This is what often attracts attention in the first place, and combined with the success that often attends the bold, they seem larger than life. But this boldness is not really under control. They must take actions that create a splash in order to keep the attention coming that feeds their high self-opinion. They cannot rest or retreat, because that would cause a lapse in publicity. To make things worse, they come to feel invulnerable because so many times in the past they have gotten away with risky maneuvers, and if they faced setbacks, they managed to overcome them through more audacity. Furthermore, these daring activities make them feel alive and on edge. It becomes a drug. They need bigger stakes and rewards to maintain the feeling of godlike invulnerability. They can work twenty hours a day when under this form of pressure. They can walk through fire. In fact they are rather invulnerable, until that fatal hubristic maneuver in which they finally go too far and it all crashes down. This could be MacArthur’s grandiose tour of the United States after the Korean War, in which his irrational need for attention became painfully apparent; or Mao’s fatal decision to unleash the Cultural Revolution; or Stan O’Neal, CEO of Merrill Lynch, sticking with mortgage-backed securities when everyone else was getting out, essentially destroying one of the oldest financial institutions in the country. Suddenly the aura of being invulnerable is shattered. This occurs because their decisions are determined not by rational considerations but by the need for attention and glory, and eventually

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  For not many men . . . can love a friend who fortune prospers without envying; and about the envious brain cold poison clings and doubles all the pain life brings him. His own woundings he must nurse, and feel another’s gladness like a curse. —Aeschylus W 11 Know Your Limits The Law of Grandiosity e humans have a deep need to think highly of ourselves. If that opinion of our goodness, greatness, and brilliance diverges enough from reality, we become grandiose. We imagine our superiority. Often a small measure of success will elevate our natural grandiosity to even more dangerous levels. Our high self-opinion has now been confirmed by events. We forget the role that luck may have played in the success, or the contributions of others. We imagine we have the golden touch. Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last. Look for the signs of elevated grandiosity in yourself and in others—overbearing certainty in the positive outcome of your plans; excessive touchiness if criticized; a disdain for any form of authority. Counteract the pull of grandiosity by maintaining a realistic assessment of yourself and your limits. Tie any feelings of greatness to your work, your achievements, and your contributions to society. The Success Delusion By the summer of 1984, Michael Eisner (b. 1942), president of Paramount Pictures, could no longer ignore the restlessness that had been plaguing him for months. He was impatient to move on to a bigger stage and shake the foundations of Hollywood. This restlessness had been the story of his life. He had begun his career at ABC, and never settling too comfortably within one department, after nine years of various promotions he had risen to the position of head of prime-time programming. But television began to seem small and constricting to him. He needed a larger, grander stage. In 1976 Barry Diller—a former boss at ABC and now the chairman of Paramount Pictures—offered him the job of heading Paramount’s film studio, and he jumped at the chance. Paramount had long been in the doldrums, but working with Diller, Eisner transformed it into the hottest studio in Hollywood, with a string of remarkably successful films—Saturday Night Fever , Grease , Flashdance , and Terms of Endearment . Although Diller certainly played a part in this turnaround, Eisner saw himself as the main driving force behind the studio’s success. After all, he had invented a surefire formula for creating profitable films. The formula depended on keeping costs down, an obsession of his. To do so, a film had to begin with a great concept, one that was original, easy to summarize, and dramatic. Executives could hire the most expensive writers, directors, and actors for a film, but if the underlying concept was weak, all the money in the world would be wasted. Films with a strong concept, however, would market themselves.