Pride

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.

Page 102 of 174 · 20 per page

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Leadership had other benefits, too. On one occasion, Moon gave me an Italian hand-blown glass figurine and $300 in cash as presents. I even played softball with his son and heir apparent, Hyo Jin Moon. Twice I ate with Moon at his lavish dinner table. I came to love the feeling of getting up in front of hundreds of people and giving a Sunday service or a Divine Principle lecture; of having members look up to me as a wonderful, spiritual person. There were even “miracles” in my life. At one point I learned that all American members had been ordered by Moon to undergo 120-day leadership training. Much to my surprise, Kamiyama interceded with Moon to keep me from being sent to that training session. I was brought before Moon—referred to by members as “Father”—and before I knew what had happened, he put his hand over my head and announced that I had just graduated from the 120-day program! When I asked Kamiyama why he had requested my exemption from the training, he told me that I was too important where I was in New York and that he didn’t want to lose me. I had received the approval of a man who, I thought, was God’s representative on Earth. Moon had an interesting, fairly typical narcissistic way of behaving—nice then nasty, double bind of motivating leaders. He would be nice to us at first, buying us gifts and taking us out for dinner or a movie. Then he would bring us back to his estate and yell and scream about how poorly we were performing. Moon also liked to stimulate the highest degree of competition between leaders in order to maximize productivity. He would single out someone who was very successful at recruiting or fundraising (he did this with me), and present that person as a model of excellence, shaming the others into being more successful. It is ironic that whereas Moon’s stated goal was to unify the world, many of his strategies fostered jealousy and spite among leaders, virtually ensuring a lack of unity. When I knew him, Moon was a movie junkie. One of his favorite movies was Rocky, which he watched repeatedly, he told us. On one memorable occasion he told us that we had to have the same determination as Rocky Balboa to defeat our enemy. Later he spent $48 million to make a film of his own, Inchon, about General Douglas MacArthur’s landing in Korea to stop the Communist invasion. Even though Moon bought top talent in Laurence Olivier and Jacqueline Bisset, Inchon was an abysmal failure. It was the most expensive movie ever made up to that time, and received resoundingly bad reviews from critics.38

