Relief

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 How the Bible Actually Works (2019)

  don’t mind saying that I don’t think God rides a chariot across the sky to make weather or for any other reason—but the ancient Israelites certainly seemed to. Or at least they found the metaphor helpful. But I don’t. And I think it’s perfectly fine to say with firm conviction that we don’t think like that anymore, because we see the heavens differently and therefore God differently. This doesn’t make the ancient Israelites “wrong” or “unsophisticated.” It makes them human. Neither should it make us snobs who think we “get it” more than others. We, too, are human, seeing God from the limitations of our own time and place in ways we probably don’t even realize. And what if God is just fine with our being human? Recognizing how our thinking of God is bound to our own time and place is freeing in that it helps us make sense of some of the rather uncomfortable things we read about God in the Bible, like Psalm 68—or the following that has caused more than its share of quiet panic among alert Bible readers. The Israelites believed something about God that would get some of us in very hot water today if we uttered the thought in polite Christian company. As we saw earlier, just like every other ancient people of biblical times, the Israelites believed that many gods existed and that their God (Yahweh) was one of them . Not “the only God,” but one of the gods. And just like their ancient neighbors with their own religions, the Israelites believed that their national god was the highest and best among all the gods. But as Moses’s warning illustrates, these other gods nevertheless had a purpose. And when you look up to the heavens and see the sun, the moon, and the stars, all the host of heaven, do not be led astray and bow down to them and serve them, things that the L ORD your God has allotted to all the peoples everywhere under heaven . But the L ORD has taken you and brought you out of the iron-smelter, out of Egypt, to become a people of his very own possession , as you are now. (Deut. 4:19–20) Translation: “Worshiping the sun, moon, and stars is what I set up for all the other nations. But you, Israel, are mine. You worship me only.” At least here, it seems as though God really doesn’t have a problem with other religions for other people. What made the Israelites different from their neighbors, religiously speaking, was their belief that only Yahweh, and not any of the other gods (heavenly bodies included), was worthy of their worship. To use the technical language, the Israelites were not monotheists in the strict sense of the word, but monolatrists: they worshiped one God, but believed in the existence of many gods. *

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  Next, within the same Priestly tradition, Genesis 9:1–7 is the re-creation of human creation in Genesis 1:26–39, yet Genesis 9 emphasizes covenant while Genesis 1 never mentions it: Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.” (9:8–17) You will have noticed that sevenfold drumbeat repetition of the word “covenant” (my italics). But notice as well that in this case, “covenant” means a unilateral promise given unconditionally by God to the whole world and all creation. There is not a hint of any sanction for human default or penalty for human rejection. God says “never again” rather than “never again unless . . . ” We might ask: In the biblical tradition, is that the meaning of covenant? Does it indicate a unilateral, unconditional, and unsanctioned divine promise? In other words, what are the metaphor, model, and matrix for the biblical concept of covenant within the ancient Near East?

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

  AMBROSE. Rightly also, from that moment was his tongue loosed, for that which unbelief had bound, faith set free. Let us then also believe, in order that our tongue, which has been bound by the chains of unbelief, may be loosed by the voice of reason. Let us write mysteries by the Spirit if we wish to speak. Let us write the forerunner of Christ, not on tables of stone, but on the fleshly tablets of the heart. For he who names John, prophesies Christ. For it follows, And he spake, giving thanks. BEDE. Now in an allegory, the celebration of John’s birth was the beginning of the grace of the New Covenant. His neighbours and kinsfolk had rather give him the name of his father than that of John. For the Jews, who by the observance of the Law were united to him as it were by ties of kindred, chose rather to follow the righteousness which is of the Law, than receive the grace of faith. But the name of John, (i. e. the grace of God,) his mother in word, his father in writing, suffice to announce, for both the Law itself as well as the Psalms and the Prophecies, in the plainest language foretel the grace of Christ; and that ancient priesthood, by the foreshadowing of its ceremonies and sacrifices, bears testimony to the same. And well doth Zacharias speak on the eighth day of the birth of his child, for by the resurrection of the Lord, which took place on the eighth day, i. e. the day after the sabbath, (septimam sabbati.) the hidden secrets of the legal priesthood were revealed. 1:65–6665. And fear came on all that dwelt round about them: and all these sayings were noised abroad throughout all the hill country of Judæa. 66. And all they that heard them laid them up in their hearts, saying, What manner of child shall this be! And the hand of the Lord was with him. THEOPHYLACT. As at the silence of Zacharias the people marvelled, so likewise when he spoke. Hence it is said, And fear came upon all; that from these two circumstances all might believe there was something great in the child that was born. But all these things were ordained, to the end that he who was to bear witness of Christ might also be esteemed trustworthy. Hence it follows, And all they that heard them laid them up in their heart, saying, What manner of child, &c. BEDE. For forerunning signs prepare the way for the forerunner of the truth, and the future prophet is recommended by auspices sent before him; hence it follows, For the hand of the Lord was with him. GREEK EXPOSITOR. (Metaphrastes.) For God worked miracles in John which he did not himself, but the right hand of God in him.

