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 The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I slipped away from Arthur next day and walked in the Park—it was perhaps the straight lines of its avenues that exerted some calming attraction over me. As a child, on visits to Marden, my grandfather’s house, days had been marked by walks along the great beech ride which ran unswervingly for miles over hilly country and gave out at a ha-ha and a high empty field. Away to the left you could make out in winter the chicken-coops and outside privies of a village that had once been part of the estate. Then we turned round, and came home, my sister and I, spoilt by my grandparents, feeling decidedly noble and aloof. It was not until years later that I came to understand how recent and synthetic this nobility was—the house itself bought up cheap after the war, half ruined by use as an officers’ training school, and then as a military hospital. Today was one of those April days, still and overcast, that felt pregnant with some immense idea, and suggested, as I roamed across from one perspective to another, that this was merely a doldrums, and would last only until something else was ready to happen. Perhaps it was simply summer, and the certainty of warmth, the world all out of doors, drinking in the open air. The trees were budding, and that odd inside-out logic was evolving whereby the Park, just at the time it becomes hot and popular, shuts itself off from the outside world of buildings and traffic with the shady density of its foliage. But I felt the threat too of some realisation about life, something obscurely disagreeable and perhaps deserved. Though I didn’t believe in such things, I was a perfect Gemini, a child of the ambiguous early summer, tugged between two versions of myself, one of them the hedonist and the other—a little in the background these days—an almost scholarly figure with a faintly puritanical set to the mouth. And there were deeper dichotomies, differing stories—one the ‘account of myself’, the sex-sharp little circuits of discos and pubs and cottages, the sheer crammed, single-minded repetition of my empty months; the other the ‘romance of myself’, which transformed all these mundanities with a protective glow, as if from my earliest days my destiny had indeed been charmed, so that I was both of the world and beyond its power, like the pantomime character Wordsworth describes, with ‘Invisible’ written on his chest.

• From Branded: Brainwashed Inside NXIVM (2020)

  1369 01:08:43,519 --> 01:08:45,287 [Kelly] I think, at the end of the day, 1370 01:08:45,387 --> 01:08:50,326 that he was trying to create an army of women through DOS 1371 01:08:50,426 --> 01:08:52,628 to do his bidding. 1372 01:08:52,728 --> 01:08:54,830 [Narrator] But Raniere's secret sect 1373 01:08:54,930 --> 01:08:57,600 will soon be his undoing. 1374 01:08:57,700 --> 01:09:00,202 The branding is the part of DOS and the part of NXIVM 1375 01:09:00,302 --> 01:09:03,439 that ultimately brings Keith Raniere down. 1376 01:09:05,774 --> 01:09:06,842 [woman screaming] 1377 01:09:06,942 --> 01:09:08,777 [Narrator] Despite the pain and humiliation 1378 01:09:08,878 --> 01:09:10,646 of the branding ritual, 1379 01:09:10,746 --> 01:09:13,415 it's estimated that hundreds of women become members of 1380 01:09:13,516 --> 01:09:16,719 NXIVM's secret sorority, DOS, 1381 01:09:16,819 --> 01:09:20,890 led by Smallville actress Allison Mack. 1382 01:09:20,990 --> 01:09:24,226 [Robin] The question is, why did they stay? 1383 01:09:24,326 --> 01:09:26,362 Why not just say no? 1384 01:09:26,462 --> 01:09:28,998 Why do we stay in bad relationships 1385 01:09:29,098 --> 01:09:30,566 when we know it's a bad relationship, 1386 01:09:30,666 --> 01:09:32,268 and we know we should be getting out, 1387 01:09:32,368 --> 01:09:34,003 and we're still there? 1388 01:09:34,103 --> 01:09:37,006 It's the same thing with cults. 1389 01:09:37,106 --> 01:09:38,307 [Narrator] For Kelly Thiel, 1390 01:09:38,407 --> 01:09:42,545 that realization comes in June 2017. 1391 01:09:42,645 --> 01:09:45,581 I got a phone call from Canada. 1392 01:09:45,681 --> 01:09:48,117 A woman called me, and she said, 1393 01:09:48,217 --> 01:09:50,319 "Have you seen the Frank Report?" 1394 01:09:50,419 --> 01:09:52,221 And I said, "What are you talking about?" 1395 01:09:52,321 --> 01:09:53,722 She said, "You have to read the Frank Report. 1396 01:09:53,822 --> 01:09:55,391 You're not gonna believe what's going on." 1397 01:09:55,491 --> 01:09:56,859 So she sent it to me. 1398 01:09:56,959 --> 01:09:57,993 I clicked the link. 1399 01:09:58,093 --> 01:09:59,395 The Frank Report came up. 1400 01:09:59,495 --> 01:10:02,765 And it was an article talking about Keith Raniere 1401 01:10:02,865 --> 01:10:05,601 and this thing called DOS. 1402 01:10:05,701 --> 01:10:07,770 [Narrator] The Frank Report is an online blog 1403 01:10:07,870 --> 01:10:12,608 created by the private investigator Frank Parlato. 1404 01:10:12,708 --> 01:10:14,610 On June 5, 2017, 1405 01:10:14,710 --> 01:10:17,613 Parlato publishes this article, entitled 1406 01:10:17,713 --> 01:10:20,649 "Branded Slaves and Master Raniere," 1407 01:10:20,749 --> 01:10:25,354 revealing NXIVM's branding rituals to the world. 1408 01:10:25,454 --> 01:10:29,391 That was the beginning of me grappling with 1409 01:10:29,491 --> 01:10:31,694 I was possibly in a cult. 1410 01:10:32,861 --> 01:10:34,563 [Narrator] The exposé is based in part 1411 01:10:34,663 --> 01:10:37,633 on the anonymous account of Stargate SG-1 actress 1412 01:10:37,733 --> 01:10:42,538 Sarah Edmondson, a branded member of DOS. 1413 01:10:42,638 --> 01:10:46,108 Eventually, Edmondson reconsiders her anonymity 1414 01:10:46,208 --> 01:10:48,611 and goes to a bigger platform-- 1415 01:10:48,711 --> 01:10:50,779 this time, on the record,

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  Some might say that (1) obeying the commandment is good for our spiritual life because it carves out a space in our busy schedule to study God's word and to worship with the body of believers and demonstrates our willingness to be obedient; (2) obeying the commandment is good for the health of our family because it carves out a space in our busy schedule to be with them at worship, share a Sunday meal with them, and catch up on what is going on in their lives; and (3) obeying the commandment is good for our physical health because it carves out a space in our busy schedule to allow the body and mind to rest for the grueling week of hard work, it refreshes us so that we do not burn out working like dogs, and it forces us to refocus on the important things in life, such as our relationship with God. While sermons on this passage will vary, the above outline is typical of what we might expect to hear in any given Sunday morning homily. Such a sermon would be soothing balm to the busy and overworked lives of most who are white middle- and