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  It was the longest day of his life. But, he thought, if this is what it takes to become a marine, he was ready to take it, and if this is what he would have to go through in the days and weeks ahead, then he was ready for it. Ready for it! Like the young president had said, they would have to bear many burdens, many sacrifices, and now he was in this place, and as crazy and depressing as it seemed, he would face it like a man. He would not let his president, or his family, or any of them down. He could take it, he was tough, he knew it. He could make it through these thirteen weeks. And now they shouted for them to move out of the hangar that they seemed to have been in forever. “Right—face!” screamed the short sergeant. “Double time . . . MARCH!” screamed the sergeant again. And they began to move now, all eighty of them, with their fresh new clothing and their utility caps, their oversized belts hanging from their waists. They ran, dragging heavy sea bags packed full of new clothing and uniforms, like men bent in a gale. They stumbled and gasped across the huge parade deck past the great statue of the marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima, and he thought of John Wayne and the movies and Castiglia and for a moment his heart quickened. He felt good inside. He was proud of being on the island and getting the chance to become a marine. They looked like little schoolchildren being herded toward the long wooden barracks, all eighty of them now, stretched out in a long line, tripping over their pants, their caps spinning crazily around their heads, gasping for air, choking and spitting and coughing in the heat, their oversized boots thumping against the parade deck again and again, thumping until they sounded like a train slowly rolling into the station. He felt he couldn’t go on any farther and the drill instructors were still screaming. They had been screaming all day, all afternoon, all morning, ever since he got to that place they were screaming, screaming and shouting, cursing, screaming again, until it all sounded like one tremendous scream. He had to keep pushing, he thought. He had to make it to the long wooden squad bay. He had come this far, he thought. He hadn’t cried like the fat boy, he hadn’t fallen to his knees like a baby. He had come this far and he was gonna make it the rest of the way, with all of them. But now some were dropping out in back of him. He could hear the drill instructors shouting at them. They were falling to their knees in the evening heat onto the parade deck and he looked back and watched, still gasping for air, still not believing he had made it this far.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  You can always go further than you think you can.” Wrestling practice ended every day with wind sprints in the basement hallways that left us gasping for air and running into the showers bent over in pain, and I honestly wondered sometimes what I was doing there in the first place and why I was allowing myself to go through all this. The wrestling coach was very dedicated and held practice every day of the week including Saturdays and Sundays and I can even remember having practice once on Thanksgiving. I came in first in the Christmas wrestling tournament. There’s still a picture of me in one of the old albums in the attic that shows me with two other guys holding a cardboard sign with the word Champion on it. I won most of my matches that year. When I lost, I cried just like when I lost my Little League games and I’d jump on the bus and ride back to Massapequa with tears in my eyes, not talking to anyone for hours sometimes. I was very shy back then and dreamed of having a girlfriend, or just someone to hold my hand. Even though I was on the wrestling team and had won all those matches and wore my sweater with the Big M on it, I still dreamed of the day I could have a girlfriend like all the rest of the guys. I wanted to be hoisted aloft in the arms of other young men like myself and carried off the field for scoring the winning touchdown, or winning the wrestling match that brought the championship to my school. I wanted to be a hero. I wanted to be stared at and talked about in the hallways. “Hey look,” said one of the kids. “There goes Kovic!” I was the great silent athlete now, who never had to say anything, who walked through the halls of Massapequa High School, sucking the air deeply into my chest and pumping up the blood into my arms. “There goes Kovic,” a pretty freshman said. “Boy, he sure is cute.” And as I walked through the crowded halls I was sure everyone was noticing me, staring at my varsity letter, and looking at my wrestler’s shoulders. And it was also during my freshman year that I started to get pimples on my face. I remember coming home from school and seeing what looked like a tremendous blackhead on my forehead. It was right smack-dab in the middle of my forehead and it was just like the things that were all over my sister Sue’s face. The more I looked in the mirror, the more scared I got. Stevie Jacket’s face was covered with the things, he had the worst case of them of anyone I ever knew in my life.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I said hello to everyone, including a few of the doctors and nurses who had warned me that for a high-level injury like my own—no use of my stomach muscles, and a spine that had been severed by a bullet—the odds against me walking again, much less even getting up on my feet, were astronomical. Some of them looked at me like I was crazy while still others chose to simply ignore me, turning their heads as I dragged myself past them. Of course, back then as a fiercely determined, twenty-one-year-old former Marine Corps sergeant just back from a war and a former high school athlete, I believed I could accomplish anything I set out to do. As far as I was concerned, like Jafu, nothing was impossible. I remember telling Jimmy Ford several weeks later that the only way I was going to leave the hospital was on my feet. “I’m going to walk out of this place, Jimmy, if it’s the last thing I do!” By late November of 1968, having been in the hospital a little over eleven months and my rehab now complete, I was finally ready to be released. I’ll always remember that last day at the hospital: Dick and Jimmy helping me put on my braces one last time, awkwardly dragging my body with my crutches out of the ADL room, Dick spotting me all the way across the hall and into the elevator where we rode down to the ground floor. “You can do it, Ronnie! You can do it. Careful, Ronnie. Careful now!” I had only a little farther to go before I reached the SCI parking lot where my brand-new hand-controlled Oldsmobile was parked. I struggled, dragging myself across the gravel lot, growing more and more determined—doing my best not to fall . . . trying not to lose my balance. “A little bit farther. A little bit farther! Keep going, Ronnie! Almost there, Ronnie!” shouted Dick. “Only a little more to go.” When we finally reached the car I leaned forward, still balancing myself on the crutches, and unlocked the door, and after opening it slowly I spun around, swinging myself into the seat. “I did it, Dick!” I shouted. “I told you I was going to walk out of this place.” I had triumphed. I had done it. After returning home to Massapequa, Long Island, I continued my rehabilitation, putting on braces every day, and just as I had dragged myself around the hospital, I now began to drag my body around the yard each day, seeing how far I could go, determined to continue my struggle to walk again. It was great to be home and as I progressed each day I would sometimes notice the neighbors staring over from their front lawns or out their windows at the neighborhood boy who had returned from the war with the terrible wound, desperately trying to walk again.