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

  CHRYSOSTOM. Having said that a horn of salvation had risen up to us from the house of David, he shews that through it we are partakers of His glory, and escape the assaults of the enemy. As he says, That being delivered out of the hands of our enemies, we might serve him without fear. The two things above mentioned will not easily be found united. For many escape danger, but fail of a glorious life, as criminals discharged from prison by the king’s mercy. On the other hand, some reap glory, but are compelled for its sake to encounter dangers, as soldiers in war embracing a life of honour are oftentimes in the greatest peril. But the horn brings both safety and glory. Safety indeed as it rescues us from the hands of our enemies, not slightly but in a wonderful manner, insomuch that we have no more fear, which arc his very words; that being delivered from the hand of our enemies, we might serve him without fear. ORIGEN. Or in another way; Frequently are men delivered from the hands of the enemy, but not without fear. For when fear and peril have gone before, and a man is then plucked from the enemies’ hand, he is delivered indeed, but not without fear. Therefore said he, that the coming of Christ caused us to be snatched from the enemies’ hands without fear. For we suffered not from their evil designs, but He suddenly parting us from them, hath led us out to our own allotted resting place. 1:7575. In holiness and righteousness before him, all the days of our life. CHRYSOSTOM. Zacharias glorifies the Lord, because He hath made us to serve Him with full confidence, not in the flesh as Judah did with the blood of victims, but in the spirit with good works. And this is what he means by in holiness and righteousness. For holiness is, a proper observance of our duty towards God, righteousness of our duty towards man; as, for example, when a man devoutly performs the Divine commands, and lives honourably among his fellow men. But he does not say “before men,” as of hypocrites desirous to please men, but “before God,” as of those whose praise is not of men, but of God; (Rom. 2:29.) and this not once or for a time; but all the days of their life, as it is said, all our days. BEDE. For whosoever either departs from God’s service before he dies, or by any uncleanness stains either the strictness or purity of his faith, or strives to be holy and righteous before men, and not before God, does not yet serve the Lord in perfect freedom from the hand of his spiritual enemies, but after the example of the old Samaritans endeavours to serve equally the Gods of the Gentiles, and his Lord.

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

  The “targets” were not permitted to reply or defend themselves. The session was scheduled to last an hour, but their kvetching not only took the entire evening, it spilled over into the next morning and set “new records in inventive criticism,” Romney said. Despite the counseling, the group neared the end of the retreat wondering if they could ever work together. Then a final, one-hour exercise changed everything. In that session, the instructor taught the group that if individuals live in conflict with their core values, they will be unhappy, unhealthy, and less successful. In psychology, that is called cognitive dissonance, when people experience stress from holding contradictory beliefs or when they engage in actions that go against their values. Internal conflict between how one lives and what one values creates stress, and the consequences of stress can be dire. Further, the instructor taught, if individuals in a group have widely divergent core values, it will be very hard for the group to work together inclusively. “I thought I had my answer as to why our team was disintegrating: Our values were miles apart,” Romney said. “One partner said his life ambition was to be in the Forbes list of wealthiest people, another wanted fame and recognition to compensate for his life’s early indignities, and another cared primarily about his family life. Our instructor said that it was possible that our actual core values weren’t that disparate. Instead, it might be that what we were working for, saying to ourselves that we wanted from life, was in conflict with our own core values.” The instructor asked the group to list the five people they most respected—living or dead. Then next to each person’s name they wrote the three characteristics they most associated with that individual. Romney made his list of people and chose words and phrases to describe them. They were: “service,” “love of others,” “integrity,” “faith,” “compassion,” “vision,” “strength of character.” Finally, group members were instructed to select the three words that appeared most frequently on their lists. Romney’s words were “love,” “service,” and “faith.” “I wondered what my partners’ lists would show,” Romney says. He was surprised. “We had all arrived at basically the same values. Every one of us had included love and service. And in the list of people we most admired, every one of us had included Abraham Lincoln. “We were not so different after all,” he concludes. The partners realized they needed to align their team’s mission with its members’ core values, then work together with a keen focus on those ideals. “I can’t say that our business suddenly transformed into an enterprise of love and service,” Romney says. “But I can say that it changed, and we changed, too.

