Pride

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 44 of 174 · 20 per page

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  protests, he heeded Friedrich the Wise and gave Luther a formal hearing within the boundaries of the empire at the first available meeting of the Diet, the regular imperial assembly, at Worms in April 1521. Luther arrived after a triumphal tour across Germany. Facing the Emperor, he acknowledged a long list of books as his own. Ordered to say yes or no to the question ‘Will you then recant?’ he asked for a day’s grace to answer. Would he return to being the best monk in Germany, or go forward into an unformed future, guided only by what he had found in the Bible? Luther’s answer next day was no single word, but a careful and dignified speech. His books were of various sorts, some of which were indeed ‘polemic against the papacy’ which reflected ‘the experience and the complaint of all men’: ‘if then, I revoke these books, all I shall achieve is to add strength to tyranny, and open not the windows but the doors to this monstrous godlessness, for a wider and freer range than it has ever dared before’. He spelled out to the Emperor that without a conviction from ‘scripture or plain reason (for I believe neither in Pope nor councils alone)’, he could recant nothing. It was such a momentous culmination that not long after his death, Georg Rörer, the first editor of his collected works, felt compelled to construct two tiny summary sentences in German which have become the most memorable thing Luther never said: ‘Here I stand; I can do no other’.14 This can stand for the motto of all Protestants: ultimately, perhaps, of all modern Western civilization. To his great credit, Charles ignored the Emperor Sigismund’s treachery to Hus in 1415 (see pp. 571–2) and honoured Luther’s safe conduct from the Diet. Still Luther was in peril, and the best solution was for him to vanish; the Elector Friedrich duly arranged that. Luther occupied those months in the Wartburg, a Wettin stronghold on the wooded massif high above Eisenach, familiar to him from his childhood, by beginning a translation of the Bible into German. It would present his own spin on the text, to make sure that his liberating message got across, but it was an astonishing achievement at a time of great personal stress and amid a welter of polemical writing.15 Although time only allowed the completion of the New Testament, and the complete Old Testament followed later, his text has shaped the German language. Luther was a connoisseur of the vernacular, like his English contemporary Thomas Cranmer, whose speech has haunted formal English to the present day (see pp. 630–32), but Luther had a different gift. Cranmer’s meticulously calculated liturgical prose presented a public, ceremonial face of the Reformation in restrained dignity, even sobriety, whereas Luther’s talent was for seizing the emotion with sudden, urgent phrases. His hymns, first published in Wittenberg and Strassburg in 1524, reveal his genius perhaps even more than his Bible, because they transcend the notorious

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  attitudes fostered by Isabel in Castile set patterns for the future. Her expulsions of Jews were imitated in Portugal, when in 1497 King Manoel (who was hoping to marry her daughter) ordered mass conversion of the Jewish population, many of whom had only just fled from Spain.54 So Latin Christianity, in an especially self-conscious version of its traditional form, became the symbol of identity for Iberia’s kingdoms, and Protestantism would stand little chance of making any headway there against the project of building a monolithic Catholic Christian culture. Indeed it is possible to talk of an Iberian Reformation before the Reformation: well in advance of the general Protestant Reformation in Europe, Spain tackled many of the structural abuses – clerical immorality, monastic self-indulgence – which elsewhere gave Protestant Reformers much ammunition against the old Church. This Reformation was promoted by the monarchy, which increasingly excluded any real possibility of interference in the Church from the pope. A series of papal concessions allowed the Crown to appoint bishops, and by 1600 a third or more of the yearly income of the Castilian Church disappeared into the royal treasury.55 The pope tolerated being thus kept at arm’s length partly because he had little choice, but partly because Spanish royal power was consistently exercised to create a ‘purified’ and strong Latin Christianity free from heresy or non-Christian deviation, and indeed to spread it throughout the Spanish Empire overseas. Such a satisfactory deal for the Iberian monarchies meant that they had no reason to sympathize with any other challenge to papal authority. The first chief agent of the royal programme in the Church was Francisco Ximénes de Cisneros, a Castilian who gave up a distinguished career in Church administration to join one of the most rigorous religious orders, the Observant Franciscans, within which he sought to escape the world as a hermit. Yet when the fame of his single-minded spiritual activism forced him, against his better judgement, to become confessor to Queen Isabel in 1492, he found himself in Castile’s highest offices in Church and commonwealth, Archbishop of Toledo (Spain’s primatial see) and eventually, from 1516, regent of the kingdom during the minority of Charles Habsburg. In his austere, focused piety and his determination to proclaim his vision of Christian faith to the peoples of the Spanish kingdoms, he was much more like Luther, Zwingli or Calvin than his Spanish contemporary Pope Alexander VI, yet many of his reforms anticipated what the Council of Trent was to decree many decades later. He used his unequalled opportunities for action in ways which do not now seem entirely consistent, but which sum up the main themes of the Spanish religious revolution. An advocate of apostolic poverty who was also the premier statesman in Spain, he spent money lavishly as a major patron of the most

