Pride
Pride is the upright feeling — the chest lifting, the spine straightening, the quiet or open satisfaction in something done, made, or belonged to. It is the emotion the tradition is most divided about, named a sin in one inheritance and a dignity in another. Vela reads pride as a primary emotion that runs both ways, distinct from the defensive pride that only braces against shame, and follows the writers who have held its honest version.
Working definition · Upright satisfaction in self, lineage, or work—earned or defended.
3462 passages · 1 Vela essay · in 2 clusters
Vela’s read on this emotion
Pride is the emotion with the longest moral rap sheet, and the reading takes that history seriously without accepting its verdict. The pride the contemplative tradition warned against is real, but so is the pride a person earns by surviving, by making, by refusing to be made small — and the two are not the same feeling.
The reading splits along that seam. The memoir of escape and self-making reads pride as something reclaimed — the pride of having left, of having built a self the family or the system did not authorize. Trevor Noah's Born a Crime and the memoir of leaving hold a pride that is inseparable from dignity. The contemplative inheritance reads the other pride: Augustine of Hippo named superbia — pride — as the first and root sin, the self curving in toward itself, and the Western moral imagination has argued with that ranking ever since. The literature of identity and belonging — the pride claimed by those a culture tried to shame — reads pride as a political act, a refusal of the assigned verdict.
Pride is not the same as vanity, arrogance, or pride-as-defense. Vanity needs an audience; pride can be private. Arrogance compares and ranks; pride can simply stand. Pride-as-defense is pride mobilized to shield against shame — the upright posture held precisely because the ground feels unsafe — and the reading gives it its own page. The four are kin and the reading keeps them separate, because the difference between earned pride and defended pride is the whole moral question.
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Long-form guide in the magazine
An essay on how this word lives in language, in the tagged corpus, and in figurative art when curators pair passage with image — not a list of stages, not permission to feel.
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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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3462 tagged passages
From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)
Keltic Christianity was at first independent of Rome, and even antagonistic to it in certain subordinate rites; but after the Saxon and Norman conquests, it was brought into conformity, and since the Reformation, the Irish have been more attached to the Roman Church than even the Latin races. The French formerly inclined likewise to a liberal Catholicism (called Gallicanism); but they sacrificed the Gallican liberties to the Ultramontanism of the Vatican Council. The Welsh and Scotch, on the contrary, with the exception of a portion of the Highlanders in the North of Scotland, embraced the Protestant Reformation in its Calvinistic rigor, and are among its sternest and most vigorous advocates. The course of the Keltic nations had been anticipated by the Galatians, who first embraced with great readiness and heartiness the independent gospel of St. Paul, but were soon turned away to a Judaizing legalism by false teachers, and then brought back again by Paul to the right path. 3. The Germanic3 or Teutonic4 nations followed the Keltic migration in successive westward and southward waves, before and after Christ, and spread over Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Scandinavia, the Baltic provinces of Russia, and, since the Anglo-Saxon invasion, also over England and Scotland and the northern (non-Keltic) part of Ireland. In modern times their descendants peacefully settled the British Provinces and the greater part of North America. The Germanic nations are the fresh, vigorous, promising and advancing races of the middle age and modern times. Their Christianization began in the fourth century, and went on in wholesale style till it was completed in the tenth. The Germans, under their leader Odoacer in 476, deposed Romulus Augustulus—the shadow of old Romulus and Augustus—and overthrew the West Roman Empire, thus fulfilling the old augury of the twelve birds of fate, that Rome was to grow six centuries and to decline six centuries. Wherever they went, they brought destruction to decaying institutions. But with few exceptions, they readily embraced the religion of the conquered Latin provinces, and with childlike docility submitted to its educational power. They were predestinated for Christianity, and Christianity for them. It curbed their warlike passions, regulated their wild force, and developed their nobler instincts, their devotion and fidelity, their respect for woman, their reverence for all family-relations, their love of personal liberty and independence. The Latin church was to them only a school of discipline to prepare them for an age of Christian manhood and independence, which dawned in the sixteenth century. The Protestant Reformation was the emancipation of the Germanic races from the pupilage of mediaeval and legalistic Catholicism. Tacitus, the great heathen historian, no doubt idealized the barbarous Germans in contrast with the degenerate Romans of his day (as Montaigne and Rousseau painted the savages "in a fit of ill humor against their country"); but he unconsciously prophesied their future greatness, and his prophecy has been more than fulfilled.
From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)
The excerpt from Lucy Walker’s memoirs was cited in No Man Knows My History . Twelve: Carthage My main sources were An Intimate Chronicle: The Journals of William Clayton ; No Man Knows My History ; Mormon Polygamy: A History ; Kingdom on the Mississippi Revisited: Nauvoo in Mormon History ; Cultures in Conflict: A Documentary History of the Mormon War in Illinois ; Doctrine and Covenants ; and Among the Mormons: Historic Accounts by Contemporary Observers by William Mulder and A. Russell Mortensen. The letter from William Clayton describing the dictation of Joseph Smith’s revelation on plural marriage was cited in An Intimate Chronicle . Thirteen: The Lafferty Boys My main source was Dan Lafferty. Fourteen: Brenda I relied on interviews with Betty Wright McEntire, LaRae Wright, Penelope Weiss, and Dan Lafferty, and, to a lesser extent, on the transcript of Ron Lafferty’s 1996 trial. Fifteen: The One Mighty and Strong My main sources were Robert Crossfield, Bernard Brady, Dan Lafferty, Betty Wright McEntire, and Pamela Coronado. I also relied on The First Book of Commandments, The Second Book of Commandments, The Book of Mormon, and photocopies of Ron Lafferty’s revelations. Sixteen: Removal My main sources were Dan Lafferty, Betty Wright McEntire, and LaRae Wright. I also relied on the transcript of Ron Lafferty’s 1996 trial. Facts in the footnote about marijuana use among Mormons in the early twentieth century were gleaned from Prophet of Blood: The Untold Story of Ervil LeBaron and the Lambs of God by Ben Bradlee Jr. and Dale Van Atta; a 1985 article by D. Michael Quinn, “LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890–1904,” published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought ; and articles in the Salt Lake Tribune . Seventeen: Exodus My main sources were The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power by D. Michael Quinn; Among the Mormons: Historic Accounts by Contemporary Observers ; Orrin Porter Rockwell: Man of God, Son of Thunder ; Cultures in Conflict: A Documentary History of the Mormon War in Illinois ; Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows by Will Bagley; The Year of Decision: 1846 by Bernard DeVoto; and Mormonism Unveiled; or the Life and Confessions of the Late Mormon Bishop, John D. Lee . The quote attributed to Illinois congressman John Alexander McLernand decrying polygamy was cited in Mormon Polygamy: A History . The quote attributed to Dr. Roberts Bartholow in the corresponding footnote was cited in a 1979 article by Lester E. Bush, Jr., “A Peculiar People: The Physiological Aspects of Mormonism 1850–1975,” published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought . Eighteen: For Water Will Not Do My main sources were Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows ; The Mountain Meadows Massacre by Juanita Brooks; Mormonism Unveiled; or the Life and Confessions of the Late Mormon Bishop, John D. Lee ; A Mormon Chronicle: The Diaries of John D.