Shame

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.

Page 103 of 267 · 20 per page

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  The Confessions are the work of a big frog in a small pond, determined to seize his moment of opportunity. The church he’d joined in Milan had been languishing for a century in Africa, as its better-established rival, that of the Donatists, flourished. Augustine believed with a zealot’s conviction that his church was the true church and with a snob’s commitment to his cosmopolitanism he was determined to make the church’s success his success (and vice versa). He was talented, well connected, and driven, and his church would indeed prevail—a future that must have seemed highly improbable to most observers in 397. But Augustine was a man with a past. Coming to such a place as Hippo as he did, a stranger with no friends and no family (his sister and her community of religious women only later took up residence there), inevitably drew speculative gazes. He was defined by who he was elsewhere. To be his father’s son from Tagaste was no great distinction, but he was also a young man who had had a disconcertingly flashy career in Italy that ended rather abruptly. For him to turn up as priest in the smaller of two local Christian factions set tongues wagging. His ordination as bishop had been somewhat irregular, but he professed not to have known that. And he was rumored to be sending love tokens to a married lady, but he explained that it was all a misunderstanding of something perfectly innocent. Furthermore, Augustine’s very public early Manicheism could not be ignored. The aggressively orthodox churchman of Hippo had spent a decade of his life, from about the time he was first noticed in Carthage as a promising student until he sailed away to Italy in pursuit of fame and glory, in a proscribed sect. After four years in Milan he returned with neither fame nor glory to show for his time away and settled quietly at his family home in Tagaste. His son Adeodatus was with him, but he had sent away his common-law wife, Adeodatus’s mother, at his own mother’s insistence. He ostentatiously avoided the natural prerogative of the landowner, the sexual use of female slaves.76 To some eyes, he was enacting the continence that Manicheism preached at least as enthusiastically as other Christians did. When Augustine appeared on the public scene again, in Hippo as priest, he was professing to have been baptized a catholic Christian while in Italy, by no less a figure than Ambrose of Milan.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Augustine took his Manicheism seriously. He wrote and debated in defense of the sect and surely (though he nowhere brings himself to say this) participated in their daily liturgies. Augustine himself never became a member of the elect, but he must have considered the possibility and yet cannot bring himself to talk about it. He presents his detachment from the sect as a matter of his own choice, but religious advancement in late antiquity was more often a question of being invited to advance rather than merely choosing to do so. Augustine, living with his common-law wife and their child, was very likely too much a man of the flesh for the Manichees to take seriously. His later ditherings in Milan over how to live the life of philosophical retirement while maintaining a domestic sexual attachment suggest a recurrent pattern the Manichees had seen as well. When rumors went about later that Augustine had been sending love tokens to a married woman, some were entirely unsurprised, and a few insiders regarded him as a washed-up Manichee, the one who couldn’t cut it. Augustine in 397, telling the story of his Manichee years, had reason to minimize. He had left Africa a Manichee (and a polemical and outspoken one), returning four years later a belligerent Caecilianist, telling one and all that he had been baptized an orthodox Christian while away. On his return, he took up with and was accepted by a minority sect in Africa, the Caecilianists, and it was with them that he advanced to clerical office. For the rest of his life, Augustine would be surrounded by suspicions that he was still more or less a Manichee. The Augustine we should miss the most, of all the Augustines who never were, is the one who never left the Manichees, who threw all his talent and energy into defending and defining the most extreme of his causes. The Manichee Faustus, originally from Milevis, was what Augustine could have become; a well-educated man who fell among the Manichees and knew success among them and scorn everywhere else. Augustine found Faustus less profound than he had hoped, but the extensive work he wrote years later, Against Faustus, reveals a figure of considerable substance. If Augustine had tried to take the step of becoming one of the elect and not merely an auditor, he might have stayed in that community. Perhaps he stayed in the outer circles because his sexual appetites were too recalcitrant, or even because he found the Manichee elite inadequately devoted to their austerities.91 His zeal as a celibate Manichee would surely have equaled his zeal as a celibate catholic, with the added reinforcement that Manichees would even more readily support and understand his hostility to sensuality and thus aid him in the sublimation or derailment of his energies. The risk is that we would know very little of this Augustine, his work and even his existence perhaps suppressed by the orthodoxy that prevailed.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  But were there slaves?41 Slaves have been called the electricity of ancient domestic life, indispensably labor-saving, rarely mentioned by those who used and abused them. In the awkward and embarrassed account he gave of his clergy’s lives in 425–26, a clergy that had been assuming that it would live the life of propertied gentlemen and understood Augustine’s “monastic” ideals only imperfectly, Augustine acknowledges that several of them owned slaves.42 One deacon was hustled into church on that day to manumit slaves he had bought before he became a cleric,43 and others were hastily cleaning up their affairs at the same time. Augustine seems to have been unaware of these holdings and genuinely ashamed not to have known. So Augustine himself as priest and bishop probably did not own slaves personally. But would the household of the bishop, the collective enterprise, have owned any? Every urban household of any pretensions had several, some had very many, and stories about people being sold into slavery against their will were heard on all sides.44 Augustine offered a way to manumit slaves in church,45 but he was never inclined to insist on anything remotely resembling an abolitionist position. A staff of free men and women, dependents in the ecclesiastical household, would have been possible, but it would have been, and seemed, unusual. The status of such individuals, while technically free, would have differed very little from that of slaves. Late in Augustine’s life, an imperial law46 explicitly exempted the bishops of the proconsular province of Africa (Carthage and its hinterlands) from having to supply recruits to the army, but for the issue to arise, some bishops at least must have been in the position of wealthy landowners.