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Mistakes and failures elicit the need to explain. We want to learn the lesson and not repeat the experience. But in truth, we do not like to look too closely at what we did; our introspection is limited. Our natural response is to blame others, circumstances, or a momentary lapse of judgment. The reason for this bias is that it is often too painful to look at our mistakes. It calls into question our feelings of superiority. It pokes at our ego. We go through the motions, pretending to reflect on what we did. But with the passage of time, the pleasure principle rises and we forget what small part in the mistake we ascribed to ourselves. Desire and emotion will blind us yet again, and we will repeat exactly the same mistake and go through the same mild recriminating process, followed by forgetfulness, until we die. If people truly learned from their experience, we would find few mistakes in the world and career paths that ascend ever upward. Superiority Bias I’m different. I’m more rational than others, more ethical as well . Few would say this to people in conversation. It sounds arrogant. But in numerous opinion polls and studies, when asked to compare themselves with others, people generally express a variation of this. It’s the equivalent of an optical illusion—we cannot seem to see our faults and irrationalities, only those of others. So, for instance, we’ll easily believe that those in the other political party do not come to their opinions based on rational principles, but those on our side have done so. On the ethical front, few of us will ever admit that we have resorted to deception or manipulation in our work or have been clever and strategic in our career advancement. Everything we’ve got, or so we think, comes from natural talent and hard work. But with other people, we are quick to ascribe to them all kinds of Machiavellian tactics. This allows us to justify whatever we do, no matter the results. We feel a tremendous pull to imagine ourselves as rational, decent, and ethical. These are qualities highly promoted in the culture. To show signs otherwise is to risk great disapproval. If all of this were true—if people were rational and morally superior—the world would be suffused with goodness and peace. We know, however, the reality, and so some people, perhaps all of us, are merely deceiving ourselves. Rationality and ethical qualities must be achieved through awareness and effort. They do not come naturally. They come through a maturation process. Step Two: Beware the Inflaming Factors Low-grade emotions continually affect our thinking, and they originate from our own impulses—for instance, the desire for pleasing and comforting thoughts. High-grade emotion, however, comes at certain moments, reaches an explosive pitch, and is generally sparked by something external—a person who gets under our skin, or particular circumstances. The level of arousal is higher and our attention is captured completely. The more we think about

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  In building the park, he refused to listen to experienced advisers who recommended the Barcelona site and advocated a modest theme park to keep the costs down. He did not pay attention to French culture but directed everything from Burbank. He operated under the belief that his skills as the head of a film studio could be transferred to theme parks and architecture. He was certainly overestimating his creative powers, and now his business decisions revealed a large enough detachment from reality to qualify as delusional. Once this mental imbalance takes hold, it can only get worse, because to come back down to earth is to admit that one’s earlier high self-opinion was wrong, and the human animal will almost never admit that. Instead, the tendency is to blame others for every failure or setback. In the grips now of his delusion, he made his most serious mistake of all—the firing of Jeffrey Katzenberg. The Disney system depended on a steady flow of new animated hits, which fed the stores and theme parks with new characters, merchandise, rides, and avenues for publicity. Katzenberg clearly had developed the knack for creating such hits, exemplified by the unprecedented success of The Lion King . Firing him put the entire assembly line at risk. Who would take over? Certainly not Roy Disney or Eisner himself? Furthermore, he had to know that Katzenberg would take his skills elsewhere, which he did when he cofounded a new studio, DreamWorks. There he churned out more animated hits. The new studio drove up the price for skilled animators, vastly increasing the cost of producing an animated film and threatening Disney’s entire profit system. But instead of a firm grip on this reality, Eisner was more focused on the competition for attention. Katzenberg’s rise threatened his elevated self-opinion, and he had to sacrifice profit and practicality to soothe his ego. The downward spiral had begun. The acquisition of ABC, under the belief that bigger is better, revealed his growing detachment from reality. Television was a dying business model in the age of new media. It was not a realistic business decision but a play for publicity. He had created an entertainment behemoth, a blob without any clear identity. The hiring and firing of Ovitz revealed an even greater level of delusion. People had become mere instruments for Eisner to use. Ovitz was considered the most feared and powerful man in Hollywood. Perhaps Eisner was unconsciously driven by the desire to humiliate Ovitz. If he had the power to make Ovitz beg for crumbs, he must be the most powerful man in Hollywood. Soon all of the problems that stemmed from his delusional thought process began to cascade—the continually rising costs of Euro Disney, the Katzenberg bonus, the lack of hits in both film divisions, the continual drain on resources from ABC, the Ovitz severance package.