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

  Leucippe and Clitophon, this disjuncture is a constant source of dramatic energy. In a touching scene near the end of the romance, a priest of Artemis tries to dissuade Leucippe from submitting to the harrowing, and fearfully inerrant, divine virginity test. He assumes that the girl, in professing her purity, has tried to save face out of necessity and pride, but he wants to spare her, quietly. She confi dently persists in the protestations of her innocence, and he realizes that she is indeed uncorrupted. “I rejoice with you in your chastity and your fortune.” Achilles Tatius could not have chosen more resonant words— sōphrosynē, female sexual modesty, and tychē, fortune. Leucippe’s sexual honor and her fate were inseparable. Th e novel contemplates, but does not ultimately doubt, a salvation that will realign Leucippe’s subjective modesty and her objective respectability. Th e inhabitants of the high empire were highly conscious that female sexual honor was dispensed just as much by the lottery of fate as by the force of the individual’s will. Th is awareness of honor’s origins did nothing to dim its power. If anything, it made sexual respectability all the more precious, more intimate, more numinous. Here the novel scrapes very close to the deepest recesses of belief in the high empire. In the same years when Achilles was conceiving his romance, a woman named Regilla was voted an honorifi c statue by the people of Corinth. Regilla was a descendant of the reigning imperial clan, wife to the most powerful and eloquent Greek aristocrat of the age, Herodes Atticus (whom she married when she was around fourteen, he forty). She would eventually die during the miscarriage of their sixth child, after being kicked in the stomach by a freedman acting on her husband’s orders. But in brighter times the Corinthians sculpted her in the image of the goddess Tychē, “Fortune.” Regilla was priestess of the goddess Tychē at Athens, and had in fact introduced her cult there and constructed a grand temple perched over the stadium that her husband built for the city. Th e dedicatory inscription from Corinth survives. “Th is is a portrait of Regilla. A sculptor carved the fi gure, endowing the stone with all her sōphrosynē. . . . Regilla: the Council, as if to call you ‘Tychē’ has erected this marble image in front of the sanctuary.” Ordinary women may not have hoped to merge with the divine in the way that an imperial scion like Regilla could, but in the monuments and images that surrounded them they saw memorialized the sublime value of feminine chastity, as an ideal somewhere between a moral attribute and an endowment of fate. Regilla embodied, in a superlative  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N form, the hopes, values, and suff erings out of which Roman women could make their lives.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  Kovic—” he was looking at his father now—“this kid of yours sure has a lot of guts.” “We’re really proud of him,” said the heavy guy. “The whole town’s proud of him and what he did,” said the tall commander, smiling again. “He’s sacrificed a lot,” said the heavy guy, putting his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “And we’re gonna make certain,” the tall commander said, “we’re gonna make certain that his sacrifice and any of the others weren’t in vain. We’re still in that war to win,” he said, looking at the boy’s father. His father nodded his head up and down, showing the commander he understood. It was time to go. The heavy guy had grabbed the back handles of the chair. Acting very confident, he reminded the boy that he had worked in the naval hospital. The boy said goodbye to his mom and dad, and the heavy guy eased the wheelchair down the long wooden ramp to the sidewalk in front of the house. “I’ve been pushin’ you boys around for almost two years now,” he said. The boy listened as the heavy guy and the commander stood for a moment in the front yard trying to figure out how they were going to get him into the back seat of the Cadillac convertible. “You’re goin’ in style today,” shouted the commander. “Nothing but the best,” said the heavy guy. “I haven’t learned how to . . .” “We know, we understand,” said the commander. And before he could say another word, the heavy guy who had worked at the hospital lifted him out of the chair in one smooth motion. Opening the door with a kick of his foot, he carefully placed him in the back seat of the big open car. “All right, Mr. Grand Marshal.” The heavy guy patted him on the shoulder, then jumped into the car with the commander, beeping the horn all the way down Toronto Avenue. “We’re goin’ over to Eddie Dugan’s house,” said the commander, turning his head. “Ya know Eddie?” He was talking very fast now. “Good boy,” said the commander. “Lost both legs like you. Got plastic ones. Doin’ great, isn’t he?” He jabbed the heavy man with his fist. “Got a lot of guts that kid Eddie Dugan,” the heavy man said. “I remember him . . .” The commander was turning the corner now, driving slowly down the street. “Yeah, I remember Eddie way back when he was . . . when he was playin’ on the Little Leagues. And as God is my witness,” said the commander, turning his head back toward him again, “as God is my witness, I seen Eddie hit a home run on his birthday. He was nine or ten, something like that back then.” The commander was laughing now. “I was coaching with his dad and it was Eddie’s birthday. A lot of you guys got messed up over there.” He was still talking very fast. “Remember Clasternack?

