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 First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  You that boast in the law, do you dishonor God by breaking the law? (2:21–23) That is actually quite a stretch. When Gentiles, for example, reproached Jews, it was not so much for the hypocrisy of their infidelity as for the irrationality of their fidelity to a covenantal law those Gentiles considered superstitious. Furthermore, when Paul says that “a person is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart—it is spiritual and not literal” (2:29), a contemporary Jew like Philo of Alexandria would have responded, “Of course, but you should have both circumcisions, with the inward manifested by the outward.” All in all, 1:16–3:18 is a fairly shallow indictment of universal sinfulness, but rather than dismissing it as superficial we might ponder its deeper accuracy. There seems to be something profoundly wrong and seriously askew, if not with human nature then at least with the normalcy of human civilization, with what Paul and we have also called the “wisdom of this world.” It is true, as Paul says, that we have laws and declarations that we do not follow and that thereby bear witness to our insincerity, if not hypocrisy. Think, for example, of a great nation that pledges “liberty and justice for all,” but seems somewhat unmoved by its failure to achieve it. Or, even worse, think about how humanity has, in a horrible evolution, moved from nineteenth-century imperialism through twentieth-century totalitarianism into twenty-first-century terrorism. We are now forced to wonder about the normalcy of civilization itself, and that makes us reread Paul’s accusation of global sin today on a deeper level than when he first wrote it. Maybe, of course, he just saw the same global flaw, but expressed it in the only language available to him from his past and present tradition, while we must do the same now in the more radical language of our past and present experience. THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD HAS BEEN DISCLOSED What, then, is the solution to the global failure, cosmic sinfulness, or universal human chasm between the declared ideal and its ac tual accomplishment? Here is Paul’s answer—and his first three foundational terms: the righteousness of God is granted for the justification of humanity through the sacrifice of Christ (3:25–26). Each of those terms has been profoundly misunderstood and has thereby rendered Paul’s theology incomprehensible. Righteousness: distribution, not retribution. Recall, from above, that God’s righteousness means exactly the same as God’s justice.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  The cross of Jesus would have had no meaning for Paul without his conviction that God had raised Jesus. Without this conviction, the cross of Jesus would have been for Paul just another execution, another life ended by imperial authority. Resurrection gave meaning to the cross. Paul’s Damascus experience not only transformed Paul, but also transformed, necessarily, his way of seeing Jesus’s death. It was no longer simply an execution, but a revelation. Just as resurrection gave meaning to the cross, so also the cross gave meaning to resurrection. Imagine that Jesus had died a different kind of death. Suppose, for example, that he had died while selflessly and courageously treating victims of a plague and then been raised from the dead. Would his resurrection have the same meaning? Does it matter that the risen one is the crucified one? For Paul, it most certainly matters. The cross gave meaning to Easter just as Easter gave meaning to the cross. Neither would have the meaning it does without the other. Together, they were revelation. Indeed, the plural, “revelations,” is more appropriate, for they revealed more than one thing. Our second preliminary remark concerns the meaning of the word “atonement.” In Christian theology, the “doctrine of the atonement” concerns the meanings of Jesus’s death. For many Christians today, atonement has come to be identified with a particular understanding, namely, substitutionary atonement. When people ask us what we think about the atonement, this is almost always what they are asking about. But atonement has a much broader theological meaning. It needs to be reclaimed if we are to understand the atoning significance Paul saw in the cross. Like many other common Christian words, it needs to be redeemed. Atonement refers to a means of reconciliation . It presupposes a situation of separation or estrangement. How is the estrangement overcome? How does reconciliation occur? This is what atonement is about. An old wordplay catches this broader meaning: atonement is about “at-one-ment.” How does at-one-ment with God oc cur? What role does the cross of Jesus play in this? How does his death bring about at-one-ment? For Paul, as for the New Testament as a whole, the answer to this question is plural, not singular. A scholar recently wrote that Paul had dozens of ways of speaking about the atoning significance of the cross. That may be hyperbole, but not by much. We group Paul’s understandings into three categories: the cross reveals the character of empire, the path of personal transformation, and the character of God. AS REVELATION OF THE CHARACTER OF EMPIRE In the first-century setting of Paul and his hearers, “Christ crucified” had an anti-imperial meaning. Paul’s shorthand summary was not “Jesus died,” not “Jesus was killed,” but “Christ crucified.” Jesus didn’t just die, wasn’t simply murdered—he was crucified. This meant that Jesus had been executed by imperial authority: crucifixion was a Roman form of execution. In Paul’s world, a cross was always a Roman cross.