• From The City of God

  And therefore that marriage, worthy of the happiness of Paradise, should have had desirable fruit without the shame of lust, had there been no sin. But how that could be, there is now no example to teach us. Nevertheless, it ought not to seem incredible that one member might serve the will without lust then, since so many serve it now. Do we now move our feet and hands when we will to do the things we would by means of these members? do we meet with no resistance in them, but perceive that they are ready servants of the will, both in our own case and in that of others, and especially of artisans employed in mechanical operations, by which the weakness and clumsiness of nature become, through industrious exercise, wonderfully dexterous? and shall we not believe that, like as all those members obediently serve the will, so also should the members have discharged the function of generation, though lust, the award of disobedience, had been awanting? Did not Cicero, in discussing the difference of governments in his De Republica, adopt a simile from human nature, and say that we command our bodily members as children, they are so obedient; but that the vicious parts of the soul must be treated as slaves, and be coerced with a more stringent authority? And no doubt, in the order of nature, the soul is more excellent than the body; and yet the soul commands the body more easily than itself. Nevertheless this lust, of which we at present speak, is the more shameful on this account, because the soul is therein neither master of itself, so as not to lust at all, nor of the body, so as to keep the members under the control of the will; for if they were thus ruled, there should be no shame. But now the soul is ashamed that the body, which by nature is inferior and subject to it, should resist its authority. For in the resistance experienced by the soul in the other emotions there is less shame, because the resistance is from itself, and thus, when it is conquered by itself, itself is the conqueror, although the conquest is inordinate and vicious, because accomplished by those parts of the soul which ought to be subject to reason, yet, being accomplished by its own parts and energies, the conquest is, as I say, its own. For when the soul conquers itself to a due subordination, so that its unreasonable motions are controlled by reason, while it again is subject to God, this is a conquest virtuous and praiseworthy. Yet there is less shame when the soul is resisted by its own vicious parts than when its will and order are resisted by the body, which is distinct from and inferior to it, and dependent on it for life itself.

• From Shunned (2018)

  Trust me, gentlemen, I’ve thought about this six ways to Sunday, for weeks and months, and am very clear that this is the right path for me.” I was implacable, and both men saw my calm determination. Vince reached into his briefcase, pulled out his Bible, and flipped its pages to a specific verse. “Linda,” he said in a stern monotone, “this conversation reminds me of Paul’s prophecy in 2 Timothy, chapter 3.” Then he read directly from the Bible: “But know this, that in the last days critical times hard to deal with will be here. For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, self assuming, haughty, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, disloyal, having no natural affection, not open to any agreement, slanderers, without self-control, fierce, without love of goodness, betrayers, headstrong, puffed up with pride, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godly devotion but proving false to its power, and from these turn away.” He paused and placed the Bible in his lap, moving in slow motion to let the words sink in. He looked me in the eye and said, “By your actions, you fulfill this Scripture.” The words landed like knuckles in my belly, steeling my breath. In the myriad times I’d heard that verse, I had always imagined groups of baleful, wretched people, worldly people, other people. Vince was now applying it to me. I’d made the transition from being one of the humble sheep to being a stiff-necked, stubborn goat and empathized with the latter. How smug I had been. Was this an official reproving? I hadn’t broken any biblical laws, so there was nothing they could do but shake their heads. I was voluntarily taking a break, which was my prerogative. An unwise one in their eyes, yes, and potentially scandalous. I knew the elders would not talk outside their ranks, but people would wonder all kinds of things and there would be talk. However, I was unofficially removing myself, so there was no more for them to do but shame and scare me. “Is there anything else?” I asked, defiant, eyes clear. I folded the handkerchief and returned it to Jerry. “May we visit you after you settle in to your new apartment?” Jerry inquired. “We care about you and would like to check in from time to time to see how you are.” His kindness was a sharp contrast with Vince’s denunciation, and it caught me off guard. I noticed my inclination to say yes, to please and appease him, and then thought better of it. “Jerry,” I said, “I appreciate that, but I know where to find you.” I had deliberately chosen an apartment complex that had a locked security gate.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Looking at me with bloodshot eyes, he asked with frank curiosity, Now, why is a little girl from Bumfuck, Texas, dragging Friedrich Nietzsche—kicking and screaming—into this poem? Like you’re gonna preach. You ain’t no preacher, Mary Karr. You’re a singer. When I bristled that I’d been a philosophy major in college, he said, And that’s all you’re telling anybody. What you took in college. You’re pointing right back at your own head, telling everybody how smart it is. Write what you know. But according to you, I don’t know squat. Your heart, Mary Karr, he’d say. His pen touched my sternum, and it felt for all the world like the point of a dull spear as he said, Your heart knows what your head don’t. Or won’t . He wanted me to picture a woman climbing five flights in a Harlem apartment building in summer heat, then having to go back down with armloads of garbage. He said, If you’re standing on the corner of 116th Street poeticizing, what could you possibly say to help her climb back up? This prospect of actual readers flattered me less than it scared me. He kept pushing me to go back to school. Also, long before seeing shrinks helped me to reconcile my warring insides, Etheridge fought to import Daddy onto my page. In one poem, he picked out some feeble old guy whose hands shook as he tried to bait a hook and said, Your old man’s knocking on your door, and you won’t let him in. Etheridge spoke to the pool-shooting, catfish-gutting, crawfish-sucking homegirl I was trying to squelch. Such an unlikely savior. Etheridge sometimes banged on my apartment door at three a.m., trying to mooch money for dope. Mary once caught him in the bathroom—with his kids in the next room—a hypodermic in his jugular. He talked to me about this new kind of graduate writers’ program in Vermont—low-residency, they called it. You show up a few weeks at a pop, twice per year, for lectures, readings, workshops, intense tutoring. A poet tailors a curriculum with you, and for six months you mail manuscripts and papers he or she works over. What did I think? It was either bogus, or I’d never get in. Meanwhile, I cobbled up an experiment with the ladies to see whether the poems I brought had sunk in at all, for the scene was part spelling bee, part revival meeting. Each week, I’d pit two poems against each other, a great poem and a crummy one. With an accuracy that rocked me back, they’d boo the crap stuff, then hallelujah the Yeats. Walt talked me into keeping a running tally to see how consistent they were, which I did on an index card taped to my closet door. Over two years, some 80 percent of their choices were as good as most book critics’. Even hard pieces by Stevens and Apollinaire, they’d go crazy for. The sole exceptions?

