Realization

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 An Anomalous Jew: Paul Among Jews, Greeks, and Romans (2016)

  She believes that, when the Pauline self-identity texts are interpreted against the framework of ancient Jewish constructions of race, it appears that Paul saw himself as someone who was born a Jew but no longer was one—not in the sense that his Jewishness was entirely negated, but it had been transcended by a deeper reality. Paul's perspective on the Christ- event apocalyptically changed his relationship with God, with his fellow Jews, and his disposition toward racial “others.” According to Sechrest, “When Paul maintains that he can ‘become like a Jew; he clearly implies that he does not see himself as a Jew in the first place”; and “Paul and his Jewish-born and Gentile-born Christian family had become members of a new racial identity: ”* As will be seen later, I have a strong affinity with this position (see chapter 1), but some nuance might still be required, especially when it appears that the discontinuities between Paul and Judaism have been pressed too far.”” A Transformed Jew Writers among the NPP, diverse as they are, have attempted to break the shack- les of theological readings of Paul’s letters that cast the Jews in the role of incipient medieval Catholic legalists by a fresh reading of Paul that has several characteristics: 1. engages in historically sensitive reading of Paul’s letters that are in- sulated from anachronistic categories drawn from medieval and Reformed theologies; 2. reevaluates the soteriological patterns in Second Temple Judaism, with an accent placed on the nature of grace in Jewish religious belief; 3. undertakes a comparative study between Paul and other Jewish writers in relation to Jewish apocalypticism, first-century Jewish zeal and eth- nocentrism, and sectarian debates about the interpretation of Torah. To generalize, the result has been the portrayal of Paul as a more thorough- going Jewish figure whose Jewish worldview has been transformed rather than negated by his calling to be the apostle to the Gentiles. 28. Love L. Sechrest, A Former Jew: Paul and the Dialectics of Race (LNTS 410; London: T&T Clark, 2009), 156, 164. 29. See N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (COQG 4; London: SPCK, 2014), 1448. 12 Paul the Jew. . . of Sorts E. P. Sanders’s landmark publication Paul and Palestinian Judaism changed the landscape of Pauline studies. While previous scholars had hinted at similar con- clusions, Sanders effectively succeeded in ushering in a new view of Judaism and a new view of Paul within New Testament studies.*° Sanders did two important things. First, instead of studying Paul as an object of theology to answer Christian questions concerned with “Am I saved by what I believe or by what I do?” he opted for a comparative-religious approach that attempted to trace the similarities be- tween Paul's pattern of religion and the pattern of religion in Palestinian Judaism.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  Elinor thought it wisest to touch that point no more. She knew her sister’s temper. Opposition on so tender a subject would only attach her the more to her own opinion. But by an appeal to her affection for her mother, by representing the inconveniences which that indulgent mother must draw on herself, if (as would probably be the case) she consented to this increase of establishment, Marianne was shortly subdued; and she promised not to tempt her mother to such imprudent kindness by mentioning the offer, and to tell Willoughby when she saw him next, that it must be declined. She was faithful to her word; and when Willoughby called at the cottage, the same day, Elinor heard her express her disappointment to him in a low voice, on being obliged to forego the acceptance of his present. The reasons for this alteration were at the same time related, and they were such as to make further entreaty on his side impossible. His concern however was very apparent; and after expressing it with earnestness, he added, in the same low voice,—“But, Marianne, the horse is still yours, though you cannot use it now. I shall keep it only till you can claim it. When you leave Barton to form your own establishment in a more lasting home, Queen Mab shall receive you.” This was all overheard by Miss Dashwood; and in the whole of the sentence, in his manner of pronouncing it, and in his addressing her sister by her Christian name alone, she instantly saw an intimacy so decided, a meaning so direct, as marked a perfect agreement between them. From that moment she doubted not of their being engaged to each other; and the belief of it created no other surprise than that she, or any of their friends, should be left by tempers so frank, to discover it by accident. Margaret related something to her the next day, which placed this matter in a still clearer light. Willoughby had spent the preceding evening with them, and Margaret, by being left some time in the parlour with only him and Marianne, had had opportunity for observations, which, with a most important face, she communicated to her eldest sister, when they were next by themselves. “Oh, Elinor!” she cried, “I have such a secret to tell you about Marianne. I am sure she will be married to Mr. Willoughby very soon.” “You have said so,” replied Elinor, “almost every day since they first met on High-church Down; and they had not known each other a week, I believe, before you were certain that Marianne wore his picture round her neck; but it turned out to be only the miniature of our great uncle.” “But indeed this is quite another thing. I am sure they will be married very soon, for he has got a lock of her hair.” “Take care, Margaret. It may be only the hair of some great uncle of _his_.”