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  … I struggled far more than all of them [apostles] put together’ (15:8, 10). “I reckon myself in no way behind the oh-so-grand apostles” (2 Cor 11:5). No less, Paul speaks pervasively of abrupt change, novelty, and disjunction: “If one is in Christ, it’s a new creation. The old things went away. Look: new things have come to be!” (Gal 6:15). He formerly pursued the ancestral traditions with zeal, but now regards those who read scripture without Christ as veiled and blinded by “the god of this age” (2 Cor 3:17–4:4). If Paul’s Announcement had been more in the vein of “I’m OK, you’re OK,” or “You know, I’ve discovered a new reading of Isaiah,” it would surely not have generated such urgency—or intense controversy. 64 Dunn, “New Perspective,” 102–3. 65 Ibid.,” 109. 66 Ibid., 101 (my emphasis): “Paul was by no means the only Jew who became a Christian and it is difficult to see such an arbitrary jump from one ‘system’ to another commending itself quite as much as it … did to so many of his fel ow Jews.” 38 38 Paul and Matthew among Jews and Gentiles Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), founder of a modern philosophy of history, warned against five prejudices that ensnare historians. The third, “the conceit of the scholars,” meant “delight in fancying an inaccessible esoteric wisdom among the ancients, coinciding miraculously with the opinions professed by each one of themselves [the modern scholars], which they dress in the garb of antiquity in order to enforce their acceptance. ”67 That is to say, we imagine that the ancients thought as we do, ignoring their unavoidable weirdness as figures from an alien past. Classicists and biblical exegetes—I say this as a ful y complicit commentator—are especial y prone to this fal acy because of the great distance between us and the world we study and yet the very hominess of “Judaeo-Christian” tradition. We feel that we should understand it intuitively and feel at home in it. Dunn’s call for a reasonable, scholarly Paul seems to me to embody this pul , which we all feel in some way. Conclusion Many, perhaps most historical questions are worth pursuing even if we cannot definitively answer them. When we investigate why an actor in the past did something, or why an event occurred, we are immersing ourselves in their world to rethink their thoughts and situations. Since history is first of all the act of investigating, nothing is lost and much is gained by this effort to live imaginatively in the foreign world of the past, whether we ever figure things out completely or not. Whether Paul was inside or outside “Judaism” is, by contrast, a pointless historical question in my view. This is not because it cannot be answered, but because even trying to answer it, merely framing such a question, takes us away from the ancient world, away from Paul’s world. Discussing the issue requires us to find out from each other what we mean by

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  83Lecture 9—Religious Dissent and the English Civil War õParliament did its best to stamp out the afterglow of the martyr king. It declared the kingdoms of England, Ireland, and Scotland to be a commonwealth, a republic, and later a protectorate governed by Oliver Cromwell. õCromwell had been a member of Parliament and one of the main commanders of the Roundhead forces. He was also a devout Christian who thought of himself as the Puritan Moses, with God on his side in every battle. After his own army put him in control of the Commonwealth, Cromwell and his allies essentially ran a military dictatorship. They passed a host of laws against Catholics and confiscated Catholic lands. õYet Cromwell valued freedom of conscience in a way that was ahead of his time—unless, of course, religious liberty threatened political stability. This is how he could justify persecuting Catholics: Catholics were loyal to the pope, a foreign potentate, and therefore could never be loyal to the English government. õBut as a Puritan, Cromwell believed that a person had to accept Christianity freely, without coercion, in order for a conversion to be genuine. Once the king was gone, Parliament abolished the law that required attendance at local Anglican churches, although it passed laws that made it a capital crime to hold “blasphemous and execrable” opinions. 84The History of Christianity II LEVELLERS AND DIGGERS õEven after the execution of Charles, power was still concentrated in the hands of a tiny fraction of all the people in the country. And now that they were rid of the king, they were not eager to turn that power over to the common man. õA man named John Lilburne had been protesting this state of affairs since the 1630s. After the civil war, he found others who liked what he had to say, particularly his idea of freeborn rights: the equal rights that, he declared, God gives every human being. õLilburne’s enemies nicknamed this group the Levellers, and the name stuck, partly because it was pretty accurate; the Levellers wanted to level the social hierarchy, and declared that no one had any right to rule over anyone else. They were also radical defenders of freedom of religion. Levellers didn’t form a church or agree on a confession of faith, but in general they took a very individualistic, rationalist approach to Christianity. õParliament was not too sympathetic. Leaders like Lilburne ended up in prison, and the movement petered out by the late 1650s. Yet the Levellers were pretty mild compared to another group of dissenters running around in these years: the Diggers. õThe Diggers said that true political equality couldn’t coexist with economic inequality, and that meant abolishing private property. As for the origin of their name: In 1649, a bunch of them camped out on a barren patch of land called St. George’s Hill in Surrey and started digging. The land had been abandoned by locals as infertile, but their