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

  And there was a man who had been there thirty-eight years, and was weak. Jesus asked him what ailed him. And the man told him that he had been ill for thirty-eight years and was waiting to get into the pool first after the water bubbled, in order to be healed, but all these thirty-eight years he had not been able to get in first for someone always got into the pool before him. And Jesus saw that the man was old, and said to him: Do you wish to get well? The man replied: Yes, I do wish to, but I have no one to help me into the pool in time. Someone always gets in before me. And Jesus said to him: Arouse yourself, take up your bedding and go. And the sick man took up his bedding and walked away. And it was on a Saturday. And the Orthodox said: You must not carry your bedding for today is Saturday. He replied: He who raised me told me to take up my bedding. And the infirm man went away and told the Orthodox that it was Jesus who had cured him. And they were angry, And accused Jesus because he did such things on Saturday. And Jesus said: What the Father always does, I also do. I tell you truly: the son can do nothing for himself; he does only what he has understood from the Father. What the Father does, he also does. The Father loves the son, and has taught him all the things the son needs to know. As the Father gives life to the dead so the son gives life to him who desires it, because as the business of the Father is life so the business of the son must be life. The Father has not condemned men to death, but has given them power to die or live at will. And if they Honor the son as the Father they will live. I tell you truly that he who has understood my teaching and believed in the common Father of all men, has life already and is delivered from death. They who have understood the meaning of human life have already escaped from death and will always live. For as the Father has life in Himself so He has given the son to have life in himself also, and has given him freedom. It is in this way that he is the son of man. Henceforth mortals are divided into two kinds: those who do good and thereby find life, and those who do evil and are thereby destroyed. And this is not my decision, but is what I have understood from the Father. And my decision is just, for I decide so not in order to do what I wish, but in order that all may do the will of the Father of all men.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  himself or jointly, on one occasion, with the Pope. He punished bishops and bestowed privileges on religious establishments. His son, Henry III, showed himself zealous in reforming the Church and seems to have set no limit to his powers in ecclesiastical matters. As ‘head of the Church’, he presided in 1046 at Sutri over a synod which deposed two popes, secured the abdication of a third, and elected yet another. Three years later he, and the outstanding reforming pope, Leo IX, presided jointly over the innovatory Council of Mainz and again at the Council of Constance, where he is described as ‘ascending the steps of the altar together’ with Leo. Yet within a few decades the harmony which ruled Church and State, based on papal acceptance of the wider and superior status of the monarch, had been completely shattered. It was never restored. The pontifical king, Henry IV, found himself challenged by a regal pontiff, in the shape of Pope Gregory VII. The dispute began in the 1070s when Henry, who had succeeded as a minor, began to redress the erosion of the power which had taken place during his minority, and in particular to assert his full right to appoint bishops in imperial Italy. The Pope hotly denied his power to invest bishops with ring and staff, and the dispute quickly became a confrontation over the whole range of Church and State authority, culminating in the excommunication of Henry, his election of an anti-pope, open warfare, the king’s submission at Canossa, and then a long, inconclusive period of attrition. How did this come about? Why did the papacy abruptly attempt to reverse a situation which had at least the merit of tradition and feasibility? There can be little doubt that Gregory VII was the aggressor, in that Henry IV was merely doing what all his predecessors had done. Henry seems to have been a pious and earnest man – Ebo, the biographer of Otto, Bishop of Bamberg, says that Henry used his psalter so much that it became ‘wrinkled and almost unreadable’. But this was irrelevant: or, rather, it could be said that a pious emperor might be storing up trouble for his successors. The efforts of Conrad II, and especially Henry III, to improve standards in the Church, in Rome and elsewhere – their conscientious discharge of their pontifical duties – did a great deal to create a reformed body of clergy which promptly denied Henry IV the right to exercise such duties. The mid-eleventh century was a springtime for Europe. The worst phase of the Viking raids from the north, and the Saracens from the south, was over; western Christendom was no longer a sandwich about to be devoured between barbarous and infidel fangs, but an expanding society. The production of food was growing; so was population, and

