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 The Great Believers (2018)

  “Is that even a good idea?” he asked, and Teddy shrugged. He said, “Look, Teddy, aren’t you gonna get tested now? I mean, I know how you feel about the test, but if there are things that can help—don’t you want to do those? Some clinical trial? Wouldn’t you take the Mexican pills?” Teddy said, quietly, “I did get tested. We went together. That was the deal—for his birthday, he wanted both of us to get tested. It was my present to him, that I agreed. I’m negative. I mean, I told you. I always told you.” Yale said, “Jesus Christ, Teddy. I’m happy for you, but Jesus Christ.” —The next day, Bill finally returned, suspiciously tan, and there was at least more noise around the office. That following afternoon, Roman the intern started. He sat in the Northwestern crest chair across from Yale and held his black backpack in his lap. He twitched his foot. Yale said, “I know you probably thought you’d be doing more curatorial work. I hope this isn’t a disappointment.” “No, I mean—I’m up for anything. I don’t have experience talking to people about money, but I guess that’s good to learn, right?” There was no way Roman would be talking to donors—he’d be listening in, at most—but Yale didn’t point this out. If nothing else, he’d join them in Wisconsin next week. Yale said, “Listen, I’m an art lover myself. I wasn’t a money guy who fell into museums. I’m an art guy who’s good with numbers.” Roman brightened. “Did you do grad work?” Yale said, “Let me rephrase that. I’m an art lover who majored in finance.” “Got it.” Roman nodded. “I mean, it’s not too late.” Yale couldn’t help laughing. “I’ve gotten a pretty good education along the way.” “Cool,” Roman said. “Cool.” He took his glasses off and wiped them on his sweater. Yale set him to work on the Rolodex, which was still a mess. There was an extra table in the front corner of the office that made a decent desk, so long as no one opened the door. And, if Yale was honest, it improved his view. When he wanted to look at something nice, there was the window behind him, or there was Roman, hard at work, in front of him. In another life, Yale might have let himself fantasize about filling another kind of mentor role for Roman, teaching him things in and out of bed. But at the moment, the thought was almost revolting. —Before he left for Wisconsin, Yale bought a big bag of stuff from the deli—egg salad, pasta salad, cold cuts—and put it all right at the front of the refrigerator for Charlie. He made him promise to sleep enough. Charlie said, “I don’t deserve you.” He was looking into the fridge like it held King Tut’s treasures.