upper-class. Nevertheless, how would this same passage be preached from the underside of the U.S. economic system, read with the eyes of the marginalized? Justo González provides us with an excellent example. He recounts the sermon preached at a church composed mostly of very poor parishioners. The minister began by asking how many within the congregation worked six days last week? Five days? Four days? Few in the congregation were able to raise their hands to any of these questions. Then the preacher asked how many would have wanted to work six days last week but were unable to find employment. Almost every hand went up. To this response, the minister asked, “How, then, are we to obey the law of God that commands that we shall work six days, when we cannot even find work for a single day?”3 This interpretation subverts the dominant culture's interpretation, which focuses solely on taking a day off. The poor teach those with middle- and upper-class privilege that God's third commandment is more than the capricious imposition of a Deity to choose one day in seven to do nothing. Rather, God establishes symmetry and balance in the created order. Working six days is counterbalanced with resting one. When we read this text from the position of economic privilege, we assume the privilege of being employed. We are blinded to the reality that segments of our society lack opportunities for gainful employment due to their race, ethnicity, gender, or class. By imposing upon the text our assumptions of class privilege, we are oblivious to the first part of the commandment, “Six days you shall labor.” By listening to the voices of the disenfranchised, we are confronted with our society's failure in keeping this commandment. Our entire economic system is questioned.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  Although Jesus successfully rebuffed Satan while in the desert, it would be naive to assume that he was never again tempted. A careful reading of the Scriptures shows how he had to learn not to fall into future temptations. Another opportunity to be tempted by Satan occurred when Jesus refused to minister to a marginalized woman. Matthew 15:21–28 recounts the story of a Canaanite woman who came to Jesus so that her daughter could be healed. The Canaanites were seen by the Jews in very much the same way people of color are today seen by some Euroamericans, as an inferior people, no better than dogs. When the Canaanite woman appealed to Jesus for help, the Lord responded by saying, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. It is not good to take the bread of the children and throw it to the dogs.” How many times have people of the margins heard similar remarks from Euroamericans? Jobs, educational opportunities, and social services are for “real” Americans. Instead of taking food away from the children of hard-working “Americans” to throw to the dogs, “they” should just go back to where they came from. Leticia Guardiola-Sáenz, interpreting the text from her social location, points out that this woman crosses the “border” not to worship her oppressor (Jesus) but to demand an equal place at the table of the Lord. She demands to be treated as an equal.11 Now, Jesus’ response was typical for a person who was inculturated to believe in the superiority of his or her particular race. Jesus learned from his culture the superiority of Judaism and the inferiority of non-Jews. However, Jesus was willing to learn from a “woman of color” and thus avoided falling into the temptation of perpetuating racism. The woman responded by saying, “For even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the table of their masters.” Her remark shocked Jesus into realizing that faith was not contingent on a person's ethnicity. In fact, Jesus had to admit that this was a woman of great faith. Up to this point, the gospel message was only for the Jews. In fact, Jesus restricts the spreading of the Good News to his own race. In Matthew 10:5, Jesus sends his twelve disciples on their first missionary venture. He clearly instructs them, “Do not turn your steps into other nations, nor into Samaritan cities; rather, go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Yet five chapters later, from the Canaanite margins of Jesus’ society came the challenge that the gospel would no longer be the exclusive property of one ethnic group and would instead become available for all who believe. Jesus learned something about his mission from this woman. By the end of his ministry, when he gives the great commission, he commands his followers to go out to all nations, not just the people of Israel.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  Managing risk is the subject of many other books, but not this one.) When thinking in expected value, the first step is to ask, “Does the course of action I’m considering (either a new course of action or continuing what you’re currently doing) have a positive expected value?” The second step is to compare that expected value with the expected value of other options you might be considering. Because time, attention, and money are limited resources, and we only have a limited number of things that we can do in our life, when we’re thinking about whether we should stick to something, we need to ask, “If I were to switch and do something else, would that have a higher expected value than the thing I’m currently doing?” If you figure out that another path carries a higher expected value, then walking away from the path you’re currently on and switching to the new one will get you to where you’re going faster. No matter whether you are thinking about flipping coins or buying stocks where wins and losses are measured in money, or you are thinking about who to marry or where to live, where wins and losses are measured in happiness and quality of life, expected value is a helpful concept for determining whether the path you are on is worth sticking to. Stewart Butterfield used expected value to decide whether to continue developing Glitch . As a cofounder of a start-up, he was dealing with an endeavor that had a low probability of success but a huge potential payoff. The vast majority of start-ups, obviously, don’t become Slack or Netflix or Twitter or Facebook. Most start-ups fail. Even so, the probability of success can still be just high enough to make pursuing that big idea worthwhile. This reveals what was bothering Stewart Butterfield. On his trip to the future during his sleepless night on November 11, 2012, he saw that Tiny Speck didn’t have a high enough probability of becoming a unicorn to make it worth persevering. There was some future world in which he could turn Glitch into a unicorn, but the likelihood was too remote to justify going for that billion-dollar-plus exit. He could see the writing on the wall, but when you are a good quitter, often you’re the only one able to read it. At the time when he told his cofounders and investors on November 12, he understood that quitting had a better expected value than continuing. In essence, Stewart Butterfield was thinking like a poker player. Winning poker players aren’t thinking about trying to win a single hand, come what may. They know that while any two cards can win, only some hands can win enough of the time to make them worth pursuing. Poker players are making decisions based on whether playing or folding will have the greater expected value.