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.

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• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  from beneath two protruding black eyebrows. Each eye had its own little thatch roof. Maybe it was because factories were so much on my mind in those days, but I often thought Judge Burns looked as if he’d been built in some far-off factory that manufactured hanging judges. And I thought he knew it, too. And took pride in it. He called himself, in all seriousness, James the Just. In his operatic basso he’d announce, “You are now in the courtroom of James the Just!” Heaven have mercy on anyone who, thinking James the Just was being a bit dramatic, dared to laugh. Portland was still a small town—minuscule, really—and we’d heard through the grapevine that someone had recently bumped into James the Just at his men’s club. The judge was having a martini, moaning about our case. “Dreadful case,” he was saying to the bartender and anyone who’d listen, “perfectly dreadful.” So we knew he didn’t want to be there any more than we did, and he often took out his unhappiness on us, berating us over small points of order and decorum. Still, despite my horrid performance on the stand, Cousin Houser and Strasser and I had a sense that James the Just was inclining toward our side. Something about his demeanor: He was slightly less ogreish to us. On a hunch, therefore, Cousin Houser told the opposing counsel that, if they were still considering our original settlement, forget it, the offer was no longer on the table. That same day, James the Just called a halt to the trial and admonished both sides. He was perturbed, he said, by all he was reading about this case in the local newspapers. He was damned if he was going to preside over a media circus. He ordered us to cease and desist discussing the case outside the courthouse. We nodded. Yes, Your Honor. Johnson sat behind our table, often sending notes to Cousin Houser, and always reading a novel during sidebars and breaks. After court adjourned each day, he’d unwind by taking a stroll around downtown, visiting different sporting goods stores, checking on our sales. (He also did this every time he found himself in a new city.) Early on he reported back that Nikes were selling like crazy, thanks to Bowerman’s waffle trainer. The shoe had just hit the market, and it was sold out everywhere, meaning we were outpacing Onitsuka, even Puma. The shoe was such a hit that we could envision, for the first time, one day approaching Adidas’s sales numbers. Johnson got to talking with one store manager, an old friend, who knew the trial was under way. “How’s it going?” the store manager said. “Going well,” Johnson said. “So well, in fact, we withdrew our settlement offer.” First thing the next morning, as we gathered in the courtroom, each of us sipping our coffee, we noticed an unfamiliar face at the defense table. There were the five lawyers... and one new guy?

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  DAWN I was up before the others, before the birds, before the sun. I drank a cup of coffee, wolfed down a piece of toast, put on my shorts and sweatshirt, and laced up my green running shoes. Then slipped quietly out the back door. I stretched my legs, my hamstrings, my lower back, and groaned as I took the first few balky steps down the cool road, into the fog. Why is it always so hard to get started? There were no cars, no people, no signs of life. I was all alone, the world to myself—though the trees seemed oddly aware of me. Then again, this was Oregon. The trees always seemed to know. The trees always had your back. What a beautiful place to be from, I thought, gazing around. Calm, green, tranquil—I was proud to call Oregon my home, proud to call little Portland my place of birth. But I felt a stab of regret, too. Though beautiful, Oregon struck some people as the kind of place where nothing big had ever happened, or was ever likely to. If we Oregonians were famous for anything, it was an old, old trail we’d had to blaze to get here. Since then, things had been pretty tame. The best teacher I ever had, one of the finest men I ever knew, spoke of that trail often. It’s our birthright, he’d growl. Our character, our fate—our DNA. “The cowards never started,” he’d tell me, “and the weak died along the way—that leaves us.” Us. Some rare strain of pioneer spirit was discovered along that trail, my teacher believed, some outsized sense of possibility mixed with a diminished capacity for pessimism—and it was our job as Oregonians to keep that strain alive. I’d nod, showing him all due respect. I loved the guy. But walking away I’d sometimes think: Jeez, it’s just a dirt road. That foggy morning, that momentous morning in 1962, I’d recently blazed my own trail—back home, after seven long years away. It was strange being home again, strange being lashed again by the daily rains. Stranger still was living again with my parents and twin sisters, sleeping in my childhood bed. Late at night I’d lie on my back, staring at my college textbooks, my high school trophies and blue ribbons, thinking: This is me? Still? I moved quicker down the road. My breath formed rounded, frosty puffs, swirling into the fog. I savored that first physical awakening, that brilliant moment before the mind is fully clear, when the limbs and joints first begin to loosen and the material body starts to melt away. Solid to liquid. Faster, I told myself. Faster. On paper, I thought, I’m an adult. Graduated from a good college—University of Oregon. Earned a master’s from a top business school—Stanford. Survived a yearlong hitch in the U.S. Army—Fort Lewis and Fort Eustis.