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  World treated him so mean Treat me mean, too.79 The results were spectacular, but posed new questions. By 1800, around a fifth of all American Methodists were enslaved people — and enslaved they were still, despite being Methodists. In this aftermath of the Revolution which had talked much of life, liberty and human happiness, African-Americans whether free or bonded found little welcome in white Churches and at best would be directed to a segregated seat. So they frequently made a further choice — to create their own Churches (see Plate 41). From 1790 there was an African Methodist Episcopal Union; there followed Black Baptist Unions, taking their known origin from a congregation of Baptists no more than eight strong in the 1770s.80 Congregations demanded their share in Christian decency — and how could Evangelical Protestants deny them that? Clothing and the dignity it conveyed, indeed, would become a major theme in Evangelical mission worldwide. Plantation slaves had frequently been kept naked for work — fuelling white fantasies about their innate lasciviousness.81 Now members of black congregations were known to walk more than fourteen miles to church, dressed in their special Sunday clothes but barefoot, carrying their clean shoes with them, which they put on when they reached their church buildings. Such independent Churches naturally wanted their own clergy — white clergy would not minister to them in such settings. In a land which restricted any blacks to the manual work for which they had been imported, suddenly there was a profession open to them, and it was difficult for white Evangelicals to deny the clerical character of such ministers who used the same charged language of conversion, and won souls for Christ just as they did.82 So a racial revolution, shaped by Evangelical Christianity, took shape quietly alongside a different revolutionary uprising by whites against whites. In the 1770s a gradual poisoning of relations between the British mother-country and the thirteen colonies became a political crisis, which ended in a colony-wide Declaration of Independence in 1776. The relationship of the Awakenings to this great fracture in anglophone power is not straightforward. One element in it was paradoxically the British victory in the Seven Years War, which in 1763 delivered New France (Canada) into British control. This forced the British government to face the problem of how a Protestant power might govern an overwhelmingly Catholic territory. One precedent was Protestant ‘Ascendancy’ government in Ireland, but already the punitive policies against Irish Catholics produced by two centuries of warfare after the Reformation were beginning to be modified; and the political situation in Canada, where there was no loyalist

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Bible published for the first time in good literary Welsh by the Protestant Bishop William Morgan in 1588. Morgan’s Bible preserved the special character of Welsh culture in the face of the superior resources and colonial self-confidence of the English, and it also ensured, against all likelihood in the early Reformation, that the religious expression of the Welsh became overwhelmingly Protestant.5 So it was too for Koreans at the end of the nineteenth century, when the Korean Bible translation revived their alphabet and became a symbol of their national pride, sustaining them through Japanese repression and paving the way for the extraordinary success of Christianity in Korea over the last half-century. And one of the reasons for the obstinate survival and now huge revival of Orthodox Christianity has been a story (largely unknown in the Christian West) of biblical translation, undertaken by the Russian Orthodox Church for an astonishing variety of language groups in Eastern Europe and the area of the former Soviet Union. The Bible thus embodies not a tradition, but many traditions. Self-styled ‘Traditionalists’ often forget that the nature of tradition is not that of a humanly manufactured mechanical or architectural structure with a constant outline and form, but rather that of a plant, pulsing with life and continually changing shape while keeping the same ultimate identity. The Bible’s authority for Christians lies in the fact they have a special relationship with it that can never be altered, like the relationship of parent and child. This does not deny relationships with other books which may be both deep and long-lasting, and it does not necessarily make the parental relationship easy or pleasant. It is simply of a different kind, and can never be abrogated. Once we see this, much modern neurosis about the authority of the Bible can be laid aside. Maybe the Bible can be taken seriously rather than literally. Books are the storehouses for human ideas. Three great religions which come from the Middle East centre their practice on a sacred book and are indeed frequently known as Religions of the Book: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. This book about the people of a book therefore necessarily discusses ideas. Many readers may want to see it as a narrative: students and scholars may find it helpful to test how social and political history both breed and are transformed by theology. Ideas, once born, often develop lives of their own within human history, and they need to be understood in their own terms as they interact with societies and structures. Christianity in its first five centuries was in many respects a dialogue between Judaism and Graeco-Roman philosophy, trying to solve such problems as how a human being might also be God, or how one might sensibly describe three manifestations of the one Christian God, which came to be known collectively as the Trinity. After much ill-tempered debate on

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  ‘Epaenetus, who was the first convert in Asia for Christ … Mary, who has worked hard among you … Andronicus and Junias, my kinsmen and my fellow prisoners … Ampliatus, my beloved in the Lord …’3 The most striking feature of the correspondence is the locations of its recipients: in busy Graeco-Roman towns, commercial centres throughout the eastern half of the Mediterranean as far as Rome, and including people like Epaenetus, who had much experience of travel. By contrast, the story of Jesus told in the Gospels had been played out in a rural and largely non-Greek environment, where villages within an easy day’s journey of each other could naively be described by the writers as cities and where only the denouement of the story took place in a real city, Jerusalem. Now Paul, the Apostle of the Gentiles, divided up the world he perceived around him into city, sea and wilderness (II Corinthians 11.26), and despite his pride in his Jewish roots, he unselfconsciously divided the people of that world into Greeks and barbarians (Romans 1.14). One significant and at first sight puzzling peculiarity actually emphasizes Paul’s break with Jesus’s first followers in Palestine. His letters have a preoccupation with personal means of support, which he links directly to one of his few quotations of the Lord Jesus. Characteristically, he takes a contrary line to the Lord. Jesus had said that ‘those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel’: that is, they deserve support from others.4 Paul emphasizes that he has not done this: he tells us that he has supported himself, although in what seems to be an attempt to face down criticism, he proclaims his contradiction of Jesus’s practice as a privilege renounced rather than an obligation spurned. He makes no bones about saying ‘keep away from any brother who is living in idleness and not in accord with the tradition that you received from us’. So much for Jesus and his wandering Twelve. Paul was on the side of busy people who valued hard work and took a pride in the reward that they got from it: tent-makers of the world, unite.5 Christianity had become a religion for urban commercial centres, for speakers of common Greek who might see the whole Mediterranean as their home and might well have moved around it a good deal – Paul’s restless journeyings are unlikely to have been unique. The communities associated with him included such figures as Gaius, wealthy enough to be ‘host to me and the whole Church’, or Erastus, a man prominent as ‘the city treasurer’ in the great city of Corinth.6 Although there is not much sign that Christianity had yet made inroads on ‘old money’ – the aristocratic elites of Mediterranean society – it was already gathering people across a wide spectrum of social status, and it is not surprising that differences of wealth and public esteem produced tensions and arguments. Two examples involve food, but have much wider implications. The earliest

