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 The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  They work harder, under more difficult conditions, in an often fly-by-night industry with uncertain futures, catering to a fickle and capricious clientele in an environment in which you can do everything right and still fail. This environment tends to breed a clannishness, a tribal subculture, a tunnel-vision view of the world where "there's us —and there's those like us" and screw everybody else. We have to cook as best we can for them, but that doesn't mean we have to be them. So all those hours scraping carrots, scrubbing oysters, pulling the bones out of pig trotters, tourneeing turnips, in the end, pay off. In addition to becoming expert, presumably, at those valuable tasks, you are asserting your reliability, your toughness, and your worth as someone whom an overworked chef de partie or sous-chef or chef might want to take under their wing, invest a little time and attention actually teaching, helping you to climb out of the cellar and up to the next level. You are also coming to an understanding—a real understanding—of what the hell it is that we really do in this business, meaning, we transform the raw, the ugly, the tough, and the unlovely into the cooked, the beautiful, the tender, and the tasty. Any cretin can grill a steak after a few tries. It takes a cook to transform a humble pig's foot into something people clamor for. This is the real story of haute cuisine, of course: generations of hungry, servile, and increasingly capable French and Italian and Chinese and others, transforming what was readily at hand, or leftover from their cruel masters, into something people actually wanted to eat. And as the story of all great cooking is often the story of poverty, hardship, servitude, and cruelty, so is our history. Like the shank of beef that over time becomes a falling-off-the-bone thing of wonder when slowly braised in red wine and seasonings, so too is the prep cook transformed—into a craftsman, an artisan, a professional, responsible to himself, his chef, his owners, his coworkers, his customers. A stressed, badly rested, overworked three-star chef is not going to take time out of his or her very busy day training some young commis to clarify stock properly if there's any doubt whether that commis will still be around, still focused, and still motivated in three months. The very real need for dreary, repetitive functions like squid cleaning serves a secondary purpose in weeding out the goofballs, the people who thought they wanted to be in The Life—but don't really understand or want that level of commitment. If some of these budding culinarians feel that they are not, for instance, comfortable with being spoken to harshly, or dismissed with an expletive in a moment of extremis, then they usually lack the basic character traits needed for a long, successful run in this greatest of all businesses. Much is made of the emotional volatility, even the apparent cruelty, of some of our better-known culinary warriors.

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  uses. After denuding the statues, they left the “superfluous and useless” remnants to “the superstitious to keep as a souvenir of their shame” (Life of Constantine 3.54). How the tide had turned. Now it was not the Christians who were superstitious; it was the pagans. It was not the Christians who embraced a religion open to public mockery; it was the pagans. It was not the Christians who suffered from the imperially sponsored violence; it was the pagans. The tide would continue to turn against the pagans in years to come, and it would never turn back, except for one brief moment under the reign of the emperor Julian. Constantine thus built his city and adorned it with the spoils of the pagan empire. It was a city built to last. It remained the capital of Christendom for over a millennium, until the assault of the Ottoman Turks in 1453. CONSTANTINE AS AN ADVOCATE FOR THE FAITH There should no longer be any doubt about the sincerity of Constantine’s devotion to the god of the Christians, despite the incredulity of some scholars over the years.!! Of course, it is technically possible that it was all a front. But his deep and personal commitment to Christian causes, if nothing else, should lay all suspicions to rest. As should his own words, found repeatedly throughout the sources, as in a letter he sent to those living in Palestine: “Indeed my whole soul and whatever breath I draw, and whatever goes on in the depths of the mind, that, I am firmly convinced, is owed by us wholly to the greatest God” (Life of Constantine 2.29). Not only did Constantine take a vital interest in internal Christian affairs; he also took considerable steps to improve the lot of the church and the clergy who ran it. Most of the staffing and funding of ancient urban societies came from local aristocracies, not through high taxes but through enormous demands placed on their time, energy, and resources. Public office was an oft-noted burden for the wealthy, involving considerable outlays of cash—not just expected but demanded— for public buildings and public services. These official positions did provide real status for its occupants, but the large outlays of personal resources could obviously have been put to other, more personal uses. Constantine issued legislation that absolved Christian clergy—who by this time tended to be among the local aristocracies—from having to serve in civic capacities, relieving them of such duties and financial obligations. Moreover, he provided them with extensive funds out of the imperial treasury for use in their congregations. Most famously, Constantine himself arranged for the building of major churches throughout his empire, including the Lateran in Rome.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  Wherein does the superiority of Jesus over Moses lie? The picture in the mind of the writer to the Hebrews is this. He thinks of the world as God’s house and God’s family. We use the word house in a double sense. We use it in the sense of a building and also in the sense of a family. The Greeks used oikos in the same double sense. The world is God’s house, and we are God’s family. But he has already shown us the picture of Jesus as the creator of God’s universe. Now, Moses was only part of God’s universe, part of the house. But Jesus is the creator of the house, and the creator is bound to stand above the house itself. Moses did not create the law; he only passed it on to the people. Moses did not create the house; he only served in it. Moses did not speak of himself; all that he ever said was only a pointer to the greater things that Jesus Christ would some day say. In short, Moses was the servant; but Jesus was the Son. Moses knew a little about God; Jesus was God. Therein lies the secret of his superiority. Now, the writer to the Hebrews uses another picture. True, the whole world is God’s house; but in a special sense the Church is God’s house, for in a special sense God brought it into being. That is a picture the New Testament loves (cf. 1 Peter 4:17; 1 Timothy 3:15; and especially 1 Peter 2:5). That building of the Church will stand and be indestructible only when every stone is firm; that is to say, when every member is strong in the proud and confident hope that he or she has in Jesus Christ. Each one of us is like a stone in the Church; if one stone is weak, the whole structure is endangered. The Church stands firm only when each living stone in it is rooted and grounded in faith in Jesus Christ. WHILE TODAY STILL LASTSHebrews 3:7–19