• From City of Night (1963)

  I attempted to tell the story of Lance O’Hara as a Greek tragedy, the chorus of bar-voices warning of the imminent fall of the demi-god, the almost-moviestar on the brink of aging, the whispering Furies conspiring to assure the fall. From my early fascination with mathematics, I “plotted” the chapter on Jeremy as an algebraic equation drawn on a graph, the point of intersecting lines revealing the “unknown factor”—here, the unmasking of the narrator. Memory itself, being selective, provides form; each portrait-chapter found its own “frame.” (The most difficult chapter to write was Sylvia’s.) My rejected Catholicism was bringing to the narrator’s journey a sense of ritual—and the bright colors of garish Catholic churches are splashed in descriptions throughout this book. As I wrote, stirred memories rushed the “stilled” present, and to convey that fusion I shifted verb tenses within sentences. The irregularly capitalized words I hoped would bring a visual emphasis that italics could not. Before writing, I often listened to music: Presley, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Richard Strauss, Stravinsky, Bartok—to absorb the dark, moody sexuality of rock, the formal structure of classical music, the “ordered” dissonance of modern composers. Each chapter went through about twelve drafts, some passages through more than that—often, paradoxically, to create a sense of “spontaneity.” The first four paragraphs that open this book were compressed from about twenty pages. The first chapter was written last, the last one came first. Although four years elapsed between the time I began this book—with the unsent letter—and the time it was finished, most of it was written during one intense year in El Paso. Three titles had been announced with published excerpts: Storm Heaven and Protest, Hey, World! and It Begins in the Wind. The intertwining chapters that connect the portraits were called “City of Night” from the start. But I did not conceive of that as the book’s title. I did consider: Ash Wednesday, Shrove Tuesday, The Fabulous Wedding of Miss Destiny, Masquerade. Finally, I decided: Storm Heaven and Protest. Then Don Allen—always a superb editor—suggested the obvious: City of Night. The book was finished. That night—and this is one of the most cherished memories of my life—my mother, my oldest brother, Robert, and I were weaving about my mother’s living room, bumping into each other, each with great stacks of the almost-700-page typescript, collating it—I had made three or four carbon copies. The manuscript was mailed. I went to return the rented typewriter, but I couldn’t part with it. I bought it; I still have the elegant old Underwood, now comfortably “retired.” Proofs came. As I read, I panicked. In print, it was all “different”—wrong! About a third of the way through, I began changing a word here and there, a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph; then I started back at the beginning. By the time I had gone through the galley proofs, the book was virtually rewritten on the margins and on pasted typewritten inserts. But now —I knew—it was “right.”

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  The same thing happens to all kinds of college athletes. Years of training and competing at a high level take their toll. You need a rest. But now the rest was over. I needed to get back out there. I didn’t want to be the fat, flabby, sedentary head of a running-shoe company. And if tight suits and the specter of hypocrisy weren’t enough incentive, another motivation soon came along. Shortly after that all-comers race, after Grelle refused me the loan, he and I went for a private run. Four miles in, I saw Grelle looking back at me sadly as I huffed and puffed to keep up. It was one thing to have him refuse me money, it was another to have him give me pity. He knew I was embarrassed, so he challenged me. “This fall,” he said, “let’s you and me race—one mile. I’ll give you a full minute handicap, and if you beat me I’ll pay you a buck for every second of difference in our times.” I trained hard that summer. I got into the habit of running six miles every night after work. In no time I was back in shape, my weight down to 160. And when the day of the big race came—with Woodell on the stopwatch—I took thirty-six dollars from Grelle. (The victory was made all the sweeter the following week when Grelle jumped into an all-comers meet and ran 4:07.) As I drove home that day I felt immensely proud. Keep going, I told myself. Don’t stop. AT ALMOST THE halfway mark of the year—June 15, 1970—I pulled my Sports Illustrated from my mailbox and got a shock. On the cover was a Man of Oregon. And not just any Man of Oregon, but perhaps the greatest of all time, greater even than Grelle. His name was Steve Prefontaine, and the photo showed him sprinting up the side of Olympus, aka Bowerman Mountain. The article inside described Pre as an astonishing, once-a-generation phenom. He’d already made a big splash in high school, setting a national record (8:41) at two miles, but now, in his first year at Oregon, running two miles, he’d beaten Gerry Lindgren, who’d previously been considered unbeatable. And he’d beaten him by 27 seconds. Pre posted 8:40.0, third-fastest time in the nation that year. He’d also run three miles in 13:12.8, which in 1970 was faster than anyone, anywhere, on earth. Bowerman told the writer from Sports Illustrated that Pre was the fastest middle-distance runner alive. I’d never heard such unbridled enthusiasm from my stolid coach. In the days ahead, in other articles I clipped, Bowerman was even more effusive, calling Pre “the best runner I’ve ever had.” Bowerman’s assistant, Bill Dellinger, said Pre’s secret weapon was his confidence, which was as freakish as his lung capacity. “Usually,” Dellinger said, “it takes our guys twelve years to build confidence in themselves, and here’s a young man who has the right attitude naturally.” Yes, I thought. Confidence.

• From Educated (2018)