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

  From this state of infamy the papacy was rescued for a brief time by the interference of Otho I., justly called the Great (936973). He had subdued the Danes, the Slavonians, and the Hungarians, converted the barbarians on the frontier, established order and restored the Carolingian empire. He was called by the pope himself and several Italian princes for protection against the oppression of king Berengar II. (or the Younger, who was crowned in 950, and died in exile, 966). He crossed the Alps, and was anointed Roman emperor by John XII. in 962. He promised to return to the holy see all the lost territories granted by Pepin and Charlemagne, and received in turn from the pope and the Romans the oath of allegiance on the sepulchre of St. Peter. Hereafter the imperial crown of Rome was always held by the German nation, but the legal assumption of the titles of Emperor and Augustus depended on the act of coronation by the pope. After the departure of Otho the perfidious pope, unwilling to obey a superior master, rebelled and entered into conspiracy with his enemies. The emperor returned to Rome, convened a Synod of Italian and German bishops, which indignantly deposed John XII. in his absence, on the ground of most notorious crimes, yet without a regular trial (963).281 The emperor and the Synod elected a respectable layman, the chief secretary of the Roman see, in his place. He was hurriedly promoted through the orders of reader, subdeacon, deacon, priest and bishop, and consecrated as Leo VIII., but not recognized by the strictly hierarchical party, because he surrendered the freedom of the papacy to the empire. The Romans swore that they would never elect a pope again without the emperor’s consent. Leo confirmed this in a formal document.282 The anti-imperial party readmitted John XII., who took cruel revenge of his enemies, but was suddenly struck down in his sins by a violent death. Then they elected an anti-pope, Benedict V., but he himself begged pardon for his usurpation when the emperor reappeared, was divested of the papal robes, degraded to the order of deacon, and banished to Germany. Leo VIII. died in April, 965, after a short pontificate of sixteen months. The bishop of Narni was unanimously elected his successor as John XIII. (965–972) by the Roman clergy and people, after first consulting the will of the emperor. He crowned Otho II. emperor of the Romans (973–983). He was expelled by the Romans, but reinstated by Otho, who punished the rebellious city with terrible severity. Thus the papacy was morally saved, but at the expense of its independence or rather it had exchanged its domestic bondage for a foreign bondage. Otho restored to it its former dominions which it had lost during the Italian disturbances, but he regarded the pope and the Romans as his subjects, who owed him the same temporal allegiance as the Germans and Lombards.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  AL INTRODUCTION two women, Euodia and Syntyche, whose dissen- sion concerns the apostle, evidently because of their prominent standing in the community (Phil 4:2). Indeed, according to the narrative of Acts, the church in Philippi began with the conversion of Lydia, a woman of means whose entire house- hold came to follow her lead in adopting this new faith. She was the head of her household when the apostle first met her and soon became head of the church that met in her home (Acts 16:1-15). Even after the period of the New Testament, women continued to be prominent in churches connected with Paul. The tales connected with Thecla, recounted in Chapter 21, appear to have struck a resonant chord with such people. Here were stories of women who renounced sexual rela- tions and thereby broke the bonds of patriarchal marriage, that is, the laws and customs that com- pelled them to serve the desires and dictates of their husbands. Joining the apostle, these women came to experience the freedom provided by an ascetic life dedicated to the gospel. These narra- tives portray Paul as one who proclaimed that the chaste will inherit the kingdom, with women in particular being drawn to his message. Even though the stories themselves are fictions, they appear to contain a germ of historical truth. Women who were associated with Paul's churches came to renounce marriage for the sake of the gospel and attained positions of prominence in their communities. Recall that letters later written in Paul's name speak of such women and try to bring them into submission. Some of these women were "widows," that is, women who had no hus- band overlord (whether they had previously been married or not). Such women are said to go about telling "old wives tales" (1 Tim 4:7 and 5:13), pos- sibly stories like The Acts of Paul and Thecla that justified their lifestyles and views. Even in writings that oppose them, such women are acknowledged to be important to the church because of their full- time ministry in its service (1 Tim 5:3-16). There is still other evidence of women enjoying prestigious positions in churches, well into the late second century. Some of this evidence derives from Gnostic groups that claimed allegiance to Paul and that were known to have women as their leaders and spokespersons.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  Even though these apostles were committed to evange- lizing Jews (2:7-9), they conceded that there was no need for Gentile converts to be circumcised. Emblematic of this decision was the fate of the Gentile '[itus, who accompanied Paul to the con- CHAPTER 19 PAUL ,',,ID THE CRISES OF HIS CHURCHES 2.89 ference and who was not compelled to be circum- cised by those who took the opposing perspective (2:3-4). By securing this agreement with the Jerusalem apostles, Paul could rest assured that they would give his mission their full blessing and not try to undermine it. In his words, he knew that he "was not running, or had not run, in vain" (2:2). Paul provides one other autobiographical detail to secure his point. After his meeting with the Jerusalem apostles, one of them, Cephas, came to spend time with him and his church in Antioch. At first, Cephas joined with Paul and the other Christians of Jewish background in sharing "table fellowship" with the Gentile believers ("he used to eat with the Gentiles"; 2:11-12). But when repre- sentatives of the apostle James, the brother of Jesus, arrived on the scene, Cephas withdrew from fellowship with the Gentiles, and the other J ewish-Christians joined with him (2:12-13). Paul saw this withdrawal as an act of hypocrisy and openly rebuked Cephas for it. In Paul's view, Cephas had compromised the earlier decision not to compel Gentiles to obey Jewish laws (2:14). Scholars have different opinions concerning what this conflict was all about. It may be best to assume that eating with the Gentiles somehow required Cephas and his Jewish-Christian compan- ions to violate kosher food laws. They may have thought that this was acceptable so long as they gave no offense to other believers, but when the representatives of James, that is, Jewish-Christians who perhaps continued to keep kosher, came to town, Cephas and his companions realized that they had to decide with whom they were going to eat. They chose not to give offense to their Jewish brothers and sisters and so ate with them. For Paul, this was an absolute affront because it suggested that there was a distinction between Jew and Gentile before God, whereas the agreement that had been struck in Jerusalem maintained that there was not. Jew and Gentile were on equal foot- ing before God, and any attempt to suggest Jewish superiority was a compromise of the gospel.

• From The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (2007)

  It is true that the church is the new people of God, yet the Jews should not be spoken of as rejected or accursed as if this followed from holy scripture. Consequently, all must take care, lest in catechizing or in preaching the word of God, they teach anything which is not in accord with the truth of the Gospel message or the spirit of Christ. The shift in Roman Catholic attitudes is striking. Catholic children since Vatican II have not been raised to think of Jews as “Christ killers.” Nevertheless, theology and history, teaching and practice do not always march hand in hand. The teaching of contempt still continues, which is in part why the Vatican continues to issue guidelines on how to present Jews and Judaism.3 Most mainline Protestant churches agree with the Vatican’s statement; most have also issued official statements indicating that they find anti-Semitism sinful and that “the Jews” are not to be blamed for Jesus’s death. This teaching appears to be working. In the United States, polls suggest that the number of Americans holding this view of Jewish guilt at the beginning of the twenty-first century is between 2 and 8 percent. Pockets of Islamic thought, although denying that Jesus died on the cross, nevertheless manage to blame the Jews for his crucifixion. The Qur’an states: Therefore, for their [the Jews’] breaking their covenant and their disbelief in the communications of Allah and their killing the prophets wrongfully and their saying “Our hearts are covered”; nay! Allah set a seal upon them owing to their unbelief, so they shall not believe except a few. And for their unbelief and for their having uttered against Marium [Mary] a grievous calumny. And their saying: “Surely we have killed the Messiah, Isa son of Marium, the apostle of Allah”; and they did not kill him nor did they crucify him, but it appeared to them so (like Isa) and most surely those who differ therein are only in a doubt about it; they have no knowledge respecting it, but only follow a conjecture, and they killed him not for sure. (4:155–57) According to this teaching, the Jews boast in claiming to have killed Jesus, but in reality they did not. They are condemned for something they did not do, and the condemnation is, again, their own fault. Regarding Matthew 27:25, whether one accepts these theological or historical claims or not becomes a matter of interpretation. Again, the question of whether the New Testament is anti-Jewish ends in personal assessment of the arguments, and so it ends in stalemate. “You Are from Your Father the Devil” The Gospel of John, where the term Ioudaios (“Jew,” “Judean”) appears approximately seventy times (the approximation is because of manuscript variations), has received the most attention from scholars concerned about the anti-Jewish potential of New Testament texts.