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Hoplite fighting was distinguished by the phalanx, a tightly packed body of men, standing shoulder to shoulder, eight deep. Each soldier held his circular shield to protect his left side and gripped the right shoulder of the man next to him. The phalanx would push forward as one against the enemy, stabbing above and below the wall of shields. Eventually one side would break and run. The phalanx proved to be extraordinarily effective, but it inflicted particularly horrible wounds on the enemy. The hoplite army was a people’s army, drawing on a larger proportion of the male population than ever before. And conversely, that meant that the people, the demos, were now essentially an army. In India, fighting had become the sole prerogative of the kshatriya class; warfare was now a specialized activity, from which the other three classes were barred. It was thus circumscribed and contained and, as the ideal of ahimsa took hold, was regarded increasingly as impure, tragic, and evil. But not so in Greece, which was going in the opposite direction. During the seventh century, the entire polis had become militarized. The citizenry had become an army, which could be mobilized at very short notice. This was a radical break with the past. Hesiod had suggested that it was time to abandon the traditional heroic ideal; the hoplite army effected this severance. The individual warrior, yearning for personal glory, had become an anachronism: the new ideal was collective. The hoplite soldier was essentially one of a team. Hoplites fell or succeeded together, en masse; there could be no private glory. The hubris of an Achilles, which had put the whole army at risk, was now redundant. “Excellence” (arete) was redefined: it now consisted of patriotism and devotion to the common good. Writing in the late seventh century, the Spartan poet Tyrtaios described the new hero: This is excellence, this the finest possession of men, The noblest prize that a young man can win: This is the common good for all the city and all the people; When a man stands firm and remains unmoved in the front rank And forgets all thought of disgraceful flight Steeling his spirit and heart to endure And with words encourages the man standing next to him.59 Instead of aggressively seeking his own fame and glory, the hoplite submerged his own needs for the good of the entire phalanx. Like the Axial ideal of kenosis, it promoted an ethic of selflessness and devotion to others. The difference was that this self-surrender was acted out on the battlefield in a savagely effective killing machine.

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

  HILARY. Further, He makes this answer, that a Prophet is without honour in his own country, because it was in Judæa that He was to be condemned to the sentence of the cross; and forasmuch as the power of God is for the faithful alone, He here abstained from works of divine power because of their unbelief; whence it follows, And he did not there many mighty works because of their unbelief. JEROME. Not that because they did not believe He could not do His mighty works; but that He might not by doing them be condemning His fellow-citizens in their unbelief. CHRYSOSTOM. But if His miracles raised their wonder, why did He not work many? Because He looked not to display of Himself, but to what would profit others; and when that did not result, He despised what pertained only to Himself that He might not increase their punishment. Why then did He even these few miracles? That they should not say, We should have believed had any miracles been done among us. JEROME. Or we may understand it otherwise, that Jesus is despised in His own house and country, signifies in the Jewish people; and therefore He did among them few miracles, that they might not be altogether without excuse; but among the Gentiles He does daily greater miracles by His Apostles, not so much in healing their bodies, as in saving their souls. CHAPTER 14 14:1–51. At that time Herod the tetrarch heard of the fame of Jesus. 2. And said unto his servants, This is John the Baptist; he is risen from the dead; and therefore mighty works do shew forth themselves in him. 3. For Herod had laid hold on John, and bound him, and put him in prison for Herodias’ sake, his brother Philip’s wife. 4. For John said unto him, It is not lawful for thee to have her. 5. And when he would have put him to death, he feared the multitude, because they counted him as a prophet. GLOSS. (non occ.) THE. Evangelist had above shewn the Pharisees speaking falsely against Christ’s miracles, and just now His fellow-citizens wondering, yet despising Him; he now relates what opinion Herod had formed concerning Christ on hearing of His miracles, and says, At that time Herod the tetrarch heard the fame of Jesus. CHRYSOSTOM. It is not without reason that the Evangelist here specifies the time, but that you may understand the pride and carelessness of the tyrant; inasmuch as he had not at the first made himself acquainted with the things concerning Christ, but now only after long time. Thus they, who in authority are fenced about with much pomp, learn these things slowly, because they do not much regard them.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Though the Hasmonean monarchy proved to be the last Judaean experience of prolonged independence in the ancient world, it was an extraordinary achievement against a great power: a victory to cherish, reinforcing the sense of a unique Judaic destiny and distinctiveness in God’s purpose. The Hasmoneans remained a significant regional force in the eastern Mediterranean for a century until conquered by a new imperial power arriving from far to the west of Judaea’s previous overlords. When the Hasmoneans first encountered the Roman Republic in the second century BCE, Rome was still a far-away city, a potential ally against their threatening neighbours. By 63 BCE, the Roman army’s invasion of Judaea was part of its mopping-up operations around Rome’s real prizes, the Seleucid and Ptolemaic empires. Roman conquest led to a further Jewish Diaspora into the western Mediterranean: the Jewish community in Rome was one of the first to be affected by Christian activism in the first century CE. In 37 BCE, looking for a compliant local ruler for Judaea but finding no convincing Hasmonean candidate, the Romans displaced the last Hasmonean and replaced him with a relative by marriage, who reigned for more than three decades. Their choice, an outsider from the land of Edom (which the Romans called Idumea) south of Judaea, was Herod I, ‘the Great’. Herod rebuilt the Second Temple as one of the largest sacred complexes in the ancient world; its remnants still impress by their monumentality. Yet his subjects gave him little thanks, and self-conscious Judaean upholders of purity in God’s Covenant were angered by Herod’s Greek-style innovations such as public sporting contests (male nudity always a possibility), gladiatorial combats or horse-racing in newly built arenas.[4] After Herod’s death in 4 BCE, his sons divided the extensive territories that the first Roman emperor Augustus had allowed the puppet king to build up. For more than a century thereafter, and during the life of Jesus, Rome experimented with a mixture of indirect rule through various members of the Herodian family and, for parts of Judaea, direct imperial control through a Roman official. Rome’s triumph in the eastern Mediterranean only reinforced the central cultural role of Hellenism. Remarkably for such an aggressively expansionist power, which by the time of Jesus had conquered the entire Mediterranean basin and had ruled the Greek heartland for two centuries, the Roman Empire did little to challenge Hellenistic cultural superiority: quite the reverse. The original city-state of Rome somewhat resembled a Greek polis, but, unlike Greek citizen status, the quality of being a Roman (Romanitas) was never restricted by racial or local exclusiveness. In their relentless drive to expand their territory, Romans were happy to confer Roman citizenship throughout their empire on deserving foreigners with something to offer in return, if only grateful collaboration; occasionally they granted whole areas citizenship. Even slaves might change from being non-persons to citizens, simply by a formal ceremony before a magistrate, or by gift in their owners’ wills.[5]

