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 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

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

  century conservative Evangelicals were too cowed by the fiasco of Prohibition to try to impose their social values on the rest of the nation by political means. They largely left Federal politics to liberal Protestants, plus a growing number of elite Catholics. As Washington DC’s hilltop Episcopal cathedral, which called itself ‘National’, steadily rose from its scaffolding to dominate northward views of the city, its cool and scholarly English Gothic represented the low- temperature, well-mannered religion of the white neighbourhoods in the Federal capital, in a way that Europeans would understand. Meanwhile, Evangelicals waited. They listened to their wireless sets in their small towns, their unfashionable suburbs, their remote farms, even in the barn milking, and they took comfort from the packaging of old-time religion, syndicated and delivered by a host of local radio stations, which had profited from the example set by Aimee Semple McPherson. The Evangelicals’ hour would come, in a more literal historical sense than their Scofield Reference Bibles told them.98 As the tectonic plates of American religion shifted, so around the world innumerable offshoots of enthusiastic Protestantisms found their own life and style. By no means all observed the Pentecostal shibboleth of speaking in tongues, though they were certainly charismatic in their own fashion. Africa bred a host of prophets who owed something, if only at a remove, to William Wade Harris (see pp. 887–8). A major spur to their message was the great influenza epidemic which swept the world in 1918, proving as destructive of human life as the First World War, and in Africa almost as destructive to the reputation of the West: the much-vaunted Western medicine seemed helpless in face of it. So two characteristics of the new prophets were first that they left European-led Churches which had fostered their faith, and second that they offered their own style of healing. In West Africa their Churches were commonly known by the Yoruba word for ‘owners of prayer’: Aladura. Prophet- led they might be, but one of their most effective founders, the Nigerian Josiah Olulowo Ositelu, brought from his rather High Church Anglican background a proper respect for hierarchy, which quickly ran to twelve categories of male officer, from Primate down to Male Cross Holders (women could bear iron rods or crosses with the Primate’s permission). Aladura were proud of their new beginning, proclaiming in their constitution ‘that Ethiopia or Africa shall raise up her own hands unto the Great Jehovah-God under the Spiritual Guide and lead her own indigenous sons’.99 That pride in an ‘Ethiopian’ faith, something truly African, runs through the crowded assembly of prophets across the continent. They could bring African solutions to African problems. That proud boast was a great contrast with the generation of political leaders who were to take over when European colonies in

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

  finance. Pius IX had on principled grounds refused any monetary compensation for the Papal States and its tax revenues from the Italian government, and the only way of filling the gap was by soliciting financial support from devout Catholics – what had been known in medieval Europe as ‘Peter’s Pence’. At first the appeal for funds had been associated with the futile military effort to defend the pope’s remaining territories, but this purpose became irrelevant after Italian unification in 1870. The net was cast worldwide, and the Vatican started taking a much more detailed interest in congregations far away.31 This was a shift as fraught with significance as that other great financial change in the Church’s medieval past, the financing of parish priests by tithes (see p. 369).The papacy was looking to every last Catholic man, woman and child for help in carrying out its task, and in return it delved much deeper into the everyday lives of the faithful. One liturgical change engineered by Pope Pius X had a huge effect on Catholics and their experience of the Church. Over the centuries there had been a seesaw of arguments as to how frequently or infrequently the laity should receive the eucharistic elements at Mass. Pius X had no doubts that the more frequent reception, the better, and issued a barrage of instructions to that end. One of these had a powerful effect: in 1907 the Pope decreed that the minimum age for first communion should be lowered from twelve or fourteen to seven. Around that ‘first communion’ there rapidly grew a new Catholic folk culture, a public celebration of family life in the parish church, centred on an array of proud infants dressed in innocent splendour. One might say that the modern vision of Catholic family bliss which the Church still so assiduously promotes dates from that order of 1907.32 The fact that financial appeals across the oceans succeeded in keeping the papacy afloat after its nineteenth-century losses of territorial revenue was an indication of the Church’s overall optimism and growth. For the Catholic Church was now undergoing one of the greatest expansions in its history, especially in Africa. Whereas the nineteenth century had been the great age of Protestant mission, Catholic missions were now outstripping at least European-run Protestant initiatives. In 1910 there were more or less equal numbers of European or American Catholics and Protestants in African missions, but recruitment of Protestant missionaries from Britain was beginning to fall away – just at the time that the Irish Catholic Church, previously remarkably inward- looking, was beginning to produce great numbers of clergy and nuns prepared for mission abroad, to add to a growing stream of Catholics from mainland Europe.33 Benedict XV (Pope 1914–22) and his successor, Pius XI (Pope 1922– 39), were both keenly interested in world mission. Benedict, conscious of the political impotence revealed in his peace initiatives during the war, was further