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  In his Eclogues, Calpurnius Siculus rejoiced: Amid untroubled peace, the Golden Age springs to a second birth; at last kindly Themis [Greek goddess of Justice]…returns to earth; blissful ages attend the youthful prince…. While he, a very God (Latin ipse deus ), shall rule the nations, the unholy War-Goddess shall yield and have her vanquished hands bound behind her back…. Peace in her fullness shall come; knowing not the drawn sword…. Assuredly a very God ( ipse deus ) shall take in his strong arms the burden of the massive Roman state. (1.42–47, 63, 84–85) How was it even possible—let alone credible—that the exact same terms and titles were taken by Christians from Caesar the Augustus on the Palatine Hill in Rome and given to Jesus the Christ on the Nazareth ridge in Galilee—or, even worse, to the “King of the Jews” on a Roman cross in Jerusalem? What did Paul and his communities mean when they denied those terms and titles to Caesar and transferred them to Christ? Was it low lampoon or high treason? If it was all a joke, why were the Roman imperial authorities not laughing? And, if it was not a joke, what was the fundamental difference between the incarnate program of a Caesar and that of a Christ? Think, for example, of those proclamations of imperial justice and peace that accompanied the accession of Nero as ipse deus —“a very God” or, better, “the God Himself”—after his accession in October of 54 CE. What is the essential difference between Roman peace and Christian peace? With the same transcendent status claimed for both, what was the difference in content between them? As mentioned in Chapter 2, each of Paul’s seven authentic letters begins with exactly the same official and formulaic greeting. The only slight exception is his earliest letter, and even there all the key elements of the formula are already present. Furthermore, in all of Paul’s letters except Philemon the final farewell always mentions “peace.” Here they all are: To the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace to you and peace…. May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely. (1 Thess. 1:1; 5:23) Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ…. Peace be upon them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God. (Gal. 1:3; 6:16) Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ…. The God of peace will be with you. (Phil. 1:2; 4:9) Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. (Philem. 3) Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ…. Send him on his way in peace, so that he may come to me. (1 Cor. 1:3; 16:11) Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ…. Live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. (2 Cor.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  3:5–6). Moreover, he did not convert from one religion to another. Not only was Christianity not yet a religion separate from Judaism, but Paul thought of himself as a Jew after his conversion and for the rest of his life. Paul’s was a conversion within a tradition: from one way of being Jewish to another way of being Jewish, from being a Pharisaic Jew to being a Christian Jew. Paul’s Damascus experience was his “call” to the rest of his life. It called him to his vocation, just as the “call stories” of the great Jewish prophets were calls to a vocation. All three accounts in Acts report that his Damascus experience was his commissioning to his vocation as an apostle to the Gentiles. Paul’s genuine letters confirm the picture created by Acts. Paul had experiences of Jesus as a living reality, and these experiences transformed him. We begin with Galatians 1:13–17, simply because it is one of only two places in Paul’s letters in which he mentions Damascus. He describes his earlier life as a zealous persecutor of the Jesus movement. Then he writes: God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles. In his own words, Paul testifies that he had an experience of divine revelation (“God was pleased to reveal his Son to me”) that transformed him and gave him his vocation. Two verses later, in 1:17, he connects this experience to Damascus. After referring to some subsequent events in his life, he says, “Afterwards, I returned to Damascus.” In other letters Paul also speaks of having experienced Jesus. He does so twice in 1 Corinthians. In 9:1, he says that he has “seen Jesus our Lord.” Nothing in Acts or his letters suggests that Paul had ever seen the pre-Easter Jesus. The passage must refer to seeing the post-Easter Jesus—the risen Jesus as Christ and Lord. Later in the same letter, he speaks of Jesus appearing to him. In 15:3–8, he names people to whom the risen Christ appeared and includes himself in the list: “He appeared also to me.” Paul has had firsthand experience of the risen Christ—and, interestingly, one that he says belongs in a list of resurrection experiences had by Peter and other Christian apostles. In 2 Corinthians (which may combine several letters), Paul says he “will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord.”

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ …(3:27–29) That central triad must never, ever, be cited without those framing statements containing “into” and “with Christ” and “in” and “to Christ.” Quoted without those frames, they might correctly deny the validity of slavery, but they also incorrectly deny the validity of the difference (as distinct from the hierarchy) between women and men, and the ongoing validity of Judaism as a religion separate from Christianity. Some such declaration of equality was the heart of the radical transformation that was involved in Christian baptism. Paul repeats the call to equality, with only the first two examples, in 1 Corinthians—and again notice the framing process: For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body —Jews or Greeks, slaves or free— and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. (12:13) For Paul, life “in Christ” or life “with the Spirit” means the exact same mode of transfigured Christian life committed to the justice of equality. That baptismal formula commits the baptized person to the life principle that whether you come into the Christian community as Gentile or Jew, slave or free, female or male, you are equal to one an other within that community . Hierarchical distinctions from outside are invalid inside. But is that simply an “as if” fiction, a demand that, when the Christian assembly meets and only within such a meeting, all will act “as if” they were equal? Is it the equivalent of: “We are all equal inside, spiritually, before God—but outside in the world, of course, everything goes back to normal”? It is in answer to those questions that the letter to Philemon becomes absolutely vital. It was—as we saw—the perfect test case. Paul could have sent the Christian slave back to his Christian owner with admonitions for each: Onesimus is to obey and Philemon is to forgive. Or he could have requested that Onesimus remain as his own slave or even be freed into his care. But, no, as we have seen, Paul sends Onesimus back to Philemon so that Philemon can—that is, must—free him voluntarily as is his Christian duty deriving from his Christian baptismal commitment. Christians cannot be equal and unequal to one another in Christ. But that equality within the Christian assembly spills out into the streets and fills up all of Christian life. Christians are to be equal to one another inside and outside—in the assembly and out in society. GOD AS HOUSEHOLDER OF THE EARTH There is still one even deeper question. From where did that vision of baptism-based equality derive?