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Alas, Theophilus’s emotional literacy did not find many committed successors in early Christianity. Closest to him was Tertullian, his contemporary in North Africa. Tertullian devoted a significant part of his writings on Christian conduct to texts specifically written for women, intended for courses of instruction in Christian faith (catechēsis). His Latin prose did incline towards untrammelled vigour, and he has rather unfairly been remembered for one extreme verbal sally that women were ‘the Devil’s gateway’, for which he has earned reproof from no less a patristic authority than Simone de Beauvoir.[32] In fact Tertullian never repeated this remark anywhere else; it occurred in the course of a discussion of modest female clothing, referring back to Eve’s part in the Fall, and if anything, it was a criticism of men for their lustful efforts to enter the vagina, that gateway of female desirability. In the same spirit, Tertullian’s treatment of Adam and Eve is not nearly so insistent on Eve’s special guilt as Justin Martyr had been (see Plate 13). Rather, he emphasized the joint responsibility of Adam and Eve: in another delightfully brutal phrase, he said of Adam’s eating the forbidden fruit that ‘he sold salvation for his gullet’. Elsewhere, in emphasizing Adam’s culpability Tertullian observed that ‘the whole human race, infected with his seed, were also made the carrier of his condemnation.’[33] This is consistent with Aristotle’s views on biological reproduction, in which male seed is the essential agent in procreation, but it also reflects a conviction common in North African theology about the fatal legacy of Adam’s sin. By the fifth century this was to develop into what in theological jargon is termed ‘traducianism’: Augustine of Hippo’s conviction that this inheritance of sin from Adam via procreation is the source of a universal sinfulness in humanity – ‘original sin’ (below, Chapter 9).[34] Consistent with Tertullian’s equal apportionment of blame for the Fall between Adam and Eve was his exceptional emphasis on equality in marriage, hearkening to Paul’s idea of the ‘marriage debt’. In his treatise addressed to his own wife (Ad Uxorem), his usual eloquence turns to this startlingly positive thought: What kind of yoke is that of two believers, sharing one hope, one desire, one discipline, one and the same service? Both are brethren, both fellow-servants; there is no difference of spirit or of flesh…Together they pray, together prostrate themselves, together perform their fasts; mutually teaching, mutually exhorting, mutually sustaining. Equally are both in the Church of God; equally at the banquet of God; equally in straits, in persecutions, in refreshments.[35]

