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.

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• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Williams unapologetically insinuated Black women into the discourse of the new woman, a term that sought to characterize white women who were involved in the progressive movements at the turn of the century.25 Not only were Black women new women, but they were the real new women, even more so than their white counterparts! The role that Williams ascribed to Black new women is even more telling. In language reminiscent of both Lucy Laney and Pauline Hopkins’s true race woman, Williams described the African American new woman as “an educator of public opinion.” Their job was to shift public perception and ideas about African American women through their work on the public stage. This call for Black women to shift public opinion, through both their pristine embodiment of respectable Black womanhood and their choice to make visible the particular struggles and precarity that attended to Black women’s lives, exemplifies Cooper’s ideas of using embodied discourse as a textual and discursive strategy to combat negative and damaging ideas about Black women. Undoubtedly, these ideas were steeped in moral condescension toward Black women of lower-class status. Williams balked at the treatment of nonelite colored women who had “been left to grope their way unassisted toward a realization of those domestic virtues, moral impulses and standards of family and social life that are the badges of race respectability.”26 Though her views were steeped explicitly in respectability politics, she also critiqued middle-class Black people for their neglect of the Black poor. Moreover, she continued: There has been no fixed public opinion to which they could appeal; no protection against the libelous attacks upon their characters, and no chivalry generous enough to guarantee their safety against man’s inhumanity to woman. Certain it is that colored women have been the least known, and the most ill-favored class of women in the country.27 Here, Williams turns to the notion of changing public opinion as the animating force of race women’s “intellectual activism.”28 Reshaping the public discourse about Black women topped the list of racial priorities of race women and of the NACW’s intellectual agenda. Black women’s strategic deployment of respectability, on the one hand, and embodied discourse that pointed to the extreme racial and sexual vulnerability Black women experienced, on the other, was critical to shifting public perception and opinion about the value of Black women’s lives.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  After a song or two, the dads drifted off the dance floor, while the girls kicked off their high heels. They jumped around in little scrums to “clean” pop songs such as Pharrell Williams’s “Happy.” As I slipped out the door, “Let It Go,” the anthem from Frozen, came on. At the chorus, like young women everywhere, the girls flung their arms extravagantly wide and belted the words. The fathers looked on, smiling indulgently, apparently unaware that the point of the song—“No right, no wrong, no rules for me. I’m free!” and “That perfect girl is gone”—is that Elsa, the princess, is coming into her power, rejecting the restrictive, false morality that was imposed on her by her father, the king. The Good-Person Checklist Christina had known Brandon since kindergarten. They chased each other on the school playground, went to each other’s birthday parties at the local skating rink. He won first prize in the middle school science fair, she took second. They shared their first kiss after the winter formal during their junior year. Over time, their physical intimacy deepened, but the specter of the Church was never far from her mind. “It was like, ‘My boyfriend took off my shirt. What if other people find out?’” she recalled. “Even now, I can logically talk myself out of those feelings, but it’s all still there. There are degrees of shame and guilt that are probably permanently embedded in me. I wish that wasn’t so. It haunts a lot of my actions.” She paused thoughtfully. “But then, I don’t know where the line is between how I was raised and what’s just my personality. By nature, I’m a very cautious person.” Perhaps. Yet when I met Christina, she was planning a semester abroad in Botswana, which seemed pretty nervy to me. She’d also purposely chosen to attend a college that would challenge her long-held values, and sought housing that would push her even further. Christina’s willingness to step so far out of the bubble of her upbringing—something that’s hard for any young person to do regardless of her politics—struck me as admirable, even brave. She couldn’t fully explain why she’d done it. It may have been because her parents weren’t as conservative as her teachers. Christina’s mother never contradicted the school’s teaching on chastity, but she drew the line at its condemnation of homosexuality as a sin. “She just told me straight out, ‘That’s not true,’” Christina said. Beyond that, though, Christina always felt different from her peers. The other kids in her grade were white, and she resembled her Filipino father; she was the only Asian in the entire school. In middle school, boys teased her about the shape of her eyes, the color of her skin; it made her feel, even to this day, unattractive, undesirable. That sense of difference, of alienation, may have been enough to set her searching.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  For I am ruined, Because I am a man of [ceremonially] unclean lips, And I live among a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.” 6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a burning coal in his hand, which he had taken from the altar with tongs. 