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  As it turns out, Renee is in the kitchen, very stoned, doing the dishes. Three guys are sitting at the kitchen table, one cleaning pot, the other two watching Renee like she’s a TV show. When she runs out of dishes, one of them obediently picks up another stack off the floor and sets them in the water for her. This place is a pig sty. I pour myself another cup of whatever that crap is. Renee looks at me foggily, trying to assess my mood. “Want to dry some dishes?” she asks. “Not hardly, pal,” I say. The guys at the table give me a long look and I give them one back. A Dave holds out his hand to me. “C’mere,” he says kindly, pulling me onto his lap. The Beatles are on the stereo. “The Long and Winding Road,” a song that’ll break your heart in about one minute, begins to play. I sit quietly on the Dave’s lap and hum a few bars. He pets my hair awkwardly for a while and then puts his hand up the back of my shirt. The other two guys exchange a smirk. I take Dave’s ear by the lobe and whisper into it. His eyes open wide. He puts his hand across his chest protectively as I get up. “She’s fierce,” he says to the other two. Renee drops some crusty silverware into the brown dishwater. She struggles for a second to bring me into focus. “Jo Ann doesn’t like that kind of stuff,” she explains to them. “Well, man oh man,” Dave says. “What did I do.” The other two laugh. Looks like my old personality is back. In the phone booth in New York, I draw a picture of a girl with her fists on her hips, eyebrows converging, mouth set. She’s wearing my clothes. I have one question to ask Elizabeth, but first she wants to tell me about her weekend. “I went out with a guy who looks like the Artful Dodger,” she says. “He’s in a band and he wears a top hat. He couldn’t wear it on the date, though, because we went to a movie.” “That’s good,” I say. I tell her I’m working on a party scene. “Which party?” she asks suspiciously. “What am I doing at it?” “It’s sort of a composite of all parties, you know?” There’s silence at the other end. “It’s just a party party, is all, with those guys who all had the same names.” “The Ted Nugent guys?” she asks. Well, yes. “I never liked any of those guys, did I?” she says hopefully. Uh, I think Dave Nelson would be hurt. She probes her brain, comes up with a memory. “Oh.” She thinks for a second. “Well, he was a nice guy,” she says firmly. “Wasn’t he?” We ponder for a minute and finally both admit we can’t remember.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  it alive. Euro Disney would be the answer. He would show the world he was not just a corporate executive but rather a renaissance man. In building the park, he refused to listen to experienced advisers who recommended the Barcelona site and advocated a modest theme park to keep the costs down. He did not pay attention to French culture but directed everything from Burbank. He operated under the belief that his skills as the head of a film studio could be transferred to theme parks and architecture. He was certainly overestimating his creative powers, and now his business decisions revealed a large enough detachment from reality to qualify as delusional. Once this mental imbalance takes hold, it can only get worse, because to come back down to earth is to admit that one’s earlier high self-opinion was wrong, and the human animal will almost never admit that. Instead, the tendency is to blame others for every failure or setback. In the grips now of his delusion, he made his most serious mistake of all—the firing of Jeffrey Katzenberg. The Disney system depended on a steady flow of new animated hits, which fed the stores and theme parks with new characters, merchandise, rides, and avenues for publicity. Katzenberg clearly had developed the knack for creating such hits, exemplified by the unprecedented success of The Lion King . Firing him put the entire assembly line at risk. Who would take over? Certainly not Roy Disney or Eisner himself? Furthermore, he had to know that Katzenberg would take his skills elsewhere, which he did when he cofounded a new studio, DreamWorks. There he churned out more animated hits. The new studio drove up the price for skilled animators, vastly increasing the cost of producing an animated film and threatening Disney’s entire profit system. But instead of a firm grip on this reality, Eisner was more focused on the competition for attention. Katzenberg’s rise threatened his elevated self-opinion, and he had to sacrifice profit and practicality to soothe his ego. The downward spiral had begun. The acquisition of ABC, under the belief that bigger is better, revealed his growing detachment from reality. Television was a dying business model in the age of new media. It was not a realistic business decision but a play for publicity. He had created an entertainment behemoth, a blob without any clear identity. The hiring and firing of Ovitz revealed an even greater level of delusion. People had become mere instruments for Eisner to use. Ovitz was considered the most feared and powerful man in Hollywood. Perhaps Eisner was unconsciously driven by the desire to humiliate Ovitz. If he had the power to make Ovitz beg for crumbs, he must be the most powerful man in Hollywood. Soon all of the problems that stemmed from his delusional thought process began to cascade—the continually rising costs of Euro Disney, the Katzenberg bonus, the lack of hits in both film divisions, the continual drain on resources from ABC, the Ovitz