• From Opening Up by Writing It Down (2016)

  The experimental volunteers have created a mental summary of their experience that often is psychologically less daunting to deal with. One woman, after writing about being raped by a casual acquaintance, explained: I haven’t been able to talk about the rape in detail to anyone. In the last three months, it has dominated my being. I’ve had fears and problems with other people that I’ve never had before. Being in this [writing experiment] has made a difference. Somehow, just writing about what happened has made it all less overwhelming. I won’t ever forget what happened but I see more clearly that it was an isolated event in my life. SUMMARIZING AND SHARING MEMORY TO REDUCE STRESS Nearly any type of an event is less overwhelming and easier to think about once it is summarized in some way. Many times, when we write something down, we don’t have to think about it any longer. You may have noticed this when you are preparing to go on a vacation. There’s packing, stopping the mail, getting the car checked, and on and on. In the middle of meetings or talking to someone on the phone, overlooked chores come to mind. “Oh, I can’t forget to pack the fishing rod” or “get someone to water the plants.” As much as you try to avoid it, you probably break down and start making lengthy lists of last-minute tasks to perform. Before list making, you have to actively juggle the tasks in your mind. Once you start the lists, however, your mind becomes freer and you probably feel a little less distressed. You have, in essence, transferred your mental notes from your head onto a piece of paper. Several researchers have discussed how memory and thought processes can be viewed as external to our brains. Dan Wegner provided fascinating examples of how partners in a marriage gradually become repositories of each other’s thoughts and memories. One spouse may remember restaurants; the other may keep track of movies. One spouse never has to think about finances, for example, because all financial thoughts are housed in the other spouse’s brain. As with list making or marriage, we can also construe the act of writing about a trauma as a method of externalizing a traumatic experience. Once it has been written down or told to another, the memory and value of it have been preserved. There is now less of a reason to rehearse the event actively. In the computer world, this is analogous to transferring data from one computer system to another; it removes the file(s) and frees up space on the original computer, and relocates the information to the second computer.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  To recap: In issue #140, Annihilus was busy trying to take control of the world. Natch. This was all happening in the Negative Zone, that universe beside our own, where the laws of nature were subtly altered. Annihilus was a sort of insect—a late-model Gregor Samsa—who had been transformed through the agency of some extinct Negative Zone creatures, called Hereroes, into a winged, metallic fighting machine in pursuit of immortality. The control of the universe was his goal. The means to this end, in Annihilus’s view, was none other than the F.F. In particular, he intended to sap the powers of young Franklin Richards, who was being held in the country by his mother, Sue—away from Reed, her husband, who never gave enough time to his child, who was no kind of father or husband. Agnes Harkness, Sue’s former governess, had been hypnotized by Annihilus into leading Sue and Franklin to the Negative Zone. Reed, Johnny, Ben, and Medusa—who had assumed Sue’s spot on the team way back in issue #112—and Johnny’s old college roommate, Wyatt Wingfoot, followed. Most of the issue, though, was just a setup. Annihilus narrated at length his origins to Wyatt Wingfoot. This was the kind of issue that had no purpose but to insure that Paul Hood would purchase the next. Which brought Paul to #141. Reed was set to rescue his estranged wife and son. He was half-crazy with paternal and marital loyalty. Paul had never seen him so frenzied, so … irrational. Yet as the issue opened, Annihilus had immobilized Reed and the rest of the team in some kind of antigravity paralysis. “You brought us here for a reason, Annihilus,” Reed cried out to the insect. “Revenge was part of it—but so is my son. What is it you want with him?” Meanwhile, Alicia Masters, the blind girl who loved Benjamin Grimm was traveling to Latveria, to try to find a cure for her blindness. The F.F. escaped from their suspended animation—they just did —and were soon walking the surface of Annihilus’s desolate planet. They fought off and befriended the telepathic aliens who lived there. And they tunneled through the rock under their foe’s fortress. Soon they had managed to penetrate the laboratory chamber where Sue, Agnes Harkness, and Franklin Reed were being held in an enormous test tube. These last eight pages were enough to lift Paul Hood from the murky bog of self-recrimination. As the cover promised, little Franklin was indeed glowing like an ATOMIC BOMB! It began with this light in his eyes, this internal and eternal cosmic power raging in him. Galaxies, endless expanses of primordial creation, were spread before him like mere toys . Medusa, Johnny, and Ben launched Annihilus into a tomb of corroded machinery. It was that simple. The stage was set for the final act of this grave domestic tragedy. Reed wanted to get them all back to N.Y.C., where he could use his untested antimatter device to try to stabilize Franklin.