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  In the beginning, God created us “in his image.” So first, God gave us an image to bear. Then God gave us gender: male and female. Then God gave us something to do, to take care of the world and move it forward, taking part in the ongoing creation of the world.17 Later, people began moving to different places. It takes years and years of human history to get to the place where these people are from here and those people are from there. Different locations, skin colors, languages, and cultures come much later in the human story. What we often do is reverse the creative process that God initiated. We start with different cultural backgrounds and skin colors and nationalities, and it’s only when we look past these things that we are able to get to what we have in common—that we are fellow image-bearers with the shared task of caring for God’s creation. We get it all backward. We see all of the differences first, and only later, maybe, do we begin to see the similarities. The new humanity is about seeing people as God sees them. When They Become We I was having lunch in September of last year with a group of people I had just met. We were discussing the kind of work we each did and places we had been, and one man started telling stories about being in the marines. He had led one of the first groups into Iraq during the Gulf War in 1991. He talked about what it was like to enter enemy territory and to be shot at—about the complexities of war—and he had us all on the edge of our seats. During one battle he and his marines won quickly, they had to arrest the soldiers who had just been shooting at them. They lined them up and were handcuffing them when one of them ran up to him waving a letter, begging to have it sent immediately. The man was frantic and starting to cause a scene. He kept repeating that this letter he was holding had to be sent immediately. He then looked the marine in the eyes and said, “Please mail this letter for me. It’s to my father, and he must know that I love him.” The man telling the story paused, looked around the table at each of us, and said, “He had no idea about the troubled relationship I had with my own father. Here I am, out in the middle of nowhere in the desert of Iraq, trying to arrest a group of soldiers who moments before were trying to kill me, staring at a man who wants me to mail a letter for him, thinking, I could be him.”

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Toward a Biology of TraumaIn an attempt to understand the episode with Nancy, I was pulled in several new directions. First, I realized that, if not for trusting my gut instincts and a little bit of blind luck, I might just as easily have inadvertently “retraumatized” Nancy, leading to a worsening of her already severe symptoms. In addition, like the gambler who hits the jackpot early in his career, I would soon find out that such dramatic—one-time—“cures” would not always be the case. I was drawn into a consuming journey to uncover just what had transpired that summer day in 1969. As I discovered, it was crucial to “titrate” (gradually access) these physiological reactions so that they were not overwhelming. Just exposing a client to his or her traumatic memories and having the person relive them was, at best, unnecessary (reducing integration and feelings of mastery and goodness) and at worst retraumatizing for the individual. I also learned that the shaking and trembling, which constitute the discharge reactions, were often so subtle as to be barely noticeable to an outside observer. Often the manifestation of the discharge was a gentle muscular fasciculation (minute muscular trembling and quivers) or temperature change—such as going from very cold to very hot. These changes are generally monitored by observing color changes in the hands and face. Over the following decades, I explored the biological basis of trauma from a comparative study of animals and their nervous systems. This, I felt, would help me develop a systematic approach to healing trauma that could be reproduced reliably and systematically, as well as being sufficiently safe. This journey also fulfilled an early dream of mine: I became a (small) part of the space adventure. While still a Berkeley graduate student in medical biophysics, I was given a fellowship as a stress consultant at NASA for a year. My primary task—to help prepare our astronauts for the first space shuttle flight—gave me a unique opportunity to study people whose stress resilience was unusually robust. These observations inspired me to reflect back on my session with Nancy some years earlier: on her profound lack of resilience and her spontaneous transformation. It seemed possible that the astronauts’ super-resilience was a skill that even the most highly traumatized individuals could learn to activate, a birthright that needed to be reclaimed. A First Step: Serendipity GainedIn attempting to understand what had transpired that day with Nancy, I was struck by a “footnote” in an informal graduate seminar I was taking in comparative animal behavior. One of the professors, Peter Marler, had mentioned some peculiar behaviors exhibited by prey animals such as birds and rabbits when they were physically restrained. That night I awoke, shaking in excitement. Could Nancy’s reaction (when held down by the doctors) be similar to those of the experimentally restrained animals? As for my “hallucination” of the crouching tiger, that was undoubtedly a creative “waking dream” stimulated by that inspiring graduate seminar.