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  In 1073 came the papacy of Gregory VII, another member of the papal entourage around Leo IX, and, once he was Pope, determined to formalize the claims made for a universal papal monarchy and to use it for what he saw as the correction of error and the fulfilment of God’s purposes for the world. The list of pronouncements known as the Dictatus Papae entered into his papal register in 1075 make remarkable reading, including the claim that ‘the Roman pontiff alone can with right be called universal’ and that ‘for him alone is it lawful, according to the needs of the time, to make new laws’. Many of the propositions might have been found individually in previous documents, but the assertion of universality was among the real novelties, providing a justification for schism with the East.[20] Moreover, between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries, amid repeated clashes with the Western Emperor, popes made a significant modification of their title. Gregory still thought of himself as ‘Vicar [representative] of Peter’, reckoned as the first Pope; by the time of Innocent III (1198–1216) the description was amplified to be ‘Vicar of Christ’, a priest in charge of God’s providential plan to mould all society to his commands.[21] Many secular rulers joined successive Holy Roman Emperors in resisting papal claims to universal authority, and the Papacy never wholly fulfilled the vision of Gregory and his circle, but, from the eleventh century, Western society was united by an unprecedented expansion of ecclesiastical lawmaking, based on a growing papal bureaucracy in Rome. The stimulus to the legal innovations of the Gregorian revolution was a series of Italian manuscript rediscoveries: encounters with the Digest of Roman imperial law compiled in the systematizing efforts of Justinian half a millennium before. Much else in the imperial legal corpus had not been completely forgotten, but now this rich resource of previously unknown material stimulated a newly intensive study of the imperial system, which came to be known as ‘civil law’. Alongside the recovery of civil law was the development of a legal code to suit the needs of a universal and papal Church: ‘canon law’. This was a fusion of much from the Western Church’s own tradition with borrowings from civil law, and it depended on a compilation of material created in stages through the first half of the twelfth century in Italy’s chief centre of legal study, the university in the city of Bologna.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  When I discovered there was still such a thing as falconry things became less amorphously religious. I told my long-suffering parents that I was going to be a falconer when I grew up and set about learning as much as I could about this miraculous art. Dad and I hunted for falconry books on family days out, and one by one the great works came home with us, second-hand trophies in paper bags from bookshops long since gone: Falconry by Gilbert Blaine; Falconry by Freeman and Salvin; Falcons and Falconry by Frank Illingworth; the gloriously titled Harting’s Hints on Hawks. All the boys’ books. I read them over and over, committed great swathes of nineteenth-century prose to memory. Being in the company of these authors was like being dropped into an exclusive public school, for they were almost entirely written a long time ago by bluff, aristocratic sportsmen who dressed in tweed, shot Big Game in Africa, and had Strong Opinions. What I was doing wasn’t just educating myself in the nuts and bolts of hawk-training: I was unconsciously soaking up the assumptions of an imperial elite. I lived in a world where English peregrines always outflew foreign hawks, whose landscapes were grouse moors and manor houses, where women didn’t exist. These men were kindred spirits. I felt I was one of them, one of the elect.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  In addition, I encourage people to remind their socially anxious friends of how capable they really are. For instance, friends could say, “Remember, last time you were really glad you went,” or “Let’s give it a shot—I bet you’ll be proud of yourself afterward,” or “The scariest moment is right before we go in. Once we’re in there, we’ll feel better.” It’s a fine balance—we shouldn’t push our anxious friends off the ledge, but we should encourage them to experience for themselves that the ledge isn’t as high and precarious as they originally imagined. How can schools and workplaces support kids and adults who struggle with social anxiety? This is the friend question, except on a broader, institutional scale. Again, be a champion. And again: ask them! Have an ongoing conversation. Talk about where they’re currently at, and where they want to be. What can the teacher, boss, school, or workplace do to help them work on those goals? What do they want to accomplish? What challenges do they want to take on? Are they working toward being able to give a presentation? To speak in front of the class? Delegating? Asking for help? I think it’s important to say that people with social anxiety are often terrific students and employees—we’re often kind and conscientious. We’re hard workers with high standards. In the workplace, we’re often star performers. It’s a double-sided coin—we have a tendency to put our heads down and get the work done, which is good for productivity, but at the same time, we need to remember to put energy into good relationships with our colleagues and peers. You talk about your own struggles with social anxiety in the book. Where are you in your journey today? Oh, there’s such a difference. Over time, I’ve deliberately worked on initiating and maintaining conversations, introducing myself, asking questions, asking for help, accepting compliments without downplaying them, and being on camera (which I had no idea would be part of being a writer!) And that deliberate practice has worked—by now, those things are pretty much second nature. But what’s been most interesting in my one-person experiment is what has changed without even identifying them as targets of change. For instance, my everyday speaking voice is notably louder than it used to be, even though I never deliberately tried to change that. I choose shoes without thinking about whether or not they’ll click-clack on the floor and draw attention. In college, my wardrobe consisted exclusively of black, white, and blue, and now my favorite color to wear is orange. Our readers can’t see this, but I’m wearing an orange sweater right now. There are hundreds of similar examples that I never consciously tried to change, but have changed along the way. A rising tide really does lift all boats.