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  He wrote in his diary that night how proud he was to have been made the leader of the scouts, to be serving America in this its most critical hour, just like President Kennedy had talked about. He might get killed, he wrote, but so had a lot of Americans who had fought for democracy. It was very important to be there putting his life on the line, to be going out on patrol and lying in the rain for Sparky the barber and God and the rest. He was proud. He was real proud of what he was doing. This, he thought, is what serving your country is supposed to be about. HE WENT OUT on patrol with the others the night of the ambush at exactly eight o’clock, loading a round into the chamber of his weapon before he walked outside the tent and into the dark and rain. As usual he had made all the men put on camouflage from head to toe, made sure they had all blackened their faces, and attached twigs and branches to their arms and legs with rubber bands. One by one the scouts moved slowly past the thick barbed wire and began to walk along the bank of the river, heading toward the graveyard where the ambush would be set up. They were moving north exactly as planned, a line of shadows tightly bunched in the rain. Sometimes it would stop raining and they would spread out somewhat more, but mostly they continued to bunch up together, as if they were afraid of losing their way. There was a rice paddy on the edge of the graveyard. No one said a word as they walked through it and he thought he could hear voices from the village. He could smell the familiar smoke from the fires in the huts and he knew that the people who went out fishing each day must have come home. They were the people he watched every morning moving quietly in their small boats down toward the mouth of the river, heading out to the sea. Some of the older men reminded him of his father, going to work each morning and coming back home every night to sit by their fires with their children cooking their fish. They must talk about us sometimes, he thought. He wondered a lot what it was they thought about him and the men. He remembered how difficult it had been when he had first come to the war to tell the villagers from the enemy and sometimes it had seemed easier to hate all of them, but he had always tried very hard not to. He wished he could be sure they understood that he and the men were there because they were trying to help all of them save their country from the Communists. They were on a rice dike that bordered the graveyard. The voices from the huts nearby seemed quite loud.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  President Kennedy had talked about. He might get killed, he wrote, but so had a lot of Americans who had fought for democracy. It was very important to be there putting his life on the line, to be going out on patrol and lying in the rain for Sparky the barber and God and the rest. He was proud. He was real proud of what he was doing. This, he thought, is what serving your country is supposed to be about. HE WENT OUT on patrol with the others the night of the ambush at exactly eight o’clock, loading a round into the chamber of his weapon before he walked outside the tent and into the dark and rain. As usual he had made all the men put on camouflage from head to toe, made sure they had all blackened their faces, and attached twigs and branches to their arms and legs with rubber bands. One by one the scouts moved slowly past the thick barbed wire and began to walk along the bank of the river, heading toward the graveyard where the ambush would be set up. They were moving north exactly as planned, a line of shadows tightly bunched in the rain. Sometimes it would stop raining and they would spread out somewhat more, but mostly they continued to bunch up together, as if they were afraid of losing their way. There was a rice paddy on the edge of the graveyard. No one said a word as they walked through it and he thought he could hear voices from the village. He could smell the familiar smoke from the fires in the huts and he knew that the people who went out fishing each day must have come home. They were the people he watched every morning moving quietly in their small boats down toward the mouth of the river, heading out to the sea. Some of the older men reminded him of his father, going to work each morning and coming back home every night to sit by their fires with their children cooking their fish. They must talk about us sometimes, he thought. He wondered a lot what it was they thought about him and the men. He remembered how difficult it had been when he had first come to the war to tell the villagers from the enemy and sometimes it had seemed easier to hate