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Lovell burst out laughing when the Gemini 6 crew, Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford, flashed a sign to Borman: BEAT ARMY . Schirra, Stafford, and Lovell were Navy, and as a West Point man Borman had no choice but to take it. By the time Borman and Lovell splashed down in the western Atlantic, they had set records for duration of flight (more than 330 hours, or 13.75 days), distance traveled (more than 5 million miles), and number of orbits (206). More important, they’d helped America take a major step toward the Moon by proving man could endure long stretches in space. The two weeks they’d spent was the maximum duration it was believed a lunar mission would require. Borman was immediately made a full colonel, the youngest in the Air Force at age thirty-seven. A few weeks after splashdown, Susan wrote an article that was published in newspapers around the country. People had noticed how frightened she’d been during launch and the flight, and not everyone appreciated it—including some at NASA. “These past weeks I had worn my feelings on my sleeve,” she wrote. “Some said they were pleased to see an astronaut’s wife willing to admit she was scared. Others, including some people in the space program, were critical because I failed to maintain the traditional stiff upper lip. ‘For heaven’s sake, wipe your tears. You’re ruining my morning coffee,’ one woman wrote. At one time, such criticism would have cut me deeply. But…I have come to realize you can’t be all things to all people. So I decided not to pretend and not to try to hide my feelings—I decided to be myself.” Soon after Gemini 7’s return, Borman received a telegram from West Point offering him a permanent professorship of mechanics. Susan loved the idea of returning to an idyllic life at West Point. But Borman said he couldn’t do it—his heart was in flying, and he had a Cold War to help win. He would stay with NASA. A year later, the tragic Apollo 1 fire occurred. Susan made it her mission to comfort and support her friend Pat White, the wife of one of the fallen astronauts. She visited the new widow every day, listening to her, holding her, and crying with her, trying to be strong as Pat kept repeating, “Who am I, Susan? Who am I? I’ve lost everything. It’s all gone.” At night, when Susan got home, she began to drink a bit, if only to quiet her nerves. In the past, Susan had dealt with fatalities among Frank’s colleagues the same way he did—by assuming it would never happen to him. But Ed White was different. He was a near-perfect physical specimen, even stronger than Frank, yet even he had been unable to get the spacecraft’s hatch open during the fire. Frank told her that Charles Atlas himself couldn’t have moved the hatch, but it was more than that to Susan.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  because the town was one of the few in Germany to be spared bombing in the Second World War. That exemption was a tribute to the worldwide impact of a monk-lecturer’s spiritual turmoil in what in 1517 was one of Europe’s newest universities. The university owed its existence to the then head of the Wettin dynasty, Friedrich of Saxony, a strong-minded and creative ruler, by hereditary right one of seven electors, who chose a new Holy Roman Emperor when required (the imperial title had never become hereditary). That honour gave Friedrich a good deal of influence on the Habsburg dynasty, who since the early fifteenth century had normally provided one of their number as the next emperor, but who could never be certain that the electors would allow this to continue. Without the Elector Friedrich’s support (puzzling in its consistency – he did not know Martin Luther well and never approved of his religious revolution), it is likely that Luther would have suffered the fate of Jan Hus a century before, burned by the authority of the Church. The Wettin were hugely wealthy from the profits of mining, particularly mining for silver, and one of the justifications for Friedrich’s later nickname ‘the Wise’ was the constructive uses to which he had put his generous inheritance, especially the improvement of the little market town at the gates of his palace in Wittenberg. Some of his spending was what was expected of a medieval prince, like the beautiful music which he sponsored in the Castle Church, or the large collection of holy relics which he also assembled there, all lovingly listed for pious visitors in a printed catalogue. The foundation of the university was less conventional. The first in Germany to be founded without the blessing of the Church authorities, it brashly boasted against its older rivals that it could provide students with an up-to-date immersion in humanist learning.2 The lecturer who arrived in 1511, nine years after Friedrich had founded the university, came from the sort of family who provided most of the Western Church’s most effective clergy: not especially rich or endowed with long pedigrees, but hard-working and high-achieving. Martin Luther’s father made his money in the mining industry, and with a miner for a father, Luther was prone in later years to emphasize his credentials as a man of the people. In fact his mother’s family boasted more than one successful graduate. It was only natural for Hans Luther to direct his son towards graduate study to become a lawyer, but Martin struck out in his own direction into the religious life, after an incident which, if he had become a saint of the Catholic Church, would have been the perfect opening for hagiography in a traditional mould. Caught in a thunderstorm in 1505, the young man was so terrified that he vowed to St Anne, the mother of Mary, that he would enter monastic life if he survived. When the