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Home was where they had to take you in. Language was for praising home, for praising home and God and rivers. God and language and rivers and home were elastic. Everything stretched around the surface of family. But these weren’t smiles, really. His family wasn’t smiling. Smiles were cheap jewelry. They were looking down, his family, scuffing the snow and ice in the parking lot. It wasn’t as good as all that. It wasn’t a romance. It was enough that he dropped the emblems. Just unloaded those elaborate bits of chromium right on the cracked pavement there. He threw his arms around his puffy dad. And then he threw his arms around his icy mom. Kissed Wendy. Kissed the dog. —Well, we are glad you are okay, his father said. How long have you been here? Paul just threw up his hands. —Have a lot to tell you, Benjamin said. Everyone tried to laugh. —And it’s not all good. It was all quiet again. They buckled themselves into the car, heat on high, as if they had all been deprived of heat lifelong. Daisy Chain scrambled over Wendy’s back to get his humid dog tongue all up in Paul’s face. Then Paul’s dad just put his head down on the steering wheel and sat that way for a while. This went on for a long time. And then he started to choke or something. Paul had never heard anything like it. He thought it might be a joke. Or a medical emergency. He didn’t know what to do. His mom’s gloved hand wavered in the air at his father’s back as though she were going to set it there. She didn’t. His father turned back to look at him, to look at Wendy, smiling, not saying anything, his cheeks shiny with some dew. —Something I have to tell you two, he said. And right then there was a sign in the sky. An actual sign in the sky. The conversation stopped and there was a sign in the sky and it knotted together everything in that twenty-four hours. Above the parking lot. A flaming figure four. And it wasn’t only above the parking lot. They saw it all over the country, over the Unitarian Church of Stamford, over New Canaan High School, over the Port Chester train station and up and down the New Haven line, over emergency vehicles in Greenwich and Norwalk, over the little office where Wesley Myers was trying to write the next day’s sermon, for the first Sunday in Advent. In halls devoted to public service, in private mansions and dilapidated apartments. The heavens declared: the flaming figure four. They saw it from the Firebird. They did, and it stayed with them all that fall, that apotheosis. Or that’s how I remember it, anyway. Me. Paul. The gab. That’s what I remember. And this story really ends right at that spot.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  large fish leaps out to attack Tobias. Raphael instructs him to open the fish and take out its gall, heart, and liver and keep them as medicines. Raphael guides Tobias to the house of Raguel, and tells him about Sarah. He urges the young man to seek her hand in marriage, since he is her next of kin. Tobias knows about Sarah’s previous husbands and is wary, but Raphael, tells him how he can repel the demon, using the fish’s liver and heart. Sarah’s parents are reluctant because of her previous history, but Tobias insists. Then Raguel gives her to him “in accordance with the decree in the book of Moses.” The young couple pray before they retire for the night. The parents are so sure that Tobias will die that they dig his grave, but in the morning he is found alive and well. Tobias now retrieves the silver but remains with his in-laws for fourteen days of wedding celebration. In the meantime, his parents are sick with worry because of his prolonged absence. Tobias hurries home when the feast is ended. Raphael instructs him to smear the gall of the fish on his father’s eyes, and sure enough, his sight is restored. Tobit proposes to give Raphael half of the silver in gratitude, but the angel finally reveals his true identity. Tobit thereupon bursts into praise of God (chap. 13). Before he dies he prophesies that all Israel, including Jerusalem, will be made desolate, but that Jerusalem will subsequently be restored and the exiles will return to the land. The book ends with a brief notice about the deaths of Tobit and his wife, and says that Tobias lived to see the destruction of Nineveh. The story of Tobit is no more historical than the other stories we have reviewed. Its fanciful nature is apparent in the roles of the angel, the demon, and the magical cures. Even though it is set in Assyria before the Deuteronomic reform, it clearly reflects the piety of Second Temple Judaism. The story is a romance; in large part it is the story of the quest of a young man for a bride and the trials he encounters. More broadly, the plot is that of a traditional folktale. At the beginning, the protagonists are in a state of lack (Tobit is blind, Tobias needs a wife, and Sarah needs a husband). Their needs are met and their problems are resolved through the aid of a wonderful helper (Raphael). The story draws on widespread folkloric motifs such as the Grateful Dead and the Dangerous Bride. Tobit’s ultimate good fortune is clearly related to his piety in burying the dead,