• From The Porn Trap: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Problems Caused by Pornography (2008)

  Like Nick, Laura has also been able to reduce her vulnerability to porn by understanding her deeper psychological issues. “I’m now exploring the origin of my attraction to porn in therapy,” she said. “I’ve mostly been drawn to written porn about risky sex in which a woman is weak and physically threatened. It’s pretty clear that my attraction to this scenario has something to do with how powerless I felt when my brothers molested me when I was a young girl.” Analyzing the types of porn fantasies you are most attracted to is a useful way to learn more about the deeper issues that may be fueling your porn relationship. You may find it helpful, especially with the assistance of a trained mental health professional, to answer the following questions: What type of story line and plot are you primarily attracted to in porn?What are the characters like, and how and why do they relate to each other in the way they do?Is there anything about your ideal porn fantasy that relates to unmet needs or painful events that you experienced in your past?Ethan told us, “My desire for porn greatly diminished after I took a close look at the porn fantasies I’d treasured since I was eight years old. They were all about a woman being degraded, humiliated, and treated roughly by a man. No matter what he does to her, the woman thinks the guy is great and doesn’t want to leave him. When I really looked at the fantasies, I discovered they weren’t about sex, at all. They were about how angry, powerless, and insecure I felt as a child with my mom gone a lot.” As Ethan explored the relationship dynamics in his old porn fantasies, he saw that they defied common sense and were in contradiction to what he really wanted in an intimate partner. “The kind of woman I wanted as a kid doesn’t exist,” he said. “Any woman who would stick around for that kind of treatment isn’t a person I really want to be with. Trying to live out this kind of fantasy is no longer a direction I want to go in real life—I’ve lost interest in it. These days, I’m more interested in reality and pursuing a healthy intimate relationship.” When a relapse happens, it can generate feelings of disappointment, frustration, confusion, failure, and shame. But, when you use a relapse experience to learn more about yourself and what underlies and triggers your relationship with porn, it can actually help you move forward in your pursuit of a porn-free life. Corey wisely told us, “A relapse is only a failure if you let it be. I’ve learned that a relapse can be seen as merely a temporary step back. Regardless of how disappointed you may feel about it at the time, it always has something important to teach you.”

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  We’ve seen managers reward such acts publicly and encourage them as well. For instance, if they aren’t getting anyone on the team to step up and challenge the status quo, they’ll ask an employee or two to serve as foils during meetings and speak up and argue with the boss, to show that debate is encouraged. Finally, it’s imperative that managers lead by example in this process by being open to new ideas and willing to accept challenges themselves. Yet Dr. David B. Peterson, former head of executive coaching and development for Google, told us, “If you are not genuinely curious and not willing to change your mind, people will figure it out. Why ask us for our opinions? You are just going to do what you want anyway. ” He adds, most managers are more experienced, have a broader perspective, and are armed with more information, so it’s disingenuous if they ask for input they won’t use. “When you are in the face of complexity, when you are staring at fog and there are no answers, that’s when dialogue and conversation and engagement are really important,” he said. Seeking feedback in those times can not only generate real breakthroughs but create an environment where everyone feels valued and engaged. What follows are a few other methods that managers can use to coach their employees to find their voices and work through issues openly and honestly. Method 1: Address the Issue, Value, SolutionWhen discussing any tough subject, a way that may help is by describing the Issue succinctly: “Sam, you made a sales call on Landex.” That’s about it. You state the facts as you know them, and you don’t complicate matters. Of course, Sam might go on the defensive if he feels under attack personally, so it’s important to associate the issue with your desired team culture. So second, you talk about a team Value that is in jeopardy. “Since Landex is in my territory, I can’t help but feel that this is not living our value of Working Together.” Without that core value of Working Together, Sam’s actions might have been completely justified. Third, you brainstorm together on a Solution . “Can we come up with a plan to move forward with this account?” It’s helpful to proceed in the flow from Issue to Value to Solution. If you jump ahead and start by pointing out that a value has been violated, e.g., “Sam, I’d like to talk to you about our value of Working Together,” you can create ambiguity and leave variables for Sam to fill in on his own. He has to guess what you’ll say next, and it could be negative.