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

  It was in the skies, he thought, that the fight against the Soviets would be decided; technology would determine how high and how fast. He began training in a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, flying at 1,600 miles per hour, more than twice the speed of sound. Much of what he did at Edwards was experimental and untested, making it dangerous in ways one couldn’t train for, and in ways that he never discussed with Susan. Borman graduated first in his class academically and second in flying and won the award for best overall student at Edwards. (He would have been first in flying but for a momentary failure to raise a landing gear, a slipup that would bother him for years.) He then signed on to establish a new program at Edwards, the Aerospace Research Pilot Graduate course, designed to prepare future astronauts to fly. He and four other top pilot-engineers would create a curriculum, making sure it best positioned a man for selection by NASA. It did not escape his notice that as an instructor, NASA might consider him to be among the best candidates of them all. In March 1961, Borman came to a crossroads. NASA was looking to bring on a second group of astronauts and asked top Navy and Air Force pilots to apply. If he had any interest in going into space, now was the time to strike. Borman didn’t thrill to the idea of riding on rockets or exploring the cosmos or even stepping on the Moon. The instant celebrity conferred on astronauts seemed a distraction to him. And yet only NASA could deliver him onto a new battlefield, where technology and futuristic flying machines could help determine whether democracy or Communism prevailed. With the Cold War growing hotter every day, he could think of no more important place to do his part than on the frontier of space. He talked to Susan. He told her he had a chance to help America, and to make history, but it would require undertaking a new life and unknown risks. Susan answered as she always had: They were a team and she would support him. A short time later, he submitted his application to NASA, joining more than two hundred other highly qualified hopefuls. He endured exams—physical and psychological—and several rounds of cuts as NASA trimmed its list of finalists to about eighty, then to thirty-two. Finally, in the fall of 1962—eighteen months after he first put his name in the hat—Borman became one of the agency’s nine new astronauts, selected from America’s best to go where mankind had only dreamed of going. —NASA introduced its second group of astronauts to the public at the University of Houston on September 17, 1962. Soon to be dubbed the New Nine by the press, they included James Lovell and Neil Armstrong. All nine had been test pilots and had studied aeronautical engineering. All were married and had children.

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

  the word “Defense” to its title and be renamed DARPA.) In September 1958, Eisenhower signed into law the National Defense Education Act, which provided billions of dollars for the education of young Americans in science and related subjects. And in October, he opened a space agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, known as NASA, which took on the eight thousand workers and $100 million budget of its predecessor agency, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). Many of its employees were young scientists, engineers, and visionaries. In December 1958, just about a year after Sputnik had launched, NASA announced Project Mercury, a program designed to put a human being into orbit around Earth and return him and the spacecraft safely. Seven brave men were chosen for the task from a pool of military test pilots. They would be known as astronauts—“star sailors”—and would explore the oceans of space. — America elected John Fitzgerald Kennedy president in November 1960. He’d accused Republicans of being weak on defense and Communism, and Eisenhower of allowing the United States to fall behind in production of intercontinental ballistic missiles—a so-called missile gap. According to the nation’s new president, America could not afford to be second to the Russians in anything. On April 12, 1961, less than three months after Kennedy’s inauguration, tracking stations controlled by American intelligence picked up the flight of a Soviet spaceship and detected something startling inside. Minutes later, the Soviet government announced that they’d put the first man into space—whom they called a cosmonaut, or “universe sailor.” And he’d already made a complete orbit around Earth. For the first time, a man had broken the bonds of his home planet. Yet as the twenty-seven-year-old cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin whirled around the globe, few knew the extent to which the Soviets had rushed the mission, the myriad risks they’d taken, or the critical tests they’d skipped. Near the 108-minute flight’s end, after reentering the atmosphere, Gagarin’s spaceship began spinning uncontrollably and plummeted