  I said I didn’t need a doctor. The ulcers would heal, and someone had already treated the toe. Robin’s eyebrow rose. “Who? Who treated it?” I shrugged. She assumed my mother had, and I let her believe it. The truth was, the morning after Thanksgiving, I had asked Shawn to tell me if it was broken. He’d knelt on the kitchen floor and I’d dropped my foot into his lap. In that posture he seemed to shrink. He examined the toe for a moment, then he looked up at me and I saw something in his blue eyes. I thought he was about to say he was sorry, but just when I expected his lips to part he grasped the tip of my toe and yanked. It felt as if my foot had exploded, so intense was the shock that shot through my leg. I was still trying to swallow spasms of pain when Shawn stood, put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Sorry, Siddle Lister, but it hurts less if you don’t see it coming.” A week after Robin asked to take me to the doctor, I again awoke to her shaking me. She gathered me up and pressed me to her, as if her body could hold me together, could keep me from flying apart. “I think you need to see the bishop,” she said the next morning. “I’m fine,” I said, making a cliché of myself the way not-fine people do. “I just need sleep.” Soon after, I found a pamphlet for the university counseling service on my desk. I barely looked at it, just knocked it into the trash. I could not see a counselor. To see one would be to ask for help, and I believed myself invincible. It was an elegant deception, a mental pirouette. The toe was not broken because it was not breakable. Only an X-ray could prove otherwise. Thus, the X-ray would break my toe. My algebra final was swept up in this superstition. In my mind, it acquired a kind of mystical power. I studied with the intensity of the insane, believing that if I could best this exam, win that impossible perfect score, even with my broken toe and without Charles to help me, it would prove that I was above it all. Untouchable. The morning of the exam I limped to the testing center and sat in the drafty hall. The test was in front of me. The problems were compliant, pliable; they yielded to my manipulations, forming into solutions, one after the other. I handed in my answer sheet, then stood in the frigid hallway, staring up at the screen that would display my score. When it appeared, I blinked, and blinked again. One hundred. A perfect score. I was filled with an exquisite numbness. I felt drunk with it and wanted to shout at the world: Here is proof: nothing touches me.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  On one occasion, shortly after #169, I felt the need and called an old Hound friend. He announced, to my surprise, that he really wanted to fuck me—which was out of the question. But he let it be known that for a price he would eat my pussy: amazing how demanding Hounds can get when left alone too long. The money would give him detachment—he would be a tongue for hire. I loved the idea of turning a man into a whore—though it did feel a little too politically correct. But before even negotiating a price, he proposed that he would give me a freebie under the condition that I be entirely dominant, dictating every turn, every move, fulfilling my every desire. Okay, okay, I said—but just this once. I can, on occasion, be compliant with a Hound; I could be a dominatrix for a night. It would, however, have been easier to pay him. We were now both “topping from the bottom”—and I wasn’t sure who was actually in charge anymore. He came over and I was ready for him, reclining on my bed in my boudoir in black lingerie. First I asked for admiration while he sat in a chair. Why was I the hottest chick at the party? He explained. In his life? He explained further. I found this game to be quite fun. In the whole world? He explained still further, but this time I was not convinced. Next game. We examined my ass in the mirror from all angles, and he pointed out every curve and line to explain why it was the best ass—best in the boudoir, anyway. Then we looked at how my shaved pussy lips peeked through my thighs below my ass when I bent over. This was really fun—right out there with it all, shamelessly. So far he hadn’t been allowed to touch me. Lying on my bed, I then asked for a back massage, then a breast and stomach massage, then a butt massage, then a hip and thigh massage. Then I told him to go back to the chair, sit down, take out his cock, and stroke himself while I displayed my pussy to him like a stripper girl on the runway, spread lips, swollen red clit, long lean legs, killer shoes. He got pretty fucking hard. Then I asked that he lick my pussy for a while, taking long strokes from my ass to my pussy to my clit and back again, the whole wet package. That was great. Really just great. Next I asked him to concentrate on rimming my asshole with slowly increasing pressure until his tongue started forcing its way inside: “Like you want it.” “Like?” He did want it. Then he served me four or five inches of a red chili pepper vibrator up my ass. I hadn’t asked for that part, so to speak, but it was hot so I didn’t object.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  It would be treason, I suppose, to advocate surrender at the rear for those who are just finally claiming victory at the front. Victory from behind, however, seems so much more, how can I put it . . . honorable. I can’t but wonder if my play, The Anal Dialogues, could find a venue even off-off-off-Broadway? Perhaps in some dark performance space down some little-traveled back alley? Clearly, yelling about butt-fucking from the rooftops—or on the national radio waves—is not advised. In April 2004, it was proposed that Clear Channel Communications, the nation’s largest radio broadcaster, be fined no less than $495,000 by the Federal Communications Commission for a single twenty-minute segment of the Howard Stern Show in which Stern discussed, at some length, what he refers to as “anal.” (It probably didn’t help matters that the conversation was frequently punctuated by fart noises.) Thank God that having anal sex is so much cheaper than talking about it. Despite this new trend of sodomitic censorship, ass-fucking has made several auspicious appearances recently on screens both big and small. The subject came up regularly in the popular TV series Sex and the City, whose heroines discussed not only men’s growing interest in “the ass” but also their own willingness to accommodate those interests, the appropriateness of doing so on a first date, and the basic lube how-tos. Perhaps even more surprising was its mention in the Hollywood hit Bridget Jones’s Diary . At one point, when Bridget is lying in bed after having sex with her caddish lover, Daniel Cleaver, she reminds him that what they just did is illegal in several countries. To which he replies, without missing a beat, that that’s one of the reasons he’s so pleased to be living in England today. Is Daniel Cleaver the latest incarnation of the bad-boy lover, the zipless fuck for the twenty-first century? After all, the zipless ass-fuck simply takes zipless to a new hole level. So does missionary-position ass-fucking. The term itself conjures up such perfect contradiction: the most patriarchal position, the most biblically sanctioned, and yet, well, what a difference an inch can make. The experience on the other hand—best achieved with a nice firm pillow under the ass—makes me feel downright missionary. After all, here I am spreading the word, sharing the epiphany like a born-again believer, a convert, an anal zealot. New Year’s Arithmetic Eighty-four anal fucks this year—that averages 7 per month, that’s 1.75 a week, one every 4.3 days. But he was out of town 21 weeks, in town 31 weeks, which averages 2.7 ass-fucks a week, which makes one every 2.6 days. I like the math; I do it to believe. Me and the Marquis de Sade: he counted, too. GETTING READY If you want the whole thing, the Gods will give it to you. But you must be ready for it. —JOSEPH CAMPBELL I dry the freshly washed K-Y tubes on my bath towel and put them back in the bedside drawer.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  For there were twenty-four of them, each one given his night to preach—to shine, as it were, before men, and to glorify his Heavenly Father. Of these twenty-four, all of them men of great experience and power, and some of them men of great fame, Gabriel, to his astonished pride, was asked to be one. This was a great, a heavy honour for one so young in the faith and in years—who had but only yesterday been lying, vomit-covered, in the gutters of sin—and Gabriel felt his heart shake with fear as this invitation came to him. Yet he felt that it was the hand of God that had called him out so early to prove himself before such mighty men. He was to preach on the twelfth night. It was decided, in view of his possible failure to attract, to support him on either side with a nearly equal number of war horses. He would have, thus, the benefit of the storm they would certainly have stirred up before him; and should he fail to add substantially to the effect they had created, there would be others coming after him to obliterate his performance. But Gabriel did not want his performance—the most important of his career so far, and on which so much depended—to be obliterated; he did not want to be dismissed as a mere boy who was scarcely ready to be counted in the race, much less to be considered a candidate for the prize. He fasted on his knees before God and did not cease, daily and nightly, to pray that God might work through him a mighty work and cause all men to see that, indeed, God’s hand was on him, that he was the Lord’s anointed. Deborah, unasked, fasted with him, and prayed, and took his best black suit away, so that it would be clean and mended and freshly pressed for the great day. And she took it away again, immediately afterwards, so that it would be no less splendid on the Sunday of the great dinner that was officially to punctuate the revival. This Sunday was to be a feast day for everyone, but more especially for the twenty-four elders, who were, that day, to be gloriously banqueted at the saints’ expense and labour.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  And this idea filled him, in a moment, wholly, with the intensity of a vision: What better woman could be found? She was not like the mincing daughters of Zion! She was not to be seen prancing lewdly through the streets, eyes sleepy and mouth half-open with lust, or to be found mewing under midnight fences, uncovered, uncovering some black boy’s hanging curse! No, their married bed would be holy, and their children would continue the line of the faithful, a royal line. And, fired with this, a baser fire stirred in him also, rousing a slumbering fear, and he remembered (as the table, the ministers, the dinner, and the talk all burst in on him again) that Paul had written: ‘It is better to marry than to burn.’ Yet, he thought, he would hold his peace awhile; he would seek to know more clearly the Lord’s mind in this matter. For he remembered how much older she was than he—eight years; and he tried to imagine, for the first time in his life, that dishonour to which Deborah had been forced so many years ago by white men: her skirts above her head, her secrecy discovered—by white men. How many? How had she borne it? Had she screamed? Then he thought (but it did not really trouble him, for if Christ to save him could be crucified, he, for Christ’s greater glory, could well be mocked) of what smiles would be occasioned, what filthy conjecture, barely sleeping now, would mushroom upward overnight like Jonah’s gourd, when people heard that he and Deborah were going to be married. She, who had been the living proof and witness of their daily shame, and who had become their holy fool—and he, who had been the untamable despoiler of their daughters, and thief of their women, their walking prince of darkness! And he smiled, watching the elders’ well-fed faces and their grinding jaws—unholy pastors all, unfaithful stewards; he prayed that he would never be so fat, or so lascivious, but that God should work through him a mighty work: to ring, it might be, through ages yet unborn, as sweet, solemn, mighty proof of His everlasting love and mercy. He trembled with the presence that surrounded him now; he could scarcely keep his seat. He felt that light shone down on him from Heaven, on him, the chosen; he felt as Christ must have felt in the temple, facing His so utterly confounded elders; and he lifted up his eyes, not caring for their glances, or their clearing of throats, and the silence that abruptly settled over the table, thinking: ‘Yes. God works in many mysterious ways His wonders to perform.’ ‘Sister Deborah,’ he said, much later that night as he was walking her to her door, ‘the Lord done laid something on my heart and I want you to help me to pray over it and ask Him to lead me right.’