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  But to prefer suffering to violence means to be good, or at least less evil than those who do to another what they do not wish to have done to themselves. And so all the probabilities are in favour of the fact that not those who are better than those over whom they rule, but, on the contrary, those who are worse, have always been and even now are in power. There may also be worse men among those who submit to the power, but it cannot be that better men should rule over worse men. This was impossible to assume in case of the pagan inexact definition of goodness; but with the Christian lucid and exact definition of goodness and evil, it is impossible to think so. If more or less good men, more or less bad men, cannot be distinguished in the pagan world, the Christian conception of good and evil has so clearly defined the symptoms of the good and the evil, that they can no longer be mistaken. According to Christ's teaching the good are those who humble themselves, suffer, do not resist evil with force, forgive offences, love their enemies; the evil are those who exalt themselves, rule, struggle, and do violence to people, and so, according to Christ's teaching, there is no doubt as to where the good are among the ruling and the subjugated. It even sounds ridiculous to speak of ruling Christians. The non-Christians, that is, those who base their lives on the worldly good, must always rule over Christians, over those who assume that their lives consist in the renunciation of this good. Thus it has always been and it has become more and more definite, in proportion as the Christian teaching has been disseminated and elucidated. The more the true Christianity spread and entered into the consciousness of men, the less it was possible for Christians to be among the rulers, and the easier it grew for non-Christians to rule over Christians. "The abolition of the violence of state at a time when not all men in society have become true Christians would have this effect, that the bad would rule over the good and would with impunity do violence to them," say the defenders of the existing order of life. "The bad will rule over the good and will do violence to them." But it has never been different, and it never can be. Thus it has always been since the beginning of the world, and thus it is now. The bad always rule over the good and always do violence to them. Cain did violence to Abel, cunning Jacob to trustful Esau, deceitful Laban to Jacob; Caiaphas and Pilate ruled over Christ, the Roman emperors ruled over a Seneca, an Epictetus, and good Romans who lived in their time. John IV.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  I remember only snippets from the rest of that weekend. Sailing on his boat. A walk in the woods. Finding a clamshell on the beach (that sits in my bathroom with a candle in it to this day). Telling him I wanted to be an actress. Him telling me I should be a writer instead. Noticing how we crossed our legs the same way and had a similar sense of humor. Moments that made me understand that I am a product of both BD and Ken, of nature and nurture. BD and I had another thing in common: he first met his father when he was a teenager, too. Being born into absence was our shared DNA, and so was the trauma that came with it. BD wasn’t a villain, after all. He was a victim of rejection, just like me. And as such, he did what he was taught to do. There’s a growing body of scientific literature to support that grief and trauma can be passed down from generation to generation. In epigenetics, researchers study how gene expression is modified based on behavior and environment. In terms of trauma, that means that people who’ve experienced war, famine, or other forms of extreme stress can pass down genetic modifications to their offspring. Dr. Rachel Yehuda, professor of psychiatry and director of Traumatic Stress Studies Division at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, has been at the forefront of this research. She and her team conducted a study of 32 Jewish men and women who had endured or observed torture, been interned at concentration camps, or went into hiding during the war. They also examined the genes of their adult children, finding that both parents and offspring had lowered cortisol levels compared to Jewish families who resided outside of Europe during the war. This is significant, as cortisol is the stress hormone that helps to counter adrenaline and calm the system. Yehuda concludes, “The gene changes in the children could only be attributed to Holocaust exposure in the parents.” Research like Yehuda’s suggests that our ancestors’ life experiences have the power to leave lasting imprints for generations. It wouldn’t surprise me if on some very old branches of my paternal family tree there were ancestors who had also experienced abandonment and neglect. Living in these conditions creates a whole bunch of behavioral issues: codependency; fear of being left; insecurity and low selfworth; difficulty saying no and trouble self-regulating, especially big feelings like—you guessed it—anger. As a result, it can be hard to form healthy relationships, because it’s difficult to trust others and even yourself.