• From Shunned (2018)

  The audacity made me cringe. For the very first time in my life, I wondered. I was watching a relentless slow-motion replay of the scene, with cymbals crashing the instant I used that gritty “d”-word: “destroy.” If you stripped away all the pleasantries of that conversation, I had looked this man in the eye and said definitively that he would be destroyed if he didn’t believe a certain way and join the right team —our team. I squirmed in my seat. Why hadn’t I ever heard it this way before? Was Jehovah really that ruthless? That severe? Of course not. Jehovah was the epitome of love. Everything He did was grounded in higher wisdom and righteous principle. And yet. Nick seemed like one of the good guys. No. Scratch that. Nick was one of the good guys. And yet. If he didn’t embrace The Truth, was he worthy of salvation? And yet. Nick was a man of great integrity. Everyone in the office knew of his penchant for honesty. And yet. The Bible was filled with stories of people with good intentions who still failed to meet Jehovah’s high standards. And yet. I remembered the way Nick’s eyes crinkled upward whenever he spoke about his daughter, his hopes for her future. And yet. The Bible was clear about the requirements for God’s approval. This newfound skepticism seemed to emerge from someone else, another, small, distant version of me. “Do not be misled. Bad associations spoil useful habits.” Vince was quoting First Corinthians as he pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up the long bridge of his nose. He had a good point. I needed to watch my line of thinking and keep it in check. Maybe some of my long work hours were starting to affect me. Vince was reminding us that too much time spent in worldly environments, like work, was one way our thinking could get spiritually off-track. Years earlier, a brother in our congregation, Eric, had succumbed to a curious mind and—even though we were discouraged from doing so—started reading other religious material, including heretical pieces that spoke out against the Witnesses. I made a point of avoiding any knowledge even of the titles of these books, but I knew they were written by former Witnesses we branded “apostates.” The things Eric read were so disturbing, he started questioning everything and stopped coming to the meetings, and eventually dropped out of sight. Ross said he “flipped out”—his pet term for anyone who became inactive. In the beginning, many of Eric’s friends reached out to him, but he rebuffed them all. He wanted to be left alone. No one saw him for months. When his name came up, we all shook our heads and prayed he’d find his way back from the questions, to certainty, to The Truth. Several months later, he wrote a letter to the elders, asking to be officially removed from the membership. Disassociating oneself was considered a very serious action.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Feeling her way around my kitchen, she manages to mold little balls of corn bread into patties she fries up for us, and by day, she takes calls from her program friends and knits for me by feel alone a sweater the color of daffodils with the three-D pattern of a tree blooming up the front. The day before the transplant, in a packed doctors’ office, we waltz to the front of the line to see the doctor, as Mr. Whitbread arranged, everybody watching us pass like we were majorettes. Though I’d expected to feel radically glad—for once having the leg up that the rich always have—my throat sours as I look behind us, for we pass up all manner of near-blind children, including one knobby-kneed broomstick of a boy with a black eye patch; plus an entire family from Pakistan who’ve waited—their son explained—eighteen months and spent their savings journeying to get their father’s eye cancer seen to. They aren’t waiting for transplants, necessarily, but just getting to the doctor before them feels like cheating. After the surgery, Mother lies with her head wrapped, wanly jok ing that she feels like playing pin the tail on the donkey. She listens to cassettes of The Cloud of Unknowing , Buddhist sutras, Centering Prayer , the writings of mystic Simone Weil—all brought from the hometown library. Afternoons, young Dev likes to lead her around the yard, joyfully stranding her in front of the azalea bush. Or he dons a plastic knight’s helmet and hands her a stick, batting at it with his plastic sword till she’s holding a stub. One evening I’m in the kitchen cleaning up dishes when he rushes in, claiming Mother stole the last cookie from him and threatened to slap him. She comes behind holding the cookie to her chest. Her story is they were doing watercolors together, and when she idly reached for the last cookie on the plate, he snatched it up and scampered to the other side of the table. Give him the cookie, Mother. But he had three. I had one broken one. He’s the baby, Mother. He gets the cookie. She gives me a pitiful stare and announces it was the last one. I promise to fetch another package after the dishes, and she hands it over to Dev, who nyah-nyahs her a few times, then leaves the room doing a victory dance. You can’t slap him, Mother. She stares at me with two different eyes—one blue, one green. The green one has a brown nick in it, like a fault in ice. I didn’t want to smack him, she tells me. It would’ve just been instinctual. Batching your pants is instinctual, Mother. We don’t batch our pants. We don’t beat babies. That’s what civilization is all about—reining in those pesky instincts. Dev’s never been slapped. She huffs, Maybe that’s what’s wrong with him.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Dev peered in. Jonathan said, Mine is brie and kiwi fruit. Dev reached for it, and Jonathan cupped one hand around it. It has less sugar than yours. His next sentence was so remarkable, I noted it down in my journal: I first had this sandwich in Vienna…. Perhaps Evan’s flinch stemmed from the day Dev had elected to yank Jonathan’s mittens from his coat pocket, bolt up the stairs while Evan and Warren chased after him, and fling them into the toilet. Warren fished them out with a pencil and offered to launder them. When I got the ziploc bag from my husband, I tossed the mittens into the trash among the potato peelings. I just didn’t want to deal with them—or the whole starchy Cambridge milieu. So the mittens stop me dropping Dev off, or the puking. My head spends much of its day pumping out reasons for not doing what I should the way a magician draws long strings of scarves from a sleeve. Warren drops him now, an act that brings him endless praise. How great, the teachers say every day when I fetch Dev, that Warren drops him off! And isn’t it great that I pick him up? Then spend all day and night with him? I once asked . From their stunned expressions, I could guess that it wasn’t. Not so much. About once a week Warren asks for the laundered mittens, and I pretend to rummage around before wandering away, giving in to my failure as a laundress—read: mother. The other couples in the center look so blithe. They plead academic poverty but drive swanky foreign cars and live sweatered in cashmere. They take family vacations in beachy climes with grandparents who plunk seashells into buckets their toddler grandchildren tote while the couple slips off to the local bookstore or bakery to canoodle over steaming coffee. Our nearest grandparents are assiduously hands-off. Though Mrs. Whitbread had cranked out six kids like linked hot dogs, Warren’s upbringing was almost Victorian in its chill. By his testament, he’d been presented from time to time like a petit four, scrubbed up and bathrobed before bedtime for kisses. Otherwise, he’d been banished to a gulag nursery guarded by some icy servant. During our own requisite holidays at the great house, we spent hours chasing Dev through rooms big as skating rinks packed with costly breakables, which we weren’t allowed to move out of kid reach. A sofa lined with antique dolls stared at Dev with insouciant porcelain faces he squirmed in my arms to get at. Once, from exhausted spite, I let him smash one. As for Mr. Whitbread, he seemed to eye Dev’s festive ramblings as he might have a cockroach’s. He once made the boy cry by calling him—beyond my earshot, of course— an ignorant little crud .