• From Between Us

  Not surprisingly, then, the middle-class U.S. mothers in Miller’s study noted it was important to actively “build, cultivate or protect their children’s self-esteem.” And in their minds, a good way of doing this was to “love, respect and affirm” their children in the here and now; all psychological benefits would follow. So this was the project that Oliver’s father and I embarked on: we loved, respected, and affirmed our ten-month-old son. We were not alone in praising our child’s special accomplishment. Parents’ praising is not limited to events in the here and now. Many moms in Miller’s study reminisced with their children, or with the researcher, about events in which their children were the star. Referring to her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Molly, one Chicago mom relates to the researcher: You’ll get a kick out of this one. Friday night, we were just sitting around. . . . Jim and I were sitting on the ground. . . . she puts her hand on me and says “Me happy.” And I am like, “That is good, Mollie. You happy.” [researcher: I love it, it sounds so cute.] I said: “I don’t think I ever heard anyone say that,” and Jim says, “I know I never heard anyone come up with [me happy].” In this narrative, Miller and her colleagues tell us, Mollie’s mom draws attention to her daughter’s funny pronoun use (in Mollie’s presence). In doing so, she conveys to both Mollie and the researcher, how endearing and surprising Mollie’s expression is, further underlining the novelty (and uniqueness) of Mollie’s word choice by citing her own and her husband’s response in the moment. She also uses the situation to solicit an audience: the researcher, being a well-socialized audience, affirms Mollie’s mother’s take on the behavior: “I love it, it sounds so cute.” The story sets Molly apart as a special child, and creates an opportunity for pride both for the mom and the child. The Chicago homes of these middle-class European American toddlers were full of this kind of narrative. Praising is not restricted to homes. Both Oliver and his two-year-younger sister Zoë often came home from their North Carolina elementary school with “best student” awards. As a “new” American mom, I would have liked to believe my kids were “the best,” but the awards did not reflect as much. One month they were the best at having mastered the first list of French vocabulary (twenty words), another month they had been the most eager participant of a sports day: the person who, despite having had no chance at winning, had been a good sport. None of these certificates marked major achievements, but the school practiced public praising as a way of giving kids—many kids, I believe—a sense of being valued and seen, or even of being unique at something or other. We may call the associated feeling “pride.”

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  But what is striking is the way in which suc h a monumental change in self- understanding is fed from a multitud e of sources. Other developmen ts could ha ve been mentio ned in the Renais sance. To take one exampl e, there is the fam ous landmark that everyone cites : Pica' s Oration on the dignity of ma n, whic h affirms an exceptio nal position for huma n beings in the universe. They are free, in that they are not, as othe r things are, tied to a determinate natu re, but rather have the power to assume any nature. Pico has God address Adam thu s: Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine alone nor any function peculiar to thyself have we given thee, Adam, to the end that according to thy longing and according to thy judgement thou mayest have and possess what abode, what form, what functions thou thyself shalt desire. The .r99 200 • INWA RDN ESS nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by Us. Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature. We have set thee at the world's center that thou mayest from thence more easily observe whatever is in the world. We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer.1 This seems to prepare the way, even while remaining within the Renaissance Platonic order of ontic logos, for a later decisive break with it. It seems to prepare the way for a stage where the ends of human life will no longer be defined in relation to a cosmic order at all, but must be discovered (or chosen ) within. This although Pico is still very far himself from such a step. The order of being is still a geocentric and hierarchical one ("we have set thee at the world's center") , and man's power to assume any nature is the power either to debase or exalt himself. The passage continues : "Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish. Thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul' s judgement, to be reborn with the higher forms, which are divine" .2 Ma n's ends are still set by a cosmically realiz ed order of good. Or again, there was a new emphasis in the Renaissance on human action, on man's role in completing God's creation and bringing the cosmos to its full nature. We see this with Nicholas of Cusa, for instance, and later with Bovillus.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Belgium, for instance, was a new country on the European map from 1830, forged in a national revolt based on Catholic resentment of the Protestant Dutch monarchy imposed on the former Habsburg Netherlands in the international peace settlement of Vienna in 1815. Belgium became a laboratory for the new shapes of European Catholicism. Between 1780 and 1860, the proportion of Belgian women religious to men reversed, from 40/60 to 60/40, and latterly, in a decided rebuff to what the Council of Trent had decreed, only 10 per cent of Belgian nuns were in contemplative Orders: the vast majority devoted themselves to working out in the world in teaching, health care and help for the poor.[14] In nineteenth-century Ireland, as in Belgium, Catholicism became the prime vehicle of national identity against external rule, and statistics for nuns compared with clergy are equally striking. There were a mere 120 nuns in the whole island in 1800, but 8,000 in 1900 – nuns outnumbered priests and male religious in the Irish Church two to one, with the numbers still rising.[15] That growth had a worldwide effect because of the remarkable scale of Irish emigration across the anglophone world, especially to the United States and Australia. A persistent feature of Irish migration, unique amid the various streams of nineteenth-century European migrants overseas, was the high proportion of women participating; that helped to spread Irish patterns of convent life across the globe. In the rapidly growing Catholic population of the United States (of course not all Irish in origin), more than two hundred women’s Orders were operating by the early twentieth century, and nuns then outnumbered priests four to one. A common feature of convent life in all these situations was a rhetoric of female subservience to male clerical authority combined with a sturdy independence of action in testing circumstances, often of dire social deprivation that demanded heroic initiative. One might call it a manifestation of Catholic feminism, though the rapid rise in numbers of nuns in relation to monks and other male clergy can be strikingly paralleled in the Orthodox Church in tsarist Russia in the same period.[16] *