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Besides Jesus’s two interventions on marriage, his voice has not much been preserved on matters sexual – notably he disappoints many conservative Christians by saying nothing whatsoever about homosexuality, about which they would especially love to know what Jesus would do.[42] There nevertheless exists one curious textual fragment from his sayings that has ended up in John’s Gospel, though in narrative texture it feels more like the three Synoptic Gospels, and it does not appear in the earliest surviving manuscripts of John. Now it usually forms John 7.53–8.11. Its textual wanderings and the verbal variants in the manuscript testimonies to it probably indicate that many in the second-century Church found it disconcerting and were not sure what to do with it. Like Matthew’s version of Joseph making his own decisions about the unexpected pregnancy of Mary in the Infancy Narratives, it confronts the punitive adultery provisions of Deuteronomy 22.20–29. The story is presented as being a test by the conventional enemies of Jesus’s preaching, ‘the scribes and Pharisees’, to see how he would deal with the Deuteronomic mandate for death by stoning for adulterous women. Jesus is teaching in the Temple when they drag before him a woman ‘caught in adultery’ (notably, not accompanied by the man who was presumably caught with her). What would Jesus do? they ask. His first reaction is to squat down on the ground and write with his finger. It is ironic that the only reference in the Gospels to Jesus writing is in their most textually insecure section, and what he might have written has been a source of inevitably fruitless speculation over the centuries.[43] Rather than disclosing the meaning of his doodles, Jesus observes, ‘Let him who is without sin among you, be the first to throw a stone at her.’ They will be forced to recognize that sin encompasses much more than sexual sins. When they have all shuffled off looking sheepish, Jesus is left alone with the woman. No one had condemned her; ‘neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again.’ Jesus is proclaiming his own prerogative of forgiveness; yet this tiny biblical fragment has wider implications for his followers over two millennia and more. Like his pronouncements on divorce and monogamy, it subverts the ethical expectations and conventions of its age: part of a ferment of new possibilities while Christians began creating identities separate from parent Judaism in a Hellenistic Mediterranean society. Its troubled textual history and the equally troubled later commentary on it witness that its subversive role did not end in the first century CE. It has continued to challenge Christianity’s constant reconstruction of Christian ethics up to our own time. We may be in the early stages of exploring its full implications. [image file=image_rsrcC2P.jpg] 5. For more than two centuries, the parishioners of St Margaret’s (Herefordshire) have exited church beneath a disconcerting quotation of John 8.11, unusually painted above the medieval south door. Today a hand-sanitizer brings practical assistance to this stern Georgian admonition.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Now Christian Churches that over three centuries had become accustomed to wielding power in their territories had to become reacquainted with the experience of their rulers espousing a different religion. Not all Christians would have found this a trauma, since the imperial Church had done its best to make life difficult for both Miaphysites and Dyophysites, and non-Chalcedonians generally may not have been displeased to have new masters professing what initially may have seemed no more than an eccentric variant on their own creed. Early Islam remained the religion of a small military elite in its wide new dominions, and it was not a proselytizing faith, following the Qur’anic precept that ‘there is no compulsion in religion’.[9] Muslims were usually content to avoid trouble among their subjects by letting Christianity go its own way, on the understanding that it should accept a co-operative second-class status in society. That left Christians as the most numerous of the early Caliphate’s subjects in west Asia until at least the tenth or eleventh centuries: until then, this was an ‘Islamicate’ rather than a predominantly ‘Islamic’ society. Above all, for Dyophysite Christianity, the new dispensation was a change from often downright hostile Zoroastrian monarchs to a rather more congenial form of monotheism. If Dyophysites read what the Qur’an said about Mary – chief among examples of believers, into whom God breathed his Spirit – they might have been reminded of Patriarch Nestorios’s effort to give Mary an appropriate honour that avoided the title Theotokos.[10] Indeed, the Church of the East found it easier to find a cultural niche alongside Islam than it had done under the Sasanians. It is remarkable to read the relieved words of the Dyophysite Patriarch Isho‘yahb III in 649, soon after the Muslim conquest: ‘Not only do they not oppose Christianity, but they praise our faith, honour the priests and saints of our Lord, and give aid to churches and monasteries.’[11] When the Abbasid dynasty overthrew the Umayyads as Caliphs in 750, they moved the centre of power eastwards from Damascus into Mesopotamia and in 762 created a new capital, Baghdad. This move east particularly favoured the Dyophysite Church hierarchy over its more westerly Miaphysite or Byzantine rivals. The Abbasids granted the Dyophysite Patriarch a newly enhanced authority which really did create a Church of the East. His writ extended over all Christians in the Caliphate, which now extended from Cairo into Central Asia, and he was in charge of Christian missions beyond the Caliphate’s eastern frontiers as far as China. It is no exaggeration to say that, in the eighth and ninth centuries, the great and long-lived Patriarch Timothy I (reigned 780–823), who supervised bishops from Tibet to the Mediterranean and saw some of his Christian layfolk well-placed among the Baghdad governing class, looked out on a flock as numerous and certainly far more extended than that of the Bishop of Rome in the far west.[12]

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  That turn away from de-Christianization in the first decade of the nineteenth century was the work of Napoleon Bonaparte, the most successful general to emerge from the Revolution. He extended its conquests but turned them to new ends to suit himself and consolidate power won both on the battlefield and in the fractious Republic. In 1799 he headed a coup d’état against the increasingly dysfunctional regime of the Directory and then thrust aside his fellow conspirators. Successive plebiscites, only partially rigged, gave overwhelming majorities to his assumption first of a Republican title of First Consul in 1802 and then, in 1804, Emperor of the French. Almost his first act on seizing power had been a symbolic step to reconciliation with the shattered Catholic Church: providing a decent funeral for Pope Pius VI, who had died exiled in France as a prisoner of the Revolution in 1799. Napoleon’s own religion was a collage of random pieties and Enlightenment clichés, but, in any case, it took second place to his sense of political realities. It happened that most of the Revolution’s most lasting conquests were in the Catholic parts of the continent, especially the Catholic Low Countries, southern Germany and Italy. Napoleon realized what could be gained from ending internal warfare in France against Catholic traditionalism, and how much lost if the Republic persisted in anti-Catholic brutality elsewhere in Europe. There was an all-embracing deal to be done, not with the troubled Constitutional Church of France but with a new Pope – Pius VII – a serious-minded Benedictine monk-bishop reputed to have Enlightenment sympathies, though also cousin to the late Pius VI. Very soon after Pius’s election in Venice in 1800, Napoleon, fresh from an unexpectedly shattering victory over the Austrian Habsburgs at Marengo in northern Italy, declared that he intended ‘that the Roman Catholic and Christian religion be preserved in its entirety, that it be exercised publicly…’.[6] It was a bold move that risked alienating the strong anti-clericalism in his army while failing to impress conservatives with bitter recent memories of the Revolution, but Napoleon persisted, his goal a new version of the Concordat agreed back in 1516 between Pope Leo X and the French monarchy.