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  77. WB 4, 1250, April 9, 1528; 1364, Dec. 6, 1528. Metzsch wanted Luther to publish on the issue. 78. WB 4, 1253, April 12, 1528, 443:12; 442:8–10; 442:7; she was the sister-in-law of the Wittenberg printer Georg Rhau. See also WB 6, 1815, May 10, 1531. See also for some local cases in which Luther was cited as advisor, StadtA Witt, 35 [Bc 24], Privat Protocoll von Hofgerichtsurtheilen…(Thomas Heyllinger notary). 79. See, for example, WB 4, 1179, 1205, 1304, and Beilage, 1309. 80. WB 5, 1523, Feb. 1, 1530, 226:23–25. 81. WB 5, 1526, 232:20–23. For the full text, see 1526, Feb. 1, 1530, 230–36. 82. WB 4, 972, Jan. 17, 1526; and see Luther’s letter, 975, Jan. 25, 1526, 22. Topler’s marriage was arranged by her relatives and celebrated in Nuremberg, and it was consummated, probably against her will. When questioned by the official ( Schösser ) at Allstedt, she explained that her sister and relatives had sent her books when she was in the convent telling her that the spiritual estate was damned and she should leave; so she got in touch with Kern to instruct her, and left the convent. See Otto Clemen, “Die Leidensgeschichte der Ursula Toplerin,” Zeitschrift für bayerische Kirchengeschichte 7 (1932): 161–70: “But to have sex with him was never in her heart” (162). God had now illuminated her so that “she had realised that she would not be saved without her previous convent vows” (163). When he had tried to force her to return to Allstedt she would not sleep with him, so her relatives (Sigmund Fürer and Leo Schürstab) made a rod for him, telling him “Magister, she has a devil in her, if you want to drive it out, whip her till we tell you to stop” (164). This he did; he had also beaten her many times and threatened her with a knife. Topler was related to the leading Nuremberg families of the Tucher, Nützel and Pömer. It is not clear whether Topler wanted to return to the convent as her abbess wanted her to do, but she would not have been the only ex-nun to consider reentry. Ottilie von Gersen, Müntzer’s widow, wrote to Duke Georg of Saxony when she was left destitute after Müntzer’s execution, noting that she had heard that Georg believed she should reenter the convent; she was willing to do so if he thought it right. Müntzer, Briefwechsel, 506. 83. WB 5, 1433, April 23, 1530 (to Catharina Jonas); in fact Luther’s gynecological predictions proved wrong and Catharina gave birth to yet another son, Luther writing to congratulate Jonas on being the creator of five sons. But the child died soon after birth, and Luther did his best to console him. 84. WB 4, 1257, May 1, 1528, 447:1–2. 85. Plummer, From Priest’s Whore, 218; Baylor, ed. and trans., Revelation and Revolution, 135. Thomas Müntzer, Außgetrückte emplössung des falschen Glaubens der vngetrewen welt, Nuremberg 1524 [VD 16 M 6745], fo. E ii (r).