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

  But another man in these same circumstances, who maintained his resolve, whose reason was “made more fi rm and strength- ened by care,” would “resist the provocation and dispel his desire.” Free will was not the absence of external causation, but the capacity to act morally regardless of circumstance. In a revealing passage, Epictetus also imagined a phi los o pher who encounters some handsome boy or woman. If the lady summoned him, drew close to him, tempted him, but the phi los o pher “con- quered,” this sage would have solved a logic problem of the greatest magni- tude. Th is man was the “true athlete,” whose prize was “freedom.” For Origen, moral liberty inhered in the capacity to choose either of two paths, the freedom to do otherwise; Origen evoked both the sinner and the sage to demonstrate the properties of free will. For Epictetus, freedom was the prize won by the philosophical athlete who conquered the false impressions that bombarded him.  Origen’s beliefs about free will quickly became entangled in his account of the soul’s preexistence. But his pre sen ta tion of free will would survive the shipwreck of his unorthodox cosmology, and his exegetical prowess in over- coming problematic passages of scripture was indispensable. Even Metho- dius, who would adamantly oppose Origen’s views on eternity, unapolo- getically absorbs his teaching on free will. It should be no surprise to fi nd Methodius’s staunch rebuttal of fatalism in a treatise on virginity: the complete abstention from sex was a radical expression of human freedom. In the Symposium, Th ecla off ers a speech on free will that is one of the most detailed ancient Christian attacks on astrology. Methodius believed that the stars had been created posterior to mankind, so that there had been a time when people existed who could not have had a horoscope.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I should have preferred to see their generosity take other forms than that of ostentation in alms, and to teach them to augment their possessions wisely in the interest of the community as they had done hitherto only for the enrichment of their children. With this intention I myself took over the direction of the imperial domains; no one has the right to treat the earth so unproductively as the miser does his pot of gold. Our merchants are sometimes our best geographers, our best astronomers, and our most learned naturalists. Our bankers number among our ablest judges of men. I made use of these special capacities, but fought with all my strength against their possibilities for encroachment. Subsidies given to shipbuilders had multiplied tenfold our trade with foreign nations; thus I succeeded in reinforcing our costly imperial fleet with but slight expense. So far as importations from the Orient and Africa are concerned, Italy might as well be an island, dependent upon grain dealers for its subsistence, since it no longer supplies itself; the only means of coping with the dangers of this situation is to treat these indispensable men of business as functionaries to be watched over closely. In recent years our older provinces have attained to a state of prosperity which can still perhaps be increased, but it is important that that prosperity should serve for all, and not alone for the bank of Herod Atticus, or for the small speculator who buys up all the oil of a Greek village. No law is too strict which makes for reduction of the countless intermediaries who swarm in our cities, an obscene, fat and paunchy race, whispering in every tavern, leaning on every counter, ready to undermine any policy which is not to their immediate advantage. In time of shortage a judicious distribution from the State granaries helps to check the scandalous inflation of prices, but I was counting most of all on the organization of the producers themselves, the vineyard owners in Gaul and the fishermen in the Black Sea (whose miserable pittance is devoured by importers of caviar and salt fish, middlemen battening on the produce of those dangerous labors). One of my best days was the one on which I persuaded a group of seamen from the Archipelago to join in a single corporation in order to deal directly with retailers in the towns. I have never felt myself more usefully employed as ruler.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  family, or any of them down. He could take it, he was tough, he knew it. He could make it through these thirteen weeks. And now they shouted for them to move out of the hangar that they seemed to have been in forever. “Right—face!” screamed the short sergeant. “Double time . . . MARCH!” screamed the sergeant again. And they began to move now, all eighty of them, with their fresh new clothing and their utility caps, their oversized belts hanging from their waists. They ran, dragging heavy sea bags packed full of new clothing and uniforms, like men bent in a gale. They stumbled and gasped across the huge parade deck past the great statue of the marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima, and he thought of John Wayne and the movies and Castiglia and for a moment his heart quickened. He felt good inside. He was proud of being on the island and getting the chance to become a marine. They looked like little schoolchildren being herded toward the long wooden barracks, all eighty of them now, stretched out in a long line, tripping over their pants, their caps spinning crazily around their heads, gasping for air, choking and spitting and coughing in the heat, their oversized boots thumping against the parade deck again and again, thumping until they sounded like a train slowly rolling into the station. He felt he couldn’t go on any farther and the drill instructors were still screaming. They had been screaming all day, all afternoon, all morning, ever since he got to that place they were screaming, screaming and shouting, cursing, screaming again, until it all sounded like one tremendous scream. He had to keep pushing, he thought. He had to make it to the long wooden squad bay. He had come this far, he thought. He hadn’t cried like the fat boy, he hadn’t fallen to his knees like a baby. He had come this far and he was gonna make it the rest of the way, with all of them. But now some were dropping out in back of him. He could hear the drill instructors shouting at them. They were falling to their knees in the evening heat onto the parade deck and he looked back and watched, still gasping for air, still not believing he had made it this far. There were boys on their knees—three, four, five, six—he couldn’t count them all, but they were on their knees with their sea bags still over their shoulders like Christs, and they were crawling, he saw them crawling! trying not to quit, trying to catch up with the rest. And he was thankful now he was still on his feet. Oh his legs ached and his chest felt like it was going to explode and his head was pounding now and his eyes were burning and he was getting closer and closer. Some men were cursing now, swearing and cursing like the drill instructors,