• From An Anomalous Jew: Paul Among Jews, Greeks, and Romans (2016)

  In his more recent magnum opus he has devoted a mammoth 1,500 pages to describing how Paul redrew the Jewish worldview, symbols, and story around Jesus the Messiah.*” The background story is that Israel was meant to be a light to the nations, but they recapitulated Adam’s sin by their disobe- dience and found themselves in a protracted state of exile, resulting in the infliction of covenant curses. Many groups within Israel, including zealous Pharisees like Saul of Tarsus, had expected the pathway to Israel’s deliverance to emerge through a regime of purity observance, separation from sinners and apostates, and militant resistance to pagan powers, which left them clinging to a “national righteousness.” Yet the scriptural story was that God would remain faithful to his covenant promises to Abraham and bless the nations through his “seed,” Israel and her Messiah, a promise that had come to pass in Jesus and his followers. Thus, Israel’s problem is a mixture of an Adamic state, an exilic curse, and an ethnocentric disposition.’ Given that narrative, Wright argues that Paul’s intellectual current is not against Jewish religion as much as it is a transformation of Jewish beliefs around a particular messianic eschatology.”* The sticking point was that Paul “believed that the Messiah had come, and had inaugurated the long-awaited new age, and they [i.e., his fellow Jews] did not.’*? While “Paul was born a Jew, and believed that the Jewish way of life and view of life were above all true,” even so, Paul had a “complex and ambiguous relation to those of his Jewish contemporaries who did not believe that Jesus of Nazareth had been raised from the dead.”’® Paul had been transformed by his encounter with the risen Christ, which included both a call to his apostolic vocation but also a conversion to seeing the Messiah's death and resurrection as redefining the goal and meaning of the Jewish way of life.” In terms of Paul’s Jewish identity, there is no question of an “erasure,” but a type of redundancy of the old order of life in light of the new event that had 2009), 522-30; idem, “Who Did Paul Think He Was? A Study of Jewish Christian Identity,” NTS 45 (1999): 174-93. 52. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God. 53. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, esp. 783-95 and 894-96, 1064-65, 1207-8, 1455. 54. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 1407-72. 55. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 1409. 56. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 1410-11 (italics original). 57.

• From An Anomalous Jew: Paul Among Jews, Greeks, and Romans (2016)

  First, there was scholarly recoil at the horrors of the European Holocaust, coupled with the observation that the gro- tesque evils of the Holocaust were at least partly perpetuated by a specifically Christian anti-Semitism. This point alone required a radical rethink of Paul and the Jewish people. Second, there was the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and several scholarly comparisons of Paul with later rabbinic literature, with the re- sult that Jewish sources eclipsed Hellenistic sources as the primary foil for Paul's thought. Third, the revolution in Pauline studies ushered in by E. P. Sanders in the 1970s spawned the subsequent “New Perspective on Paul” (NPP),’* which 10. Udo Schnelle (Apostle Paul: His Life and Theology, trans. M. Eugene Boring [Grand Rap- ids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005], 362): “Not only for Jews but for strict Jewish Christians, there was no longer any difference between Paul and an out-and-out apostate who had betrayed the true spiritual home of both Jews and Christians, the synagogue.” See discussion in John M. G. Barclay, “Paul among Diaspora Jews: Anomaly or Apostate?,” JSNT 60 (1995): 89-120; James D. G. Dunn, “Paul: Apostate or Apostle of Israel??? ZNW 89 (1998): 256-71. 1. One thinks here of a trajectory of scholarship including F. C. Baur, Adolf von Harnack, and Rudolf Bultmann. See Anders Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism: German Bib- lical Interpretation and the Jews, from Herder and Semler to Kittel and Bultmann (Leiden: Brill, 2009). 12. Adolf von Harnack, What Is Christianity? (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 176. 13. Rudolf Bultmann, Primitive Christianity in Its Contemporary Setting, trans. R. H. Fuller (London: Thames & Hudson, 1956), 59-71. 14. See E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparisen of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977); idem, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People. Paul the Jew .. . of Sorts took as its starting point the view that Paul’s problem with Judaism was not “legalism” but something else like “ethnocentrism.” Scholars like James Dunn and N. T. Wright, each with their own particular vision, proffered a portrait of Paul that entailed a heavy revision of traditional Protestant interpretation in light of a fresh reading of Paul within his Jewish context.