• From Between Us

  Coming to America made me aware, for the first time, that my own emotions were not like those of people from this other culture. This would not have been remarkable, because it was the first time I had lived outside of the European continent—save for a small, but important detail: I had just spent the preceding six years studying cultural variations in emotions. Given that my research expertise was the role of culture in emotion, my failure to recognize my own emotions as cultured goes to show the difficulty of recognizing our own emotions as anything but natural. Even to me, as a cultural psychologist who studied emotions for a living, it was impossible to see my own emotions as products of culture, until I had a real stake in being part of another culture—until I became an immigrant to the United States. Many an ethnographer has similarly run “into painful reminders, of [her] failure to share emotional assumptions or commitments” of the people with whom they stayed. The late anthropologist Jean Briggs described in her now-famous ethnography Never in Anger how, only after she got ostracized, she fully grasped how different (and inappropriate) her own emotions must have been from the perspective of the Utku Inuit, who lived in the Canadian Northwest Territories. It was then that she realized that her own emotions were cultured, and unfit to the Utku social relationships.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  I answer that the early doctors of the faith were compelled to discuss matters of faith on account of the insistence of heretics. Thus Arius thought that existence from another is incompatible with the divine nature, wherefore he maintained that the Son and the Holy Spirit, whom Holy Writ describes as being from another, are creatures. In order to refute this error the holy fathers. had to show that it is not impossible for someone to proceed from God the Father and yet be consubstantial with him, inasmuch as he receives from him the same nature as the Father has. Since, however, the Son in that he receives from the Father the nature of the Father is said to be born or begotten of the Father; whereas the Holy Spirit is not said in the Scriptures to be born or begotten while he is said to be from God, Macedonius thought that the Holy Spirit is not consubstantial with’the Father but his creature: for he did not believe it possible for anyone to receive from another the latter’s nature unless he were born of him (and were his son. Hence he thought that if the Holy Spirit receives from the Father the latter’s nature and essence it must infallibly follow that he is begotten and a Son. Wherefore to refute this error it was necessary for our doctors to show that the divine nature can be communicated by a twofold procession, one being a begetting or nativity, and the other not: and this is the same as to seek the difference between the divine processions. Accordingly some have maintained that the processions in God are distinct by themselves. The reason for this view was because they held that the relations do not differentiate the divine hypostases but only manifest their distinction: for they thought relations in God were like individual properties in creatures, which properties do not cause but only manifest the distinction between individuals. They say then that in God the hypostases are distinct only by their origin. And seeing that those things whereby certain things are distinguished primarily must be distinguished by themselves—thus opposite differences, whereby species differ, differ by themselves, otherwise we should go on for ever—they maintain that the divine processions are distinct by themselves. But this cannot be true: because one thing is distinguished from another specifically by that which gives it its species, and numerically by that which gives it individuality. Now the difference between the divine processions must not be merely like that which distinguishes things numerically; it must be like that which differentiates things specifically, since one is generation and the other not. Consequently the divine processions are distinguished by that which gives them their species. But no procession, operation or movement has its species from itself, but from its term or principle. Hence it is futile to say that any processions are distinguished by themselves: and they must differ in relation either to their principles or to their terms.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  How could this have happened? Apparently, in selecting on male wing song production capacity through mate choice, female Club-winged Manakins have evolutionarily transformed both the male’s wing morphology and their own. Again, we do not yet have physiological evidence that these morphological changes affect the female’s flight capacity or energetics. However, the best explanation of why these wing bones are so invariant across all of the rest of birds is that natural selection has maintained their highly functional, tubular, columnar design to achieve optimal flight function and capacity. In other words, the morphological consistency in wing bone design among birds is strong evidence that other variations in wing bone shape are functionally inferior and costly to survival and fecundity. Although female Club-wings will never use their wings to sing a song, they appear to incur at least some of the functional costs of the extraordinary wing bone changes necessary for males to make these attractive songs. By not completely ossifying these bones, as males do, and maintaining a hollow space in the center, female Club-wings appear to avoid at least some of the costs of growing extreme ulnas that males incur. The observation that male Club-wings are likely made worse by the action of female mate choice—less functional, capable, and efficient—could still be rationalized as providing honest information about mate quality. But the observation that female Club-wings have also likely made themselves less functional, capable, and efficient at flight as a consequence of their mating preferences for exotic male wing songs can only be described as decadent. Interestingly, females will not be harming their own survival and fecundity by preferring males that make attractive songs with extreme wing bones. Rather, females with preferences for males with maladaptive wing bones will only pay an indirect, genetic cost for their preferences, because their daughters may inherit more awkward wing bones, which will interfere with their daughters’ survival and fecundity. However, this indirect genetic cost to mate choice can be outweighed by a simultaneous indirect, genetic benefit of having sexually attractive male offspring. Because the maladaptive costs of aesthetically extreme mate choices are deferred by each generation of choosers, the whole population can ease further and further into decadence and dysfunction generation by generation. The population will not be saved from decadence by natural selection, because the maladaptive functional costs are indirect and will be more than balanced by the advantages of having beautiful, sexually attractive offspring. Nevertheless, the entire population becomes increasingly maladapted because the fit between the organisms and the environment gets worse and worse over time. The survival and fecundity of all individuals—both males and females—suffers.