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Each particular group has its own distinctive set of ritual behaviors that help bind it together. These typically include mannerisms of speech, specific posture and facial expressions, as well as the more traditional ways of representing group belief. In the Moonies, for instance, we followed many Asian customs, such as taking off our shoes when entering a Moonie center, kneeling and bowing when greeting older members. Doing these little things helped make us feel we were special and superior. Psychologists call this “social proof.” If a member is not behaving sufficiently enthusiastically, they may be confronted by a leader and accused of being selfish or impure, or of not trying hard enough. They will be urged to become like an older group member, even to the extent of mimicking that person’s tone of voice. Obedience to a leader’s command is the most important lesson to learn. A cult’s leaders cannot command someone’s inner thoughts, but they know that if they command behavior, hearts and minds will follow. Information Control Information control is the second component of mind control. Information provides the tools with which we think and understand reality. Without accurate, up-to-date information, we can easily be manipulated and controlled. Deny a person the information they require to make sound judgments and they will become incapable of doing so. Deception is the biggest tool of information control, because it robs people of the ability to make informed decisions. Outright lying, withholding information and distorting information all become essential strategies, especially when recruiting new members. By using deception, cults rob their victims of “informed consent” and in the case of religious cults, this lack of honest disclosure most certainly violates people’s individual religious rights. In many totalistic cults, people have minimal access to non-cult newspapers, magazines, TV, radio and online information. Certain information may be forbidden and labeled as unhealthy: apostate literature, entheta (negative information), satanic, bourgeoisie propaganda, and so on. Members are also kept so busy that they don’t have free time to think and seek outside answers to questions. When they do read, it is primarily cult-generated propaganda or material that has been censored to keep members focused. Information control also extends across all relationships. People are not allowed to talk to each other about anything critical of the leader, doctrine, or organization. Members must spy on each other and report improper activities or comments to leaders, often in the form of written reports (a technique pioneered by the Nazis, with the Hitler Youth). New converts are discouraged from sharing doubts with anyone other than a superior. Newbies are typically chaperoned, until they prove their devotion and loyalty. Most importantly, people are told to avoid contact with ex-members and critics. Those people who could provide the most outside—that is, real—information are to be completely shunned. Some groups even go so far as to screen members’ letters and phone calls.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  My mom thought having a child was going to be like having a partner, but every child is born the center of its own universe, incapable of understanding the world beyond its own wants and needs, and I was no different. I was a voracious kid. I consumed boxes of books and wanted more, more, more. I ate like a pig. The way I ate I should have been obese. At a certain point the family thought I had worms. Whenever I went to my cousins’ house for the holidays, my mom would drop me off with a bag of tomatoes, onions, and potatoes and a large sack of cornmeal. That was her way of preempting any complaints about my visit. At my gran’s house I always got seconds, which none of the other kids got. My grandmother would give me the pot and say, “Finish it.” If you didn’t want to wash the dishes, you called Trevor. They called me the rubbish bin of the family. I ate and ate and ate. I was hyperactive, too. I craved constant stimulation and activity. When I walked down the sidewalk as a toddler, if you didn’t have my arm in a death grip, I was off, running full-speed toward the traffic. I loved to be chased. I thought it was a game. The old grannies my mom hired to look after me while she was at work? I would leave them in tears. My mom would come home and they’d be crying. “I quit. I can’t do this. Your son is a tyrant.” It was the same with my schoolteachers, with Sunday school teachers. If you weren’t engaging me, you were in trouble. I wasn’t a shit to people. I wasn’t whiny and spoiled. I had good manners. I was just high-energy and knew what I wanted to do. My mom used to take me to the park so she could run me to death to burn off the energy. She’d take a Frisbee and throw it, and I’d run and catch it and bring it back. Over and over and over. Sometimes she’d throw a tennis ball. Black people’s dogs don’t play fetch; you don’t throw anything to a black person’s dog unless it’s food. So it was only when I started spending time in parks with white people and their pets that I realized my mom was training me like a dog.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Then I had her imagine herself as a time traveler. I instructed her to go back in time and teach the younger Sarah about mind control, so she could avoid the group’s recruiters. I asked her to imagine how differently her life would have turned out if she had never become involved with the group. This enabled her to see that with more information, she would have had more choices and could have averted the danger. This became very important for her later in her therapy. I asked her to re-experience, one at a time, traumatic cult experiences. This time, however, she could correct her responses. She told off one of the leaders in front of the members and angrily walked out of the cult. Even though she knew that we were just doing an exercise, it provided her the opportunity to channel her emotions constructively and reclaim her personal power and dignity. By standing up for herself and telling the cult leader to “Shove it!” she could walk out of the group on her own and avoid the trauma of the forcible deprogramming. Sarah knows that in reality, her parents did need to rescue her. However, through this process she was able to regain personal control over the experience. This was extremely important in order to enable Sarah to move forward with her life. Like everyone else in her position, she needed to take all the things she had learned, and all the people she had met and come to care for, and integrate them into a new sense of identity. Integrating the old into the new allows former members to be unusually strong. We are survivors. We have suffered hardship and abuse, and, through information and self-reflection, we are able to overcome adversity. Like all former members I have counseled, Sarah suffered from lack of trust in herself and others, and fear of commitment to a job or a relationship. By helping her to reprocess her cult experience, I was able to show her that she now has resources that the younger Sarah didn’t have, and that she is no longer the same person who was tricked and indoctrinated into a cult. She is older, smarter and wiser now. She knows on a very deep personal level that she can identify and avoid any situation in which she is being manipulated or used. She can rely more completely on herself, and if she needs assistance, she will be able to find what she needs. Likewise, she needs to not fear making commitments. She knows now to ask questions and keep on asking questions, and to distrust any job or relationship that requires anything that violates her core self, including her ethics and values.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  * * * There was a night not long after he had killed the corporal when he was walking on the wooden path that snaked around all the tents past the bunkers like a sidewalk. He was sort of tiptoeing along the casings and he opened up what seemed to be his tent. He had seen this light in the long crack at the bottom of it and he walked in to find he had just walked into the battalion commander’s tent. It was very dark, so dark somebody, anybody, could get lost in a place like that, he thought. Just like that goddamn patrol a few months ago when he had read the map wrong, when he had led the men in the wrong direction. He had been a thousand meters off. He was a mile from where he was supposed to be, and now he was doing it again. He was walking in on the goddamn battalion commander who was in his pajamas getting ready to go to bed or something. “Yes, what do you want, sergeant?” he heard the battalion commander saying to him. “Ahhh, nothing,” he said. “I made a mistake, sir. I thought this was my tent.” The battalion commander looked at him for a moment, looked at him like he had done a very stupid thing. “Well, carry on,” he said. * * * It was his friend the major who gave him his second chance. He called him into the command bunker one day and told him he wanted him to become the leader of his new scout team. The major who understood him told him he liked the way he operated and said he knew the sergeant could do a good job. Here was his chance, he thought, to make everything good again. This young, strong marine was getting a second crack at becoming a hero. He knew, he understood, the thing the major was doing for him, and he left the tent feeling stronger and better than he’d felt for a long time. Here was his chance, he thought over and over again. He walked down the twisting ammo-box sidewalk and saluted one of the officers as smartly as ever, much too smartly for anyone who had been over there as long as him. The thoughts of the night he’d killed the corporal were already becoming faded as he began to think more and more about the scout team, how he would train them and the things they would do to make up for all the things that had come before. He wrote in his diary that night how proud he was to have been made the leader of the scouts, to be serving America in this its most critical hour, just like