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

  time—he had married the millionairess he’d been living with before the divorce —he sent us nothing, not even the pittance the judge had prescribed for my support. We were barely making it, and making it in spite of him. My shedding the name he’d given me would put him in mind of that fact. That fall, once a week after school, I went to catechism. Yellow leaves drifted past the windows as Sister James instructed us in the life of faith. She was a woman of passion. Her square jaw trembled when something moved her, and as she talked her eyes grew brilliant behind her winking rimless glasses. She could not sit still. Instead she paced between our desks, her habit rustling against us. She had no timidity or coyness. Even about sex she spoke graphically and with gusto. Sometimes she would forget where she was and start whistling. Sister James did not like the idea of us running free after school. She feared we would spend our time with friends from the public schools we attended and possibly end up as Mormons. To account for our afternoons she had formed the Archery Club, the Painting Club, and the Chess Club, and she demanded that each of us join one. They met twice a week. Attendance was compulsory. No one thought of disobeying her. I belonged to the Archery Club. Girls were free to join but none did. On rainy days we practiced in the church basement, on clear days outside. Sister James watched us when she could; at other times we were supervised by an older nun who was nearsighted and tried to control us by saying, “Boys, boys . . .” The people next door kept cats. The cats were used to having the run of the churchyard and it took them a while to understand that they were no longer predators but prey—big calicoes and marmalades sitting in the sunshine, tails curled prettily around themselves, cocking their heads from side to side as our arrows zipped past. We never hit any of them, but we came close. Finally the cats caught on and quit the field. When this happened we began hunting each other. Pretending to look for overshot arrows, we would drift beyond the targets to a stand of trees where the old nun couldn’t see us. There the game began. At first the idea was to creep around and let fly in such a way that your arrow thunked into the tree nearest your quarry. For a time we were content to count this a hit. But the rule proved too confining for some, and then the rest of us had no choice but to throw it over too, as friends of mine would later throw over the rules governing fights with water balloons, rocks, and BB guns. The game got interesting. All of us had close calls, close calls that were