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  for production, Britain developed Europe’s first industrial revolution, resulting in huge wealth for some, and a great deal of modest prosperity and spending power for many — not to mention other equally profound changes, as we will see (see pp. 787–91). This was the basis for a British world empire, based improbably on a comparatively minor archipelago of Atlantic islands. Its self- image was based on a narrative of heroic struggle against popery and arbitrary tyranny (represented generally by the French), in which Protestant English and Protestant Scots had buried their differences in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, creating a common new home for their two peoples: Great Britain. A leading historian of this period has subtitled her study of it with an appropriate play on words, speaking of the process as ‘forging’ a nation. British adventures across the world became, for the next century and more, an overwhelmingly Protestant story.38 In the eighteenth century, European politicians and generals began to realize that the Mughal Empire in India, which had seemed so formidable to Catholic European powers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was beginning to fail. By contrast, their own governmental and military organizations were growing ever more efficient and effectively financed, tested by the century of European confessional wars from 1618 onwards. India was only the centrepiece: everywhere, Spanish and Portuguese power was looking far more vulnerable. In the mid-eighteenth century, Great Britain and France contended for supremacy: a ‘Seven Years War’ drew in all the major European powers, the first war to be fought in continents circling the globe. American ‘Indians’ were enlisted on the borders of New France and the thirteen English American colonies; Africans were swept in; in armies of the Indian subcontinent, Muslims and Hindus found themselves fighting European quarrels, the beginning of two centuries during which the Christian West was to be the dominant force in world power struggles. When the British fought the French to a standstill and concluded a peace treaty in Paris in 1763, they found themselves in charge of a land empire which needed defending across the world, and their armies were now carried by a navy with a near-universal range. Their victory was sealed in 1799, when British armies defeated Tipu Sultan, the last Indian ruler capable of seriously challenging them; in Tipu’s defeat, they dashed the hopes of his French allies, now revolutionary Republicans spoiling to reverse the French monarchy’s humiliation of 1763.39 The large British gains in India had been equalled in 1763 by Britain’s acquisition of France’s Northern American territories to the north and west of their own thirteen colonies. It was tempting to see Protestantism as the Christianity of the future.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  After seven years at GE, Anders left to become chief operating officer of the aerospace and defense firm Textron. In 1989, he left that company to become vice chairman of General Dynamics, a major supplier of aircraft, tanks, and other weapons to the United States Department of Defense. By agreement, he would become the company’s CEO a year later. On paper, the move might have seemed crazy. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the coming end of the Cold War, defense contractors began to suffer, their wares no longer in name-your-price demand. General Dynamics seemed even worse off than its competitors; having amassed huge debt, it looked headed for bankruptcy. But Anders saw possibility in darkened clouds. On becoming CEO, he instituted many of the principles he’d seen Welch use at GE. Among other moves, he sold off any part of the business in which General Dynamics couldn’t be a market leader. He worked hard to change the corporate culture and become efficient, replacing most executives and many personnel, getting rid of waste endemic to the industry, and focusing on shareholder return. He even pitched in as a test pilot, flying the firm’s F-16 fighter jets—until he sold off that part of the business, too. The company’s fortunes turned around fast. Billions of dollars flowed in, enough so that Warren Buffett purchased 16 percent of the company’s stock—then gave Anders proxy to vote his shares. By the end of Anders’s three-year term as CEO, he was a darling of Wall Street and, by many accounts, had saved General Dynamics. “After orbiting the Moon,” one industry analyst said, “mundane business problems did not faze him.” Anders stayed on at General Dynamics for another year as chairman of the board, then retired from the company a wealthy man in May 1994. Soon after, he and Valerie fell in love with the natural beauty of Washington State, where they bought a house on the water and established the Anders Foundation, a philanthropic organization devoted to supporting education and the environment. All the while, Anders kept flying. He’d already purchased a De Havilland Beaver airplane restored by his friend and former commander, Frank Borman, but what he truly envied was Borman’s P-51 Mustang single-seat fighter-bomber, a workhorse from World War II and the Korean War. “If you ever find another, let me know,” he told Borman. Not long after, Anders found himself flying over Borman’s home in New Mexico. He flipped open his cellphone and called to say hello. “Hey, Anders,” Borman said, “I found a Mustang for you—get your ass down here!” The two men drove to inspect the plane. “I’ll buy it if you test it,” Anders told Borman. Borman, the old test pilot, put the plane through its paces. Anders wrote a check—and then had an idea. He would start a museum dedicated to preserving—and flying—historic military aircraft.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Lovell told the distinguished audience that a few days after returning from the flight, he’d walked outside his home in Houston and gazed up at the Moon. “I could scarcely believe I was there,” he said. The men then moved to the State Department, where they held a press conference. Before opening the floor to questions, a NASA spokesman announced that Borman had been named deputy director of Flight Crew Operations, an administrative position that would ultimately involve advising the White House on NASA affairs. One reporter asked: “Was there any moment during the mission in which you were a little bit scared or frightened?” “I was scared or frightened during a lot of the phases of the mission,” Anders said. “But I think that fear is a normal human reaction and one that is not detrimental to the flight as long as you keep it under control.” Another reporter asked, directly, when America would land on the Moon. “This summer,” Borman said. “Can you be more precise?” the reporter asked. “Apollo 11,” Borman said. What Borman didn’t say was that he, Lovell, and Anders might have been the crew for Apollo 11—if only Borman had wanted it. Deke Slayton, who assigned crews, thought that the Apollo 8 astronauts were best positioned to train for the first Moon landing, since they’d already made a lunar orbit flight. But given Borman’s decision that Apollo 8 would be his last trip in space, Slayton didn’t need to further consider Borman and his crew. In the end, Slayton decided to stay with the planned rotation, with Neil Armstrong as commander of Apollo 11. The day after the press conference, the astronauts were honored with a ticker tape