• From The City of God

  244 Books That Matter: The City of God ›In books 1–10, Augustine shows us the pagans’ attempts to find a safe harbor via various bad ways of seeking happiness, before reaching the true home. Each way must be traveled, though we find out why only at the conclusion in book 10: In the journeying, the traveler learns in a way he could never learn by simply being told. ›The second parallel is Augustine’s own Confessions, which similarly structures conversion as a wandering amid the possibilities of pagan life, dismantling their promise, and ending with a turn to the Christian story. Structure of the Argument—Negative Apologetics „Now, we should say something about the structure of the overall argument of these first 10 books. It is fair, if a bit shallow, to call these books an apology; that is, a defense. In Augustine’s own time, a genre of apologetic writings existed in Christianity. ›Typically these consisted of what are called negative apologetics, wherein a writer takes up a series of challenges to Christian belief, and shows them to lack the power that their proponents think they have. ›We also sometimes see positive apologetics, an argument that attempts to provide its audience with some fresh positive reasons for belief, intended to convince others who are not yet convinced of the truth of the Christian faith. „For right now, let’s focus on the negative apologetics. It is a fundamentally defensive project. In fact, one of the problems of this sort of negative apologetic is that it is so defensive as to be at times tempted toward simply rejecting the proposals put to them by others on those others’ own terms. This argument grants the legitimacy of the terms on which the debate is based.

• From The City of God

  15 Now in part this is due to Augustine’s enormous mental control over the material, and I hope at many times in these lectures to make you realize what kind of mental control that was. But it’s also due to the fact that, while it began as a defensive apology, its motivating energy changed over time, so much so that in later books, in later years, the sack of Rome could be mentioned without any visible emotion from Augustine at all. It had become a trauma metabolized into insight, coolly recollected in tranquility. Maybe time or wisdom allowed the second stage of Augustine’s work to emerge and in some ways to frame and contextualize the first stage, securing the whole from being a mere reaction. Perhaps Augustine knew from the beginning what would be eventually required, for by its final books it has become a summa of Augustine’s thought, addressed to his fellow Roman Christians who are troubled by the pagans’ charges, confident those accusations are wrong but confused about their condition and their station and their duties in the post-Constantinian world after the sack of Rome. How can one be a Roman—which for Augustine and his audience effectively meant being a civilized person—and a Christian? How much care should be given to the world, and in what way? We are living in Christian times, and yet the Second Coming has been indefinitely postponed. What are we going to do now in the interim? Understanding this latter aim is very important to understanding the tone of the later books, and the way in which Augustine presents arguments, and indeed a whole way of thinking about and within Christianity, some of which involves dogmatic assertion, some of which involves confessing ignorance, and some of which involves a very interesting openness to uncertainty, and perhaps even humility— strange in a bishop or a professor. Indeed, Augustine’s vehemence in critiquing the pagans, in the first part, is interestingly and intentionally in tension with his ambiguity and tentativeness in offering a Christian view in the second part. We’ll have reason to think about that, and what it says about how Lecture 1 Transcript—Your Passport to The City of God