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  According to the writer of Acts, Paul went beyond the old city walls to the proseuchē , a term used to describe the service of traditional Jewish prayers held during the Sabbath. Such prayers require a minimum number of men to be present. In a sermon, Doctor Loida Martell-Otero, a Baptist minister in the Bronx, revealed the continuous conversion of Paul in this story. A Macedonian man told him to cross over and help them. Paul then sought a group of men to begin his ministry, but instead he found a bunch of women! Paul was faced with a dilemma. Torah, God's word, was not for women, according to tradition. Yet this was the man who would eventually say that in Christ there is neither male nor female (Gal. 3:28). Paul was forced to give up his traditions and concepts of the divine in order to begin God's ministry. He spoke to the women, and one of them, Lydia, an entrepreneur who had achieved financial success in the production of purple fabric, was converted. And what did she do upon being baptized? She challenged Paul, stating, “If you really think me a true believer in the Lord, come and stay with us.” Upon this woman, the church of Philippi was established. In Dr. Martell-Otero words, “The church is being made to convert, even as it seeks converts.”9 All too often those at the centers of power and privilege look to the margins of society, asking people there to change, to conform, and to assimilate to the way the dominant culture does religion. If the truth resides only in the center, then the margins are the ones that must be converted in order to obtain truth and enter into fellowship with God and God's people. The account in Acts subverted the self-imposed religious superiority of the early church. As the first Christian church encountered the rest of the world, it was forced to change, to become multicultural so that others could come into a salvific relationship with the God of the universe, not just with the culture of that first church. This story in Acts raises another question. Can a woman establish and lead a church? Years later Paul wrote a letter to the Philippians. In it he attempted to prevent a schism by appealing to two of the church leaders, Euodia and Syntyche, to reconcile their differences. Then he praised these women for being co-laborers with him in defending the work of the Christ (4:2–3). It appears that not only did a woman start the church at Philippi but that years later women still held leadership positions. Yet, before we celebrate Paul's “feminism,” we must remember that this is the same man who required women to remain silent during church services. Two passages have traditionally been used to prevent women from participating in leadership positions.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  The split is profound. What this means is the following: All of us understand that humans have been capable of much violence and aggression in the past and in the present. We know that out there in the world there are sinister criminals, greedy and unscrupulous businesspeople, belligerent negotiators, and sexual aggressors. But we create a sharp dividing line between those examples and us. We have a powerful block against imagining any kind of continuum or spectrum when it comes to our own aggressive moments and those of the more extreme variety in others. We in fact define the word to describe the stronger manifestations of aggression, excluding ourselves. It is always the other who is belligerent, who starts things, who is aggressive. This is a profound misconception of human nature. Aggression is a tendency that is latent in every single human individual. It is a tendency wired into our species. We became the preeminent animal on this planet precisely because of our aggressive energy, supplemented by our intelligence and cunning. We cannot separate this aggressiveness from the way we attack problems, alter the environment to make our lives easier, fight injustice, or create anything on a large scale. The Latin root of the word aggression means “to step forward,” and when we assert ourselves in this world and try to create or change anything, we are tapping into this energy. Aggression can serve positive purposes. At the same time, under certain circumstances, this energy can push us into antisocial behavior, into grabbing too much or pushing people around. These positive and negative aspects are two sides of the same coin. And although some individuals are clearly more aggressive than others, all of us are capable of slipping into that negative side. There is a continuum of human aggression, and we are all on the spectrum. Being unaware of our true nature causes us many problems. We can turn aggressive in the negative sense without realizing what is happening, and then pay the consequences for going too far. Or, feeling uncomfortable with our own assertive impulses and knowing the trouble they can stir, we might try to repress our aggressiveness and appear to be paragons of humility and goodness, only to become more passive-aggressive in our behavior. This energy cannot be denied or repressed; it will emerge in some way. But with awareness, we can begin to control and channel it for productive and positive purposes. To do so, we must understand the source of all human aggression, how it turns negative, and why some people become more aggressive than others.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Danton was quite strange-looking, if not downright ugly. He was unusually large for his age, with an enormous head and a rather monstrous face. Growing up on the family farm, he had twice been attacked by bulls, their horns splitting his upper lip and cracking his nose. Some people found him frightening, but many were charmed by his youthful exuberance and could ignore the face. The boy was simply fearless, always in search of adventure, and it was his bold spirit that attracted people to him, particularly among his classmates. At the school he was attending, the liberal priests who ran it had decided to award a prize to the student who wrote an essay that best described the upcoming coronation, its necessity and meaning at a time when France was trying to modernize itself. Danton was not the intellectual type. He preferred swimming in the nearby river and any other kind of physical activity. The one subject that excited him was history, particularly ancient Rome. His favorite historical figure was the great Roman lawyer and orator Cicero. He identified with Cicero, who also came from the middle class. He memorized Cicero’s speeches and developed a love for oratory. With his powerful speaking voice, he was a natural at the art. But he was not very good at writing. He desperately wanted to win the essay prize—it would instantly elevate him among the ranks of fellow students. He had reasoned, however, that the only way he could compensate for his less-than- stellar literary skills was to witness the coronation firsthand and give a vivid description of it. He also felt a strange affinity with the young king: they were not far apart in age, and both were large and considered decidedly unhandsome. Playing hooky to get to Reims, only eighty miles away, was just the kind of adventure that had always attracted him. He had told his friends, “I want to see how a king is made.” And so he had snuck off to Reims the day before the coronation and had arrived just in time. He moved through the throng of French people congregating outside the cathedral. Guards brandishing tall pikes held them back. Only the nobility was allowed inside. Danton pushed as far forward as he could, and then he spotted the king, wearing the most spectacular ceremonial robe encrusted with diamonds and gold, making his way up the steps. There was the pretty queen following him in a splendid gown, her hair piled impossibly high, followed by other members of her entourage. From a distance, they were all like figures from another era, so different from anybody he had ever seen before. He waited patiently outside for the end of the ritual, at which point the king reemerged, now sporting a crown. For a brief moment he got a closer look at Louis’s face as he passed by, and he was surprised to find that the king seemed quite ordinary, despite the