parade in New York City, an appearance at the United Nations, and a party at the Waldorf Astoria with Mayor Lindsay and Governor Rockefeller. Celebrations and parades followed that week in Newark, Miami (at the Super Bowl), Houston, and Chicago, where more than a million people turned out. During the festivities, the astronauts never forgot that there was a war going on in Vietnam in which their friends and colleagues continued to risk their lives and die for the United States. To Borman, Lovell, and Anders, countless men were doing more for their country in Vietnam, and elsewhere, than the astronauts had done by flying Apollo 8, men that no one would ever know about, brothers the crew of Apollo 8 tried to remember every day. —On January 20, following Richard Nixon’s inauguration, NASA announced that Lovell and Anders would be on the backup crew for Apollo 11, the mission expected to make the first lunar landing. That meant if the primary crew—Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins—made the trip, Lovell and Anders likely would be primary crew for another lunar landing, Apollo 14.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  In the accompanying article, he compared his role as flight director to that of a symphony conductor. “The conductor can’t play all the instruments—he may not even be able to play any one of them,” Kraft said. “But he knows when the first violin should be playing, and he knows when the trumpets should be loud or soft, and when the drummer should be drumming. He mixes all this up and out comes music. That’s what we do here.” The magazine noted that Kraft took “an almost angry pride in his work”—an assessment with which many at NASA agreed. Now he was the director of flight operations for NASA, responsible for the overall planning, training, and execution of manned spaceflight. Whenever Low had a problem, he went to Kraft. Almost always, that problem got solved. The men shook hands, then Low put a question to Kraft: Could Apollo 8 fly to the Moon in December? Kraft could have spent the day listing all the reasons why that was impossible. Instead, he just asked, “How?” “By leaving the lunar module behind,” Low said. The command and service modules, Low reminded Kraft, were in fine shape. Technically, there was no reason those two components couldn’t fly without the troubled lunar module, leapfrog the missions of the next two Apollo flights, and go directly to the Moon. The idea seemed heresy to Kraft. No man had ever flown more than 853 miles above Earth’s surface. Now Low was proposing to send three astronauts a quarter of a million miles away, and to do it half a year sooner than anyone at NASA had planned. As if that weren’t enough, Low was proposing to skip not one but two preparatory Apollo flights, violating one of NASA’s foundational philosophies: that missions be incremental to assure mastery and success. And yet Kraft saw elegance, even genius, in the plan. Low wasn’t proposing to land Apollo 8 on the Moon, just to fly around it, so no lunar module was necessary. By going in December, NASA could prove many of the systems and procedures, and much of the equipment and technology, required for a lunar landing. It could gain valuable deep space experience, and avoid the months of downtime that would come from delaying Apollo 8 until the lunar module was ready. That would put the agency back on track to make Kennedy’s deadline. And there was another benefit: A December launch gave America a chance to beat the Soviets to the Moon. Still, the logistical challenges seemed insurmountable to Kraft. Mission Control would need to be readied, trajectories and navigation calculated, an entire deep space communication network finished, an astronaut crew quickly trained, the flight control team brought up to speed and made confident, new software written, instrumentation calibrated.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  NASA doctors to prescribe a low-residue diet before and during the flight, and his plan had worked so well that he hadn’t had a bowel movement during the entire mission. Now he needed to find a toilet. He located a cabin just in time. As nature began to have its say, there was a pounding on the bathroom door. “Major Anders! Quick! You’ve got to come to flag bridge. The president is going to call in five minutes. Move it!” Anders was torn between his duties. He could only answer to the higher power. “I’m not going!” Anders yelled to the man. “Tell him I’m on the toilet and I’m not going.” There was no way Anders could risk losing control of himself while talking to the president of the United States. A minute later, one of the ship’s doctors ran in with a portable telephone and passed it through the bathroom door to Anders. Borman and Lovell picked up their own extensions, likely in sick bay, surrounded by physicians, stethoscopes, and syringes. Less than a month remained in Johnson’s presidency. Five years earlier, he’d taken over from his slain predecessor, a president who’d made an impossible promise: to land a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. Johnson might have been forgiven for backing off Kennedy’s commitment. Instead, he’d charged forward. “You’ve seen what man has really never seen before,” Johnson said to the astronauts. “You’ve taken all of us all over the world and into a new era. And my thoughts this morning went back to more than ten years ago...when we saw Sputnik racing through the skies, and we realized that America had a big job ahead of it. It gave me so much pleasure to know that you men have done a large part of that job.” And it gave Borman, especially, the same kind of pleasure. He’d gone to the Moon because of his love of country, and because he felt it was important to beat the Soviets in the race to get there. He’d always told himself his mission wouldn’t be done until he and his crewmates were standing on the carrier deck. Putting down the telephone after speaking with President Johnson, he knew he’d made it. After the call, seventeen doctors, researchers, and medical technicians inspected the astronauts, taking blood, conducting tests, making sure all