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Tearing it open, I’d lifted a copy, thumbed it, and tried to tell myself it was some worthy stone added to poetry’s great mountain. But I hid it out of eyeshot in my study—the sight of it made me sick. First books rarely get the attention they deserve, the other poet says with a kind look. I explain that virtually all copies sold were, I’m guessing, bought by my sister, who gave twenty or thirty for Christmas that year. He tells me the story of a writer who—on finding his own first book remaindered in a used bookstore—opened to the flyleaf only to discover his own signature above the note To Mum and Dad …. He gestures behind me, where the secretary is making her way up the hall, and I grab my armload of contraband copies before scuttling off like a burglar with the house silver. A few people are starting to trickle through the halls, and I seize up, overcome with a sense of inadequacy to teach anybody anything. I simply can’t be the only dumb person in this place one more instant. Before I can stop myself, I loudly say, Let’s start a contest for who hasn’t read the most important book. I raise my hand like a testifying evangelist to shout, I haven’t read Spenser’s Faerie Queene . Who hasn’t read a greater book? A friend pokes his head from an office, yelling, I never read Moby-Dick . Somebody behind me says, I haven’t read Byron’s Don Juan . A passing scholar corrects the pronunciation to what I guess must be super-anglicized Oxfordese, saying, Don Jew-wan . Pompous effing fop, I think. You should be shot. Another voice hasn’t read a word by Virginia Woolf. Students are starting to gape. Later, in my shared cubicle along a line of hissing radiators, I spread dozens of copies and start assembly-line stapling Mr. Nabokov’s memoir, the sentences I once worshipped now streaming in a hieroglyphic blur off my eyeballs, flooding me with gall.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  When Swaggart got wind of Bakker’s sexual relationship with Jessica Hahn, he “took on Jim Bakker like a pit bulldog taking on a French poodle,” one of Swaggart’s former aides recalled. “Just ripped him to shreds, destroyed the man.” 119 Next, Bakker turned on Jerry Falwell, who had come to the rescue of PTL, and accused him of exploiting the situation to get control of the network. Falwell retaliated by calling a press conference where he produced sworn affidavits by men who claimed to have had homosexual relations with Jim Bakker, together with a note from Tammy Faye listing what she wanted from PTL in return for going quietly: $300,000 a year for Jim, and $100,000 for herself; royalties on all PTL records and books; their $400,000 mansion, two cars, security staff, legal fees, plus the fees of the accountants who were trying to sort out the Bakkers’ highly irregular finances. The grand fundamentalist enterprise seemed to have ended in a barren, unedifying cul-de-sac. The year before the scandals, Falwell had been full of confidence. He had renamed the Moral Majority “the Liberty Federation,” and declared that many of its members would be running for office in the 1988 elections at the local, state, and federal levels. But after the PTL debacle, Falwell resigned on November 4, 1987, from the presidency of the Moral Majority and the Liberty Federation and announced that his political career was over. He would never again work for a candidate as he had for Ronald Reagan, and never again lobby for legislation. In the wake of the scandals, the income from his own Old Time Gospel Hour had declined, and Falwell felt compelled to return to his private Gospel ministry. 120 He would still surface from time to time to fulminate about the nation’s ills, but he could no longer look forward to the imminent creation of a coalition of religious conservatives that would take America by storm. When Pat Robertson’s bid for the presidency failed, the fundamentalist offensive, which had started in 1979 with such great hopes, seemed to have failed. The New Christian Right, discredited, appeared to have ignominiously fizzled out, and though Christians would individually continue to lobby and try to bring voters to the polls, it was generally assumed by secularists that the fundamentalist threat was over. However, fundamentalism was not dead; it had, in fact, entered a new and more extreme phase in America. On November 28, 1987, Randall Terry, a born-again Christian from upstate New York, led three hundred “rescuers” to an abortion clinic in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. They held a service on what Terry described as “the doorstep of hell” for almost eleven hours, praying, singing psalms, and preventing women and staff from entering the clinic. By the end of the day, 211 of the “rescuers” had been arrested, but, Terry recorded triumphantly, “no babies died.”

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Abdu himself had argued that the Koran presents men and women as equal before God, and that traditional rulings concerning divorce or polygamy were not essential to Islam: they could and should be changed. 78 The lot of women had improved. Muhammad Ali had established a school that trained women in elementary medical procedures; by 1875 about three thousand Egyptian girls attended the mission schools, and in 1873 the government established the first state primary school for girls, and a secondary school the following year. Visitors noted that women were seen more frequently in public; some were discarding the veil, and by the end of the century, women were publishing articles in journals, and becoming doctors and teachers. Change was already under way when the British arrived, and, though there was still a long way to go, a start had been made. The veiling of women is neither an original nor a fundamental practice in Islam. The Koran does not command all women to cover their heads, and the habit of veiling women and secluding them in harems did not become common in the Islamic world until some three generations after the Prophet’s death, when Muslims began to copy the Christians of Byzantium and Zoroastrians of Persia, who had long treated their women in this way. But the veil was not worn by all women; it was a mark of status and worn by women of the upper classes, not by peasants. Qassim Amin’s book, however, brought the peripheral practice of veiling right into the heart of the debate about modernization. He insisted that unless the veil were abolished, the Muslim world would remain in a degraded state. Partly as a result of the furor arising from Tahrir al-Mara, the veil became for many Muslims a symbol of Islamic authenticity, whereas for many Westerners, the veil was and is “proof” of an ineradicable misogyny in Islam. Amin was not the first to see the veil as a symbol of everything that was wrong with Islam. When the British arrived, they were appalled by the practice, even though most Western men at this date derided feminism, wanted their own wives securely at home, and opposed the education and enfranchisement of women. Lord Cromer was typical in this respect: he was one of the founders in London of the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage, yet in his monumental book on Egypt, he expressed great concern about the status of Muslim women. 79 Their degraded state was a canker that began its destructive work early in childhood, as infants perceived the oppression of their mothers, and had eaten into the whole system of Islam. The practice of veiling was the “fatal obstacle” that prevented Egyptians from attaining that “elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of Western civilization.”