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

  But a man is the master of a free subject, by directing him either towards his proper welfare, or to the common good. Such a kind of mastership would have existed in the state of innocence between man and man, for two reasons. First, because man is naturally a social being, and so in the state of innocence he would have led a social life. Now a social life cannot exist among a number of people unless under the presidency of one to look after the common good; for many, as such, seek many things, whereas one attends only to one. Wherefore the Philosopher says, in the beginning of the Politics, that wherever many things are directed to one, we shall always find one at the head directing them. Secondly, if one man surpassed another in knowledge and virtue, this would not have been fitting unless these gifts conduced to the benefit of others, according to 1 Pet. 4:10, “As every man hath received grace, ministering the same one to another.” Wherefore Augustine says (De Civ. Dei xix, 14): “Just men command not by the love of domineering, but by the service of counsel”: and (De Civ. Dei xix, 15): “The natural order of things requires this; and thus did God make man.” From this appear the replies to the objections which are founded on the first-mentioned mode of mastership. OF THE PRESERVATION OF THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE PRIMITIVE STATE (FOUR ARTICLES)We next consider what belongs to the bodily state of the first man: first, as regards the preservation of the individual; secondly, as regards the preservation of the species. Under the first head there are four points of inquiry: (1) Whether man in the state of innocence was immortal? (2) Whether he was impassible? (3) Whether he stood in need of food? (4) Whether he would have obtained immortality by the tree of life? Whether in the state of innocence man would have been immortal?Objection 1: It would seem that in the state of innocence man was not immortal. For the term “mortal” belongs to the definition of man. But if you take away the definition, you take away the thing defined. Therefore as long as man was man he could not be immortal. Objection 2: Further, corruptible and incorruptible are generically distinct, as the Philosopher says (Metaph. x, Did. ix, 10). But there can be no passing from one genus to another. Therefore if the first man was incorruptible, man could not be corruptible in the present state.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  of the doctors and nurses who had earlier dismissed my belief that I would walk again. I said hello to everyone, including a few of the doctors and nurses who had warned me that for a high-level injury like my own—no use of my stomach muscles, and a spine that had been severed by a bullet—the odds against me walking again, much less even getting up on my feet, were astronomical. Some of them looked at me like I was crazy while still others chose to simply ignore me, turning their heads as I dragged myself past them. Of course, back then as a fiercely determined, twenty-one-year-old former Marine Corps sergeant just back from a war and a former high school athlete, I believed I could accomplish anything I set out to do. As far as I was concerned, like Jafu, nothing was impossible. I remember telling Jimmy Ford several weeks later that the only way I was going to leave the hospital was on my feet. “I’m going to walk out of this place, Jimmy, if it’s the last thing I do!” By late November of 1968, having been in the hospital a little over eleven months and my rehab now complete, I was finally ready to be released. I’ll always remember that last day at the hospital: Dick and Jimmy helping me put on my braces one last time, awkwardly dragging my body with my crutches out of the ADL room, Dick spotting me all the way across the hall and into the elevator where we rode down to the ground floor. “You can do it, Ronnie! You can do it. Careful, Ronnie. Careful now!” I had only a little farther to go before I reached the SCI parking lot where my brand-new hand-controlled Oldsmobile was parked. I struggled, dragging myself across the gravel lot, growing more and more determined—doing my best not to fall . . . trying not to lose my balance. “A little bit farther. A little bit farther! Keep going, Ronnie! Almost there, Ronnie!” shouted Dick. “Only a little more to go.” When we finally reached the car I leaned forward, still balancing myself on the crutches, and unlocked the door, and after opening it slowly I spun around, swinging myself into the seat. “I did it, Dick!” I shouted. “I told you I was going to walk out of this place.” I had triumphed. I had done it. After returning home to Massapequa, Long Island, I continued my rehabilitation, putting on braces every day, and just as I had dragged myself around the hospital, I now began to drag my body around the yard each day, seeing how far I could go, determined to continue my struggle to walk again. It was great to be home and as I progressed each day I would sometimes

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

  e lex Iulia was a momentous success, and one mea sure of its profound infl uence is that it subtly reshaped the vernacular of sexual honor. Th e Augustan laws protected the sexual honor of the mater familias, and the word became the Latin term for a woman with an all- encompassing sexual respectability, the equivalent of the Greek eleuthera, which had long denoted the married or marriageable woman. “We ought to accept as a mater familias she who has not lived dishonorably. For it is behavior that distinguishes and separates the mater familias from other women. So it matters not at all whether she is a married woman or a widow, a freeborn or freed woman, since neither marriages nor births make a mater familias, but good morals.” Social status and sexual behavior were inseparably fused, and the mater familias was defi ned by a mode of being, visibly projected in her comportment and appearance. It was assumed that a mater familias could be distinguished, in the way she dressed, from women without sexual honor, whose “servile” or “whorish” vestments advertised their social condition. Th e sexual life course of free women was dominated by the imperatives of marriage. In a society that was never freed from the relentless grip of a high- mortality regime, the burden of reproduction weighed heavily on the  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N female population. Th e demographic explosion of the Roman Empire, which pushed human settlement into every hill and vale, testifi es to a society that was constitutionally geared for reproduction and technologically incapable of putting brakes on its own fertility. Th e age structure of Greco-Roman marriage was an expression of the need to exploit female reproductive potential to the full, from menarche to menopause. For girls, marriage came early and inexorably. Th e legal age for marriage was twelve. Most girls married in their mid- teens. Th e higher classes may have married off their daughters latest of all, sometime in their late teens. Marriage was universal for women; there were no spinsters in antiquity. In a world where death rates were grievously high and unpredictable, early widowhood was common. Although the univira, the woman with only one husband, was idealized, in reality society could not aff ord to be too fastidious about remarriage, and serial marriage was widespread and unproblematic. It would not be hyperbolic to claim that ancient sexual morality, for men and women alike, was immanent in the age structure of marriage. Virginity at marriage was paramount for girls, an ideal rendered practical by early marriage. Th