7 He touched my mouth with it and said, “Listen carefully, this has touched your lips; your wickedness [your sin, your injustice, your wrongdoing] is taken away and your sin atoned for and forgiven.” Isaiah’s Commission 8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!” 9 And He said, “Go, and tell this people: ‘Keep on listening, but do not understand; Keep on looking, but do not comprehend.’ 10 “Make the heart of this people insensitive, Their ears dull, And their eyes dim, Otherwise they might see with their eyes, Hear with their ears, Understand with their hearts, And return and be healed.” 11 Then I said, “Lord, how long?” And He answered, “Until cities are devastated and without inhabitant, And houses are without people And the land is utterly desolate, 12 The LORD has removed [His] people far away, And there are many deserted places in the midst of the land. 13 “And though a tenth [of the people] remain in the land, It will again be subject to destruction [consumed and burned], Like a massive terebinth tree or like an oak Whose stump remains when it is chopped down. The holy seed [the elect remnant] is its stump [the substance of Israel].” Isaiah 7 War against Jerusalem 1 N OW IT came to pass in the days of Ahaz the son of Jotham, the son of Uzziah, king of Judah, that Rezin king of a Aram (Syria) and Pekah the son of Remaliah, king of Israel, went up to Jerusalem to wage war against it, but they could not conquer it. 2 When the house of David (Judah) was told, “Aram is allied with Ephraim (Israel),” the hearts of Ahaz and his people trembled as the trees of the forest tremble in the wind. 3 Then the LORD said to Isaiah, “Go out to meet Ahaz [king of Judah], you and your son b Shear-jashub, at the end of the aqueduct of the Upper Pool, on the highway to the c Fuller’s Field; 4 and say to him, ‘Take care and be calm, do not fear and be weak-hearted because of these two stumps of smoldering logs, on account of the fierce anger of [King] Rezin and Aram and of the son of Remaliah (Pekah, usurper of the throne of Israel).

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  I became the most persistent street cruiser in town. For someone who till now had had a rather irritable, short-fused fussiness about wasting time, I was suddenly willing to turn whole acres of time over to pasture. Like a hunting lion, indifferent to the beauties of nature and the night but excruciatingly alive to even the smallest twitch or chirr, I paid no attention to the buildings around me and after staring at them hundreds of hours could not have told you if they had Ionic or Corinthian capitals or even columns; yet the moment someone male lingered for even a second, slowed his pace a fraction, or looked back with a frown, conspicuously snapping his fingers in the air to mime remembering something (transparent alibi), I had taken his photo, cured it, and glued it into a special identity kit just for him. I learned I couldn’t go home unsatisfied. At the beginning of the evening I’d rush haughtily past Fatty or Gramps, but four hours later I’d be on my knees in an alleyway doing him. And I learned once is never enough. Nor is twice. I felt a blind hatred for (and shame before) anyone who interrupted my cruising—a strolling family or a boy and girl on a date who sat on a bench to neck, if that bench was my territory. The boredom I underwent was intense, painful, hard work, since all disciplined thoughts had been crowded out and soon in the toilets I’d even traded in my Chinese flashcards for unadulterated stupor. I learned that everyone else in the world was less interested in sex than I. The others reached a point where they’d had enough. They stood, buttoned up, and hurried off, irked they’d wasted so much time on nothing. But I had no shred of dignity left to button. The other fairies could be spooked by a slowly passing cop car, or they would withdraw when the prey became too scarce. Not me. I was still there, blue with the cold, beating my gloved hands for warmth. I’d had the same feeling when I was a child. I was the one who wanted to play late into the cold and the dark and to roughhouse (you be the rough, I’ll be the house). Just to feel that contact with other boys’ bodies, their knees burning into my biceps, their weight resting on my chest, or a strong forearm choking my neck from behind (I leaned closer into my tormentor)—to feel this contact, I was willing to defy the other boys, refuse to say uncle , or say it and recant. Now I spent so much time on this harsh exchange, where I was selling myself for free but still could never find enough takers, where the buyers I despised despised the merchandise I’d become, that all other human reciprocities (between friends, teacher and student, parent and child) appeared excessively kind, extraordinarily considerate.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  That staring of mine, the complete absorption in another man, would incriminate me yet, I felt certain. Finally Tex closed the store at midnight, and he and Lester and I walked down windy Rush Street. When we came to the corner of Rush and Clark, Lester said to me, offhandedly, “Do you want to come up to my room for a moment? I’m staying here in the Ambassador East.” “No, thank you,” I said. We shook hands and he and Tex made plans to have lunch the next day. Then he was gone. “What got into you, chile?” Tex asked gently. “Lose your nerve?” “Oh, Tex,” I said, “I don’t know him. He doesn’t really want me. He likes girls. Can’t I go home with you, Tex?” “Hon, I’m bushed,” he said, but he smiled with weary kindness at me. “Just for a few minutes,” I said. We went up to his modest hotel room, devoid of personal touches aside from a half-empty bottle of bourbon and, pinned to the lampshade, a photo of the cop, a beefy guy with ears that stuck