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

  “Well, one night I went to have my cigarette and lo and behold, the pack was empty. I had run completely out. It was late, too late to wake up anyone else in the dorm. Normally I would have just taken a couple of butts out of the ashtray, but it so happened that when I finished studying I had emptied the ashtray into my wastebasket and dumped it down the incinerator shaft. So there I was, without my nightly cigarette.” He paused, contemplating his outrageous youthful self. “You know what I did? I’ll tell you. I started walking in circles with my heart beating a mile a minute. ‘What’ll I do? What’ll I do?’ I kept asking myself. What I ended up doing was, I ended up running downstairs to the lounge. The ashtrays were empty. Then I started going through the garbage cans in the hallway. At last I found one with butts in it. But as I reached down—right down into a garbage can—I suddenly thought, ‘Whoa. Hold on right there, buster.’ And I did. I went back to my room and to this day I haven’t smoked another cigarette.” He looked up at me. “But you know what I did? Every day I saved the exact amount of money I would have spent on cigarettes. Just as an experiment. Then last year I put it all together, and you know what I bought?” I shook my head. “I took that money and I bought a Nash Rambler.” My mother burst out laughing. The principal sat back and smiled uncertainly. My mother was sniffing and searching in her purse. She found a Kleenex and blew her nose as if she had some kind of cold that made her shriek. “Think about it,” the principal said. “That’s all I’m saying—just think about it.” My mother let the principal maunder on for a time, then brought him back to business. He became restless and uncomfortable. He said he would prefer that the vice-principal decide this question. My mother refused. She told him that the the vice-principal had manhandled me while I was sick. The school nurse had seen him do it. If she had to, my mother said, she was prepared to talk to a lawyer. She didn’t want to, but she would. The principal saw no reason why it had to come to that. Not over one obscenity.

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

  “He didn’t do it,” my mother said. The principal tentatively, even reluctantly, mentioned the testimony of the weed fiends. My mother turned to me and asked if they were telling the truth. “No ma’am.” “He doesn’t lie to me,” my mother said. The principal was fidgeting. He seemed about ready to bolt. “Well,” he said, “there is obviously some kind of confusion here.” My mother waited. He looked from her to me and back to her. “What am I supposed to do? Just let it drop?” When she didn’t answer he said, “All right. What about two weeks?” “Two weeks what?” “Suspension.” “Two weeks suspension?” “One week, then. We’ll split it. Does that seem fair?” She frowned at the desk and said nothing. He looked at her imploringly. “It’s not that long. Just five days.” Then he said, abruptly, “All right then, I’ll let it go this time. That’s fine for you,” he added. “You don’t have to work here.” School was over when we left the principal’s office. We walked through the empty corridors, our footsteps echoing between long lines of lockers. I still had cramps. They got worse as I started moving around again, and on our way out I ducked into the lavatory. The janitor had already been there. He had changed what I’d written to BOCK YOU IT WAS TOO late for my mother to go back to work, so she went home early with me. Marian smelled a story and pressed my mother until she got it. We were sitting at the kitchen table, and as she listened to my mother Marian began looking back and forth between us and giving hard little shakes of her head as if to clear it of water. Then her eyes came to rest on me and did not move. When my mother came to the end, indignant all over again at the way I’d been treated,