• From The City of God

  The power delegated to the demons at certain appointed and well-adjusted seasons, that they may give expression to their hostility to the city of God by stirring up against it the men who are under their influence, and may not only receive sacrifice from those who willingly offer it, but may also extort it from the unwilling by violent persecution;--this power is found to be not merely harmless, but even useful to the Church, completing as it does the number of martyrs, whom the city of God esteems as all the more illustrious and honoured citizens, because they have striven even to blood against the sin of impiety. If the ordinary language of the Church allowed it, we might more elegantly call these men our heroes. For this name is said to be derived from Juno, who in Greek is called Hêrê, and hence, according to the Greek myths, one of her sons was called Heros. And these fables mystically signified that Juno was mistress of the air, which they suppose to be inhabited by the demons and the heroes, understanding by heroes the souls of the well-deserving dead. But for a quite opposite reason would we call our martyrs heroes,--supposing, as I said, that the usage of ecclesiastical language would admit of it,--not because they lived along with the demons in the air, but because they conquered these demons or powers of the air, and among them Juno herself, be she what she may, not unsuitably represented, as she commonly is by the poets, as hostile to virtue, and jealous of men of mark aspiring to the heavens. Virgil, however, unhappily gives way, and yields to her; for, though he represents her as saying, "I am conquered by Æneas,"[409] Helenus gives Æneas himself this religious advice: "Pay vows to Juno: overbear Her queenly soul with gift and prayer."[410] In conformity with this opinion, Porphyry--expressing, however, not so much his own views as other people's--says that a good god or genius cannot come to a man unless the evil genius has been first of all propitiated, implying that the evil deities had greater power than the good; for, until they have been appeased and give place, the good can give no assistance; and if the evil deities oppose, the good can give no help; whereas the evil can do injury without the good being able to prevent them. This is not the way of the true and truly holy religion; not thus do our martyrs conquer Juno, that is to say, the powers of the air, who envy the virtues of the pious. Our heroes, if we could so call them, overcome Hêrê, not by suppliant gifts, but by divine virtues. As Scipio, who conquered Africa by his valour, is more suitably styled Africanus than if he had appeased his enemies by gifts, and so won their mercy. 22. _Whence the saints derive power against demons and true purification of heart._

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  Pen in her white fingers, she drew her circular flow chart for me. Proudly she recalled its first journal publication. Now the psychiatric profession’s bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM, was about to enshrine her thinking in its pages. A massive volume filled with criteria for conditions from autism to sexual dysfunction, the DSM distinguishes the normal from the abnormal. In her diagram, Basson rendered a picture of women’s desire as intrinsically slow to build. It was the result of a series of decisions; it was hardly a drive at all. “We’re just not talking about an innate hunger,” she said. The intricate diagram was meant to evoke the step-by-step progress of a successful sexual encounter for women, beginning with a box at the top of the circle. Inside the box—the outset of the encounter—was the phrase “reasons for sex.” Raw desire wasn’t likely to be the reason, though the chart allowed for it as a possibility. Much more probably, Basson said as she sketched, the woman was going to make a deliberate calculation based on the hope of outcomes like “feeling positive emotionally, feeling loved.” About two-thirds of the way around the circle, the words “arousal” and then, finally, “desire” appeared; at this belated stage, physical sensations, pleasure, and wanting took over, to some degree. But this depended, she explained, on the partner showing “respect,” on the woman feeling “safe,” on the couple’s being in “an appropriate context,” on the partner’s touches being considerate, being just right. Listening, it was hard not to imagine flowers given, a bedroom with the lights low or off, a wife with basically cuddly inclinations, a husband’s gentle caresses. And what waited at the circle’s end? What was the culmination? “Sexual satisfaction +/- orgasms” was on the diagram, but in some versions it wasn’t even part of the chart’s main track; the physical, the carnal, didn’t matter all that much. At the end was “non-sexual rewards . . . intimacy.” For Basson, such was the natural state of women’s sexuality. She didn’t make this case based on formal research; she’d developed her chart, she said, from her own clinical experience, and grateful patients had begged her to publish it. Yet while it seemed that her diagram might well represent the wan realities of many women’s bedrooms, her assertion that she had drawn a picture of the inborn ignored the immediate genital reactions of Chivers’s women, the overwhelming randiness of Wallen’s monkeys and Pfaus’s rats. She put forward a quaint and demure portrait, and strangely, stunningly, it was being adopted by the psychiatric profession—from the editors of the DSM to hordes of sex therapists—as though it were something wise and new.

• From Quiet (2012)