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  At the end of the first day of discussion, which took approximately eight hours, the young woman agreed to sleep over at her family’s home, turned off her cell phone, and gave it to her mother. We also asked for her commitment not to communicate with anyone associated with the Call of God. She agreed to these terms at the urging of her family and husband. Defining a Cult We spent the following day discussing the nucleus for the definition of a destructive cult by examining historical cults. We focused largely on cults that claimed their behavior was based on a true understanding of the Bible and God. For example, we discussed cult leader David Koresh and his group known as the Waco Davidians. The Davidians firmly believed Koresh received special revelation from God. They also accepted him as virtually the exclusive means of truly understanding the Bible and God. The Waco Davidians remained loyal to David Koresh, even when he called on them to do battle with government law enforcement. They then endured a long standoff with authorities, which ended in tragedy. Eighty Davidians, including many children, decided to die in a fire rather than leave their leader. We then talked about the notorious cult known as Jonestown, which remains the most horrific cult murder/suicide in modern history, claiming the lives of more than nine hundred people. Cult leader Jim Jones, like David Koresh, had a penchant for quoting and twisting scriptures from the Bible and then connecting them to chosen current events. Jones did so to manipulate and control his followers. I then emphasized that both Koresh and Jones essentially saw themselves as prophets functioning in a pivotal historical role God had ordained to save humanity. Both leaders emphatically told their followers that the end of the world as they knew it was approaching. This doomsday scenario produced a kind of crisis mentality, binding the groups closely together and engendering greater dependence on the leader for a sense of security and safety. In this context doomsday predictions can be seen simply as a device cult leaders use to manipulate and control their followers. We also discussed the evident mind-set of the Waco Davidians and people at Jonestown. Was it possible for any of them to disagree with David Koresh or Jim Jones? And if they did openly question the authority or revelation of these leaders, wouldn’t this have been tantamount to questioning God or rejecting the Bible? Despite the controversy surrounding cult deprogrammer Ted Patrick and involuntary deprogramming, it was Patrick who first developed this questioning approach during the 1970s. He said, “The only thing I do is shoot them challenging questions.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 5. --Of the Resurrection of the Flesh, Which Some Refuse to Believe, Though the World at Large Believes It. But granting that this was once incredible, behold, now, the world has come to the belief that the earthly body of Christ was received up into heaven. Already both the learned and unlearned have believed in the resurrection of the flesh and its ascension to the heavenly places, while only a very few either of the educated or uneducated are still staggered by it. If this is a credible thing which is believed, then let those who do not believe see how stolid they are; and if it is incredible, then this also is an incredible thing, that what is incredible should have received such credit. Here then we have two incredibles,--to wit, the resurrection of our body to eternity, and that the world should believe so incredible a thing; and both these incredibles the same God predicted should come to pass before either had as yet occurred. We see that already one of the two has come to pass, for the world has believed what was incredible; why should we despair that the remaining one shall also come to pass, and that this which the world believed, though it was incredible, shall itself occur? For already that which was equally incredible has come to pass, in the world's believing an incredible thing. Both were incredible: the one we see accomplished, the other we believe shall be; for both were predicted in those same Scriptures by means of which the world believed. And the very manner in which the world's faith was won is found to be even more incredible if we consider it. Men uninstructed in any branch of a liberal education, without any of the refinement of heathen learning, unskilled in grammar, not armed with dialectic, not adorned with rhetoric, but plain fishermen, and very few in number,--these were the men whom Christ sent with the nets of faith to the sea of this world, and thus took out of every race so many fishes, and even the philosophers themselves, wonderful as they are rare. Let us add, if you please, or because you ought to be pleased, this third incredible thing to the two former. And now we have three incredibles, all of which have yet come to pass. It is incredible that Jesus Christ should have risen in the flesh and ascended with flesh into heaven; it is incredible that the world should have believed so incredible a thing; it is incredible that a very few men, of mean birth and the lowest rank, and no education, should have been able so effectually to persuade the world, and even its learned men, of so incredible a thing. Of these three incredibles, the parties with whom we are debating refuse to believe the first; they cannot refuse to see the second, which they are unable to account for if they do not believe the third.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  Here ceased the rapid flow of her self-reproving spirit; and Elinor, impatient to soothe, though too honest to flatter, gave her instantly that praise and support which her frankness and her contrition so well deserved. Marianne pressed her hand and replied,— “You are very good.—The future must be my proof. I have laid down my plan, and if I am capable of adhering to it—my feelings shall be governed and my temper improved. They shall no longer worry others, nor torture myself. I shall now live solely for my family. You, my mother, and Margaret, must henceforth be all the world to me; you will share my affections entirely between you. From you, from my home, I shall never again have the smallest incitement to move; and if I do mix in other society, it will be only to show that my spirit is humbled, my heart amended, and that I can practise the civilities, the lesser duties of life, with gentleness and forbearance. As for Willoughby—to say that I shall soon or that I shall ever forget him, would be idle. His remembrance can be overcome by no change of circumstances or opinions. But it shall be regulated, it shall be checked by religion, by reason, by constant employment.” She paused—and added in a low voice, “If I could but know his heart, everything would become easy.” Elinor, who had now been for some time reflecting on the propriety or impropriety of speedily hazarding her narration, without feeling at all nearer decision than at first, heard this; and perceiving that as reflection did nothing, resolution must do all, soon found herself leading to the fact. She managed the recital, as she hoped, with address; prepared her anxious listener with caution; related simply and honestly the chief points on which Willoughby grounded his apology; did justice to his repentance, and softened only his protestations of present regard. Marianne said not a word.—She trembled, her eyes were fixed on the ground, and her lips became whiter than even sickness had left them. A thousand inquiries sprung up from her heart, but she dared not urge one. She caught every syllable with panting eagerness; her hand, unknowingly to herself, closely pressed her sister’s, and tears covered her cheeks.

• From The City of God

  260 Books That Matter: The City of God Even the Stoics and the Neoplatonists, combining Roman psychology and Greek cosmology, were only able to imagine a rival alternative to contemporary social life in terms of the world that they saw around them. But none of them saw the world itself, the conditions that determined the fundamentals of our existence, as susceptible to radical transformation, a cosmic revolution, what Saint Paul calls a new creation. That imagining they left to Augustine. He was the first to see society as a whole, as an object of full analytic interest and possible of complete critique. This is really a very crucial moment in the development of what we can call a critical mindset towards the received and unreflective inhabitation of a given social world, and it is so in two ways. First, as a way to imagine the whole constellation of what we would recognize as human society as contingent, as able to be evaluated as better or worse for human flourishing, and as potentially changeable. Remember Augustine critiquing Varro’s sanctification of money and war, and even gruesome Roman sexual practices. Second, Augustine is unusual also in that he has a very historical framing of the issue. That is to say, we can all admit that there is a proximate history from which we derive—in Augustine’s case, the story of Rome—but for reasons of differences of value, that history is lost to us as a usable past: you can’t go home again. What do we do now? We can’t reattach ourselves to that past. Well, in fact, this is a very modern way to imagine the problem of historical change. It’s not always been that way. And, in a way, Augustine is the first person to imagine it so; he’s the first, in this sense, modern thinker. After him, we’re all asking versions of the following question: What do we do once Rome has fallen? Remember our earlier comments about the loss of innocence, moral or spiritual innocence. Augustine is the first one for whom the classical world is not simply an unquestionable context but a complicated legacy of inheritance. That past is gone. Something is lost, and we