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  113Lecture 12—The Church and the Scientific Revolution because it contradicted Aristotle. To suggest this was to pull support from under the Aristotelian system and send everything else crashing down as well. GALILEO’S DISCOVERIES õThe story of the astronomer Galileo Galilei’s trouble with the church is famous, but some of the facts might come as a surprise. Galileo was born in Pisa in 1564. His father made a living repairing stringed instruments and composing music, and perhaps that’s where Galileo first got his appreciation for careful measurement, rhythm, and mathematical precision. õAs a young man, he f lirted with the idea of becoming a priest, but went off to study medicine at the local university. He accidentally stumbled into a lecture on geometry and became fascinated. õWithin a couple years, he was already inventing amazing things, like an early type of thermometer and a device to measure the velocity of f lowing water. In 1589, the University of Pisa made him chair of mathematics, and a few years later he moved to Padua to teach math and science, including astronomy. In 1609, he started fine-tuning earlier models of the telescope, and that was when he really started getting into trouble. õIt’s clear that Galileo was a genius. But like so many geniuses, he was also a bit of a jerk who went around looking for intellectual fights. Keep in mind this basic fact of his personality; it makes understanding what happened next easier. 114The History of Christianity II õGalileo peered through his telescope and saw details of the heavens that no one had ever seen before: mountains on the surface of the moon and moon-like objects orbiting Jupiter. Galileo threw himself into observing the movements of the planets and became convinced of one essential idea: the earth had to revolve around the sun. õThis was not a new idea. Some ancient thinkers had suggested as much, despite what Aristotle wrote, and despite the fact that most scholars favored the geocentric theory of the 2 nd -century Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy. In 1543, the Polish astronomer Copernicus revealed that he had done the many years of mathematical spadework necessary to put together a precise theory of the universe that overturned the geocentric view.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  When the door opened behind me I stared at the homework on my desk and prepared a bland, innocent face. I turned and presented it to him. He was grinning. He crossed the room and sat on Skipper’s bed. Still grinning, he said, “Who won?” He had me tell the story again and again. Each time I told it he laughed and slapped his leg. I began by admitting, reluctantly, that I might have started the fight by calling Arthur a sissy; then, seeing how much pleasure it gave Dwight to hear this, I recalled that my actual words were “big fat sissy.” I told him I’d knocked Arthur down and I described his swollen eye. I allowed Dwight to think that I had kicked some very serious ass that day. “You actually gave him a black eye?” Dwight said. “Well, it wasn’t black yet” “But it was all puffed up?” I nodded. “Then it’s a shiner,” he said. “For sure.” I hedged the big question, the question of who had won. I let on that my victory had been less than decisive because Arthur had hit me in the ear when I wasn’t expecting it. “That was your fault,” Dwight told me. “You must have had your guard down. There’s no excuse for getting dry-gulched.” He started pacing the room. “I can show you a couple of moves that’ll leave little lord Gayle wondering what month he’s in.” At dinner that night Dwight had me repeat the story to Skipper and Norma, and then he told a story of his own. “When I was your age,” he said, “there was a kid who used to sit behind me in school and lip off all the time. He had what I call diarrhea of the mouth. Well, he lipped off just once too often and I told him to shut up. Oh yeah? he says. Who’s gonna make me? I am, I tell him. Oh yeah? he says. You and who else’s army? Just the three of us, I say. Me, myself, and I. “Well, after school that day he waits across the street with this friend of his and as soon as I come out of the building he yells something. I guess he thought I was just going to go home and forget about it. But I’ll tell you something. With people like that, you’ve got to hurt them, you’ve got to inflict pain. It’s the only thing they understand. Otherwise you’ve got them on your back for good. Believe me, I’m speaking from experience. “Okay. It was really cold out, really freezing. There were these frozen horse turds lying all over the place—road apples, we called them. So I picked one up and went over to this guy, but not acting tough, okay? Not acting tough . Acting more like, Oh gee, I’m so scared, please don’t hurt me.