  It doesn’t show us how they can shine. Consider the case of an unassuming-looking fellow named Jon Berghoff. Jon is a stereotypical introvert, right down to his physical appearance: lean, wiry body; sharply etched nose and cheekbones; thoughtful expression on his bespectacled face. He’s not much of a talker, but what he says is carefully considered, especially when he’s in a group: “If I’m in a room with ten people and I have a choice between talking and not talking,” he says, “I’m the one not talking. When people ask, ‘Why aren’t you saying anything?’ I’m the guy they’re saying it to.” Jon is also a standout salesman, and has been ever since he was a teenager. In the summer of 1999, when he was still a junior in high school, he started working as an entry-level distributor, selling Cutco kitchen products. The job had him going into customers’ homes, selling knives. It was one of the most intimate sales situations imaginable, not in a boardroom or a car dealership, but inside a potential client’s kitchen, selling them a product they’d use daily to help put food on the table. Within Jon’s first eight weeks on the job, he sold $50,000 worth of knives. He went on to be the company’s top representative from over 40,000 new recruits that year. By the year 2000, when he was still a high school senior, Jon had generated more than $135,000 in commissions and had broken more than twenty-five national and regional sales records. Meanwhile, back in high school, he was still a socially awkward guy who hid inside the library at lunchtime. But by 2002 he’d recruited, hired, and trained ninety other sales reps, and increased territory sales 500 percent over the previous year. Since then, Jon has launched Global Empowerment Coaching, his own personal coaching and sales training business. To date he’s given hundreds of speeches, training seminars, and private consultations to more than 30,000 salespeople and managers. What’s the secret of Jon’s success? One important clue comes from an experiment by the developmental psychologist Avril Thorne, now a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Thorne gathered fifty-two young women—twenty-six introverts and twenty-six extroverts—and assigned them to two different conversational pairings. Each person had one ten-minute conversation with a partner of her own type and a second conversation of equal length with her “dispositional opposite.” Thorne’s team taped the conversations and asked the participants to listen to a playback tape. This process revealed some surprising findings. The introverts and extroverts participated about equally, giving the lie to the idea that introverts always talk less.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  Since the outside world’s patron-client relations were mirrored within the group, this second-century-c.E. inscription praises especially “the most excellent Herodes Claudios,” who was none other than the fabulously rich and very well-connected Tiberius Claudius Atticus Herodes. He had been first teacher, then client, and eventually friend of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose patronage made him the best-known benefactor of cities and sponsor of civic buildings in second-century Greece, including his famous odeon south of the Acropolis and not far from the meeting hall of the Iobacchoi. No wonder, then, that upon his appointment as their new chief priest and patron, the inscribed stele records, “They cried out: ‘Long live the most excellent priest Herodes! Now you are fortunate; now we are first of all the Bakcheia!’” Although a brotherhood, there was not only competitive ranking inside the association; there was also competition outside even among the various Bacchic associations. Under Herodes Atticus’s patronage, these Athenian Iobacchoi vaulted to the top rung. Meeting and Eating in Private Archaeologists tend to devote much more attention to public settings with monumental architecture, euergistic (from the Greek for “good works”) or patronal inscriptions, and artistic sculpture. But the private sphere of homes and households has drawn increased attention of late, and in addition to a few houses here and there across the Mediterranean, the ash- and lava-covered sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum provide, as we see below, something like a tragic open-air museum for ancient domestic life. In what ways should we imagine meeting and dining in private homes? Remember that, as we saw in public space, whether we start with eating places, meeting spaces, or religious rites in homes, these three areas overlap and intertwine to such an extent that any division is purely artificial. And, to emphasize this once again, none exists in isolation from patronage. The Greek House We must start by “thinking away,” as Andrew Wallace-Hadrill proposed in that book from this chapter’s first epigraph, “the assumptions of the industrial city of the modern Western world” (141) with regard to both antiquity’s domestic architecture and social interaction. To do so we return once again to Delos, in the center of the Aegean’s Cycladic Islands, for a full set of examples that allow us to begin rethinking our models with the pre-Roman Greek house. The École Français d’Archéologie in Athens has excavated over one hundred homes on the island, and those, along with others from Olympos, Priene, and Pergamum, provide the basic framework of houses that developed within the Greek cultural tradition and were common from Asia Minor to southern Italy during the Hellenistic era and the centuries leading up to the common era. Although there were differences with regard to size, layout, and decoration among these many houses, they tend to share a set of typical features, some of which are important for understanding the antecedents of later houses in the Roman Empire at the time of Paul.

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

  Being Ioudaios therefore did not mean for Paul the enjoyment of any obvious social privilege—whatever the promises once made to his ancestor Abraham might have been. This did not mean, yet again, that Paul’s Jewish identity was not important to him. It plainly did “matter” to Paul; indeed, quite literal y—just as being, for example, a “Vaage” matters to me. It defined Paul’s family of origin, the matrix of his earthly identity, his social site in the world. But being Ioudaios did not make Paul eo ipso a man with social power. It did not make him “strong” in any immediate or other way. Instead, it described simply and sufficiently how he got the sort of “skin” he was “in” and thus who his “kinfolk” were. The same fact, however, also makes it clear that not all Ioudaioi were created equal; certainly not with respect to the practice of leisure with its literary delights and political “perks.” And for that same reason, being Ioudaios would not have answered all the questions or concerns that a person such as Paul conceivably might have any more than being Greek or Roman or a “Vaage” would. In other words, being Ioudaios did not necessarily “save” you from all your other afflictions especial y if and when you were a “poor” one as Paul apparently was. With Paul, you might be proudly Ioudaios but simultaneously find yourself welcoming “in Christ” a heretofore unthinkable “salvation.” And this would be not because you were looking to be “saved” from “Judaism” but, rather, because being Ioudaios did not encompass everything that was your life. It did not define the only identity you might hope to desire. It was not the only problem to be addressed. Not surprisingly, not all Ioudaioi agreed with Paul that a “Jew” actual y could do or think what Paul had done and said. But Paul obviously did insisting “in Christ” that he still belonged to the ancestral group that he called those who were physei Ioudaioi. This is, conceivably, what ought to make him at least an interesting historical point of reference for contemporary thinking about Jewishness; although it also likely will be the reason why those who insist on an ethno-geographical understanding of this identity will continue to dismiss him as an insignificant runagate. 38 See, e.g., Catherine Jones, “Theatre of Shame: The Impact of Paul’s Manual Labour on His Apostleship in Corinth” (Ph.D. diss.; University of St. Michael’s College, 2013). 58 58 59 3 The New Creation Motif in Romans 8:18–27 in Light of the Book of Jubilees Ronald Charles