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I got another hiding and a second trip to the psychologist for that one. The third visit to the shrink, and the last straw, came in grade six. A kid was bullying me. He said he was going to beat me up, and I brought one of my knives to school. I wasn’t going to use it; I just wanted to have it. The school didn’t care. That was the last straw for them. I wasn’t expelled, exactly. The principal sat me down and said, “Trevor, we can expel you. You need to think hard about whether you really want to be at Maryvale next year.” I think he thought he was giving me an ultimatum that would get me to shape up. But I felt like he was offering me an out, and I took it. “No,” I told him, “I don’t want to be here.” And that was the end of Catholic school. Funnily enough, I didn’t get into trouble with my mom when it happened. There was no ass-whooping waiting for me at home. She’d lost the bursary when she’d left her job at ICI, and paying for private school was becoming a burden. But more than that, she thought the school was overreacting. The truth is she probably took my side against Maryvale more often than not. She agreed with me 100 percent about the Eucharist thing. “Let me get this straight,” she told the principal. “You’re punishing a child because he wants Jesus’s body and Jesus’s blood? Why shouldn’t he have those things? Of course he should have them.” When they made me see a therapist for laughing while the principal hit me, she told the school that was ridiculous, too. “Ms. Noah, your son was laughing while we were hitting him.” “Well, clearly you don’t know how to hit a kid. That’s your problem, not mine. Trevor’s never laughed when I’ve hit him, I can tell you.” That was the weird and kind of amazing thing about my mom. If she agreed with me that a rule was stupid, she wouldn’t punish me for breaking it. Both she and the psychologists agreed that the school was the one with the problem, not me. Catholic school is not the place to be creative and independent. Catholic school is similar to apartheid in that it’s ruthlessly authoritarian, and its authority rests on a bunch of rules that don’t make any sense. My mother grew up with these rules and she questioned them. When they didn’t hold up, she simply went around them. The only authority my mother recognized was God’s. God is love and the Bible is truth—everything else was up for debate. She taught me to challenge authority and question the system. The only way it backfired on her was that I constantly challenged and questioned her. —

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Their affair had ended badly. He descended into the dank grayness of the subway, relishing slightly her surprise appearance. He had never gone to work this way before. It was probably the route she always took. He wondered what kind of job she had; she had been wearing blue jeans stuffed into short, scuffed black boots and a tweed coat with a purple scarf folded around her neck. He wondered if it had embarrassed her to encounter him in a suit, obviously the holder of the better job. In college they had often discussed how one should deal with the world in order to become successful. He saw her ghost lying on its side on his rumpled sheets, resting on one elbow, her then-long hair lying randomly on her shoulders, telling him what she thought about success. He smiled a little. The subway banged harshly into view, and he pressed forward with the sleepy, odorous mass he joined each morning. He emerged in a cleaner area of Manhattan and entered the spinning glass doors of a gray building that was as grainy and oblong as a cartoon drawing of an office building in The New Yorker. He worked for an independent film distribution company that dealt mainly in foreign films. It was a prestigious place to work, and he was proud of himself for getting the job right after graduation. When he first started there, it had thrilled him to know that he could attend screenings of important films, take his friends to see them free, and meet famous people every now and then. The office was small and contained mixed knotty-legged furniture and the square orange desks of secretaries and assistants. There was a bulletin board tacked with magazine headings and photographs slabbed together. “Hi, Joel,” said the receptionist. She was echoed by two other assistants as he walked by. He stopped to chat with Cecilia, a colleague with whom he had had an affair during his first two years at the company. Now that it was over, they were friends and often had lunch. She talked to him about her date the night before. “I’m intrigued,” she said. “He’s done work for”—she named two fashionable directors—“and next summer, he’s going to France to work with Eric Rohmer. He’s very good-looking. And funny and intelligent. Everything.” “Sounds perfect. Where did Mr. Wonderful take you?” “The Gloucester House. That seafood place around Fiftieth?” “And then what?” She returned his playful leer and told him. He didn’t feel belittled by Cecilia’s wealthier, more prestigious boyfriends, partly, he supposed, because he felt that he had somehow joined their ranks sheerly by virtue of his affair with her.