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  6 It should be noted that for both Paul and Matthew, the world is divided into these two categories: Jews and Gentiles (i.e., everyone else). Thus, ethnic identity is only relevant in these texts along this line of division. In other words, while being Jewish or not is of paramount importance, other ethnicities, such as Greek or Egyptian, carries no theological meaning at all beyond the fact that they are not Jewish. Such division of the world into two main categories, the in-group and everyone else, was quite common in antiquity; the Judeo-centric worldview of Matthew and Paul is simply a variant on a common theme. It does reveal, however, the primary discursive context from within which these authors write, and, consequently, how they self-identify religio-ethnical y. 101 Beyond Universalism and Particularism 101 being neutralized, stands at the hermeneutical center in these authors’ efforts to save the world. The results of the analysis presented here will show that the emerging mainstream church that canonized both Matthew and Paul, chose, in the end, to follow neither, as these authors’ Jewish teaching for Gentiles was turned into Gentile teaching for Jews. The reasons for this development are complex and explaining them would involve both theological and sociological analysis that cannot be undertaken within the limited space of a book chapter. The purpose of this essay is only to clarify what may be involved as the question of Gentile inclusion is asked, and to show how different groups in the first century, while maintaining a positive sense of the possibility of the salvation of the nations, chose radical y different paths to achieve it. In the following we shall first discuss how the wider issue of inclusion may be approached. Then, we shall deal, in turn, with three interrelated aspects involved as our authors tackle the issue of Gentile outsiders and the requirements for their salvation: ethnicity, theologies of salvation, and missionary strategies. Structuring the Question Twenty years ago, I wrote an article problematizing the use of the terms “universalism” and “particularism” in academic conversations.7 Somehow, regardless of how scholars applied these words, I found that the end result, mysteriously, always ended up being the same: Christianity was proclaimed, commendably, a “universalistic” religion, while Judaism was caught, lamentably, in “particularism.” 8 A closer look, however, at how these terms move in scholarly discourses reveal at least three very different, although connected, analytical concerns related to the image and status of the “other,” when issues of inclusion are highlighted. These three areas of study, I suggest, may provide helpful entry points for discussions of our topic, even though some of the terminology I used original y may benefit from further refinement. They may be summarized as follows9: 1. Ethnic Status a. Closed-Ethnic Religion: No converts accepted into an ethno-religious group. 10 b. Open-Ethnic Religion: Converts accepted into an ethno-religious group). 11 7 Runesson, “Particularistic Judaism and Universalistic Christianity?” 8 Cf. Donaldson, Jewish Patterns of Universalism, 1.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  The same boys who called her names at school would fuck her at night, fuck her or ask her to suck them, so that she had a public life where she was humiliated and a private life where she was desired. It was a kind of power, I suppose, or what felt like power, to both of us, we would talk on the phone and tell each other our adventures, hers in a boy’s stinking car or bedroom, mine in the toilets or the park; you slut, we’d say to each other, laughing, you dirty whore. She was two years older than I was, sixteen, a junior at our school, and she liked to call herself my teacher, though by that time really I think I had had more sex than she had; in a single night at the park I could have three or four guys, it didn’t take long for me to catch up. But it was the form our friendship took, that I was her student, that she would teach me how to be a whore. You have to be in love with them, she told me once, each one, you might hate them other times but you have to love them when you’re giving head, you have to imagine that you can never tell them, that the only way you can say it is by how you suck them. You have to give everything, she said, that’s the only way to give a blowjob. I hadn’t thought of her for years but I thought of her now, because that was how he sucked, taking me as deep as he could and then kissing the tip, taking my balls in his mouth, rubbing his face against me until it shone with his own saliva. It was a kind of love, or what felt like love, reverence maybe, worship, and it filled me up with something like pride, though that’s not the right word for it, something like arrogance or aggression, maybe that’s the way to put it, I felt myself becoming what he wanted.