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  It was then that Frank saw his dad live by the mantra he’d been preaching forever: Do not quit, stay in there and pitch . Edwin took a job changing tires at another garage, then found work driving a laundry truck. Frank’s mother opened their house to boarders to make extra money. At school, Frank’s teachers observed him to be bossy and headstrong, a report that didn’t surprise his parents. Since the day Frank could walk, he had moved in straight lines and with shoulders pinned forward, a kid compelled to arrive. Not everyone knew where Frank was going, not even his mom and dad sometimes, but it seemed to them a mistake to label the boy rude or abrupt just for pushing past people and things that slowed him down. They’d always told Frank he could be the best at whatever he chose if he did things the right way, with excellence and integrity, no shortcuts. Edwin and Frank often sat together at their living room card table building model airplanes, some powered by rubber bands, others by tiny temperamental gas engines that screamed like banshees. Frank learned to take responsibility for his creations. Edwin never stepped in and finished the job for Frank, no matter how many times the engines wouldn’t fire—even during model airplane competitions, even while judges were waiting. He just let Frank keep working, keep adjusting, until the Borman plane flew better and farther than all the rest. By the late 1930s, many kids across America had become fascinated by the idea of space travel. Scientists were developing rocket technologies, and the future that these machines promised exploded in color in popular science and adventure magazines, comic strips, and films. Frank couldn’t have cared less. Science fiction bored him. If his friends went to see movies about spaceships, he stayed home and built airplanes, the kind of machines that flew for real. Frank entered high school in 1943, in the midst of World War II. Schoolwork came easily to him, which left him time for deeper pleasures. One day, he wandered over to nearby Gilpin Airport and told the manager he wanted to fly. The man had no problem with Frank’s age—fifteen—but warned that lessons cost nine dollars an hour. Frank knew his parents couldn’t afford that, but he did some quick mental math. By combining the salaries from his three current jobs—bag boy at Safeway, gas station jockey, and sweeper at Steinfeld’s Department Store—he could put himself into the air. He signed up and was taken to a hangar where he met his instructor, who was about thirty years old, had trained very few students, and was dressed not like a pilot but in Levi’s and a white T-shirt, which was unusual at the time for a woman. In the 1940s, only about a hundred women worked as flight instructors in the United States. Bobbie Kroll was one of them.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Soon lodges were adding dignity to their socializing with the aid of esoteric literature: late-medieval masons had already constructed proud histories for themselves out of such material and their own craft traditions. The Church of Scotland, in interesting contrast to its growing paranoia about witchcraft (see p. 687), showed no signs of alarm at the new departure; many of its clergy were caught up in the same intellectual fashions. The impressive ancient history manufactured by Scottish Freemasons gradually travelled throughout Europe and eventually beyond, as Masonic lodges spread as congenial settings for male camaraderie with a habit of secrecy calculated to put them beyond the reach of the Church authorities. Part of Freemasonry’s continuing Reformed inheritance was a general hostility to the institution of the Catholic Church. This was inclined to linger even when Masons spread beyond Reformed societies and into the Catholic world, forming a major focus for anticlericalism wherever the Catholic Church was strong (see pp. 821–2).4 So a heady mixture of Paracelsianism, hermeticism and Cabbala bred an optimism in Protestant Europe which sat curiously alongside the pessimism about human capability built into the thought of Augustine of Hippo. The ancient esoteric books became more rather than less important through the seventeenth century, particularly in universities in central Europe. Here ecumenically minded scholars were trying to find theological ways of bridging the gulf between Lutheran and Reformed theology — while also exploring many other fields of knowledge, often with the agenda of extending the bounds of human wisdom in preparation for the Last Days. The discipline which is the ancestor of modern specializations like astronomy, biology, physics and chemistry was then called natural philosophy. It demarcated itself from theology’s concentration on the world beyond by exploring evidence from nature, the visible created world. We define this exploration as ‘science’, and the story of natural philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has in the past often been called a ‘Scientific Revolution’. In the modern West, that term has commonly been yoked to the thought that ‘science’ is a rational mode of enquiry, waging an ideological battle with an irrational foe, Christianity. ‘Science’ is a very imprecise word, and in the era of the Reformation and Renaissance it simply meant knowledge — from any quarter. Natural philosophy was as much an examination of God’s creation as theology, and exhibited no sense of clash of purpose or intention with religion. Evidence from the created world might have its own mysterious or magical dimension when seen through the eyes of a Paracelsian or Neoplatonist, and so it might link directly with religious and even political concerns. One example was the curious episode of the ‘Rosicrucians’. Unlike the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians never existed. The

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  We were to look in our parents’ newspaper and cut out words we knew the meaning of, and make them into simple sentences. We could only use one “the.” It felt like an easy task, since I was already reading the comics by this time. On Sunday morning after church, when I usually did my homework, I noticed an ad for White Rose Salada Tea on the back of the New York Times Magazine which my father was reading at the time. It had the most gorgeous white rose on a red background, and I decided I must have that rose for my picture—our sentences were to be illustrated. I searched through the paper until I found an “I,” and then a “like,” which I dutifully clipped out along with my rose, and the words “White,” “Rose,” “Salada,” and “Tea.” I knew the brand-name well because it was my mother’s favorite tea. On Monday morning, we all stood our sentence papers up on the chalk-channels, leaning them against the blackboards. And there among the twenty odd “The boy ran,” “it was cold,” was “I like White Rose Salada Tea” and my beautiful white rose on a red background. That was too much coming from a Brownie. Sister Mary of PH frowned. “This was to be our own work, children,” she said. “Who helped you with your sentence, Audre?” I told her I had done it alone. “Our guardian angels weep when we don’t tell the truth, Audre. I want a note from your mother tomorrow telling me that you are sorry for lying to the baby Jesus.” I told the story at home, and the next day I brought a note from my father saying that the sentence had indeed been my own work. Triumphantly, I gathered up my books and moved back over to the Fairies. The thing that I remember best about being in the first grade was how uncomfortable it was, always having to leave room for my guardian angel on those tiny seats, and moving back and forth across the room from Brownies to Fairies and back again. This time I stayed in the Fairies for a long time, because I finally started to recognize my numbers. I stayed there until the day I broke my glasses. I had taken them off to clean them in the bathroom and they slipped out of my hand. I was never to do that, and so I was in disgrace.