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

  Matthew’s story of Joseph in fact underlines the connection between genealogy and birth narrative. It links, as we will see, the last woman of the genealogy to the first, Mary to Tamar … and Joseph to Judah. It is usual y said that in the birth narrative Mary is marginalized; Joseph becomes the main actor. 44 But to read the birth narrative in light of the genealogy is to discover a different portrayal of Joseph. The story of Joseph in Matthew is told as a story of righteousness, and a woman improperly pregnant. This is the question at the center of the story of Judah and Tamar, too. Consider the parallels. 1. Judah discovers that the woman belonging to him is pregnant, and not by her lawful husband (for she does not have one anymore). Joseph discovers that the woman belonging to him is pregnant, and not by her lawful husband (for she does not have one yet). 2. Joseph, being righteous, seeks to fulfil the law; he decides (being also merciful) to put off Mary privately. Judah seeks to fulfil the law; he declares that Tamar shall be burnt. 3. Tamar sends to Judah the sign that the child is hers by him. The angel gives to Joseph the sign that the child is Mary’s by the Holy Spirit. 4. Judah at the beginning of David’s line and Joseph at its end act righteously to put off the woman who bears the child that is not theirs. In their righteousness, unwittingly, they endanger the Davidic line and the whole thrust of the covenant promises/biblical history. 5. Tamar by her own word, and Mary by the angel’s word are saved. 6. As at the end of Judah’s story Judah does not have sexual relations with Tamar because the sons are born, so at the end of the birth narrative Joseph does not have sexual relations with Mary until the son is born.45 Mary’s pregnancy and Joseph’s dangerous righteousness thus bring us full circle, to the first woman named in the genealogy. Mary is linked to Tamar, Judah to Joseph; the last son of David to the ancestor on whom the promise of a royal scepter rests. This is all one story, as Matthew tel s it, and it is a story in both instances of the word of God coming to fruition not in the man—not even in his righteousness—but in the woman. “She has been found more righteous than I,” Judah says. And Joseph discovers that his righteousness was blind.46 The word that God is speaking—in which, Matthew’s gospel 43 Davies and Allison, Matthew, 1.198. 44 Anderson is representative: “In these episodes Joseph, rather than Mary, is the focus of attention … Mary is marginalized” (“Mary’s Difference,” 189–90). 45 For this last parallel see T. P. Osborne, “Les femmes de la généalogie de Jésus dans l’évangile de Matthieu et l’application de la Torah,” RTL 41.2 (2010): 243–58, esp. 251 n. 14.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  Yet, the roots of anti-Semitism go deeper than simply a Jewish versus Christian understanding of Jesus. During the early development of Christianity, specifically during the medieval period, Christians interpreted Exodus 22:25 literally: “If you lend silver to my people, the poor among you, you shall not be as a moneylender, you shall not charge usury.” For a Christian to charge interest meant he or she could be excommunicated or killed by the church. Even to discuss the possibility of charging interest on a loan was sufficient grounds for burning a theologian at the stake. Jews, however, rejected the Christian interpretation of this passage, basing their understanding on Deuteronomy: “You may lend to a stranger at interest, but not to your brother, so that Yahweh your God may bless you in all that you put your hand to in the land where you go to possess” (23:21). Free to lend money and charge interest, many Jewish businessmen found a niche within Christian society. Jewish families were left to handle banking transactions, an important need for the development of Christian Europe. Ironically, several Jewish families found themselves financing many Christian advances toward domination, specifically the numerous Crusades. But what can be thought of a group of people who prospered at a trade that good God-fearing Christians believed contradicted the Bible? As Christians throughout Europe prepared to march in order to liberate Jerusalem from the infidels, often the would-be crusaders realized the paradox of riding to fight God's enemies in Palestine when God's greater enemies, the crucifiers of Jesus, remained in European cities to prosper. And this was also viewed by some as a great opportunity to eliminate the moneylenders to whom large sums of funds were owed. “Kill the Jews” became a Christian battle cry throughout Europe, a cry heard as recently as the 1940s. Even though Christians eventually reinterpreted the Bible so that they too could charge interest, the stereotype of Jews as money mongers continued to develop. This would give rise to the anti-Semitic belief that Jews controlled the world's financial institutions as well as the media and every conceivable left-leaning organization. The Polemical Protocols of the Elders of Zion , which made its appearance at the turn of the twentieth century, supposedly was documented proof that an international Jewish conspiracy existed. Believers in this international Jewish conspiracy have turned to the Bible to find justification for their views of Jews, whom they believe are unsaved due to their rejection of Jesus as the Messiah. Jews then became the children of darkness, followers of the Antichrist, and as such should be contained if not eliminated. Yet such interpreters of the Bible seem to forget that Y'shua was the name by which Jesus was known during his earthly ministry and the man called John the Baptist was known by his contemporaries as Yochanan ben Zechariah. The individuals responsible for the development of what we today call Christianity were Jews.