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] It was January, and I was Swiffering the bedroom when I saw it, the book I’d bought in the fall: Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire. The capsule description was a firm handshake: “Having tracked one hundred women for more than ten years,” it read, “Lisa M. Diamond argues that for some women love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual, but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups and, most importantly, different love relationships.”41 I read it in two days, while June was at Brandon’s. The premise was this: in the course of her career, Diamond, a professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah, had read countless studies of sexual orientation. She noticed that the overwhelming majority had recruited only men as their subjects.42 As a pregnant woman and new mother, I had been baffled by how little we know of women’s bodies; apparently, we know little of their sexuality either. The studies Diamond read had built and upheld a born-this-way model of sexual orientation, the longtime prevailing model. But since the studies had looked only at men, Diamond wondered how well the model fit non-heterosexual women. So over the course of a decade, she conducted her own methodical study. What she found surprised even her: among female subjects, the norm was not stability in sexual attraction and identity but change. Most women reported having a certain orientation, as men did, but their attractions were more nuanced, layered, sensitive to circumstance. Diamond called this quality “fluidity.” Her study dialogued with others, too, that were similarly affirming. Diamond cited a 2000 article by psychologist Roy Baumeister suggesting that women’s sexuality is more “plastic” than men’s, in the sense not only of variability in sexual attraction, but also in sex drive, qualities they like in a partner, and what they like in bed.43 (I imagine this will shock absolutely zero women.) “The notion of female sexual fluidity,” writes Diamond, “suggests not that women possess no generalized sexual predispositions but that these predispositions will prove less of a constraint on their desires and behaviors than is the case for men.”44 This made my eyes well, though for most of my life, I probably would have nodded politely at Diamond’s assertion and then privately, internally, scoffed. Riiight. Explain it however you want. Clearly these people were closeted, and now they’re just coming out. That’s what I’d thought when I heard about people who lived for years in the straight world—acquaintances, strangers, celebrities like Cynthia Nixon—coming out as gay or lesbian. I’d had a similar feeling upon hearing of seemingly straight women dating a lesbian for a while and then going back to men. She was just experimenting. I wouldn’t have believed me.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  A pagan, a social man, no longer recognizes life in himself alone, but in the aggregate of personalities,—in the tribe, the family, the race, the state,—and sacrifices his personal good for these aggregates. The prime mover of his life is glory. His religion consists in the glorification of the heads of unions,—of eponyms, ancestors, kings, and in the worship of gods, the exclusive protectors of his family, his race, his nation, his state. [9] The man with the divine life-conception no longer recognizes life to consist in his personality, or in the aggregate of personalities (in the family, the race, the people, the country, or the state), but in the source of the everlasting, immortal life, in God; and to do God's will he sacrifices his personal and domestic and social good. The prime mover of his religion is love. And his religion is the worship in deed and in truth of the beginning of everything, of God. The whole historical life of humanity is nothing but a gradual transition from the personal, the animal life-conception, to the social, and from the social to the divine. The whole history of the ancient nations, which lasted for thousands of years and which came to a conclusion with the history of Rome, is the history of the substitution of the social and the political life-conception for the animal, the personal. The whole history since the time of imperial Rome and the appearance of Christianity has been the history of the substitution of the divine life-conception for the political, and we are passing through it even now. It is this last life-conception, and the Christian teaching which is based upon it and which governs our whole life and lies at the foundation of our whole activity, both the practical and the theoretical, that the men of so-called science, considering it in reference to its external signs only, recognize as something obsolete and meaningless for us. This teaching, which, according to the men of science, is contained only in its dogmatic part,—in the doctrine of the Trinity, the redemption, the miracles, the church, the sacraments, and so forth,—is only one out of a vast number of religions which have arisen in humanity, and now, having played its part in history, is outliving its usefulness, melting in the light of science and true culture. What is taking place is what in the majority of cases serves as a source of the coarsest human errors,—men who are standing on a lower level of comprehension, coming in contact with phenomena of a higher order, instead of making efforts to understand them, instead of rising to the point of view from which they ought to look upon a subject, judge it from their lower point of view, and that, too, with greater daring and determination the less they understand what they are talking about.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Automatically I took down the volume and it opened of itself at the last page of Emerson’s advice to the scholars of Dartmouth College. Every word is still printed on my memory: I can see the left-hand page and read again that divine message: I make no excuse for quoting it almost word for word: “Gentlemen, I have ventured to offer you these considerations upon the scholar’s place and hope, because I thought that standing, as many of you now do, on the threshold of this College, girt and ready to go and assume tasks, public and private, in your country, you would not be sorry to be admonished of those primary duties of the intellect whereof you will seldom hear from the lips of your new companions. You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. ‘What is this Truth you seek? what is this beauty!’ men will ask, with derision. If nevertheless God have called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say, ‘As others do, so will I: I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of the land and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season’;—then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand thousand men. The hour of that choice is the crisis of your history, and see that you hold yourself fast by the intellect. It is this domineering temper of the sensual world that creates the extreme need of the priests of science.... Be content with a little light, so it be your own. Explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatize, nor accept another’s dogmatism. Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread, and if not store of it, yet such as shall not take away your property in all men’s affections, in art, in nature, and in hope.” The truth of it shocked me: “then perish the buds of art and poetry and science in you as they have perished already in a thousand, thousand men!” That explained why it was that there was no Shakespeare, no Bacon, no Swinburne in America where, according to population and wealth there should be dozens. There flashed on me the realization of the truth, that just because wealth was easy to get here, it exercised an incomparable attraction and in its pursuit “perished a thousand, thousand” gifted spirits who might have steered humanity to new and nobler accomplishment.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  In the second place, religion is always a determination of the activity of the future, and not of the past, and so it is obvious that the investigation of past phenomena can in no way include the essence of religion. The essence of every religious teaching does not consist in the desire to express the forces of Nature symbolically, or in the fear of them, or in the demand for the miraculous, or in the external forms of its manifestation, as the men of science imagine. The essence of religion lies in the property of men prophetically to foresee and point out the path of life, over which humanity must travel, in a new definition of the meaning of life, from which also results a new, the whole future activity of humanity. This property of foreseeing the path on which humanity must travel is in a greater or lesser degree common to all men, but there have always, at all times, been men, in whom this quality has been manifested with particular force, and these men expressed clearly and precisely what was dimly felt by all men, and established a new comprehension of life, from which resulted an entirely new activity, for hundreds and thousands of years. We know three such conceptions of life: two of them humanity has already outlived, and the third is the one through which we are now passing in Christianity. There are three, and only three, such conceptions, not because we have arbitrarily united all kinds of life-conceptions into these three, but because the acts of men always have for their base one of these three life-conceptions, because we cannot understand life in any other way than by one of these three means. The three life-conceptions are these: the first—the personal, or animal; the second—the social, or the pagan; and the third—the universal, or the divine. According to the first life-conception, man's life is contained in nothing but his personality; the aim of his life is the gratification of the will of this personality. According to the second life-conception, man's life is not contained in his personality alone, but in the aggregate and sequence of personalities,—in the tribe, the family, the race, the state; the aim of life consists in the gratification of the will of this aggregate of personalities. According to the third life-conception, man's life is contained neither in his personality, nor in the aggregate and sequence of personalities, but in the beginning and source of life, in God. These three life-conceptions serve as the foundation of all past and present religions. The savage recognizes life only in himself, in his personal desires. The good of his life is centred in himself alone. The highest good for him is the greatest gratification of his lust. The prime mover of his life is his personal enjoyment. His religion consists in appeasing the divinity in his favour, and in the worship of imaginary personalities of gods, who live only for personal ends.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  As an individual man cannot live without having a definite idea of the meaning of his life, and always, though often unconsciously, conforms his acts to this meaning which he ascribes to his life, even so aggregates of men living under the same conditions,—nations cannot help but have a conception about the meaning of their collective life and the activity resulting therefrom. And as an individual, entering into a new age, invariably changes his comprehension of life, and a grown man sees its meaning in something else than in what a child sees it, so an aggregate of people, a nation, inevitably, according to its age, changes its comprehension of life and the activity which results from it. The difference between the individual and the whole of humanity in this respect consists in this, that while the individual in the determination of the comprehension of life, proper to the new stage of life into which he enters, and in the activity which arises from it, makes use of the indications of men who have lived before him and who have already passed through the period of life upon which he is entering, humanity cannot have these indications, because it all moves along an untrodden path, and there is no one who can tell how life is to be understood, and how one is to act under the new conditions into which it is entering, and in which no one has lived before. And yet, as a married man with children cannot continue to understand life as he understood it when he was a child, so humanity cannot in connection with all the various changes which have taken place,—the density of the population, and the established intercourse between the nations, and the improvement of the means for struggling against Nature, and the accumulation of science,—continue to understand life as before, but must establish a new concept of life, from which should result the activity which corresponds to that new condition into which it has entered or is about to enter. To this demand responds the peculiar ability of humanity to segregate certain people who give a new meaning to the whole of human life,—a meaning from which results the whole new activity which is different from the preceding one. The establishment of the new life-conception, which is proper for humanity under the new conditions into which it is entering, and of the activity resulting from it, is what is called religion. And so religion, in the first place, is not, as science thinks, a phenomenon which at one time accompanied the evolution of humanity, and later became obsolete, but is a phenomenon always inherent in the life of humanity, and is in our time as inevitably inherent in humanity as at any other time.