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

  Galerius, the real author of the persecution, brought to reflection by a terrible disease, put an end to the slaughter shortly before his death, by a remarkable edict of toleration, which he issued from Nicomedia in 311, in connexion with Constantine and Licinius. In that document he declared, that the purpose of reclaiming the Christians from their wilful innovation and the multitude of their sects to the laws and discipline of the, Roman state, was not accomplished; and that he would now grant them permission to hold their religious assemblies provided they disturbed not the order of the state. To this he added in conclusion the significant instruction that the Christians, "after this manifestation of grace, should pray to their God for the welfare of the emperors, of the state, and of themselves, that the state might prosper in every respect, and that they might live quietly in their homes."55 This edict virtually closes the period of persecution in the Roman empire. For a short time Maximin, whom Eusebius calls "the chief of tyrants," continued in every way to oppress and vex the church in the East, and the cruel pagan Maxentius (a son of Maximian and son-in-law of Galerius) did the same in Italy. But the young Constantine, who hailed from the far West, had already, in 306, become emperor of Gaul, Spain, and Britain. He had been brought up at the court of Diocletian at Nicomedia (like Moses at the court of Pharaoh) and destined for his successor, but fled from the intrigues of Galerius to Britain, and was appointed by his father and proclaimed by the army as his successor. He crossed the Alps, and under the banner of the cross, he conquered Maxentius at the Milvian bridge near Rome, and the heathen tyrant perished with his army of veterans in the waters of the Tiber, Oct. 27, 312. A few months afterwards Constantine met at Milan with his co-regent and brother-in-law, Licinius, and issued a new edict of toleration (313), to which Maximin also, shortly before his suicide (313), was compelled to give his consent at Nicomedia.56 The second edict went beyond the first of 311; it was a decisive step from hostile neutrality to friendly neutrality and protection, and prepared the way for the legal recognition of Christianity, as the religion of the empire. It ordered the full restoration of all confiscated church property to the Corpus Christianorum, at the expense of the imperial treasury, and directed the provincial magistrates to execute this order at once with all energy, so that peace may be fully established and the continuance of the Divine favor secured to the emperors and their subjects.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Second, the Gospel of Peter contains a consecutive and canonically independent source that constitutes about half its content. Once again, as always, and for everyone: wrong on sources, wrong on reconstructions. Composite Document [In the Gospel of Peter ] old statements are suppressed, or wilfully perverted and displaced: new statements are introduced which bear their condemnation on their faces. Nothing is left as it was before. Here is “History as it should be”: “Lines left out” of the old familiar records. And no one who will take the pains to compare sentence by sentence, word by word, the new “Lines left out” with the old “Line upon Line,” will fail to return to the Four Gospels with a sense of relief at his escape from the stifling prison of prejudice into the transparent and the bracing atmosphere of pure simplicity and undesigning candour…. And so the new facts are just what they should be, if the Church’s universal tradition as to the supreme and unique position of the Four Canonical Gospels is still to be sustained by historical criticism. J. Armitage Robinson, “The Gospel According to Peter,” pp. 31–32 One hundred years after that somewhat strident assessment of the Gospel of Peter , Brown gives a much more balanced summary: “GPet is a gospel reflecting popular Christianity, i.e., the Christianity of the ordinary people not in the major center of Antioch, where public reading and preaching would have exercised greater control, but in the smaller towns of Syria…. GPet was not heterodox, but it incorporated many imaginative elements that went beyond the canonical gospels…. [It] belatedly supplied us with a fascinating insight into how dramatically some ordinary Christians of the early 2nd cent, were portraying the death of the Messiah. Beneath the drama, in its own way GPet proclaimed that Jesus was the divine Lord, victor over all that his enemies could do to him by crucifixion” (1345–1348). What, in between those opposite reactions, is the Gospel of Peter? It is not a necessary hypothesis, like the Q Gospel , but an extant text, like the Gospel of Thomas . It exists in the Codex Panopolitanus or Codex Cairensis 10759, a large fragment of sixty verses copied onto a parchment codex dated between the seventh and ninth centuries, which was discovered at ancient Panopolis in Egypt, and published separately in 1892 by Urbain Bouriant and Adolfe Lods. It also exists as Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 2949, two tiny scroll fragments of three verses dated to the late second or early third centuries, discovered at ancient Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, and published by R. A. Coles in 1972. Careful comparisons of both texts have been made by Dieter Lührmann (1981) and Jay Treat (1990). It is clear that there are differences in the common material between those two versions, but fewer than, for instance, in the common material between the Greek and Coptic versions of the Gospel of Thomas or the Greek and Coptic versions of the Didache .

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  But it wasn’t all bad. In some ways, this messiness was a relief. For the first time, nobody meticulously structured our every waking moment, watched us like a hawk to ensure our productivity, or lectured us on our manners. We took our newfound freedom to extremes like a couple of irresponsible college students. We stayed up late watching R-rated movies. I quit all of my extracurriculars, started failing my classes, wore dog collars and miniskirts, and became a tiny, foul-mouthed pirate, spewing all the furious expletives I’d held inside for so long. And I stopped believing in God. I drew Sharpie pentagrams on my wrists and binders. Being virtuous and good hadn’t gotten me anything but a ruined family. I might as well go the other way. My father also began a delayed adolescence in which he tried to convince me that he’d been a friendly bro the whole time, a frog under a spell who was just now turning back into the prince he was always meant to be. I made him drive us to art galleries and bookstores in San Francisco so we could become cultured. He took me to Haight-Ashbury, even chaperoned me while I explored the head shops, oohing and aahing over the shiny glass bongs. He told me stories about all the ex-girlfriends he should have married and about getting high in college with a guy named Volcano. We’d always listened to my mother’s soft-rock station growing up, but now on the ride home, we blasted Pink Floyd, chanting, “Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!” I’m not sure why, but I started affectionately calling him “Poop Dawg” instead of “Dad.” When I yelled, “Poop Dawg!” and he yelled back, “What?” all of my friends would scream with delight. Our most valuable bonding time was over dinner. My father didn’t know how to cook, so he’d take us out whenever it was time to feed me. And there, over quesadillas at Chili’s, one of us would start. We never used the word “mother.” Never uttered her name. We simply said “she.” “She never would have let me eat this because she’d say it had too much fat, too much sodium. She was the one always getting sick, yet she worried about everyone else,” he spat. “What a fucking bitch,” I said way too loudly, and people turned to look, but neither of us cared. “Do you remember all of the times she wouldn’t let me eat dinner because I couldn’t choke down the salad?” “I’m sorry. I don’t remember that,” he said. “What a horrible woman.” “Total whore. HUGE whore! Did I ever tell you about the time she beat me for an hour with chopsticks because I didn’t want to eat the Chinese broccoli in my soup?” He sucked his teeth. “I wish I’d known; I would’ve left her a long time ago,” he muttered, and I knew that was a lie, but it was okay. —