• From Shunned (2018)

  With that, Ms. Levy asked us to open our math books. I took a deep breath and began to relax, another test of faith endured. That evening, as we washed dinner dishes, I relayed the entire scene to my mother in great detail. “‘Different paths to God.’” As she echoed Ms. Levy’s words, she shook her head. “‘None of them is wrong.’ Ha! They can’t all be right.” Her movements under the sudsy water became more rigorous. “She rescued you with lies,” she said. Her words stung. Mom was insulting me and my new hero. I was aware that we didn’t agree with Ms. Levy’s logic, but it didn’t seem like the time to nitpick. Scanning my mother’s profile, I saw her jaw shoot out as it hardened. Was she disappointed that I had not confronted Ms. Levy? “Mom, please don’t say anything to her.” I grabbed her arm and summoned a whiny, pleading tone. “I don’t want to make a big deal about this. Ms. Levy is my favorite teacher, and I don’t want to upset her.” “Well, of course not, Lindy. Ms. Levy may be misguided in her religious perspective, but she’s very kind. I’ll send her a thank-you note for being so thoughtful. And I’m very proud of you. Jehovah is proud of you, too.” These words were sufficient to comfort me, and I started to relax. I finished drying the dishes, basking in maternal and celestial approval. Several incidents like this occurred throughout my school years, and I continued to feel the isolation of being different from my classmates. But even stronger than that powerful discomfort was the deeper satisfaction of knowing in my heart that Jehovah was pleased with my faith. A momentary good time wasn’t worth my everlasting life. Over time, this separation from the rest of the world became a badge of honor as I refrained from participating in all sorts of activities, like birthday parties, my high school prom, and dating. It wasn’t that I didn’t prefer to fit in; it was that I never questioned I was doing The Right Thing, avoiding worldly celebrations that had roots in ancient pagan rituals and traditions that could lead to unwholesome alliances with the world. By adulthood, I had squelched all fears of standing out at work. My siblings and friends all shared the same experience: we found understanding and our sense of belonging in the safe embrace of our family and the Witness community. Ross nudged me with his elbow. Another Scripture had been cited. I found it and followed along, more by rote than by awareness. Nick’s words kept reverberating like a catchy radio jingle: “Do you think you have the answer?” they echoed now. “Yes,” I had said.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  She turns to Warren, Do you think she’s an alcoholic ? How insulting, I think, and brace myself for Warren’s assessment, already dredging up a defense: I’ve never been five minutes late to pick up Dev. I’m a room parent, for God’s sake. I lead toddlers around the aquarium on a rope. No, he says. (How my love for him doth bloom, the drinking mind thinks.) She likes a drink. (Or nine, the scolding, sober part of me thinks.) But who doesn’t? he concludes. (Those WASPs down so much sauce—the sober mind observes—that Warren wouldn’t know a dipsomaniac if one hit him with a polo mallet.) That’s the kind of courtroom convened in my skull, prosecution and defense. Back home the next morning, while Dev blanks out at the TV, I sneak around, reaching under beds and into the hamper, gathering ratholed beer cans and wine bottles. Once Warren’s home, I drive around to unload them from the hatchback like body parts into dumpsters all over town. I also rotate liquor stores, telling each indifferent proprietor that I’m having a spectacular party—myself the honored guest. One morning before New Year’s, I’m trying to jam Dev into his coat, and he’s slipping around in my hands like a greased pig. I get one arm in, and he collapses laughing on the floor. I’ve been pondering the doctor’s suggestion as I say to Warren, Let’s quit drinking. Sure, Warren says, why not. He crimps the top of his lunch sack. He, by the way, doesn’t need to quit drinking, and being full-time at both work and grad school—and being I’m a sneaky bitch—he’s missing the gallons I drink. From my hands, Dev breaks free and dashes into the living room while I say, It’s not like we’re going to a party. Going after Dev, Warren tells me not to start, for I gripe nonstop about our lack of social life. He returns with our maniacally snickering son tucked under one arm like a baguette. Warren asks me to toss Dev’s coat upside down on the floor . Okay, dip and flip, sweetie, Warren says, setting Dev so he stands with his feet at his coat’s hood. Dev bends over, dips his hands in his coat sleeves, then upends the coat over his head. Good man, I say as Warren starts to clip a mitten to a sleeve. I ask him where—with his own patriarch’s testy disposition—he mastered parenting. He’s hitching the second mitten on as Dev lurches to smooch, my cheek. Hoisting him up, Warren says, I imagine what my father would’ve done with me, then do the opposite. I tug at Warren’s sleeve so he curves his tall form down, seeming to tolerate my peck on his lips. (Is this true or only my faulty interpretation?) The familiar masculine odor of him sends down my spine a surge of ardor as if stirred from a muddy aquarium bottom.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  Dobbins shrugged his shoulders. "What's serious? I was a kid. The thing is, I believed in God and all that, but it wasn't the religious part that interested me. Just being nice to people, that's all. Being decent." "Right," Kiowa said. "Visit sick people, stuff like that. I would've been good at it, too. Not the brainy part—not sermons and all that—but I'd be okay with the people part." Henry Dobbins was silent for a time. He smiled at the older monk, who was now cleaning the machine gun's trigger assembly. "But anyway," Dobbins said, "I couldn't ever be a real minister, because you have to be super sharp. Upstairs, I mean. It takes brains. You have to explain some hard stuff, like why people die, or why God invented pneumonia and all that." He shook his head. "I just didn't have the smarts for it. And there's the religious thing, too. All these years, man, I still hate church." "Maybe you'd change," Kiowa said. Henry Dobbins closed his eyes briefly, then laughed. "One thing for sure, I'd look spiffy in those robes they wear—yust like Friar Tuck. Maybe I'll do it. Find a monastery somewhere. Wear a robe and be nice to people." "Sounds good," Kiowa said. The two monks were quiet as they cleaned and oiled the machine gun. Though they spoke almost no English, they seemed to have great respect for the conversation, as if sensing that important matters were being discussed. The younger monk used a yellow cloth to wipe dirt from a belt of ammunition. "What about you?" Dobbins said. "How?" "Well, you carry that Bible everywhere, you never hardly swear or anything, so you must—" "I grew up that way," Kiowa said. "Did you ever—you know—did you think about being a minister?" "No. Not ever." Dobbins laughed. "An Indian preacher. Man, that's one I'd love to see. Feathers and buffalo robes." Kiowa lay on his back, looking up at the ceiling, and for a time he didn't speak. Then he sat up and took a drink from his canteen. "Not a minister," he said, "but I do like churches. The way it feels inside. It feels good when you just sit there, like you're in a forest and everything's really quiet, except there's still this sound you can't hear." "Yeah." "You ever feel that?" "Sort of." Kiowa made a noise in his throat. "This is all wrong," he said. "What?" "Setting up here. It's wrong. I don't care what, it's still a church." Dobbins nodded. "True." "A church," Kiowa said. "Just wrong." When the two monks finished cleaning the machine gun, Henry Dobbins began reassembling it, wiping off the excess oil, then he handed each of them a can of peaches and a chocolate bar. "Okay," he said, "didi mau, boys. Beat it." The monks bowed and moved out of the pagoda into the bright morning sunlight. Henry Dobbins made the washing motion with his hands.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  This is one story I've never told before. Not to anyone. Not to my parents, not to my brother or sister, not even to my wife. To go into it, I've always thought, would only cause embarrassment for all of us, a sudden need to be elsewhere, which is the natural response to a confession. Even now, I'll admit, the story makes me squirm. For more than twenty years I've had to live with it, feeling the shame, trying to push it away, and so by this act of remembrance, by putting the facts down on paper, I'm hoping to relieve at least some of the pressure on my dreams. Still, it's a hard story to tell. All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit. Certainly that was my conviction back in the summer of 1968. Tim O'Brien: a secret hero. The Lone Ranger. If the stakes ever became high enough—f the evil were evil enough, if the good were good enough—I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage that had been accumulating inside me over the years. Courage, I seemed to think, comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down. It was a comforting theory. It dispensed with all those bothersome little acts of daily courage; it offered hope and grace to the repetitive coward; it justified the past while amortizing the future. In June of 1968, a month after graduating from Macalester College, I was drafted to fight a war I hated. I was twenty-one years old. Young, yes, and politically naive, but even so the American war in Vietnam seemed to me wrong. Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons. I saw no unity of purpose, no consensus on matters of philosophy or history or law. The very facts were shrouded in uncertainty: Was it a civil war? A war of national liberation or simple aggression? Who started it, and when, and why? What really happened to the USS Maddox on that dark night in the Gulf of Tonkin? Was Ho Chi Minh a Communist stooge, or a nationalist savior, or both, or neither? What about the Geneva Accords? What about SEATO and the Cold War? What about dominoes? America was divided on these and a thousand other issues, and the debate had spilled out across the