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  They had limited space to work with, most had limited capital, and the markets—whence came their clientele—generated huge amounts of what might have been considered unpalatable foodstuffs. If you're stocking your larder from a place proudly named The Tripe Pavillion, you tend to develop a cuisine heavy on boudins, tete de pore, confit of ears, stomach lining, shanks, pates, and galantines. Don't take my word for it. Read Orwell, or Freeling, or Zola's masterful Belly of Paris; nothing I've said here or will ever say approaches the terrifying accounts of mishandled food, criminally misrepresented menu items, marginal sanitation practices, and dubious sources of supply in these classic accounts. Orwell describes working ankle deep in garbage and outgoing dinners in one such establishment—and this was by no means a slophouse. Even today, French veterans of bistro cooking are masters of System D, inured as they are to working in tiny kitchens with dollhouse-size ranges, producing ten or twelve menu items despite access to only minimal storage, refrigeration, and work area, with a plongeur bumping them from behind. Work with some of these folks, even in the relatively roomy kitchens of Manhattan, and you're likely to see a number of practices they definitely do not teach at culinary school. Of course, expediency is one thing. Laziness is another. I hate, for instance, to see a cook "sear, slice, and flash," where instead of searing, say, a gigot, then finishing to proper doneness in the oven, he'll sear the outside of the mat, slice it nearly raw, then color the slices under the salamander. I've seen jammed-up cooks searing lamb, beef, and duck simultaneously—all in the same pan. I hate that too. And instead of reducing and mounting sauces to order, in a clean pot each time, some cooks keep a veritable petri dish of reducing sauce festering on a back burner, adding unreduced sauce as needed until the pot is a crusty, horrible abomination of oversalted, scorched, and bitter swill. Not for me, thanks—and not in my kitchen. The microwave was a blessing to full-time System D experts. I've seen veterans of three-star kitchens throw absolutely raw, unseared cote de boeuf for two into a microwave oven, presumably to "warm it up" to cut cooking time! One can be a proud practitioner of The System without resorting to food murder. With a fine set of moves, a strong, adaptable mind, and a certain threshold, a level beyond which one will not under any circumstances go, one can break all the rules and still make good food. One's customers will get what they wanted, when they wanted it. And no one will be the wiser. If Vatel, the famous French chef of years past who allegedly killed himself when informed that his fish delivery would be delayed, had been fluent in System D, he might have lived a longer, happier, and more prosperous life. We remember him, after all, only for his passing.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  I am dazzled by the glorious collapse of the world! Every evening, after dinner, I take the garbage down to the court-yard. Coming up, I stand with empty pail at the staircase window, gazing at the Sacré Coeur high up on the hill of Montmartre. Every evening, when I take the garbage down, I think of myself standing out on a high hill in resplendent whiteness. It is no sacred heart that inspires me, no Christ I am thinking of. Something better than a Christ, something bigger than a heart, something beyond God Almighty I think of—MYSELF. I am a man . That seems to me sufficient. I am a man of God and a man of the Devil. To each his due. Nothing eternal, nothing absolute. Before me always the image of the body, our triune god of penis and testicles. On the right God the Father; on the left and hanging a little lower, God the Son; and between and above them the Holy Ghost. I can never forget that this holy trinity is man-made, that it will undergo infinite changes—but as long as we come out of wombs with arms and legs, as long as there are stars above us to drive us mad and grass under our feet to cushion the wonder in us, just so long will this body serve for all the tunes that we may whistle. Today it is the third or fourth day of spring and I am sitting at the Place Clichy in full sunshine. Today, sitting here in the sun, I tell you it doesn’t matter a damn whether the world is going to the dogs or not; it doesn’t matter whether the world is right or wrong, good or bad. It is— and that suffices. The world is what it is and I am what I am. I say it not like a squatting Buddha with legs crossed, but out of a gay, hard wisdom, out of an inner security. This out there and this in me, all this, everything , the resultant of inexplicable forces. A chaos whose order is beyond comprehension. Beyond human comprehension. As a human being walking around at twilight, at dawn, at strange hours, unearthly hours, the sense of being alone and unique fortifies me to such a degree that when I walk with the multitude and seem no longer to be a human being but a mere speck, a gob of spit, I begin to think of myself alone in space, a single being surrounded by the most magnificent empty streets, a human biped walking between the skyscrapers when all the inhabitants have fled and I am alone walking, singing, commanding the earth. I do not have to look in my vest pocket to find my soul; it is there all the time, bumping against my ribs, swelling, inflated with song.