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Later he changed his understanding of tax collectors (that is, toll or customs collectors), saying that they were condemned not as “collaborators” but as “charging too much, and thus of preying on the populace as a matter of course” (1993:229). The phrase “sinners and tax (toll) collectors” indicated those who were “systematically or flagrantly … living outside the law in a blatant manner,” those who “systematically and routinely transgressed the law” (1993:227, 236). They were, for example, “the wicked” who were oppressing “the weak, the orphan, the lowly, the destitute, and the needy” in Psalm 82 (cited in Chapter 12) as God deposed the gods from cosmic government for malpractice in office. With that I am in complete agreement. I also agree with the way he has cauterized, I hope forever, assertions that Jesus’ contemporary Judaism did not and would not accept repentance from and offer forgiveness to such people. He asks rhetorically, “Is it a serious proposal that tax collectors and the wicked longed for forgiveness, but could not find it within ordinary Judaism?” And he responds correctly, “There was a universal view that forgiveness is always available to those who return to the way of the Lord,” so that “if Jesus, by eating with tax collectors, led them to repent, repay those whom they had robbed, and leave off practicing their profession, he would have been a national hero…. It is simply inconceivable that Jewish leaders would have been offended if people repented, and this is a cliché which should be dropped from Christian scholarship” (1985:202–203, 272–273). That statement, long overdue, is absolutely true and deserves frequent quotation. Early-first-century Judaism, and any other Judaism before or after it, did not need lessons from Jesus on the elimination of impurities, the forgiveness of sins, or the mercy of God. It had had all of that firmly in place for a very long time. But what, then, was left for Jesus to do that caused trouble? Sanders makes three claims about Jesus in response to that question that are as “inconceivable” as those anti-Jewish claims he has rightly and justly condemned. First, he understands Jesus as a prophet of Jewish restoration. Despite that understanding, however, he repeatedly (varying the wording across several pages) makes this assertion: “There is very little evidence which connects Jesus directly with the motif of collective, national repentance in view of the eschaton…. [T]here is not a significant body of reliable sayings material which explicitly attributes to Jesus a call for national repentance…. [T]here is no firm tradition which shows that he issued a call for national repentance in view of the coming end, as did John the Baptist…. [I]t seems that he did not make thematic that Israel should repent and mend their ways so as to escape punishment at the judgment” (1985:108, in, 112, 115).

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  The point was symbolically quite clear: direct Roman rule is on the way out and another Herod the Great is on the way in. All of that may have looked like good news for the Christian community in Jerusalem. Schwartz maintains that “there was no Roman governor in Judaea under Gaius, but that the province was instead attached to Syria” (65). That would have given the high priest very great local power, and it may well have been under the Ananides Jonathan or Theophilus that Stephen was killed. Schwartz thinks, however, that he was executed under their Agrippa-appointed replacement, the Boethian Simon Cantheras. He is correct to note “the glaring absence of the Roman governor” (72) in Stephen’s death, but that also applies to Jonathan and Theophilus in 36–38 as well as to Simon Catheras in 38–41. After what certainly happened to Jesus under Caiaphas, an Ananide son-in-law, and probably happened to Stephen under Jonathan, an Ananide son, Agrippa’s ascendancy may well have seemed relatively good news to Jerusalem’s Christian community in 38, especially when he departed once more for Rome in 39. But all that changed in the summer of 41. AGRIPPA I AND THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY In 41, when Agrippa again returned to Jerusalem, everything had changed. In the fall of 39 Caligula ordered his statue erected in Jerusalem’s Temple, and only the procrastination of the Syrian legate Petronius, the intervention of Agrippa himself, and the assassination of Caligula prevented the war of fall 66 starting in spring 40. But by the early summer of 41, Caligula was dead, Claudius was emperor, and Agrippa was back in Jerusalem as king of the Jews. We know of two events consequent upon his arrival there. First, according to Josephus, he deposed Simon Cantheras, from the Boethian dynasty, and gave the office back to the Ananide dynasty. He offered it first to Jonathan once again, but when Jonathan proposed his brother Matthias instead, Agrippa accepted his recommendation (Jewish Antiquities 19.313–316). Why did Agrippa go back to the Ananide dynasty? There was now a new emperor, Claudius, whose financial secretary was M. Antonius Pallas, freedman of Claudius’s mother, Antonia, younger daughter of Marc Antony. Agrippa still had very powerful friends in Rome but so now had Jonathan. As Schwartz concluded, “It is reasonable, moreover, to suppose that Jonathan had links with Pallas, Felix’s brother, who was a very influential advisor of Claudius” (71). Agrippa was wise to accept a draw: the house of Herod had the kingdom once again; the house of Ananus had the high priesthood once again. A decade later, with Agrippa I dead, Jonathan was still very powerful. At the start of the 50s he was important enough to have one governor, Cumanus, banished (Jewish War 2.245) and another governor, Felix, appointed (Jewish Antiquities 20.162).