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did? I tried to swallow it back. I tried to smile, except I was crying. Now, perhaps, you can understand why I've never told this story before. It's not just the embarrassment of tears. That's part of it, no doubt, but what embarrasses me much more, and always will, is the paralysis that took my heart. A moral freeze: I couldn't decide, I couldn't act, I couldn't comport myself with even a pretense of modest human dignity. All I could do was cry. Quietly, not bawling, just the chest-chokes. At the rear of the boat Elroy Berdahl pretended not to notice. He held a fishing rod in his hands, his head bowed to hide his eyes. He kept humming a soft, monotonous little tune. Everywhere, it seemed, in the trees and water and sky, a great worldwide sadness came pressing down on me, a crushing sorrow, sorrow like I had never known it before. And what was so sad, I realized, was that Canada had become a pitiful fantasy. Silly and hopeless. It was no longer a possibility. Right then, with the shore so close, I understood that I would not do what I should do. I would not swim away from my hometown and my country and my life. I would not be brave. That old image of myself as a hero, as a man of conscience and courage, all that was just a threadbare pipe dream. Bobbing there on the Rainy River, looking back at the Minnesota shore, I felt a sudden swell of helplessness come over me, a drowning sensation, as if I had toppled overboard and was being swept away by the silver waves. Chunks of my own history flashed by. I saw a seven-year-old boy in a white cowboy hat and a Lone Ranger mask and a pair of bolstered six-shooters; I saw a twelve-year-old Little League shortstop pivoting to turn a double play; I saw a sixteen-year-old