• From The City of God

  259 Lecture 12 Transcript—Augustine’s Critique of Rome (Books 1–10) people of Rome. Most centrally, for Augustine, the Jews, the people Israel, still have a distinct role as the people Israel in the Christian economy of salvation, and so their existence until the end of time is something that Christians should accept, while Rome is just one more worldly excrescence of the stock of Cain, one more terrestrial consequence of that primordial brother-murder, and it bears no more distinct salvific significance than does a mountain or a forest or a weather front. Equally importantly, Augustine seems to be the first thinker—not just the first Christian thinker, the first one altogether—to offer something like a fundamental critique of the whole sociocultural system that is his society—that is, in his case, Rome. This kind of critique is a major change in critical thinking and social criticism in the ancient world. It offers, we may say, a more radical kind of social analysis and sociopolitical critique than heretofore had ever been practiced. Let me put it this way. Earlier Roman social critics—writers such as Tacitus, Sallust, and Cicero—typically called Rome back to an earlier age of authentic virtue, or at least an age of a less depraved parody of the virtues that they purported to profess. And these critics gave little evidence of believing that such a return was impossible. Their world remained in organic continuity with the whole history of Rome, and with an imagined ideal state that was still possible for people to inhabit. Meanwhile, Greek critics such as Plato were not really that radical either. Plato was always aware of Socrates’s unjust execution for impiety for failing to care for the city in the proper way, and so Plato spent the rest of his days imagining versions of a city that would be more worthy of Socrates, that could hear what he had been trying to tell them. But this imagining always remained rooted in the idea of the polis, the small city-state, with a small philosophical elite and a large class of laboring drones. Plato never imagined a new kind of society altogether.

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

  With all the suddenness and radicalness of the transformation there is nevertheless a bond of unity between Saul the Pharisee and Paul the Christian. It was the same person with the same end in view, but in opposite directions. We must remember that he was not a worldly, indifferent, cold-blooded man, but an intensely religious man. While persecuting the church, he was "blameless" as touching the righteousness of the law.372 He resembled the rich youth who had observed the commandments, yet lacked the one things needful, and of whom Mark says that Jesus "loved him."373 He was not converted from infidelity to faith, but from a lower faith to a purer faith, from the religion of Moses to the religion of Christ, from the theology of the law to the theology of the gospel. How shall a sinner be justified before the tribunal of a holy God? That was with him the question of questions before as well as after his conversion; not a scholastic question merely, but even far more a moral and religious question. For righteousness, to the Hebrew mind, is conformity to the will of God as expressed in his revealed law, and implies life eternal as its reward. The honest and earnest pursuit of righteousness is the connecting link between the two periods of Paul’s life. First he labored to secure it by works of the law, then obedience of faith. What he had sought in vain by his fanatical zeal for the traditions of Judaism, he found gratuitously and at once by trust in the cross of Christ: pardon and peace with God. By the discipline of the Mosaic law as a tutor he was led beyond its restraints and prepared for manhood and freedom. Through the law he died to the law that he might live unto God. His old self, with its lusts, was crucified with Christ, so that henceforth he lived no longer himself, but Christ lived in him.374 He was mystically identified with his Saviour and had no separate existence from him. The whole of Christianity, the whole of life, was summed up to him in the one word: Christ. He determined to know nothing save Jesus Christ and Him crucified for our sins, and risen again for our justification.375