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

  By setting the accusation in a heavenly tribunal, Zechariah in effect appeals the case to the supreme court. We are not told precisely what the accusation is. It evidently entails some form of unworthiness, symbolized by the filthy garments that have to be removed. There is no argument that Joshua is not actually guilty; the Lord rebukes the Satan for bringing any accusation against him, because he is “a brand plucked from the fire.” In view of the precarious situation of the Jewish community after the exile, the high priest must be affirmed and supported, not criticized. So the Lord invests Joshua with clean garments, thereby forestalling any further accusations. The investiture is followed by an oracle that makes a twofold promise to Joshua. First, if he observes the Lord’s requirements, he will be confirmed in the high priesthood, and given access “among those who are standing here,” that is, the divine council. The requirements are not spelled out. We should expect that they would include both cultic and moral provisions. Access to the heavenly council is a privilege granted to prophets in the Hebrew Bible (e.g., Jer 23:18). Here it is extended to the high priest, who becomes the dominant religious functionary in Second Temple Judaism. The access is temporary, as it was in the case of the prophets. The apocalyptic literature of the Hellenistic period (Daniel, 1 Enoch, Dead Sea Scrolls) will extend this privilege to the righteous after death, in the form of eternal life, but this is not yet the case in Zechariah. The second promise is that God is about to bring “my servant the Branch.” The word “branch” (Hebrew tsemach ) occurs in Jer 23:5 and 33:15, where it refers explicitly to the Davidic line: “The days are surely coming, says the L ord , when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall exercise justice and righteousness in the land” (Jer 23:5). The term is also found with reference to the legitimate heir to the throne in a Phoenician inscription from the third century B.C.E. A different term, but essentially the same image, is used in Isaiah 11, which refers to a shoot from the stump of Jesse. There is no doubt then that Zechariah is predicting a restoration of the Davidic line. Many scholars think that the choice of image, a branch, is a play on the name Zerubbabel, which means “seed of Babylon.” In the context of Zechariah, the branch who is expected can only be Zerubbabel. The objection that the Persians would not allow Zerubbabel to become king is beside the point. The prophet is not giving a realistic assessment of Persian policy, but expecting a miraculous divine intervention. The colleagues of Joshua mentioned in v.

• From The Ultimate Guide to Orgasm for Women: How to Become Orgasmic for a Lifetime (2011)

  Older women tend to have less natural lubrication, but the quantity of natural lubrication we produce varies, like all other aspects of our sexuality: some women get very creamy very quickly, while others produce little wetness however aroused they become. Even for those of you who get very wet, I would recommend having a bottle of lube on hand for all sexual play. There may be times when you want to prolong a session of lovemaking beyond the point where you have started to get a little sore. On these occasions, the use of a lubricant can make the difference between a yeast infection, a bladder infection, and no infection at all. Some parts of our bodies, such as the anus, don’t naturally produce lubrication. You must use artificial lubrication if you are doing anal penetration. Sex definitely felt very uncomfortable until I discovered lube—that made a big difference. The most common kinds of artificial lubrication, made specifically for use during sex, are water-based, which means two things: they will wash out of the vagina easily, and they will not degrade condoms. Oil-based products—vegetable, mineral, or petroleum, which include Crisco®, baby oil, Vaseline®, and most massage oils—will degrade latex condoms or gloves very quickly. One of the stupidest things I ever did was have sex with this guy when all we had to use for lube was olive oil. Believe me, olive oil destroys condoms. Silicone-based lubes don’t degrade latex (although they do damage silicone dildos). I have heard of women having allergic reactions to these lubricants. You need to find out what works for you; there are enough choices that you don’t need to use anything you find irritating. If you are not using latex condoms or gloves, you can use massage oil for lubrication, but I recommend not using anything that is mineral-based on any sensitive, or potentially tender, parts of your anatomy. Oils don’t wash out of the vagina as readily as water-based lubes, and they tend to encourage the growth of bacteria. Some lubes have a high level of glycerine in them and this makes them sweet, which may promote the growth of yeast cells. Some lubes are foamy, some are smooth, some dry out more quickly than others, some are runnier, some are thicker. Some reconstitute when you add water, which means you can use them sparingly because you can add a few drops of water instead of lube when they start to dry out—but beware of lube spills that dry out and appear harmless until you try to wash them away, and they turn into a slippery morass!

• From The Sex-Starved Marriage: Boosting Your Marriage Libido: A Couple's Guide (2003)