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

  complete outside with its proudly displayed bust of the great nineteenth-century liberal hero and liberator José Martí. President Castro was as much heir to the nineteenth century’s anticlerical liberalism as he was to Marx.14 Yet in 1864 ‘liberalism’ had a different and less negative sound for Catholics elsewhere. Even in France, tormented by the rift between those venerating and those execrating the Revolution, several influential bishops were privately appalled at the Syllabus’s potential effects. One of their number not ashamed of joining the word ‘liberal’ to ‘Catholic’, Félix Dupanloup, Bishop of Orléans, wrote a best-selling pamphlet defending the Syllabus by the backhanded method of explaining away its intemperate propositions.15 Likewise in the British Empire, Catholicism owed its opportunities for expansion to liberal principles. The precedent came in the historic decision of the British Crown in 1774 to secure its newly won Canadian dominions by allying with the Catholic elite of New France. This effectively prevented French Canadian Catholics from abetting France’s aid to the Protestant revolutionaries of the United States. Their decision was vindicated by the anticlerical horrors perpetrated by French revolutionaries a decade later – indeed, the Catholic Church in Quebec became well aware that it enjoyed much less interference under the British than from the previous royal French government.16 Then Britain and Ireland witnessed a gradual dismantling of public disabilities for Catholics (not yet completed in the early twenty-first century, with a repeal of the legislation of 1701 forbidding Catholics to succeed to the British throne still pending). Without such new freedoms, the authorities in Rome could not have launched a comprehensive reform of the startlingly pre-Tridentine and lay-dominated Catholic Church in Ireland, to bring it into line with the well-regulated devotional revolution in the rest of Catholic Europe.17 Not only Catholics subject to the British Crown benefited from the rearrangement of the modern world. In the Protestant republic which was the United States of America, Enlightenment was the benevolent force in separating Church and State, allowing the Catholic hierarchy complete institutional freedom and the chance to exercise pastoral care for a growing flood of Catholic immigrants, protected by the Constitution in the face of widespread Protestant popular hostility (which was nevertheless often paradoxically couched in the language of liberalism and resistance to Catholic priestcraft). In Lutheran northern Europe, the new constitutional arrangements for state boundaries which so favoured Protestant monarchies were mitigated by a liberal idea of Parität – fair play between Catholics and Protestants – which was especially important in the former Holy Roman Empire in protecting Catholic subjects against their newly acquired Protestant princes.18 In the southern Netherlands, a revolution of

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

  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.

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

  Cheers also erupted in the astronauts’ homes. Marilyn Lovell felt proud of her husband—his voice had been the first one broadcast from the Moon. To Valerie Anders, Lovell’s simple statement—“Burn complete”—sounded like an ebullient “We’re still here!” Susan Borman was happy that her sons were happy, but she felt no sense of relief. She’d seen this movie a thousand times in her head, and it always ended the same way. — Sixteen minutes after appearing on the lunar near side, Apollo 8 passed over the Sea of Fertility, an expanse roughly the size of France, visible with the naked eye to observers on Earth as one of the prominent dark patches on the Moon’s eastern limb. “What does the ol’ Moon look like from sixty miles?” Carr asked the astronauts. Lovell took the question. For the first time, man was about to hear man describe the Moon, not as a distant observer, but as an eyewitness. “Okay, Houston,” Lovell said. “The Moon is essentially gray, no color; looks like plaster of Paris, sort of a grayish beach sand. We can see quite a bit of detail. The Sea of Fertility doesn’t stand out as well here as it does back on Earth. There’s not as much contrast between that and the surrounding craters.” He paused for a moment, taking in more of the expanse beneath him. “The craters are all rounded off. There’s quite a few of them, some of them are newer. Many of them look like, especially the round ones, look like [they were] hit by meteorites or projectiles of some sort. Langrenus is quite a huge crater; it’s got a central cone to it. The walls of the crater are terraced, about six or seven different terraces on the way down.” A few minutes later, the spacecraft passed over one of the sites NASA had identified as a potential landing area for future missions. “It’s very easy to spot,” Lovell said. “You can see the entire rims of the craters from here with, of course, the white crescent on the far side where the Sun is shining on it.” A few seconds later, Borman jumped in. He still couldn’t believe the accuracy with which planners had calculated the flight.