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  I could just make out the sounds of the game going on up the hill, the cheers, the drumming of feet in the stands. I listened with godly condescension. I was all alone where no one could find me, only the faint excitements of a game and some voices crying Concrete, Concrete, Concrete. My brother and I hadn’t seen each other in six years. After leaving Salt Lake I lost touch with him until, in the fall of my second year at Concrete High, he wrote me a letter and sent me a Princeton sweatshirt. The letter was full of impressive phrases—“In a world where contraception and the hydrogen bomb usurp each other as negative values...”—that I tried to use in conversation as if they had just occurred to me. I wore the sweatshirt everywhere, and told strangers who picked me up on the road that I was a Princeton student coming home for a visit. I even had my hair cut in a style called “The Princeton”—flat on top, long and swept back on the sides. I decided to make my way there. My mother was busy campaigning for Senator Jackson and John F. Kennedy. Dwight called Kennedy “the Pope’s candidate” and “the senator from Rome.” He didn’t like him, possibly because of his effect on my mother, who was stirred by Kennedy’s hopefulness and also a little in love with him. With her out of the house so much Dwight had grown casual about pushing me around. He didn’t really beat me but he kept the possibility alive. I hated being alone with him. My idea was to hitchhike to Princeton and hand myself over to Geoffrey. I had no money for the trip. To get it, I planned to forge a check. For some time I had been struck by the innocence of banks, the trusting way they left checkbooks out on the service tables for their customers. People walked in off the street, wrote down their wishes, then walked out again with their pockets full of money. There was nothing to keep me from taking a few blanks to fill out later. I couldn’t cash them in Chinook or Concrete, where I was too familiar to use a false name, but in another town it would be easy. I belonged to the Order of the Arrow, a Scout honor society whose annual banquet was to be held in Bellingham that year. I drove down in the afternoon with some other OA members from my troop, and shook loose from them soon after we arrived. First I went to a bank. Before going inside I put on the horn-rimmed glasses my mother had bought me so I could see the blackboards at school. They made me look owlish, but older. I walked across the bank to one of the tables and tore off a check from the convenience checkbook.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  “Judaism”—a common-room discussion requiring several levels of abstraction. In this essay I have tried to examine with readers a different and simpler question, which is susceptible to at least partial (dis)confirmation: “How did Paul present himself to the groups of Christ-followers he established, in relation to Judaean law, custom, and culture?” Paul was a Judaean by ethnos, and that he could not change. He was indelibly circumcised, and he continued to follow at least some key moments in the Judaean calendar. The degree to which he “remained in the ancestral customs” of the Judaeans, as Josephus might have put it, is a different matter. Since most of what we all do comes from custom or habit, not rational analysis before each action, even if we could watch Paul acting in certain contexts we might not know what he was thinking or how he reconciled his thought with his actions. Where we can make some progress is with Paul’s self-representation to his “in Christ” groups in letters. From this it emerges, first, that he was sure of having been singled out by God, and son Christ, to prepare the chosen among the nations for rescue to heaven. Second, 67 This is Benedetto Croce’s summary, in The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (trans. R. G. Collingwood; New York, NY: Macmil an, 1913), 157, of passages from Vico’s Scienza Nuova (1744), accessible in English in Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch, eds., The New Science of Giambattista Vico (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948), such as l.vii (59); II.iv (127–128), and III (330). 39 Paul without Judaism 39 “The Announcement” he lays out to his groups lacked any Judaean requirements and required no biblical knowledge. Third, in response to those who thought that he should include Judaean content, he responded with a firm “No.” This was not because he had a different Judaism or because his groups were Gentiles. It was because, for him, being in Christ rendered every nomos, of Greeks or of Judaeans, a dead letter. Moses’ law too had served only until Christ. Paul was emphatical y not “under law.” Fourth, Paul declared as vividly as one could imagine his abandonment of the zeal he formerly had for his ancestral traditions. Fifth, he was happy to eat with non-Judaeans in a way that leading Judaean Christ-followers—Peter, Paul’s associate Barnabas, and a group from Jesus’ brother James—could not accept. Sixth, as word about these points got around, from Rome to Jerusalem, Paul’s Announcement caused deep offence to other Judaeans, whether Christ-followers or not. Seventh, Paul faced a rough reception from Judaeans everywhere, which included repeated whippings, because of The Announcement.