  Even though you are using new and improved behavior, it doesn’t mean that your spouse will respond in kind immediately. You both have months, years, maybe even a lifetime of less-than-effective communication habits to overcome, and change may not come instantly. If your spouse doesn’t pick up on the fact that you’ve turned over a new communication leaf, stay the course. Don’t get discouraged and give up. You’ve probably done that already, and it doesn’t work. Eventually, s/he should come around. Just stay focused on the tools you’re learning here, and continue to practice them and model them even if your spouse is a slow learner. Eventually, s/he’ll come around because you can’t argue with yourself. • If he’s not deaf, he’s heard you. I wish someone had taught me this in my first year of marriage. I could have prevented tons of heartache had I known it. When you finally get up the nerve to tell your spouse your innermost thoughts, even if s/he doesn’t agree, understand, or acknowledge your point of view, s/he’s heard you. Many times during heated conversations, spouses defend themselves rather than acknowledge that their partners have a valid point of view. However, after having had some time to reflect on the conversation alone, it is often the case that people think through things more carefully and start to make changes to please their spouses. They just don’t talk about their willingness to compromise or see things in a new light. They just quietly change. This is important for you to know. Because your spouse isn’t saying, “Yes, dear, you’re right,” or “I can see your point,” doesn’t mean that s/he isn’t going to take your feelings into consideration and change his or her behavior. Remember, if s/he’s not deaf, s/he’s heard you. Make your point two times. If your spouse doesn’t say something indicating s/he’s receptive, you need to stop talking. End the conversation. Zip it. But over the next few days, keep your eyes glued on your spouse. Watch for any signs that s/he’s thought about what you said and taken your feelings to heart. If s/he has, it’s not necessary to draw his or her attention to it; just enjoy it. • Agree to disagree. It is unrealistic to think that you and your spouse will always find a solution or compromise that you both find acceptable. Sometimes that won’t happen. But believe it or not, this doesn’t have to create problems in your marriage. You don’t need to have a consensus on everything. In fact, you can agree to disagree peacefully.

• From Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)

  There is no outside to work, if work in this reading is a metonym for the material and psychic circumstances of those who must earn a wage to trade for the basic rights of housing, food, medical care, child care, pleasures, and autonomy. And, indeed, in a Foucaultian way, maintaining that there is an outside to work only produces a power relation that reinforces the disciplining apparatuses of work; the couple, or the family, or the friends, participate in a mutual make-believe wherein they are truly off when they are off, as opposed to off in relation to work, off inflected by work. The illusion of off-time and its benefits facilitates their acquiescence to on-time; “at least we get a weekend,” they might say, “at least we have this vacation.” The greatest relief freedom from a daily job gives me is not having to dread work—not the individual act of working, but the endless concept, extending forever out in front, always upcoming and overtaking—as opposed to a discrete event bracketed by whatever else I want to do. Nonetheless, my perspective is not the dominant one. Myriad self-help gurus, books, and articles extoll the foundational importance of achieving work-life balance and offer tricks to do just so—“37 Tips for a Better Work-Life Balance”; “Post Covid, What Work-Life Balance Needs”; “4 Easy Ways to Maintain a Healthy Work-Life Balance”; “Creating Work-Life Balance When Returning to Office”—squarely pitting work and life against one another. This creates what is both a necessary and misleading dichotomy. The dichotomy is misleading for the reasons previously outlined; the dichotomy is also necessary because one assumes that without it, life would simply be subsumed within work—life, the wave, and work, the ocean. Tellingly, for example, Jeff Bezos is an opponent of the work-life balance concept and instead pushes for “work-life harmony.” In a 2018 interview with Mathias Dopfner, CEO of Business Insider’s parent company, Bezos proclaimed the virtues of integrating life and work: This work-life harmony thing is what I try to teach young employees and actually senior executives at Amazon too. But especially the people coming in. I get asked about work-life balance all the time. And my view is, that’s a debilitating phrase because it implies there’s a strict tradeoff. And the reality is, if I am happy at home, I come into the office with tremendous energy. And if I am happy at work, I come home with tremendous energy. It actually is a circle; it’s not a balance. Meanwhile, Amazon warehouse workers face inhumane and untenable conditions: grueling hours, frequent injuries, constant surveillance, limited and monitored bathroom breaks, low wages, fierce anti-unionization tactics. In the words of a formerly incarcerated warehouse worker who subsequently quit: “I would rather go back to a state correctional facility and work for 18 cents an hour than do that job.”

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

  In her thirty-ninth interview, as she feels her therapy drawing to a close, she returns to this topic. C: I wonder if I ought to clarify—it’s clear to me, and perhaps that’s all that matters really, here, my strong feeling about a hate-free kind of approach. Now that we have brought it up on a rational kind of plane, I know—it sounds negative. And yet in my thinking, my—not really my thinking but my feeling, it—and my thinking, yes, my thinking, too—it’s a far more positive thing than this—than a love—and it seems to me a far easier kind of a—it’s less confining. But it—I realize that it must sort of sound and almost seem like a complete rejection of so many things, of so many creeds and maybe it is. I don’t know. But it just to me seems more positive. T: You can see how it might sound more negative to someone but as far as the meaning that it has for you is concerned, it doesn’t seem as binding, as possessive I take it, as love. It seems as though it actually is more—more expandable, more usable, than— C: Yeah. T: —any of these narrower terms. C: Really does to me. It’s easier. Well, anyway, it’s easier for me to feel that way. And I don’t know. It seems to me to really be a way of—of not—of finding yourself in a place where you aren’t forced to make rewards and you aren’t forced to punish. It is—it means so much. It just seems to me to make for a kind of freedom. T: M-hm. M-hm. Where one is rid of the need of either rewarding or punishing, then it just seems to you there is so much more freedom for all concerned. C: That’s right. (Pause) I’m prepared for some breakdowns along the way. T: You don’t expect it will be smooth sailing. C: No. This section is the story—greatly abbreviated—of one client’s discovery that the deeper she dug within herself, the less she had to fear; that instead of finding something terribly wrong within herself, she gradually uncovered a core of self which wanted neither to reward nor punish others, a self without hate, a self which was deeply socialized. Do we dare to generalize from this type of experience that if we cut through deeply enough to our organismic nature, that we find that man is a positive and social animal? This is the suggestion from our clinical experience. BEING ONE’S ORGANISM , ONE’S EXPERIENCE The thread which runs through much of the foregoing material of this chapter is that psychotherapy (at least client-centered therapy) is a process whereby man becomes his organism—without self-deception, without distortion.