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  Regardless, Jesus calls such persons fools. Remember, this is the same Jesus who in Matthew 5:22 tells us not to call anyone a fool lest we be answerable by hell's fire! By the use of such strong language, Jesus castigates the person whom our present society elevates. In order to reconcile Jesus’ harsh judgment with our capitalist social location, we must spiritualize the parable, interpreting it so that the sin is not hoarding resources that could be shared with those who had none but rather is relying on the individual to succeed instead of God. This metaphoric reading reinterprets the action of hoarding as the core of the sin and reduces it to the individual motivation of the person. But those who read the Bible literally, those who live on the margins of society, instead agree with Jesus’ pronouncement that this rich person is a fool. There exists the realization that those who hoard their profits usually believe that they have earned their wealth and thus are entitled to their riches and beholden to no one. This is what makes them fools. Missing from this analysis, however, is how societal privilege opens doors to one ethnic group at the expense of other groups. I recall a student who insisted that his father's economic success, his rags-to-riches testimony, was due solely to his entrepreneurial skills. I simply asked one question: If his father were a black Latino, would he have been able to achieve the same level of success? Would he have had access to adequate public education, normally available in white suburban neighborhoods? Would he have been hired by his company for a managerial position? If hired, how many people on the margins would end up working in top administrative posts in the company, or would his color or ethnicity prevent him from passing the glass ceiling? Would he have gotten the necessary funding from the local bank to set out on his own? The student was forced to recognize that whiteness provided a privilege that contributed directly or indirectly to his father's success. If his father stores his profit believing that he has pulled himself up by his bootstraps, like the fool in Jesus’ parable, the day will come when he will have to give an account for himself. He will have to reckon with his complicity with societal structures designed to privilege him at the expense of others whose skin pigmentation or ethnic background deprive them of the opportunities taken for granted by the dominant culture. A HISPANIC CHRIST José was a simple man who worked with his hands. He built things. He tried to make a living as a carpenter, but times were hard and taxes were high. Regardless of the foreign military occupation of his homeland, there simply was no time for him to become involved with any of those revolutionary groups doing maneuvers and hiding in the wilderness. He just worked hard, barely keeping food on the table for his rapidly growing family.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  Several years ago a woman called the church where I was a pastor because she wanted to talk. We set up a time to meet, and when she showed up, I asked her how I could help. She said that she was a prostitute and didn’t want to live anymore, so she had made a plan to kill herself. She described in detail how she was going to do it, when she was going to do it, and where it was going to happen. She was very thorough. She said she was telling me all of this because she had to know whether she would go to heaven or hell when she died. Somewhere in the course of telling me her plans, she mentioned that she had a daughter because one of her clients had gotten her pregnant. She was confident that a family member would raise her daughter when she was gone. I asked her to tell me more about her daughter. She gave a few details. Then I asked what her daughter’s name was. She replied, “My daughter’s name is Faith.” Faith. There are these moments when the enemy all of a sudden becomes just like me. When a soldier becomes a son. When a prostitute becomes a mother. When they become we. When those become us. When he becomes me. Moments when all of the ways that we divide ourselves and rank each other and convince ourselves of how different, better, and unalike we are disappear, and we are faced with the fact that first and foremost, we are humans. In this together. And not that much different from each other.18 Jew. Gentile. Marine. Iraqi. Orphan. Family. Pastor. Prostitute. We could be them. Thirty Years Later When I was five, my family visited my grandparents in California during Christmas vacation. They lived in an apartment building with an alley beside it—very exciting for a boy who lived on a farm in Michigan. At some point in my exploration of the alley, I decided to make a Christmas present for my dad out of the things I had found there. So on the morning of the twenty-fifth, my father had the privilege of opening a gift of a piece of black and green drainpipe glued to a flat gray rock with little white stones resting on the inside of it. A masterpiece, to say the least. The reason I remember this is because I visited my dad at his office a few days ago, and while I waited for him to finish his meeting, I wandered around looking at the pictures on his walls and the papers on his desk and the things on his shelves. On one of his shelves sat the drainpipe and rock sculpture, thirty years later. He still has it. He brought it home with him and put it in his office in 1977 and hasn’t gotten rid of it.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  I thought I was being the rationalist she needed; she thought I was polluting the purity of her grief. I thought I was leading her back into life; she thought I was forcing her to turn her back on Jack. I thought I was inspiring her to become the existential hero; she thought I was a smug spectator watching her tragedy from a safe grandstand seat. I was stunned by her obstinacy. Why can’t she get it? I wondered. Why can’t she get that Jack is really dead, that his consciousness is extinguished? That it isn’t her fault? That she is not jinxed, that she will not cause my death or the death of the next man she loves? That she is not fated to experience tragedy forever? That she is clinging to crooked beliefs because she so fears the alternative: recognizing that she lives in a universe absolutely indifferent to whether she is happy or unhappy. And she wondered at my obtuseness. Why can’t Irv get it? Why doesn’t he see that he is defacing my memory of Jack, defiling my grief by tracking in grave mud and leaving the shovel in the kitchen? Why can’t he understand that I just want to look out the window at Jack’s grave? That it infuriates me when he tries to yank me away from my heart? That there are times when, despite my need for him, I absolutely have to get away from him, squeeze by him on the stairs, breathe fresh air? That I’m drowning, I’m clinging to the wreckage of my life, and he keeps trying to pry my fingers away? Why can’t he get it that Jack died because of my poisoned love? That evening, as I reviewed the session in my mind, another patient whom I had seen decades earlier came into my mind. Throughout adolescence she had been locked in a long, bitter struggle with her nay-saying father. When she left home for the first time, he drove her to college and, in typical fashion, ruined the trip by grousing the entire time about the ugly, garbage-littered stream by the side of the road. She, on the other hand, saw a beautiful rustic, unspoiled creek. Years later, after he died, she chanced to make the trip again and noted that there were two streams, one on each side of the road. “But this time I was the driver,” she said sadly, “and the stream I saw through the driver’s window was just as ugly and polluted as my father had described it.” All the components of this lesson—my impasse with Irene, her insistence that I read Frost’s poem, my recollection of my patient’s story of the automobile ride—had been deeply instructive. With astonishing clarity, I understood now that it was time for me to listen, to set aside my personal worldview, to stop imposing my style and my views upon my patient. It was time to look out Irene’s window.