• From Post Office (1971)

  I lit up a cigar Joyce had given me and I told the midget, “That’ll be all, buster. Now see that I get back. And drive slowly. I don’t want to blow this game now.” I played the operator to please him. “Yes, sir, Mr. Chinaski. Yes, sir!” He admired me. He thought I was a son of a bitch. When I got in, Joyce asked, “Well, did you see everything?” “I saw enough,” I said. Meaning, that they were trying to knock me off. I didn’t know if Joyce was in on it or not. Then she started peeling my clothes off and pushing me toward the bed. “Now wait a minute, baby! We’ve already gone twice and it’s not even 2 p.m. yet!” She just giggled and kept on pushing. 3Her father really hated me. He thought I was after his money. I didn’t want his god damned money. And I didn’t even want his god damned precious daughter. The only time I ever saw him was when he walked into the bedroom one morning about 10:00. Joyce and I were in bed, resting up. Luckily we had just finished. I peered at him from under the edge of the cover. Then I couldn’t help myself. I smiled at him and gave him a big wink. He ran out of the house growling and cursing. If I could be removed, he’d certainly see to it. Gramps was cooler. We’d go to his place and I’d drink whiskey with him and listen to his cowboy records. His old lady was simply indifferent. She neither liked nor hated me. She fought with Joyce a lot and I sided with the old lady once or twice. That kind of won her over. But gramps was cool. I think he was in on the conspiracy. We had been at this cafe and eaten, with everybody fawning over us and staring. There was gramps, grandma, Joyce, and I. Then we got in the car and drove along. “Ever seen any buffalo, Hank?” gramps asked me. “No, Wally, I haven’t.” I called him “Wally.” Old whiskey buddies. Like hell. “We have them here.” “I thought they were just about extinct?” “Oh, no, we got dozens of ’em.” “I don’t believe it.” “Show him, Daddy Wally,” said Joyce. Silly bitch. She called him “Daddy Wally.” He wasn’t her daddy. “All right.” We drove on a way until we came to this empty fenced-in field. The ground sloped and you couldn’t see the other end of the field. It was miles long and wide. There was nothing but short green grass. “I don’t see any buffalo,” I said. “The wind’s right, “said Wally. “Just climb in there and walk a ways. You’ve got to walk a ways to see them.” There was nothing in the field. They thought they were being very funny, conning a city-slicker. I climbed the fence and walked on in. “Well, where are the buffalo?” I called back. “They’re there.

• From The City of God

  41 Lecture 2 Transcript—Who Was Augustine of Hippo? role, and once that was over, his decks had been cleared to begin writing The City of God in late 411 or 412, and he kept at it, although often distracted by other work, until he completed the whole thing 15 years later, in 426 or 427. The last few years of his life were just as busy as the earlier ones, and he kept on writing, teaching, and even occasionally preaching up to a few weeks before his death on August 28, 430, with the Vandals besieging Hippo. And it is here, in his dealings with the Donatists and the Pelagians and his overall practice in the office of Bishop, where his critics find warrant for their charge that he is a fundamentally antidemocratic thinker; in fact, an authoritarian who gave the highest moral and theological imprimatur for the practices of coercion popular in the Middle Ages. And we will see again in these lectures, as in the accusations of his metaphysical anti-worldliness and his moral- psychological promotion of a guilt morality, that his reputed political authoritarianism is vastly overdrawn. In fact, in his role as a leader of the Latin Christian churches, he was anything but authoritarian. As a Bishop, he was more than just a religious leader; he was a political actor and a judicial figure, as well. Moreover, he became, as the historian Peter Brown has put it, a sort of one-man brain trust for the churches of Africa. Although his labors earned him great respect and veneration from others, he continued teaching what was effectively an anti-authoritarian vision of the Gospel, one that was quite suspicious of figures such as he was becoming. And he wasn’t afraid of attacking himself in this way. In one sermon, he said, and this is a quote: Don’t even think of regarding as canonical scripture any debate, or written account of a debate by anyone. If I have said something reasonable, then follow, not me, but reason itself; if I’ve proved it by the clearest divine testimonies, then follow, not me, but the divine scripture. I get angrier with that fan of mine who takes my book as