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” (9:1). It is that sight that puts him on a par with the Twelve and all the other earlier apostles: “Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared [Greek ophthē, ‘was seen’] also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God” (15:8–9). Paul already knew enough about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus to persecute his followers for proclaiming their faith to fellow Jews at Damascus. In Christian gospel, art, and mysticism, the risen Christ retains the wounds of historical crucifixion even on his glorified and transcendental body. Those wounds do not heal or fade. They are forever there. To take seriously Paul’s claim to have seen the risen Jesus, we suggest that his inaugural vision was of Jesus’s body simultaneously crucified (by Rome) and glorified (by God). Such a stunning vocational vision would already contain foundationally the full message of Paul’s faith and theology, the full meaning of Paul’s life and death. An apostle of Christ. That preceding divergence between Paul and Luke leads directly into a second major disagreement between them, and it too concerns much more than autobiographical details and résumé upgrades. It involves Paul’s very identity, integrity, and authority as a Christian apostle. An “apostle” is a person “sent” somewhere (from Greek apostellein, “to send”) in order to found new Christian communities. But by whom is an apostle “sent”? According to Paul, he is an apostle called and sent directly by Christ—just as were the Twelve—but according to Luke Paul has no such status or authority. He is only an apostle sent by the community at Antioch and is therefore subordinate to Antioch, and through Antioch to Jerusalem and the Twelve. As you can understand, there are profound theological implications to that difference. Do God and Christ call an apostle by revelatory vocation (from Latin vocare, “to call”) directly from heaven even after the resurrection and ascension, or only indirectly through the Christian community here below? So for Luke in Acts, Paul is an apostle sent by Jerusalem and Antioch. Here is how Paul becomes an “apostle” according to Luke in Acts 13:1–3, but notice that Barnabas is mentioned first and seems much more important than Saul/Paul in this account: In the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers: Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen a member of the court of Herod the ruler, and Saul. While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off ( apelusan ). For Luke, Paul is an “apostle” sent by God, but only indirectly through the Antioch community as it prays and worships in the Holy Spirit.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  According to Acts 9:2, they were known as followers of “the Way,” the way of Jesus. However, despite the risk of anachronism, we will sometimes call them “Christians” or “Christian Jews” or “Christian Gentiles.” After Paul’s dramatic experience of the risen Christ, he became part of the movement. Though Paul knew enough about Jesus before his Damascus experience to become a persecutor of his followers, his transformation into an apostle of Jesus involved learning more about Jesus from those who were part of the movement. It is intrinsically what we would expect, and Acts does in fact report it. Moreover, Paul was sustained by his involvement with Christian communities. As the contemporary scholar Peter Berger puts it, Saul became Paul in a moment of religious ecstasy; but Paul could remain Paul only in the context of Christian community. In his life as an apostle, Paul sought to express in the larger Mediterranean world what the Jesus movement meant for both Jews and Gentiles. The third concentric contextual circle is first-century Judaism. Like Jesus, Paul was passionately Jewish. Jewish scripture (for Christians, the Old Testament) and Jewish practice shaped his life and thought, both before and after he became a follower of Jesus. Indeed, to the end of his life, Paul thought of himself as Jewish, not as having converted to a new religion. Without an understanding of Paul’s Jewish context, much in his letters is opaque. The fourth concentric contextual circle is the Roman Empire. Though it is not more important than the other circles, it is the largest and most comprehensive context. Paul and all of his communities lived under Roman rule. This matters not simply as information about Paul’s time and place. Rather, it matters because Roman rule was legitimated by an imperial theology that proclaimed that the emperor was the Son of God, Lord, Savior of the World, and the one who had brought peace on earth. It also proclaimed, as we will see especially in Chapter 4, that peace and justice came through military victory and imperial order. For now, we simply note that Paul’s proclamation of Jesus as Son of God, Lord, and Savior directly countered Roman imperial theology. For Paul as a follower of Jesus, God as known in Jesus was Lord, and the emperor was not. In this context, Paul’s most concise affirmation about Jesus—“Jesus is Lord”—was high treason. It is not surprising that Paul, like Jesus, was eventually executed by Rome. In this fourfold context, much of what is in Paul’s letters becomes luminous.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  He does not work from universal human rights or democratic social privileges. He is thinking of the householder, who in a patriarchal society is usually the father, so we can with full integrity replace the gendered word “father” with the ungendered word “householder” or even “homemaker.” If, thinks Paul, you went into the household of an extended family, how would you judge the householder, that is, the one responsible for all and everything within those walls? What would make you praise or criticize the name, that is, the reputation, of the householder? What makes a good and what makes a bad householder? Is there a just, fair, and equal distribution of rights and responsibilities, of duties and privileges? Are all the children well fed, clothed, and sheltered? Does everyone have enough? Do some members get far more than they need, while others get far less? Is it, in summary, a household well run for all concerned? If it is, then, indeed, one praises the name of the householder. For Paul, the Householder of the earth-house, the Homemaker of the world-home, is God, and all people are God’s dependents and God’s children. God as Householder is the One who has responsibility and charge for the home’s extended family. Therefore, for Paul, the justice of equality is directly about God and indirectly about us. It is, first and foremost, about the honor and glory of a just God reflected in a just world. Paul is not thinking primarily about democracy, social justice, or human rights. He is thinking primarily about the honor and glory of God revealed in how Christ lived and died and how the world should live and not die. That, of course, is why there is so much family language in Paul. Christians have already taken their place in the family of God. Hence Philemon is Paul’s “brother” and Apphia his “sister” in God’s family (Philem. 1–2). It is also fascinating to watch how Paul moves back and forth between calling Christians “sons ( huioi ) of God” and “children ( tekna ) of God,” sometimes in the very same unit. Since all Christians are “in Christ” and Christ is “Son of God,” Paul emphasizes “sons of God” in the Greek of Galatians 3:26, but then he has “children of God” in the Greek of Philippians 2:15. Even more striking and revealing is how he interweaves “sons of God” twice in Romans 8:14, 19 with “children of God” twice in Romans 8:16, 21—and again in Romans 9:8. It is, for Paul, all about family values—but divine family values, and that is what makes him very, very radical. Finally, against that background of God as Householder of our world-home, we return to Paul’s emphasis on intra-Christian equality in Philemon, Galatians, and 1 Corinthians one more time. We might be tempted today to criticize Paul along these lines: “You are so narrow and parochial, dear Paul. You are only speaking about Christianity and not about the whole world.”