• From How the Bible Actually Works (2019)

  it is only the person who sins that shall die (18:3–4). It’s as if God is saying, “Yes, I see your point.” Ezekiel goes on for a few paragraphs laying out various scenarios to make it absolutely clear what God means. God will bless a righteous and lawful man, but if his son is wicked, that son will be treated as he deserves; he can’t appeal to his father’s reputation. Likewise, if the son is righteous and does not follow in his father’s wicked footsteps, he will not bear his father’s punishment. There’s more to it, but we get the gist: everyone is treated by God as they deserve. The son doesn’t get a free pass because dad was the model of obedience, nor is the father’s punishment for wickedness downloaded onto the son. Okay, why bring this up at all? Because the exiled Judahites were struggling with God’s fairness —wasting away in a foreign land, punished by God for something some of them had no part in, wondering whether all this God business was really worth the effort. If God’s justice looks like this, we might be better off giving up on being Israelite and instead joining a softball league or community theater. And so God declares the promise that everyone will be treated as they deserve. Of course, this is wonderful, but here’s the problem. Ezekiel’s prophecy, his word from the Lord, collides with an earlier word from the same Lord—the Second Commandment, against false worship (the making of idols). In Exodus 20:4–6 (and the later version in Deut. 5:8–10), false worship merited a punishment extending to the third and the fourth generation . * The blessings for obedience will linger to the thousandth generation . Sure, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, which the Bible tends to do a lot when numbers are involved, but the point still sticks: when it comes to worshiping God, obedience and disobedience have multigenerational effects: children are blessed or punished for what their parents did. Remember that the sin that landed the Judahites in exile wasn’t something like stealing or adultery or murder, but the very same topic that occupies the Second Commandment, false worship, which had been sponsored by one dumb Judahite king after another. It’s hard to miss the implication of Ezekiel’s words: God clearly said one thing to Moses in the Second Commandment at the beginning of Israel’s journey, and then God clearly says something different through Ezekiel at the end. Briefly, another example of diversity in the Bible over time is found in the story of King Jehu’s bloody coup in 2 Kings 9–10, a story from the days of the divided monarchy. In that definitely not-for-children’s story, Jehu is anointed by the prophet Elisha to hurry on to Jezreel and massacre the entire royal family of wicked king Ahab, including seventy of his sons. Thus began the dynasty of Jehu, and it all happened according to the word of the L ORD

• From How the Bible Actually Works (2019)

  a ray of hope—but generally speaking they weren’t the perky life-of-the-party kinds of folk you want to hang out with. Definitely not the type of people you ask to come speak at the church fund-raiser. Having said that, in Ezekiel 18 we find a turn for the better. It seems that God has heard a complaint and has sent his prophet to clear things up. Apparently, a saying was making the rounds at the time: The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge (18:2). As the following verses make clear, this saying is a complaint: children are exiled in Babylon for what their parents did (worshiping foreign gods). If the parents were the ones who ate the sour grapes, why should the children’s teeth be on edge ? Think of how your jaw locks when you bite into a lemon. Pretty effective metaphor, if you ask me. Anyway, that doesn’t seem fair, does it? No, it doesn’t. Not one bit. One can easily imagine that some of the deported Judahites were too young to have actually done anything all that wrong. And, if you think about it for a second, plenty of deportees were probably not themselves serious offenders but just got caught up in the mayhem. Still others were born in captivity and weren’t even alive when the wrongs were done. So why are all these people being punished by this prolonged time-out when they themselves didn’t do anything to deserve it? Why are their teeth on edge? And if this is how God operates, maybe God isn’t just at all! Ezekiel’s answer—better, God’s answer spoken through Ezekiel—is: As I live, says the L ORD God, this proverb shall no more be used by you in Israel. Know that all lives are mine; the life of the parent as well as the life of the child is mine;

• From Between Us

  In Japan you will not be acceptable unless you keep up with others. In the US there is a lot of diversity [in choices, behaviors]. It is all right as long as you are happy with it. When I returned to the United States [after having been in Japan for a while] I felt relieved. I thought that now I could assert myself without worrying about conforming to others. But on the other hand, it was difficult. Here you have to make decisions yourself . . . you should be alert and support yourself, or you drop out. . . . Being taken care of in the Japanese way isn’t so bad as I used to think. After all, you enjoy more a feeling of security. Although individuals from immigrant groups may come to spend more time dancing the waltz, many of them still remember how to dance the tango; they are familiar with the emotions of two (or more) cultures. I still remember how stunned I was when, fresh upon my arrival back in Europe, the newly elected chair of my department accepted his position by saying that he would accept this time-consuming job, even though his wife was surely not going to be happy with the news. He assured the department that he would work hard on its behalf, and would try his best. He was no slacker, but in his acceptance speech had no trace of the honor of having been elected, and no reference to pride or happiness. He did not express his happiness that this wonderful department gave him their trust, and made no mention of the great department that he was going to make greater. His acceptance speech was humble, not exhilarated. I was surprised because I had expected the North American waltz. Yet, I also instantly remembered that I was back in the country of tango. My own ways of doing emotions had changed. At the same time, my more than thirty years of experiences in the Netherlands kept an indelible influence. I was able to shift gears right away.