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

  But there was a sale on nylons, three pair for $1.25, or fifty cents a pair. The Korean War was already pushing prices back up, and this was a good buy. Ginger tried to decide if she wanted to spend that much. “Come on, girl, get a pair with me,” she urged. “They’re real cheap, and your legs are going to get cold, even in pants.” “I hate nylons. I can’t stand the way they feel on my legs.” What I didn’t say was that I couldn’t stand the bleached-out color that the so-called neutral shade of all cheap nylons gave my legs. Ginger looked at me, pleadingly. And I relented. It wasn’t her fault I was feeling so out of sorts all of a sudden, so disjointed. Crispus Attucks . Something had slipped out of place. “Oh, buy them,” I said. “You want them and you can always use them. ’Sides, your mother will never let them go to waste.” I ran my fingers over the fine mesh of the display stockings hung from a T-rack on the counter. The dry slippery touch of nylon and silk filled me with distrust and suspicion. The effortlessness with which those materials passed through my fingers made me uneasy. They were illusive, confusing, not to be depended upon. The texture of wool and cotton with its resistance and unevenness, allowed, somehow, for more honesty, a more straightforward connection through touch. Crispus Attucks . Most of all, I hated the pungent, lifeless, and ungiving smell of nylon, its adamant refusal to become human or evocative in odor. Its harshness was never tampered by the smells of the wearer. No matter how long the clothing was worn, nor in what weather, a person dressed in nylon always approached my nose like a warrior approaching a tourney, clad in chain-mail. I fingered the nylon, but my mind hammered elsewhere. Crispus Attucks, Boston ?! Ginger knew . I prided myself on my collection of odds and ends of random information, more and less useful, gathered through avid curiosity and endless reading. I stored the garnered tidbits on the back-burner of consciousness, to be pulled forward on any appropriate occasion. I was used to being the one who knew some fact that everybody else in the conversation had not yet learned. It was not that I believed I knew EVERYTHING, just more than most people around me. Ginger handed three pair of tissue-wrapped stockings to the woman behind the counter, and stood waiting for her change. I wondered where that half-dill pickle had come from. Crispus Attucks . How was that possible? I had spent four years at Hunter High School, supposedly the best public high school in New York City, with the most academically advanced and intellectually accurate education available, for “preparing young women for college and career.” I had been taught by some of the most highly considered historians in the country.

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

  I turned off the lamp over her head, pulled the covers over her, and went on to work. Que Será, Que Será, Whatever will be, will be… Spring came in with extraordinary fervor, and the sounds of Doris Day’s wide-mouthed rendition of “Whatever Will Be, Will Be” resounded from every jukebox and soda fountain radio. One brisk Sunday evening in early April, Muriel and I ran into my old school friend Jill crossing East Houston Street, huddled into a worn pea coat two sizes too big for her. I had not seen her for almost two years, since she and The Branded had used my Spring Street apartment after I left for Stamford to work. Both poets, renegades, and very determined young women, there was much that connected Jill and me across our differences. There was also a lot of unfinished business that separated us. It made us wary of each other, at the same time as we valued each other’s insights. Jill was on her way to her father’s law office downtown to use his electric typewriters after business hours. Muriel and I joined her, and for several Sundays thereafter, we typed our poems and themes on elegant IBM machines. There was a guarded truce between Jill and me, as if we had decided to forget whatever had occurred before without speaking of it, as if the connections and the history we shared were enough to bridge the differences between us. At least Jill was a fighter too, another confirmed outsider. As infants, we had grown up in the subliminal echo of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s determinedly optimistic fireside chats. We each had absorbed some of his prescription for progress: When times are hard, do something. If it works, do it some more. If it does not work, do something else. But keep doing. The next week, coming out of my german class one evening, I heard someone calling me by name. Turning, surprised, I saw Toni, ex-varsity star of Hunter High School. We had only been bare acquaintances before, but here in the inhospitable wastelands of Hunter College, we greeted each other’s familiar face warmly and with welcome relief. “Let’s go for coffee next week,” I suggested, as the bell rang for the next class and we dashed for the elevator. Toni laughed and shook her close-cropped blonde head. “Why coffee? How about a drink! There’s a great bar downtown on the West Side called the Sea Colony. We can drive down after class, and it’s not too far from where you live, is it?” So Toni was gay. Another welcome not-quite-surprise. And she had her own car, no mean accomplishment three years out of high school. Toni was by now a registered nurse, teaching a course in Hunter’s nursing program once a week. I was amazed.