• From A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  of his independence of the But the fa, on n, 6-7 91 the whole, slightly to be preferred: it is more consonant with the thought of cfcxb Bik T&V o"oxo6yuct>v, in which the apostle apparently began to say what he here expresses in a different syntactical form, and with the words acpdaw-rcov . . . Xatxp&vec, which seem to have been written, as pointed out above, in anticipation of these words. 7. a\\a Tovvawriov l&dvrev Srt, TreTr/crrev/iat TO Kpoftva-rias /ca6o)$ Tl&pos rfjs TrepiTQ/jLfjs, "but on the con- trary when they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised as Peter with the gospel to the circum- cised." aXA<& (Germ, "sondern") introduces the positive side of thej fact which is negatively stated in epol yap, etc. The participle ISJvres, giving the reason for the fact about to be stated, Se^tk !&»/an>, v.9, implies that what they had learned led them to take this step, and so that they had in some sense changed their minds. There is an obvious relation between the words of this v. and vA But whether the decision of the Jerusalem apostles to recognise Paul's right of leadership in the Gentile field was based on his statement of the content of his gospel (v.2), or on his story of how he received it (i15), or on the recital of its results, or in part on the spirit which he himself manifested, or on all these combined, is not here stated. The last supposition is perhaps the most probable.* That Paul regarded the distinction between the gospel of the uncircumcision entrusted to him and that of the circumcision entrusted to Peter as fundamentally not one of content but of the persons to whom it was addressed is plain from that which this verse implies and the next verse distinctly affirms, that the same God commissioned both Paul and Peter each for his own work. It IB implied, moreover, that this essential identity of * Nor Is it wholly clear precisely to what extent they had changed their minds. If the in- terpretation of v» * advocated at that point Is correct, they had urged the circumcision of Titui on grounds of expediency rather than of principle. They can not therefore have stood for the circumcision gf Gentile Christians in general as a matter of intrinsic necessity. But whether in af&Ing tor the circumciaion of TituB for the sake of the legalists, they had also that fur like rejuKins Paul should circumcise all his Gentile converts, does not clearly up* pear. Consistency would have required that they should do so, since the circuuaeMon of Titus could femve had little tig aificance if it were not to be regarded as a precedent But it Is not certain tint they w«re is latent upon logical consistency M upon securing a peaceful ieutaneat of the matter* « 92 GALATIANS

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 4 (300 – 1300, Rome) (2009)

  10 Latin Christendom: New Frontiers (500–1000) CHANGING ALLEGIANCES: ROME, BYZANTIUM AND OTHERS The era spanning the collapse of the Western Roman Empire’s political structures up to the tenth century, so often called the Dark Ages, was a rich and creative period in the development of the West, and ‘early medieval’ might describe it more neutrally and fairly. When did it begin? Something recognizable as Classical society survived in the western Mediterranean well after the Western Empire itself, only decisively changing in the later sixth century. The Roman aristocracy had been shattered by repeated wars in Italy, ironically mostly resulting from efforts by emperors in Constantinople to restore the old Italy under their own rule. Similar catastrophes crippled the old way of life in North Africa, leaving it weakened before Muslim onslaughts in the seventh century (see pp. 260–61). Perhaps most significantly, in the decades after 550, Latin culture came within a hair’s breadth of extinction: the witness to that is the survival of datable manuscript copies of texts. The laborious process of copying manuscripts, the only way in which the fragile products of centuries of accumulating knowledge could be preserved, virtually came to an end, and would not be taken up again for two and a half centuries in the time of Charlemagne (see pp. 352–3). In the intervening period, much of Classical literature was lost to us for ever. Politically, the area of the former empire was transformed into a series of ‘barbarian’ kingdoms, mostly ruled by Arian Goths, who preserved their Arianism as a mark of cultural distinction from the Catholic Christians of the old Latin world. The two cultures remained curiously separate side by side, with the Latin elite excluded from military service, paying tribute to Gothic leaders while preserving some shadowy rights of property as ‘hosts’ to ‘guests’ who never actually got round to leaving.1 We have already noted that young Gallo-Roman noblemen are said to have formed a disproportionate number of those joining the pioneer monasteries of Bishop Martin of Tours in the late fourth century, and

• From How the Bible Actually Works (2019)

  version of this episode (2:13–25): the Temple has outgrown its usefulness. With no money changers, there is no sacrifice; with no sacrifice, well, Judaism would need to figure something out. And as you read that, again, remember that Jesus and the early followers of Jesus were Jewish and not angling to start a new religion. We are at a pivotal moment in understanding the significance of Jesus: the ancient story of Israel and Israel’s God was hinting at an upheaval, a shift in direction. When asked by the Jewish authorities to give them some indication that he had the right to turn over tables, Jesus answered (and this is only in John, who you remember is very big on establishing Jesus’s authority), Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up (2:19). They all thought Jesus might be a bit bonkers in the brain, since Herod’s renovations were still going on forty-six years later. But John goes on to explain that Jesus was talking about his body— that he would be crucified and raised on the third day. Jesus is the Temple. Talk about an upheaval. Money changers and animals are no longer needed. Neither is the Temple. The Romans would destroy the Temple in 70 CE, never to be rebuilt. But Jesus will still be here. It might help to remember that John is writing all this about two decades after the Temple fell. John is taking the time to explain how the destruction of the Temple speaks to the significance of Jesus. The other three Gospels were written much closer to 70 CE (Mark perhaps a bit before). They don’t include this exchange that John has—perhaps because they hadn’t yet had time to process how the cataclysmic fall of the holy sanctuary fit with the gospel. A new era of “God’s residence” was dawning, already hinted at in John 1:14: The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory . The Greek word behind lived is better rendered tented or tabernacled —it is the same word used in the Greek translation of the Old Testament for Moses’s Tabernacle in the wilderness. John says that, as the glory of Yahweh filled the Tabernacle in the Old Testament (Exod. 40:34), we see Jesus’s glory as he “tabernacled” with us. All of which is to say we are witnessing here a rather seismic shift in how God’s presence is perceived, one that goes beyond anything the tradition had made room for. And we can see why some accused Jesus of blasphemy. But Jesus is here. Things are different. The idea of God’s presence remains as it did in former days—that is the “old treasure.” But the new treasure—the new wine that the old wineskin of the Temple can’t contain—is how God’s presence is now experienced: through Jesus.