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  Since Self-Control is a figure in Augustine’s imagination, and the fig tree is symbolic, Courcelle argued that the child’s voice Augustine now hears must also be a psychic event, not literal—Courcelle even used a rare textual variant to say the voice came from God’s house (divina domo) not from a nearby house (vicina domo). But Augustine does not treat this like a metaphor or an interior event. He wonders if any child’s game had the repeated chant Tolle, lege. Unable to think of one, he accepts the hint, understanding the words to mean “Pick up and read,” and turns back to what he had been reading. A. Sizoo thinks one indication that the voice was real is the possibility that Augustine records it without really understanding it. Since lege often meant “select” rather than “read,” he could have been repeating a harvesters’ work chant, “Pick up and sort” (O’Donnell 3.63), an Italian chant not familiar to an African like Augustine. In any event, Augustine instantly saw the meaning of the text he picked up under the voice’s prodding: “Be clothed in Jesus Christ.” The very instant I finished that sentence, light was flooding my heart with assurance, and every shadow of doubt evanesced (T 8.29). 3. Cassiciacum: 386–387 AS A CONVERT, Augustine wanted to make a clean break with his past life. Una had already left. He laid plans to give up his court post, pleading ill health. He changed scene, going to a villa loaned him by a friend, Verecundus. He was not becoming just a Christian but a Christian ascetic. Verecundus regretted he could not join the company at the villa, since he was married. This elite Christian community would be made up of celibates (T 9.5). There was a competitive note to this ascetical break with “lower” life. Though it was possible to be a Christian but not an ascetic, that did not fit late-antique views of what was proper for a philosophical adherent to any serious moral program. When Augustine had heard his last conversion story, just before he burst into the garden, he said to Alypius: What’s the matter with us? Has it come to this—do you hear so?—that non-philosophers surge ahead and snatch at heaven, while we, with our cold learning—we, look at us, are stuck in the mire of our own flesh and blood? Just because they have got ahead, should we be ashamed to follow at all rather than shamed at least into following? (T 8.18) This need for a strict renunciation in the pursuit of reason was part of what Peter Brown calls a Mediterranean-wide phenomenon. It shows up in the praise for pagan sages, as in Ammianus’ tribute (5.4.2) to Julian the Apostate:

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  So that evening, when at 7:20 p.m. I heard the college bell summoning the students to dinner, I did not lay down my pen, close my books neatly, and walk obediently to the dining hall. My essay had to be finished in time for my tutorial the following morning, and I was working on a crucial paragraph. There seemed no point in breaking my train of thought. This bell was not the voice of God, but simply a convenience. It was not inviting me to a meeting with God. Indeed, God was no longer calling me to anything at all—if he ever had. This time last year, even the smallest, most mundane job had had sacred significance. Now all that was over. Instead of each duty being a momentous occasion, nothing seemed to matter very much at all. As I hurried across the college garden to the dining hall, I realized with a certain wry amusement that my little gesture of defiance had occurred on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. That morning, the nuns had knelt at the altar rail to receive their smudge of ash, as the priest muttered: “Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.” This memento mori began a period of religious observance that was even more intense than usual. Right now, in the convent refectory, the nuns would be lining up to perform special public penances in reparation for their faults. The sense of effort and determination to achieve a greater level of perfection than ever before would be almost tangible, and this was the day on which I had deliberately opted to be late for dinner! As I pushed back the heavy glass door, I was confronted with a very different scene from the one I had just been imagining. The noise alone was an assault, as the unrestrained, babbling roar of four hundred students slapped me in the face. To encourage constant prayer and recollection, our rule had stipulated that we refrain from speech all day; talking was permitted only for an hour after lunch and after dinner, when the community gathered for sewing and general recreation. We were trained to walk quietly, to open and close doors as silently as possible, to laugh in a restrained trill, and if speech was unavoidable in the course of our duties, to speak only “a few words in a low voice.” Lent was an especially silent time. But there was no Lenten atmosphere in college tonight. Students hailed one another noisily across the room, yelled greetings to friends, and argued vigorously, with wild, exaggerated gestures. Instead of the monochrome convent scene— black-and-white habits, muffled, apologetic clinking of cutlery, and the calm, expressionless voice of the reader—there was a riot of color, bursts of exuberant laughter, and shouts of protest. But whether I liked it or not, this was my world now.

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

  Like the chimpanzees, bonobos, or pygmy chimpanzees, also live in large groups consisting of multiple males and females, but their sexual behavior is very different from that of chimpanzees—indeed, from that of all other mammals. As we saw earlier, bonobos have evolved to use sexual behavior to mediate social conflicts, and they engage in sexual behaviors with individuals of both sexes across all age and social status categories. In general, males and females are social equals (or co-dominant) and share access to all ecological resources. Females have strong female-female social alliances or friendships. As a consequence, sexual coercion over fertilization is virtually nonexistent in bonobos, and there is no evidence of infanticide at all, nor of any other kind of extreme intra-group violence. However, as with chimpanzees and gorillas, it is the females of the species who do all the work of gestating and taking care of the young. In summary, in our closest relatives—both species of chimpanzees—females are highly promiscuous (albeit for different reasons), only occasionally exhibit specific mating preferences, and contribute all the parental investment. However, only in chimpanzees do females face having their offspring killed by males. — Although sexual conflict and coercion are found in virtually every human society on the planet, they are very different in frequency, magnitude, and deadliness from what we see in the lives of our close relatives among the apes. The difference between us and most of our monkey and ape relatives is even more dramatic when we look specifically at infanticide by males. Viewed through the lens of human biology, the average male baboon, gorilla, or chimpanzee is an infanticidal maniac just waiting for his opportunity. Male infanticide accounts for 38 percent of infant deaths in baboons and approximately 33 percent in gorillas. What is common male monkey and ape behavior is almost unknown in any human society. Even though men are still responsible for the overwhelming majority of human violence, including the occasional death of children, human males simply do not murder young children for their own reproductive benefit. Actually, most of the anthropological literature on infanticide in humans is about infanticide by mothers. The virtual elimination of male infanticide in humans constitutes a major evolutionary transition in primate biology. This transformation involved a reduction in male-male sexual competition and sexual coercion and a qualitative and quantitative advance in the sexual autonomy of females. How did this happen?