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

  did not. He staged a coup d’état in 1799, and successive plebiscites, only partially rigged, gave overwhelming majorities to his assumption first of the Republican title of First Consul and then of Emperor of the French. Right up to the final collapse of his extraordinary conquests in 1813–14, Napoleon continued to enjoy widespread support throughout France. An astute politician as well as a brilliant general, Napoleon attached great importance to religion – not because he cared about it personally, but because he saw that other people cared about it a great deal. The Republic had made a gross error in attacking the Church. Now, if he was to unite France, he would have to come to an understanding with this institution which so controlled human emotions. He would benefit not only in France but throughout the large areas of Catholic Europe that came to be under French rule. If Napoleon was to clinch an agreement to cover all these territories, he would have to approach the Pope. Accordingly, in 1801, he and Pope Pius VII reached an agreement or Concordat, the model for many similar deals between the papacy and a variety of governments throughout the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Napoleon said that its negotiation was the most difficult task of his life.79 This Concordat was important not simply for its extensive reorganization of the French Church in partnership with the State, but for its effect on the pope’s position. The marginalization of the pope begun by ‘Enlightened Despots’ had seemed to be complete when revolutionary French armies arrested Pius VI and watched him die in French exile in 1799. Now the new pope was negotiating terms for the whole French Church, once so proud of its independence. The new structure of appointments and hierarchy among the clergy gave the pope much more power, a move which many lower clergy welcomed since it was likely to curb the powers of their immediate superiors the bishops. The Pope’s new position was most effectively symbolized when in 1804 he agreed to be present at the coronation ceremony for Napoleon as Emperor in Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris: a curious reconciliation of the traditional Church with the new people’s State, as Napoleon placed on his own head the crown which the people’s armies had won for him. Nor was the Pope’s usefulness over then: Napoleon prevailed on his new ally to discover a new saint of the Church, an ancient Roman martyr called with providential coincidence Napoleon, whose feast day on the Emperor’s birthday, 15 August, usefully fell on that popular holy day of the Church, the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady (see Plate 39). Even after the Emperor’s fall, the Feast of St Napoleon remained a rallying point for Bonapartists throughout the nineteenth century, a sore annoyance to those French Catholics who detested the Emperor’s memory and wanted to concentrate on celebrating God’s Mother.80

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

  toward Earth. He managed to eject and parachute down, unharmed but almost two hundred miles off course. He landed in a field near the tiny village of Smelovka, east of the Volga River in southern Russia, where he was discovered by a woman and a little girl. The girl ran away, startled by the sight of this alien being who had dropped from the sky, but Gagarin waved his arms and called out, “I’m one of yours, a Soviet, don’t be afraid.” He struggled to walk in his space suit but managed to reach the girl and reveal an incredible truth—he had just come from outer space. In 1945, the Soviet Union had lain in ruins. Now, sixteen years later, it had put the first man into orbit around Earth. Gagarin was given a parade in Red Square, an event as big as or bigger than the one held to celebrate the end of World War II. People cried in the streets and hung pictures of the cosmonaut in their homes. — Gagarin’s flight dealt an even bigger blow to the United States than did Sputnik. “We are behind,” Kennedy admitted at a press conference. Soviet propaganda rained down from Moscow extolling the virtues of Communism and the superiority of Soviet science and technology, and it was hard to argue with any of it—the Soviets continued to do everything first, and biggest, in space. And that meant that no matter what Khrushchev claimed about wanting peace, the Soviets were building their advantage in war. Kennedy needed to strike back. He asked his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, to find a long-term challenge that NASA might undertake, one that would allow sufficient time for the space agency to catch up to the Soviets, but one that was so difficult, and so spectacular, it could put America ahead in space for good. Kennedy needed something epic, and he needed to announce it soon. Just days after Gagarin returned from his trip, a group of about fifteen hundred Cuban exiles trained and armed by the Central Intelligence Agency launched a failed invasion of Soviet-backed socialist Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy, who’d approved the mission and then withdrawn his support, was devastated by the failure, knowing the damage it would cause to his reputation and that of the United States. “All my life I’ve known better than to depend on the experts,” he told Theodore Sorensen,

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

  “Forget the TV cameras,” Borman said. “It’s a distraction.” “No way,” Kraft said. “This is history, Frank. This belongs to the American people.” “We’re here to do a job,” Borman said. “That’s part of the job,” Kraft answered. Borman saw no yielding in Kraft’s eyes. The cameras would stay. Borman still objected that the work plan was too crowded, and Kraft didn’t deny it. There was a lot to do, maybe too much, but six days on a moonshot was an eyeblink, given the risks and expenditures required to get there, so they damn well had to get the most out of it. Anything less and none of them would be doing his job. That made sense to Borman. And with that, the plan was complete. The men checked their watches. It was five P.M. In just four hours, they’d designed a mission that would send the first human beings away from their home planet, have them orbit the Moon, then return home. In a year that was shaping up to be among the most fractious in the nation’s history, in which its citizens were rippling with anger and its institutions were no longer trusted, something sublime had occurred in this office. Shaking hands, Kraft and Borman had the same thought: This was a great afternoon. This was America at her best. The two men left the building together. As Borman walked past the other astronauts’ Corvettes and climbed into his 1955 Ford pickup, Kraft could only admire him. Even during this technical meeting, Borman had been true to form: direct, principled, and bullshit-free, unwilling to look past minor details or compromise around edges. To many, including Kraft, he seemed the ideal astronaut to command the riskiest flight NASA might ever undertake. To those who knew him best, it seemed Borman had arrived at a crossroads, not just in his career but in his life. Chapter Five

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

  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.