• From The City of God

  367 Lecture 17 Transcript—Augustine’s Scriptural History (Books 15–17) So he says that some stories should be read as vast, as expressive of fundamental historical themes. Thus the story of Babel is not just about Babylon, it’s about the fundamental contest between sin and grace in this world, and thus of his whole two cities schema. Here the moralizing energy helps us see the pathologies manifest in one instance are, in fact, abstractable from the details of that context and generalizable across many settings. We do this all the time, of course. So, for example, we consider building nuclear weapons kind of like opening Pandora ’s Box—there’s an analogy drawn right there. Now, note that although these reading strategies move tactically in opposite directions—one to diminish, one to expand the significance of these events—both are in the service of a single strategic aim. The first example diminishes the text; it makes it seem less important or central to the narrative. The second amplifies the text; it makes it seem larger, more allegorically revelatory than its literal details might suggest. But both tactics serve the single strategic aim of showing his audience how the Bible can offer a moral and spiritual frame within which the past, and the present, and the future should be understood. The aim here is to show how this imaginative framework displayed in the Bible can remarkably illuminate our world. Recall Augustine’s repeated attention to the pagan Roman poet Vergil throughout previous books of The City. He knew the power Vergil had over the imagination and the understanding of the Romans, Pagan and Christian alike, in his audience. He knew the power Vergil had over his own imagination, in fact. Here in these books, we see the fullest unfolding of the contrasting imaginative frame—the frame provided by the Bible. For Augustine, the Bible is the true moral lens that lets us see the world aright, whereas Vergil’s stories warp our vision and distort our affective responses. “To learn to accept God’s grace, we must replace the old Roman stories we were once taught,” he says, “with these new stories, for they are the true ones.” This is, in short, an allegorical mode of reading meant to cultivate in us what we can call a typological imagination.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  It is quite possible to say that the price a Negro pays for becoming articulate is to find himself, at length, with nothing to be articulate about. (“You taught me language,” says Caliban to Prospero, “and my profit on’t is I know how to curse.”) Consider: the tremendous social activity that this problem generates imposes on whites and Negroes alike the necessity of looking forward, of working to bring about a better day. This is fine, it keeps the waters troubled; it is all, indeed, that has made possible the Negro’s progress. Nevertheless, social affairs are not generally speaking the writer’s prime concern, whether they ought to be or not; it is absolutely necessary that he establish between himself and these affairs a distance which will allow, at least, for clarity, so that before he can look forward in any meaningful sense, he must first be allowed to take a long look back. In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly. I know, in any case, that the most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage. At the same time I had no other heritage which I could possibly hope to use—I had certainly been unfitted for the jungle or the tribe. I would have to appropriate these white centuries, I would have to make them mine—I would have to accept my special attitude, my special place in this scheme—otherwise I would have no place in any scheme. What was the most difficult was the fact that I was forced to admit something I had always hidden from myself, which the American Negro has had to hide from himself as the price of his public progress; that I hated and feared white people.

• From The City of God

  The world had changed immeasurably since he was a boy and seemed very likely to change even more. And he was right. A man born early in Augustine's Christian career could have, as a child, seen and lauded Theodosius, the last great emperor, who died in 395; and then lived on into his 80s, this young man, to see the final Westerner with a claim to the title Imperator, Romulus Augustulus—little more than a boy of 14 or 15—be ignominiously deposed and sent contemptuously out of Ravenna into exile, to live in a castle, by the barbarian chief Odoacer in September of 476. People cope, of course, and what we imagine as tectonic changes were probably not felt in their full radicality at all moments by everyone who had managed to live through them. Historians who insist that the fall of Rome is too melodramatic, and ideologically and self-congratulatory a description for late antiquity, they have a point. Civilization went on. No one lived in caves huddled around open fires, wearing animal furs and Viking helmets. But then again, something did change—something momentous. The barbarians stopped becoming Roman. Cultural change became a two-way street. Roma turned out to be not so aeterna—eternal—after all. Furthermore, the barbarians were convertible to Christianity as a civilizing step up for them, not—as was the case with the old Roman pagans—as an embarrassing fall from some noble sublimity. So with the barbarians’ ascendancy came a change in Christianity’s cultural status. Legally it had been long allowed, then endorsed, then prescribed; but now it gained cultural status as tradition. And insofar as the barbarians wanted access to the political and existential

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

  I didn’t know you was cullud!” I went around telling that story for a while, although a lot of my friends couldn’t see why I thought it was funny. But this is all about how very difficult it is at times for people to see who or what they are looking at, particularly when they don’t want to . Or maybe it does take one to know one . Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography 24 It seemed preordained that Muriel and I should meet. When Ginger and I had been getting to know each other over the cutting-room X-ray machines in the heat and stink and noise of Keystone Electronics, she was constantly telling me about this crazy kid called Mo who had worked at my machine a year or so before. (It was her way of letting me know that she knew I was gay and it was all right with her.) “Yeah, she sure was a lot like you.” “How do you mean; did she look like me?” “Very funny.” Ginger cut her doll-baby-round eyes at me. “She’s white. Italian. But both you-all have that easy way about you, and that soft way of talking. ’Cept you’re this slick kitty from the city and she’s a strictly local product. Used to say her father never let her smell the night air ’til she was eighteen. “She wrote poetry, too. All-a-time, even on lunch hour.” “Oh.” Somehow I knew there was more. What Ginger couldn’t bring herself to tell me was that Muriel liked girls. I saw Ginger one last time before I left for Mexico. She told me that her friend Mo had come back to live in Stamford because she had had a nervous breakdown in New York. During the time I was in Mexico, Muriel was slowly crawling out from under the basket of shock treatments she had been thrust into. When she began seeing her friends again in Stamford, Ginger made sure she told her about “this crazy kid from New York City who worked your old machine a year before and who wrote poetry, too.” When I returned to New York from Mexico, I returned full of sun and great determination to re-order my life and someday get back to Mexico and, of course, Eudora. I moved back into my old Seventh Street walk-up and started the discouraging work of job-hunting. One Sunday evening, the telephone rang, and Rhea answered. “One of your cool-voiced young women,” she said, handing me the phone with a smile. It was Ginger, whose smoky tones sounded anything but cool to me. “H’ya doin’, kiddo?” she began. “I have somebody here who wants to meet you.” There was a short pause and then a little chuckle, and then a high, nervous voice saying, “Hello? Audre?”