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

  toothy grin, his strange duel with a swamp rabbit, and, most notably, his redneck doppelgänger—brother Billy. 28 Carter was the perfect candidate of the seventies, because he was someone who came to politics with “roots.” He ran as the man from tiny Plains, as one who loved the land, loved his kin, and treasured his local community. That simple heritage was his calling card, and as a profile in the Christian Science Monitor concluded, “Few cling to their roots with more tenacity.” Like Alex Haley, he was obsessed with his family’s genealogy. He successfully cultivated his “common man” origins until a British publication on the peerage released a startling twenty-three-page finding on the Carter family lineage in 1977. Instead of descending from indentured servants, the president had one of the most significant family histories in the English-speaking world: he was related to both George Washington and the queen of England. The New York Times projected that his fellow Americans would find this discovery “amusing.” It tempered the British announcement with a reminder to readers that some of the Carters in old England were poachers, the American equivalent of would-be moonshiners. Noble blood or hillbilly moonshiners? A spokesman for the British study, Debrett’s Peerage, invoked eugenic thinking when he claimed that the Carter family had produced “intelligent to brilliant” people. The family line had its share of “sleepers,” the expert confided, and it was from those less successful branches that Jimmy’s brother Billy had acquired his less fine attributes. 29 That said, Billy Carter was no sleeper. He became a redneck luminary, and tourists poured into the Carters’ hometown of Plains looking for autographs and photographs with the down-home celebrity. He began producing his own beer, Billy Beer, and hired an agent to coordinate talks he gave around the country. He was known for voicing ornery, uncensored opinions. Billy smoked five packs of Pall Malls a day, and his code name on the CB radio was “Cast Iron,” for his iron-gutted ability to drink anything and a lot of it. He was no “Holy Roller,” no celebrant of the “Lost Cause.” When asked what side he would have fought on in the Civil War, Billy joked, “I’d probably hid out in the swamp.” In 1981, after his brother left office, Billy was peddling mobile homes. 30 Roy Blount said he wished that Jimmy had a bit more of Billy in him, a little more irreverence and sass: “The first Cracker President should have been a mixture of Jimmy and Billy, . . . Billy’s hoo-Lord-what-the-hell-get-out-the-way attitude heaving up under Jimmy’s prudent righteousness—or Jimmy’s idealism heaving up under Billy’s sense of human limitations—and forming a nice-and-

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

  Public opinion in the Middle Ages believed neither in co-ordination nor separation of the two powers, but in the subordination of one to the other on the basis of union. Church and State were inseparably interwoven from the days of Charlemagne and even of Constantine, and both together constituted the Christian commonwealth, respublica Christiana. There was also a general agreement that the Church was the spiritual, the State, the temporal power. But the parties divided on the question of the precise boundary line.32 The papal party maintained the theocratic superiority of the Church over the State: the imperial party maintained the caesaropapistic superiority of the State, or at least the equality of the two powers. It was a conflict between priestcraft and statecraft, between sacerdotium and imperium, the clergy and the laity. The imperialists emphasized the divine origin and superior antiquity of the civil government, to which even Christ and the Apostles were subject; the hierarchical party disparaged the State, and put the Church above it even in temporal affairs, when they conflicted with the spiritual. Emperors like Otto I. and Henry III. deposed and elected popes; while popes like Gregory VII. and Innocent III. deposed and elected emperors. Gregory compares the Church to the sun, the State to the moon, which borrows her light from the sun.33 The episcopal dignity is above the kingly and imperial dignity, as heaven is above the earth. He admits the necessity of the State for the temporal government of men; but in his conflict with the civil power he takes the pessimistic view that the State is the product of robbery, murder, and all sorts of crimes, and a disturbance of the original equality, which must be restored by the priestly power. He combined the highest view of the Church and the papacy with the lowest view of the State and the empire.34 His theory of the papal power could not have been more explicitly stated than when, writing to Sancho, king of Aragon, he said that Jesus, the king of glory, had made Peter lord over the kingdoms of the world. This principle he consistently acted upon.35 Henry IV. of Germany he twice deposed and absolved his subjects from allegiance to him. He concluded his second excommunication of Henry IV., at the synod in Lent, March 7, 1080, with this startling peroration: — "And now, O ye princes and fathers, most holy Apostles Peter and Paul, deal ye with us in such wise that all the world may know and understand that, having the power to bind and to loose in heaven, you have the like power to take away empires, kingdoms, principalities, duchies, marquisates, earldoms, and all manner of human rights and properties .... Having such mighty power in spiritual things, what is there on earth that may transcend your authority in temporal things? And if ye judge the angels, who are high above the proudest of princes, what may ye not do unto those beneath them?

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

  He did not claim infallibility in theory, though he assumed it in fact; but he did claim and exercise, as far as he could, an absolute authority over the temporal powers of Christendom, which the popes have long since lost, and can never regain. Hildebrand was convinced that, however unworthy personally, he was, in his official character, the successor of Peter, and as such the vicar of Christ in the militant Church.30 He entirely identified himself with Peter as the head of the apostolic college, and the keeper of the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven; but he forgot that in temporal affairs Peter was an humble subject under a hostile government, and exhorted the Christians to honor the king (1 Pet. 2:17) at a time when a Nero sat on the throne. He constantly appealed to the famous words of Christ, Matt. 16:18, 19, as if they were said to himself. The pope inherits the lofty position of Peter. He is the Rock of the Church. He is the universal bishop, a title against which the first Gregory protested as an anti-Christian presumption. He is intrusted with the care of all Christendom (including the Greek Church, which never acknowledged him). He has absolute and final jurisdiction, and is responsible only to God, and to no earthly tribunal. He alone can depose and reinstate bishops, and his legates take precedence of all bishops. He is the supreme arbiter in questions of right and wrong in the whole Christian world. He is above all earthly sovereigns. He can wear the imperial insignia. He can depose kings and emperors, and absolve subjects from their oath of allegiance to unworthy sovereigns. These and similar claims are formulated in a document of twenty-seven brief propositions preserved among Gregory’s letters, which are of doubtful genuineness, but correctly express his views,31 and in a famous letter to Hermann, bishop of Metz. Among his favorite Scripture quotations, besides the prophecy about Peter (Matt. 16:18, 19), are two passages from the Old Testament: the words of the prophet Samuel to Saul, which suited his attitude to rebellious kings (1 Sam. 15:23): "Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as idolatry and teraphim; because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, he has also rejected thee from being king;" and the words of the prophet Jeremiah (48:10): "Cursed be he that doeth the work of the Lord negligently, and cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood." He meant the spiritual sword chiefly, but also the temporal, if necessary. He would have liked to lead an army of soldiers of St. Peter for the conquest of the Holy Land, and the subjection of all rebellious monarchs. He projected the first crusade, which his second successor carried out. We must consider more particularly his views on the relation of Church and State.