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  that paid him $16,000 a year for exclusive access to his and his family’s personal stories. For her part, Susan would be obliged to speak at luncheons and urge young mothers to buy World Book encyclopedias (published by Field Enterprises) for their families. NASA assigned each new astronaut to a specialty. Borman’s was boosters, the rockets that lifted spacecraft off Earth and into orbit and beyond. His focus would be on a crucial aspect—the crew safety and escape systems. Borman and his colleagues would spend hundreds of hours in classrooms, visiting contractors, and on field trips, learning everything from astronomy to meteorology to flight mechanics to computers to spacecraft construction. If America was going to reach the Moon by President Kennedy’s deadline, now just seven years away, the astronauts had to learn in gulps, not sips. That applied to public relations, too. Meet-and-greets became commonplace, black tie functions the norm. Everyone in America, it seemed, wanted a piece of the astronauts. Once, Borman and Susan shared a limousine with a celebrity on their way to a gala sponsored by a wealthy Texas oilman. “I’m Tony Randall,” the man said. “So nice to meet you,” Borman said. “I really enjoyed your song ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco.’ ” The actor did not appreciate being mistaken for the singer Tony Bennett. Borman did not appreciate the arrogance in Randall’s indignation. “To hell with him,” Borman whispered to Susan. As Borman settled in at NASA, it became clear to peers and management that he was a different breed, even among these unique men. He did not dabble in reflection, showed no patience for shades of gray. Mission came first, always, and if he sensed you were unqualified for a job or, worse, a bullshitter, he got your ass out of the way. He seemed unconcerned with NASA politics, blew smoke up no one’s posterior, superiors included, and would not say, or do, anything he did not believe in. Some astronauts considered him arrogant or hard-headed, but all respected him, and few would have disagreed with Borman’s own assessment—that he was among the best of the astronaut corps. Like most astronauts, Borman was conservative politically. Yet he

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Given the almost blanket support of the South African Dutch Reformed Church for apartheid, and its withdrawal or expulsion from ecumenical activities in worldwide Church bodies, the Anglican Church was best placed to lead the struggle in South Africa. For all the Nationalist government’s efforts to shut down any sphere of cooperation between whites and non-whites, Anglicans led the Churches’ resistance, and had the capacity from time to time to intimidate the ostentatiously Christian Nationalist regime – admittedly often against the wishes of many in their prosperous white congregations. Throughout all the Anglican Communion’s centuries of involvement with politics and social change, its role in the liberation struggle in South Africa should perhaps give it most pride. It is a story of heroic individuals who turned what was often a personal singularity and craggy awkwardness into a stubborn refusal to compromise with evil. Exemplary was the monk Trevor Huddleston, sent out to South Africa by his Community of the Resurrection: he was tireless in his anti- apartheid work alongside the ANC and then, after a reluctantly obeyed recall from his order, he spent a lifetime in helping the struggle from afar, as an Anglican bishop and eventually archbishop. Desmond Tutu, another exceptional Anglican priest of the next generation who rose to be Archbishop of Cape Town – perhaps Anglicanism’s greatest primate in the twentieth century – recalled his astonishment as a boy at witnessing Father Huddleston, the picture of Anglo- Catholic authority in his black hat and white cassock, showing an automatic English courtesy to Tutu’s mother: ‘I couldn’t understand a white man doffing his hat to a black woman, an uneducated woman … it made, it appeared later, a very deep impression on me and said a great deal about the person who had done this.’31 Perhaps most important of all for the eventual defeat of apartheid was an English Anglican priest who briefly visited South Africa only once: John Collins. Like Huddleston, Collins was an example of a type which Anglicanism has traditionally been good at fostering: an undisciplined, extrovert rebel member of England’s solid middle class, for whom the Church’s untidy historic legacy of niches for eccentrics provided a perch in a canonry of London’s St Paul’s Cathedral. Canon Collins ruined the breakfasts of many a choleric Tory reader of the Daily Telegraph by his pronouncements as chairman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, but his contribution to South Africa’s future was the International Defence and Aid Fund, an umbrella organization which, after the South African government banned it in 1967, managed to avoid journalistic scrutiny for another quarter-century. The fund gathered money from across the northern European and North American world via a host of personal contacts; it provided a cleverly disguised financial lifeline for those struggling in

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  yangban origins to gain around ten thousand adherents – this with the help of just one resident Chinese priest from 1795, martyred in 1801. It was a distinctively lay beginning for a branch of the Church. The next priest did not surmount the formidable problems of entry to Korea till 1833; by now Rome had placed Korea under the auspices of the French Missions Etrangères de Paris, and it may have helped the acceptability of Catholic Christianity that France had no great military presence in East Asia. The contrast with the power of the Chinese and Japanese empires which had threatened to annihilate Korea for centuries was significant. While Christianity expanded into the wider population still seeking deliverance from Korea’s ongoing deprivations, the monarchy continued to pursue the total destruction of the alien religion. Thousands died or were tortured, the worst phase being the latest, in 1866–71. The many who faced suffering with extraordinary bravery had available to them the heritage of Tridentine Catholicism, with its stories of earlier martyrdoms and its world- denying ethos, but it is interesting to look past the emphases in contemporary Catholic accounts of persecutions to see what Christian activists did not take from the Tridentine heritage. Lifelong celibacy was not high among their goals; as in Africa, Korea’s social structure made it both unacceptable and difficult to practise. For instance, only nine female virgins can be counted among the stories of sixty-three adult women martyrs and confessors gathered from the persecution of the Korean year Kihae (1839–40).93 Given that clergy normally had to remain