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

  The Union was an amalgam of British colonies and two former republics dominated by ‘Afrikaner’ descendants of colonists from the Netherlands. Afrikaners were proud of more than two centuries of struggle to establish themselves in a wilderness, buoyed up by a militant Reformed Protestantism which told them that God had delivered them this land, and determined to resist any extension of power to non-whites, whether African or Asian. Indeed, as the twentieth century wore on, the Afrikaners turned their military defeat by the British in the second Boer War (1899–1902) into a gradual rebuilding of Afrikaner ascendancy, removing what political rights had existed for non-whites in some parts of the new Union. Most British settlers, and successive British governments anxious to avoid confrontation, connived at the process, which culminated in the victory of an Afrikaner Nationalist party in the 1948 all-white general election. In the intervening years, Africans had quit white-initiated Churches on a massive scale to lead their own Christian lives; the segregation of races widened inexorably. After the Nationalist victory, successive governments, with cabinets stuffed with Dutch Reformed pastors and elders, turned this de facto situation into a system with its own crazy and cruel logic, known by the Afrikaans word apartheid, separateness. This was often glossed by the South African government as ‘separate development’. The separation of blacks, whites, Asians and ‘Coloureds’ was small-mindedly real; the development entirely one- sided.29 At the heart of apartheid was a great act of theft from the Churches: the entire mass-education system which they had built up from primary level to higher education, a beacon for Africa that had benefited students from as far away as Uganda. From 1953 all this was delivered into the hands of the government and became an instrument to hold black Africans back rather than advance them. The Roman Catholic Church resisted the confiscation the longest, but it too was eventually defeated by the effort of financing its independent schools.30 Around the world, as the cruelty and arbitrariness of apartheid became apparent, a chorus of protest went up. From Western governments it was muted, because South Africa had a strategic importance in the ‘Cold War’ against Communism which had been in operation from the late 1940s (a card played to the full by the Nationalist government, which talked much of Communism as the enemy of Christian civilization). The Soviet government did indeed use the struggle against apartheid to further its own interests, but on the Western side the bulk of opposition had to come from the Churches. They alone among the coalition of activists could effectively draw on their international fellowship to keep open overseas links for South Africans and help the beleaguered liberationist political party which Christians dominated, the African National Congress.

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

  their rearview mirrors, the astronauts could see throngs of people waving goodbye until they’d pulled out onto the Houston roads and there was only black night behind them. None of the men said much about his trip as he drove home. They just said how happy they were to be back, that all had gone as perfectly as could be imagined, and that they felt lucky. None of them was inclined to philosophize about the trip—not yet, anyway. Over the years, these men had become expert at coming home from missions, forgetting about the risks they’d just undertaken, getting on with their day. No other kind of men could have climbed into such unproven flying machines. These were the kind of men NASA had always wanted. When Borman, Lovell, and Anders opened their front doors, they found Christmas trees still glowing and presents waiting for them, and they knew that this was just how their homes had looked on Christmas Eve when they had been 240,000 miles away at the Moon, and they knew that this was how their homes would have looked no matter how long it might have taken them to return. The next morning, as the Bormans sat down for breakfast at the kitchen table, Frank asked the boys about football and hunting, and demanded to know why dog food had been left in the bowl while he was gone. As for Edwin’s broken thumb—by the look on their dad’s face, they knew there had better be a good explanation for that. When the family opened presents, Susan found a new dress Frank had bought for her before he’d left for the Moon. He’d always loved shopping with her, and knew her style and size. In the days that followed, it seemed the world talked only about Apollo 8. A New York Times editorial called it “the most fantastic voyage of all times.” The Washington Evening Star announced that “Man’s horizon now reaches to infinity.” The Los Angeles Times said the mission “boggles the mind.” And Time magazine rushed to change its iconic Man of the Year cover from THE DISSENTER to ASTRONAUTS ANDERS, BORMAN, AND LOVELL. Even the Soviet Union could not hide its admiration. Apollo 8, the nation said, “goes beyond the limits of a national achievement and marks a stage in the development of the universal culture of Earthmen.” In a congratulatory note, several Soviet cosmonauts lauded their counterparts