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  We have, as it seems to me, in this most mechanical and interlocking of civilizations, attempted to lop this creature down to the status of a time-saving invention. He is not, after all, merely a member of a Society or a Group or a deplorable conundrum to be explained by Science. He is—and how old-fashioned the words sound!—something more than that, something resolutely indefinable, unpredictable. In overlooking, denying, evading his complexity—which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves—we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation which is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over all other claims. What is today parroted as his Responsibility—which seems to mean that he must make formal declaration that he is involved in, and affected by, the lives of other people and to say something improving about this somewhat self-evident fact—is, when he believes it, his corruption and our loss; moreover, it is rooted in, interlocked with and intensifies this same mechanization. Both Gentleman’s Agreement and The Postman Always Rings Twice exemplify this terror of the human being, the determination to cut him down to size. And in Uncle Tom’s Cabin we may find foreshadowing of both: the formula created by the necessity to find a lie more palatable than the truth has been handed down and memorized and persists yet with a terrible power. It is interesting to consider one more aspect of Mrs. Stowe’s novel, the method she used to solve the problem of writing about a black man at all. Apart from her lively procession of field hands, house niggers, Chloe, Topsy, etc.—who are the stock, lovable figures presenting no problem—she has only three other Negroes in the book. These are the important ones and two of them may be dismissed immediately, since we have only the author’s word that they are Negro and they are, in all other respects, as white as she can make them. The two are George and Eliza, a married couple with a wholly adorable child—whose quaintness, incidentally, and whose charm, rather put one in mind of a darky bootblack doing a buck and wing to the clatter of condescending coins. Eliza is a beautiful, pious hybrid, light enough to pass—the heroine of Quality might, indeed, be her reincarnation—differing from the genteel mistress who has overseered her education only in the respect that she is a servant. George is darker, but makes up for it by being a mechanical genius, and is, moreover, sufficiently un-Negroid to pass through town, a fugitive from his master, disguised as a Spanish gentleman, attracting no attention whatever beyond admiration. They are a race apart from Topsy.

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  Specifically, it is true that “we most prefer to say yes to the requests of someone we know and like.”1165 For example, as Cialdini points out, “how much more difficult it is for us to turn down a charity request when it comes from a friend or a neighbor.” The young man admitted that his relationships in Amway with people he liked had greatly contributed to his growing commitment and often served as a kind of organizational glue. He also acknowledged the powerful influence authority figures, such as emeralds and diamonds, exerted in Amway. We examined the “deep-seated sense of duty to authority within us all.”1166 Cialdini notes, “We are trained from birth that obedience to proper authority is right and disobedience is wrong.”1167 How had the powerful authority figures in Amway used the aura of authority to influence the thinking of distributors? At this point during the third day, the young man broke down and began crying. He said that before our discussion began he’d had no idea how the organization manipulated him. But now that he had examined the process of coercive persuasion and the techniques commonly used to gain undue influence, he felt that he had been brainwashed and that this realization was deeply disturbing. I explained that the process people often call brainwashing is really quite subtle and comes on gradually in increments that are deceptive. I added that typically those the process exploits are therefore actually unaware of what is going on, and in this sense they never knowingly give their fully informed consent to go through such a process. As the third day continued, we expanded our discussion of why people stay in multilevel marketing schemes such as Amway, even when they lose money or earn a minimal income that is inconsistent with the time they invest. Cialdini describes “our nearly obsessive desire to be (and to appear) consistent with what we have already done.”1168 This is accomplished through “personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision.”1169 This is the basis for the principles of “commitment and consistency,” which Cialdini says can become the “hobgoblins of the mind.”1170 We now discussed how the young man’s hobgoblins of commitment had effectively anchored him to Amway so that he felt locked in by his commitment despite the financial setbacks and lack of meaningful income. The young man also explained that he had experienced pressure to remain—personally through his own sense of commitment and externally through other Amway distributors and “uplines.” This, in part, explained his seeming determination to remain loyal to Amway despite whatever hardships occurred and the serious questions his concerned family and friends raised about the business.