completely hidden before 1871, most of the burden of teaching fell on Catholic laity. This was a Catholicism in which the Latin Mass was necessarily an infrequent experience. The practice of lay baptism, which the Church has not always treated with much enthusiasm despite its theoretical acceptability, now became essential and common. Some lay baptizers also became preoccupied with baptizing the babies of non-Christian parents who were expected to die soon: not a matter which the Church authorities had urged on them. Very early, Korean Christians showed a pride in their own cultural heritage, which they could contrast with the imported Chinese culture dominating the royal Court. To spread their message as widely as possible, they championed the use of the distinctive han’gul alphabetic script, invented in Korean Court circles in the fifteenth century, and they developed their own literature in this alphabet, so different from the Chinese pictogrammic system and long despised by the Korean elite. Christian vernacular use was the prelude to the general revival of han’gul in twentieth-century Korea. When (mainly American) Protestants arrived in the aftermath of the monarchy’s belated and reluctant decision in the 1870s to open Korea’s borders, they learned from the Catholic example, and

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  vision of world peace, without that alarming corollary – but now after Napoleon’s defeat, it was characteristic of liberal German Protestantism also to be nationalist; and then after the failure of parliamentary efforts at reunion in 1848–9, also largely monarchist. Hohenzollern Prussia triumphed between 1867 and 1870 over first the Austrian and then the French emperor. A Second Empire (Reich) was proclaimed in 1871, self-consciously an heir to the old Holy Roman Empire, and so a Protestant alternative to that still-existing Catholic empire of the Habsburgs. German academics, theologians included, gave it their allegiance with extraordinary fervour. The great historian Leopold von Ranke, historiographer to the Prussian Court and giant among the professors of the University of Berlin for half a century, saw the new German Emperor as ‘immediate to God’ (unmittelbar zu Gott). This was a fusion of nationalism and divine right theory in which liberty and equality took a distinctly subordinate place to monarchy and a new imperial Court.44 An essential underpinning of this vision was a sense of the divine right of Protestantism. From early in his career, Ranke also included in his vision of the future a sense of the unity of the ‘Teutonic’ nations of northern Europe, in which one essential element was the Reformation. He was not alone in this. Protestant nations of northern Europe, several of them precociously industrialized, and mindful of the rapid imperial expansion of Britain and the United States in contrast to the fading of Spain and Portugal, could be forgiven for seeing their prosperity and growing power as God’s will against a decaying world Catholicism. Towards the end of the century, one best-selling British Evangelical rant culminated in a typical paean of praise in that vein to God’s chosen nations: ‘When we contrast Popish countries with Protestant lands, can we doubt any longer which religion most promotes National Prosperity?’45 It was a vulgar expression of the mood which prompted Max Weber to create the thesis embodied in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. All through the nineteenth century, Evangelicals kept up the transcontinental links sustained since the first days of Pietism, which were now encouraged by the continuing family ties of the British monarchy to German royal houses. The Prussian monarchy was central to this. King Friedrich Wilhelm III’s rather shapeless religious energies led him to press, against much opposition, for a union of his Lutheran and Reformed Churches, complicated by his eccentric amateur interest in the High Church aspects of Anglicanism, which produced some bizarre liturgical experiments and even more ill-will.46 More problematic still was the project which Friedrich Wilhelm’s son, successor and namesake sponsored in 1841 for a joint Anglo-Prussian bishopric in Jerusalem. There could have been no better symbol of the worldwide aspirations of northern

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  proud of a growing interest in their culture in the Christian West, ironically often as a result of their excellent education in Christian colleges. From the beginning of the century, there had been correspondence and even meetings between a small number of outward-looking Indian religious leaders and European and American Unitarians, mutually impressed by the possibilities which their respective revolts against traditional understanding of religion might open up in their search for a common and greater religious truth, in which the constraints of particular cultures were left behind. These contacts were spearheaded by the reformist and controversially ecumenical Bengali Rammohun Roy (c. 1772–1833), who travelled across the oceans to Britain to defend the reforms of Hindu customs like widow-burning promoted by his former employees the East India Company; he died in Bristol, where the grand classical chapel built by prosperous Unitarian merchants in the city centre still proudly houses a plaque commemorating his life.78 In the 1880s a growing self- confidence among Hindus encouraged a much wider ‘Hindu renaissance’ and a significant number of Hindu reconversions among Christian converts (conversion was indeed a borrowing of a Christian concept). The ‘positivist’ theories of the Western anticlerical philosopher Auguste Comte were among the influences in some modernizing reconstructions of Hindu faith which sought to sidestep priestly power but justify the continuing existence of the caste system.79 Conversely Indian missionary struggles and setbacks bred a new spirit of humility among Christians. It was among Protestants in India that the impulse first arose to forget old historic differences between denominations which meant little in new settings and to seek a new unity. This was the chief origin of the twentieth-century ecumenical movement (see pp. 953–8). CHINA, KOREA, JAPAN The greatest Asian empire was China, ruled by the Qing dynasty. It tottered but did not quite fall during the nineteenth century, only just surviving determined efforts by first the British and then other Europeans and Americans to exploit its huge territory. The arrival of Christianity and interference by European powers identified with the Christian faith contributed to a catastrophic rebellion, and almost a century would follow from the collapse of the Qing in 1911 before the Churches could free themselves from association with imperial humiliation. The decay of the empire at the end of the eighteenth century gave opportunity both for Roman Catholics to pull together the surviving congregations of their old missions (see pp. 705–7) and for Protestants to begin their own assault on China