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

  Then they came to me and my father immediately appeared with my boy and withdrew me from the step, and said in a supplicating tone, "Have pity on your babe."And Hilarianus the procurator... said. "Spare the grey hairs of your father, spare the infancy of your boy, offer sacrifice for the well-being of the emperors." And I replied, "I will not do so." Hilarianus said, "Are you a Christian.:" And I replied, "! am a Christian." And as my father stood there to cast me down from the faith, he was ordered by Hilarianus to be thrown down, and was beaten with rods.... Th e procurator then delivers judgment on all of us, and condemns us to the wild beasts, and we went down cheerfully to the dungeon (Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas. 2). Perpetua and her slave Felicitas. who had herself given birth just days before the event, were thrown to the wild beasts for confessing to be Christians. A detailed and gory account of the incident was recorded by an eyewitness and forms the final portion of the second-cen- tury martyrology called The Passion of PerpetUa and Felicitas. Christ are sometimes subject to mob violence (e.g., Acts 7:54-60; 13:48-51; 14:19-21, 21:27- 36; 1 Thess 2:13-16). At other times they suffer an official punishment by order of a Roman magis- trate, as indicated, for instance, by Paul's reference to being beaten three times with rods (2 Cor 11:25; see also Acts 16:22). Outsiders evidently considered the followers of Christ to be public nui- sances, not the moral, upright citizens one might have expected them to be. 3?0 THE NEW TESTAMENT: A HSTOC,'L INTRODUCTION The negative public image of the early Christians can be deduced from the caustic remarks directed against them by pagan authors of the early second century (see box 13.1). Thus, for example, the Roman historian Tacitus calls Christianity a "pernicious superstition" and claims that Nero could use Christians as scapegoats for the burning of Rome because they were the "hatred of the human race" (Annals 15). At about the same time (ca. 115 C.E.), the historian Suetonius described Christians as people who held "to a novel and mischievous superstition" (Life of Nero 16). The Roman governor of Bithynia- Pontus, Pliny the Younger, considered the Christians to be "obstinate" and "mad" adherents of a "depraved superstition" and expressed some surprise when he learned that at their community meals they ate ordinary food, possibly because he suspected them of cannibalism (Letter 10 to Trajan). Later authors like the emperor Marcus Aurelius considered Christians to be misguided and hardheaded (Meditations XI, 3); the satiricist Lucian portrayed them as irrational, gullible dolts (Death of Peregrinus, 11-13). This widespread disapproval of the Christians lies at the root of the earliest governmental actions against them. The first full-blown episode appears to have been the persecution under Nero.

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

  It is the absolute sovereignty of the Church in this world, commanding respect and obedience by her moral purity and ascetic piety. By the Church is meant the Roman Catholic organization headed by the pope as the vicar of Christ; and this hierarchical organization is identified with the Kingdom of God, in which men are saved from sin and death, and outside of which there is no ordinary salvation. No distinction is made between the Church and the Kingdom, nor between the visible and invisible Church. The Holy, Catholic, Apostolic, Roman Church has been to popes as visible and tangible as the German Empire, or the Kingdom of France, or the Republic of Venice. Besides this Church no other is recognized, not even the Greek, except as a schismatic branch of the Roman. This ideal is the growth of ages. It was prepared for by pseudo-Isidor in the ninth, and by St. Augustine in the fifth century. St. Augustine, the greatest theological authority of the Middle Ages, first identified the visible Catholic Church with the City or Kingdom of God. In his great apologetic work, De Civitate Dei, he traced the relation of this Kingdom to the changing and passing kingdoms of this world, and furnished, we may say, the programme of the mediaeval theocracy which, in theory, is adhered to by the Roman Church to this day.28 But Augustine was not an ecclesiastic like Cyprian and the popes. He was more interested in theology than Church policy; he had little to say about the papacy, and made a suggestive distinction between "the true body of Christ" and "the mixed body of Christ," which led the way to the Protestant distinction (first made by Zwingli) between the visible and invisible Church.29 In the Hildebrandian controversy he is quoted by both parties, and more frequently than any other father; but neither Gregory nor his most zealous adherents could quote Augustine in favor of their hierocratic theory of the apostolic right to depose temporal sovereigns. The pseudo-Isidorian Decretals went further: they identified the Catholic Church with the dominion of the papal hierarchy, and by a series of literary fictions carried this system back to the second century; notwithstanding the fact that the Oriental Church never recognized the claims of the bishops of Rome beyond that of a mere primacy of honor among equal patriarchs. Gregory VII. actualized this politico-ecclesiastical system more fully than any previous pope, and as far as human energy and prudence would admit. The glory of the Church was the all-controlling passion of his life. He held fast to it in the darkest hours, and he was greatest in adversity. Of earlier popes, Nicolas I. and Leo I. came nearest to him in lofty pretensions. But in him papal absolutism assumed flesh and blood. He was every inch a pope. He anticipated the Vatican system of 1870; in one point he fell short of it, in another point he went beyond it.