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

  While we cannot verify the divine acceptance of the ritual, we can assess its effect on the people who practiced it. We can imagine that people who approached the Day of Atonement burdened by a sense of sin would feel a great sense of relief as they watched the goat bearing their sins disappear into the wilderness. Such people might well resolve to avoid sinful conduct in the future, although this is not necessarily the case. We can also understand that an individual who made an offering for sin would be pardoned not only by God but by the society that acknowledged the validity of the ritual. The efficacy of the ritual, however, depends on its acceptance. A person who did not believe that the goat carried the sin of the people into the wilderness could hardly feel any relief when it went out of sight. The Priestly laws in Leviticus may give the impression that the sacrifices work automatically, but elsewhere in the Bible we often find an awareness that rituals are only effective when they give expression to genuine human intentions. We shall find that the prophets were often very critical of the sacrificial cult when it was not accompanied by the practice of justice (see especially Amos 5). The psalmists also were aware of the limits of ritual. “For you have no delight in sacrifice,” says Ps 51:16-17. “If I were to give a burnt offering you would not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” Leviticus, however, assumes that God is pleased by burnt offerings and that the ritual is effective when it is performed properly. The Consecration of Priests The instructions for the building of the tabernacle included directions for the consecration of the sons of Aaron as priests in Exodus 29. The actual consecration is described in Leviticus 8–10. Aaron is given a special tunic and a breastplate equipped with Urim and Thummim, which were used to consult the Lord. We do not know exactly what the Urim and Thummim were. Scholars have speculated that they were some form of dice that could be rolled so as to get either a positive or a negative answer to a question. In any case, it is of interest that the high priest was equipped to engage in divination, which is a function that we associate more usually with prophets. It is also noteworthy that the priests were anointed with oil. Anointing was widely used in the ancient Near East to indicate a raise in status. In Israel the king was anointed.

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

  The Day of Atonement Perhaps the most vivid example of ritual atonement in Leviticus is found in the ritual for the Day of Atonement in chapter 16. This ritual requires the sacrifice of a young bull and the offering of two goats. The high priest (Aaron) casts lots over the goats and designates one for the Lord and offers it in sacrifice. The other goat is designated “for Azazel” and is driven away into the wilderness. Azazel is not attested elsewhere but is evidently a demon of some sort. In the ancient Near East, all sorts of problems were explained as being due to angry demons that had to be appeased by offerings or other means. In contrast, there are scarcely any references to demons in the biblical writings. (They do appear, however, in Jewish writings of the Hellenistic period, such as the books of Tobit and 1 Enoch. ) Azazel, then, is probably a relic of a stage of Israelite religion when demons were given a more prominent role. It may be that demons were more important in popular Israelite religion than in the writings that are preserved in the Bible. Little is said about Azazel here, and it is difficult to know just what role he ever played in Israelite religion. He was apparently important enough at some point that he had to be appeased by the offering of a goat. The goat is not killed but is simply sent out into the wilderness, where Azazel presumably lived. Our purpose in considering Leviticus 16 here is not to speculate on the origin of Azazel, but to reflect on the way in which the ritual works. The priest “shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat. . . . The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities” (16:21-22). Iniquities (sins) are not material objects that can be packaged and put on an animal’s head. They are deeds that people have done (murder, for example), and in many cases they cannot be undone. The action of the priest, then, is symbolic, and the effectiveness of his action depends on the belief of everyone involved. When the ritual is performed correctly, the sins of the people are deemed to be carried away into the wilderness. Just as a judge in a court has the power to declare someone guilty or innocent, the priest has the power to declare sin forgiven. The legitimacy of a court depends on the consensus of a society. Similarly, the effectiveness of a ritual depends on its acceptance within a society. It is assumed in Leviticus that these rituals are prescribed by God and that sin is forgiven because God so declares it. God, however, speaks through the priest.

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  In any case, it was the conceptions and beliefs which were considered as the essential elements of religion. As for the rites, from this point of view they appear to be only an external translation, contingent and material, of these internal states which alone pass as having any intrinsic value. This conception is so commonly held that generally the disputes of which religion is the theme turn about the question whether it can conciliate itself with science or not, that is to say, whether or not there is a place beside our scientific knowledge for another form of thought which would be specifically religious. But the believers, the men who lead the religious life and have a direct sensation of what it really is, object to this way of regarding it, saying that it does not correspond to their daily experience. In fact, they feel that the real function of religion is not to make us think, to enrich our knowledge, nor to add to the conceptions which we owe to science others of another origin and another character, but rather, it is to make us act, to aid us to live. The believer who has communicated with his god is not merely a man who sees new truths of which the unbeliever is ignorant; he is a man who is stronger . He feels within him more force, either to endure the trials of existence, or to conquer them. It is as though he were raised above the miseries of the world, because he is raised above his condition as a mere man; he believes that he is saved from evil, under whatever form he may conceive this evil. The first article in every creed is the belief in salvation by faith. But it is hard to see how a mere idea could have this efficacy. An idea is in reality only a part of ourselves; then how could it confer upon us powers superior to those which we have of our own nature? Howsoever rich it might be in affective virtues, it could add nothing to our natural vitality; for it could only release the motive powers which are within us, neither creating them nor increasing them.