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  I got my key and took the elevator to my floor, and as I walked down the hall, the door of the room next to mine opened and a woman stepped out wearing a shirt with four words on it: “Mick, Keith, Ronnie, Charlie.” Ah, yes, the Rolling Stones. With great passion, she told me that they were staying in this very hotel and that the concert was tomorrow night, only a mile from here. The next night, I went to the stadium and bought a single ticket from a man standing at the main gate. I found my seat and began talking with the couple next to me. At one point they asked what I do for a living. I told them that I’m a pastor. They looked at each other, stunned. They told me that they weren’t very religious or part of a church or anything like that, but on the way to the concert, they both had this unusual sense that there would be some sort of significance to whoever they ended up sitting next to that night. We discussed politics and the environment and literature and nuclear energy and music and family—all during the opening band. At one point the woman asked why the world was so broken and why people have such difficulty getting along. The question seemed to come from years of reflection. And it wasn’t just an intellectual issue; this was something that deeply troubled her soul. She pointed to the forty thousand people seated around us in the stadium and asked, “Why is it so hard for us to get along? Why do we have to fight with each other and go to war and hurt each other and sue each other and say horrible things about each other?” As she was saying this, I realized that what she was saying was less a series of questions and more of a lament. A grieving. We’re disconnected from each other, and we know it. It’s not how things are supposed to be. Even people who would say they have no faith in God or in any sort of higher being or supreme power still have a sense that there is a way things are supposed to be. And that way involves us as humans being connected with each other. I recently talked to a woman in our church whose husband has a history of physical abuse. She told me about the group of people who have come around her to help her through her pain. They’re helping her set boundaries so that she and her children are protected, offering her whatever they can in the way of resources and support. Several weeks after talking to her, a man walked up to me with tears in his eyes and told me that he had hit his wife and he wanted to get help so he could put his life and his marriage and his family back together. It was him.

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

  By contrast, the main reason why Paul could think as he seems to have done about himself as someone who obviously was Ioudaios while simultaneously being “in Christ,” that is, why Paul was able to imagine that he could still have Jewish flesh without continuing any longer to be governed by the mundane distinction between Jew and Gentile (or slave and free, male and female)—had everything to do with Paul’s discovery (or, if you wil , his self-dis-closure) of an ability (attributed to the experience of having received a certain “spirit”) to be more than one thing at a time. In other 25 See Shlomo Sand, How I Stopped Being a Jew (trans. David Fernback; London: Verso, 2014); also Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (trans. Yael Lotan; London: Verso, 2009); and Sand, The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland (trans. Geremy Forman; London: Verso, 2012). 26 See Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 349 n. 6. 27 One takes up or rejects what once was and still may be used to put down or to privilege. This is not merely a “reaction-formation” but belongs to the politics of survival and resistance and thus is worthy of consideration. At the same time, it does not mean that such a reading of things is inevitably or necessarily persuasive. 28 That is why, e.g., Sand must try to “stop” being “Jewish” when he opposes the modern State of Israel’s definition of this identity. Similarly Boyarin’s advocacy of a “diasporic” existence for contemporary Jews real y only “works” if and when it takes place in an otherwise official y “secular” social and political environment, or where one’s identity as a “Jew” or “Christian” or “Muslim” effectively is limited to matters of private or personal concern. Thus it seems to me to be unlikely that Boyarin “real y” thinks of Paul as actual y embodying another equal y legitimate way of being properly “Jewish,” however much Boyarin may welcome him under the aegis of a “reading” as an erstwhile critic of Jewish ethnocentrism vis-à-vis contemporary debates among Jews about how best to be such a person. Meanwhile, Shaye Cohen clearly does not view Paul as being in any way a representative “Jew” even if Cohen also begrudgingly acknowledges that Paul obviously was a product of (one of) the multiple Judaisms existing “between the Maccabees and the Mishna.” 52 52 Paul and Matthew among Jews and Gentiles words, Paul knew himself yet to be carnal y a “Jew” while ceasing “pneumatical y” to be solely defined by that fleshly identity within the same earthly body. This was possible because, for Paul, being human—to wit, the kind of creature denominated by the Greek term anthrôpos—was (as it appears to have been for most human beings both before and after Paul) a multiform existence. By “multiform” I do not mean merely a complex “intersectional” mode of singular existence.