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  This is one aspect of his thinking that is difficult to understand today and where the gulf that separates our world from his seems at its greatest. In this book I have tried to show why it mattered. Luther’s theological legacy was a view of human nature that escaped the split between flesh and spirit that has dogged so much of the history of Christianity, and has given rise to a profound suspicion of sexuality and an unbending moralism. Not so with Luther: Whatever else he was, he was no killjoy. He saw sexuality as sinful but only in the way that all our actions are sinful, and this perspective freed him to be remarkably positive about the body and physical experience. His religiosity had nothing saccharine about it. His relationship with God was not that of a believer cheerfully confident of having been “saved.” It was wrested from his Anfechtungen and it engaged all his intellectual and emotional capacities. He would pray for hours a day, conversing with God, but this never gave him happy assurance: For Luther, doubt always accompanied faith. Melanchthon described how, in one debate, Luther suddenly became unsure that he was right, and he left the room, falling on his bed and praying. 49 This was not how one would expect a university professor to behave: He was utterly engaged in the subject under discussion, and shaken to the core by the thought that he might have been mistaken. Luther’s extraordinary openness, his honest willingness to put everything on the line, and his capacity to accept God’s grace as a gift he did not merit are his most attractive characteristics. Luther is a difficult hero, nonetheless. His writings can be full of hatred, and his predilection for scatological rhetoric and humor is not to modern taste. He could be authoritarian, bullying, overconfident; his domineering ways overshadowed his children’s lives and alienated many of his followers. His intransigent capacity to demonize his opponents was more than a psychological flaw because it meant that Protestantism split very early, weakening it permanently and leading to centuries of war. His anti-Semitism was more visceral than that of many of his contemporaries, and it was also intrinsic to his religiosity and his understanding of the relation between the Old and the New Testament. It cannot just be excused as the prejudice of his day. His greatest intellectual gift was his ability to simplify, to cut to the heart of an issue—but this also made it difficult for him to compromise or see nuance. And yet only someone with an utter inability to see anyone else’s point of view could have had the courage to take on the papacy, to act like a “blinkered horse” looking neither to right nor left, but treading relentlessly onward regardless of the consequences.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  ὀφλισκάνω Soph. Ant. 470, Eur., ΡΙαΐ.: impf. ὠφλίσκανον Dem. 864: fut. ὀφλήσω Soph. O.T. 511, Eur., Plat.: pf. ὥφληκα Ar. Nub. 34, etc. : aor. ὥφλησα Lys. 136.1 (where perh. however ὠφείλησεν should be restored, as in Ar. Av. 115), Walz Rhett. 8. 243, (mpoo—) Alciphr. 3. 26; in correct writers the aor. in use is ὦφλον, inf. ὀφλεῖν, part. ὀφλών, —sometimes wrongly written ὄφλειν, ὄφλων, as if there were an Att. pres. ὄφλω ; but this pres., though quoted by Gramm. (Arcad. 158. 26, E. M. 232.9), only occurs in late writers as Dio Chr., Aristid., Alciphro, Eust., etc., and prob. originated in the error of writing ὄφλειν, ὄφλων for ὀφλεῖν, ὀφλών, as in Eur, Bacch. 854, Plat. Apol. 39 B, ν. Elmsl. Ach. 689, Heracl. 985 :---ὀφλέω is prob. a still later form ; for in Hesych. ὀφλεῖ should be corrected ὄφλει ; ὥφλεε in Hdt. 8. 26 is an error for ὦφλε (which is given by some Mss.): a pres. ὀφλίσκω is cited by Suid. ; ὀφλάνω by Phot. and Hesych. (From same Root as ὀφείλω, 4. ν.) To owe, properly of one condemned to pay a fine, Zo be liable to pay, ζημίαν Eur. Med. 581, etc.; χρήματα Lys. 159.17; πέντε τά- Aayta Ar. Pax 172; χιλίας δραχμάς Plat. Apol. 36 A; εἴκοσι μνᾶς Xen. An. 5. 8,1; τὴν ἐπωβελίαν Isocr. 373 C. 2. δίκην ὀφλεῖν to be cast in a suit, lose one’s cause; ὠφληκέναι δίκην Ar. Nub. 34, Av. 1457 ; ἣν τις ὄφλῃ παρὰ τοῖς ἄρχουσι δίκην Tw Id. Eccl. 655; so, ὀφλεῖν δίαιταν to lose in an arbitration, Isae. 111. 7, Dem. 862. 2, εἴς. ; ἐρήμην da. τὴν δίκην to let judgment go against one by default, Antipho 131.1; Opa. ἐξούλης Andoc. 10. 15; κλοπῆς ἕνεκα τὰς εὐθύνας ὀφλ. Aeschin. 55.17. 3. absol. to be cast, to be the losing party, μέλλων ὀφλή- σειν Ar. Nub. 777; Kar’ ὀφλὼν ἀπέρχεται Id. Ach. 689, cf. Thuc. 3. 70, Plat. Legg. 745 A; ὀφλεῖν τῷ δημοσίῳ ἐπί τινι for an offence, Dem. 998. 23. 4. c. gen. criminis, ὀφλὼν ἁρπαγῆς Te καὶ κλοπῆς δίκην Aesch. Ag. 534 (cf. ἐκτίνων) ; then often without δίκην, ὠφληκὼς φόνου Sound guilty of murder, Plat. Legg. 873 Β 54.; ὀφλ. τραύματος éx προ- νοίας Ib. 877 B; ὀφλ. κλοπῆς, δώρων Andoc. το. 20; ἀστρατείας, ἀπο- στασίου Dem. 732. 23., 790.2: but also, Ὁ. c. gen. poenae, θανάτου δίκην ὀφλ. Plat. Apol. 39 B, Legg. 856 Ὁ. II. generally, of any- thing which one deserves or brings on oneself, αἰσχύνην, βλάβην Opa. to bring infamy, loss on oneself, incur them, Eur. Hel. 67, Andr. 188 ; Opa. γέλωτα to be laughed at, Id. Med. 403, Ar. Nub. 1035; Tue by one, Eur. Bacch. 854; παρά τινι, πρός τινα Plat. Phaedo 117 A, Hipp. Ma. 282 A. 2. δειλίαν ὀφλ. (much like ὀφλ. δίκην δειλίας), to incur a charge of cowardice, get a character for cowardice, δειλίην ὥφλεε πρὸς βασιλῆος he drew upon himself the reproach of cowardice from the king, Hdt. 8. 26, cf. Eur. Heracl. 985; so, μώρῳ μωρίαν ὀφλι- σκάνω Soph, Ant. 470, cf. Eur. Med. 1227, etc.; αὐθαδία τοι σκαιότητ᾽ Opa. Soph. Ant. 1028; ἀπ᾽ ἐμᾶς φρενὸς οὔποτ᾽ ὀφλήσει Eur. Hec. 327, Ion 443; ἄνοιαν Dem. 16. 24; αἰσχύνην 18. 26.