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  For that treatment I eventually became immensely grateful. Upon her death, however, no one could take on her mantle. In the end, her experiment failed. Her motives may have been honorable in her own mind, but her tactics were abhorrent and destructive. It is interesting to note that since her death, there has been no body of work regarding her life, her role at the Center, her impact on humanity. On the other hand, one can find numerous articles, books, and references to Leonard Feeney, who will likely live on for centuries as a force in the American Catholic Church from the 1940s through the 1970s. * * * On my fifty-fifth birthday, in 2003, I was sitting with my parents at the beach house my husband and I had bought several years earlier. We were nursing our summer gin and tonics as we rocked in the white wicker chairs and took in the magnificent vista of whitecaps on the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Rhode Island, much as we had done thirty-two years earlier on our first family vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. My father was now eighty-five, my mother seventy-four. Without any preparatory thought, I said to them, “I’ve been thinking about writing a memoir. I look back on my childhood with great pleasure. I know that may seem strange, but I did not grow up as an unhappy child, and I want to tell that story for my children and my grandchildren. In fifty years, long after I’m dead and buried, there won’t be anyone alive who was part of the Center.” I was aware that I could offer only my own account, which might differ from other eyewitness versions, but growing up in St. Benedict Center was part of the history of the Catholic Church in America during the mid-twentieth century, and firsthand versions are better than second and third, or speculation and hearsay. Their response was unsurprising: “Tell it exactly as you remember it. It’s a part of history. Yes, there are things that we wish we could do over, but you should tell the story.” After thinking about the project for a full five years, I finally put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) a little more than ten years ago. In truth, my initial instinct was to hide behind a pseudonym. I was still anxious about what the world might think of me. But as I started to share the unfolding chapters with the women in my memoir writing group, I was encouraged by their reactions. They found the story fascinating. They expressed empathy for my parents. It was Sister Catherine whom each of them despised.

• From On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy (1961)

  Even when an infant gets all his food from the “hard mother” he clearly and increasingly prefers the “soft mother.” Motion pictures show that he definitely “relates” to this object, playing with it, enjoying it, finding security in clinging to it when strange objects are near, and using that security as a home base for venturing into the frightening world. Of the many interesting and challenging implications of this study, one seems reasonably clear. It is that no amount of direct food reward can take the place of certain perceived qualities which the infant appears to need and desire. TWO RECENT STUDIES Let me close this wide-ranging—and perhaps perplexing—sampling of research studies with an account of two very recent investigations. The first is an experiment conducted by Ends and Page (5). Working with hardened chronic hospitalized alcoholics who had been committed to a state hospital for sixty days, they tried three different methods of group psychotherapy. The method which they believed would be most effective was therapy based on a two-factor theory of learning; a client-centered approach was expected to be second; a psychoanalytically oriented approach was expected to be least efficient. Their results showed that the therapy based upon a learning theory approach was not only not helpful, but was somewhat deleterious. The outcomes were worse than those in the control group which had no therapy. The analytically oriented therapy produced some positive gain, and the client-centered group therapy was associated with the greatest amount of positive change. Follow-up data, extending over one and one-half years, confirmed the in-hospital findings, with the lasting improvement being greatest in the client-centered approach, next in the analytic, next the control group, and least in those handled by a learning theory approach. As I have puzzled over this study, unusual in that the approach to which the authors were committed proved least effective, I find a clue, I believe, in the description of the therapy based on learning theory (13). Essentially it consisted (a ) of pointing out and labelling the behaviors which had proved unsatisfying, (b ) of exploring objectively with the client the reasons behind these behaviors, and (c ) of establishing through re-education more effective problem-solving habits. But in all of this interaction the aim, as they formulated it, was to be impersonal. The therapist “permits as little of his own personality to intrude as is humanly possible.” The “therapist stresses personal anonymity in his activities, i.e., he must studiously avoid impressing the patient with his own (therapist’s) individual personality characteristics.” To me this seems the most likely clue to the failure of this approach, as I try to interpret the facts in the light of the other research studies. To withhold one’s self as a person and to deal with the other person as an object does not have a high probability of being helpful. The final study I wish to report is one just being completed by Halkides (9).