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Unbeknownst to them, this may be the greatest opportunity for expansion they’ve had in years, for it allows them to express parts of themselves that have long been denied. It’s tiresome to have to be in control all the time, and Rose was due for a break. It’s equally draining to feel erotically impoverished, and Charles’s refusal to tolerate this situation was his first step in bringing more authentic parts of himself to Rose. Ironically, in the midst of this emotional turmoil they began making love again after many years apart. Rose’s desire for Charles came back to life in tandem with his interest in other women. The more he eludes her, the more she wants him. And for his part, seeing her care so much about what he does has a profound erotic appeal. For a long time their relationship operated on a contract of mutuality. They were not to express feelings or needs that exceeded what they had been allocated. They were not to be irrational, insensitive, or greedy. Now, however, they both were making strong claims. They made demands on each other that they didn’t want to give up on. There was a lot of pain, but at the same time there was a vibrancy that neither could deny. “I haven’t felt this lousy in years,” Rose tells me. “But underneath, I can see it needed to happen. I’ve always focused on the tangible stuff—the money, the house, the kids in college—thinking that’s what’s solid. But who says that what Charles is after is so frivolous? Maybe it’s another way of taking care of a marriage.” By refusing to acknowledge anything that falls outside the accepted range of behavior, Charles and Rose had achieved the opposite of what they were seeking. Rather than making their love more secure, they had, in fact, made it more vulnerable. But allowing both of them to reveal heretofore segregated parts of themselves was not without risk. The very foundation of their relationship was at stake. Each of them would have to tolerate the unfolding of the other, even if it took them beyond their range of comfort. Dismantling the Security System We often expect our relationship to act as a buttress against the slings and arrows of life. But love, by its very nature, is unstable. So we shore it up: we tighten the borders, batten down the hatches, and create predictability, all in an effort to make us feel more secure. Yet the mechanisms that we put in place to make love safer often put us more at risk. We ground ourselves in familiarity, and perhaps achieve a peaceful domestic arrangement, but in the process we orchestrate boredom. The verve of the relationship collapses under the weight of all that control. Stultified, couples are left wondering, “Whatever happened to fun? What ever happened to excitement, to transcendence, to awe?”

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  93 for it in the process. Likewise, Quixote begins to temper some of his most rash misreading because of his association with Sancho. A second question concerns the way we view the world around us. In every episode, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are looking at the same thing, but they see it differently. In many important ways, what matters is not the thing in itself, but the reading given it by a perceiver. The way each individual reads the world is the result of all of his or her experiences across a lifetime. Quixote and Sancho read things differently because their experiences—and hence their needs—are different. Every interpretation of an object or event tells us more about the interpreter than it does about the object or event itself—which is part of what critics mean when they say that a book reads us as we read the book. Don Quixote has been read in an amazing variety of ways by different readers in different historical periods. For the ¿ rst century after it was written, it was read as a comic work about a man out of step with his contemporaries’ reading of reality—a re À ection of an age of conformity to social norms and values. The Romantics saw Quixote as a superior being crushed by a brutal conformist society—a re À ection of Romantic values. Modern readers tend to see the work as perspectivist, in which Cervantes endorses neither the novelistic (“real”) world of Sancho nor the romantic (“psychotic”) world of Quixote; rather, Cervantes shows that the meaning of anything resides in the way we interpret it, which is in turn based on our past experiences and choices. Don Quixote uses frames in a different way than other framed stories we have covered in this course, such as 1001 Nights and The Canterbury Tales. One of the problems of the novel in its early days was that of authority. Readers grappled with works that seemed true but were in fact made up by someone. The question was: What, if any, kind of “truth” does the novel contain? Most early novels tried to make themselves feel like true stories to accommodate readers who wanted to read things that were factual and informative. Like Shakespeare, Cervantes has supplied us with … a text which has been used to mirror every age’s concerns … values … questions ever since.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  They dealt with battle. He then proceeded to talk about cancer patients and how, because of war metaphor, many people who suffer with cancer feel more burdened than, in fact, they should. Most of them are frightened beyond their need to be frightened, and this affects their health. Some, feeling that they have been thrust into a deadly war, simply give up. If there were another metaphor, a metaphor more accurate, perhaps cancer would not prove so deadly. Science has shown that the way people think about cancer affects their ability to deal with the disease, thus affecting their overall health. Professor Spencer said that if he were to sit down with his family and tell them he had cancer they would be shocked, concerned, perhaps even in tears, and yet cancer is nothing near the most deadly of diseases. Because of war metaphor, the professor said, we are more likely to fear cancer when, actually, most people survive the disease. Mr. Spencer then asked us about another area in which he felt metaphors cause trouble. He asked us to consider relationships. What metaphors do we use when we think of relationships? We value people, I shouted out. Yes, he said, and wrote it on his little white board. We invest in people, another person added. And soon enough we had listed an entire white board of economic metaphor. Relationships could be bankrupt , we said. People are priceless , we said. All economic metaphor. I was taken aback. And that’s when it hit me like so much epiphany getting dis-lodged from my arteries. The problem with Christian culture is we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money. Professor Spencer was right, and not only was he right, I felt as though he had cured me, as though he had let me out of my cage. I could see it very clearly. If somebody is doing something for us, offering us something, be it gifts, time, popularity, or what have you, we feel they have value, we feel they are worth something to us, and, perhaps, we feel they are priceless. I could see it so clearly, and I could feel it in the pages of my life. This was the thing that had smelled so rotten all these years. I used love like money. The church used love like money. With love, we withheld affirmation from the people who did not agree with us, but we lavishly financed the ones who did. The next few days unfolded in a thick line of melancholy thought and introspection. I used love like money, but love doesn’t work like money. It is not a commodity. When we barter with it, we all lose. When the church does not love its enemies, it fuels their rage. It makes them hate us more.