out. Tex’s body, pale and hairless, looked much younger than his face, which was large and endowed with too much humor and mobility to go with such a featureless torso. I worried about what he was going to spring on me, but he kissed me and massaged my shoulders and back with surprisingly strong hands, then he explained step-by-step what we were about to do. Always the good student, I responded competently, never guessing I was meant to feel any pleasure. The minute I came, a wave of sickening guilt rushed over me. The hotel room looked depressing. I noticed the stain on Tex’s underpants and the hole in his stocking. Down the hall someone was coughing. Tex’s obsession with the policeman had reduced him to this. Compared to my father’s solid if cheerless fortune, Tex’s poverty was too great an expense of spirit. I pecked him on the cheek, barely able to conceal my shame and disapproval. He yawned. I hurried down the cold street, my mouth sour from Tex’s cigarettes, my cock and ass glowing, my heart sinking, sunk. I swore to myself I’d never, never sleep with another man. Defiance against my mother, no doubt, had propelled me into Tex’s bed. It was her fault that I was “acting out” on my homosexual impulses (my psychiatrist, Dr. O’Reilly, had explained it all to me). As the elevated train clattered back to Evanston and rewound the film I’d seen coming down, glimpses into slum apartments, these pitiful cuttings from the domestic life I’d been taught to admire but could never like, flickered past, educational and tragic.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  The wolf in me trotted away from the campfire, threw back a finely modeled head, and howled—but the sheep went to O’Reilly, because I didn’t know how to say no. Taken out of his office and spirited here, O’Reilly looked crazy and ill—puffy, disordered, breathing laboriously, reeking of bourbon. I was ashamed of him. Over the next few weeks, Annie stopped eating. She’d got it into her head that William had found her repulsively fat, and she’d spit with scorn at the reflection in the mirror of her meager breasts and nearly fleshless hips. She longed for the purity of a boy’s body (a boy before puberty). She’d found another girl at school with the same obsessions. They slept all day, prided themselves on their luminous paleness, grew their hair very long. They wrote poetry and began to go to cocktail parties with professors; they were invited by a teaching fellow in art history whom they’d befriended. At midnight they’d get together in Annie’s dorm room, light candles, and take several hours to eat two cucumbers. The rest of the time they lived on vodka, cigarettes, and black tea. O’Reilly hospitalized Annie for not eating, but she tore the intravenous tubes out of her arms and trotted frantically up and down the stairs to work off the disfiguring calories. I took her home to my father’s for Christmas. My stepmother gave us a tour of the house, as Midwesterners will do. We looked at cedar closets, the linen cupboard with enough sheets to outfit an infirmary, the whole cooked turkey and cold ham waiting in the fridge for our midnight snacks. We inspected the basement, saw the furnace, the bar locked tight against pilfering maids, the Ping-Pong table. “If you kids feel in the mood for a game,” Dad said, “even in the middle of the night, go right ahead since it’s soundproof down here.” “Anyway, you’ll be up,” my stepmother said to my father sourly. She launched into a recital of his annoying nocturnal habits. “He doesn’t get up till late afternoon, and at six in the evening he sits down to a breakfast of a pound of bacon. I’ve had to go my own way. Otherwise I’d never have had a life.” Which was my father’s cue to brag about his wife’s social successes as chief Friend to the Symphony, as docent at the art museum, and as the star of Mr. Feltrinelli’s painting class. She said, “I did a portrait of your dad as a sad clown and then a sort of Michigan landscape that got out of hand so I made it abstract but it’s kinda cute anyway.” She was also going to play Scrooge in a Christmas production for the Home for the Incurables (“If only I can get my lines down. Will you help, Annie? I’ve got a wonderful costume and beard and bah-humbug all worked out”).

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  33 Women were often the butt of sexist jokes, much to Murray’s dismay, and as the only woman in her class and in the entire student body (the other female student had dropped out), Murray was routinely excluded from class discussions—not because professors “deliberately ignored” her, but because “their freewheeling classroom style of informal discussion allowed the men’s deeper voices to obliterate [her] lighter voice.” 34 This alleged obliteration of voice, coupled with the assumption that Murray “had nothing to contribute,” left her feeling “condemned to silence.” 35 The use of the term obliterate might have been hyperbolic on Murray’s part, given her reputation for aggressive questioning and her willingness to confront male opponents, but her sense of her experience there attests to the ways in which her masculine-of-center gender performance was summarily rejected.

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  Supplication to the Lord for forgiveness may also involve fasting: So if a man fasts for his sins, and goes again and does the same things, who will listen to his prayer? And what has he gained by humbling himself? (34.26; Heb., 34.27f.) But it is clear that the main thing is avoiding transgression and doing what is right. Covenant, commandments, sin and atonement in Ben Sirach and Rabbinic literature In many ways Ben Sirach remains closer to the Old Testament, and particu- larly Deuteronomy, than he is to the Rabbis. He does not believe in the resurrection; he believes that a man is rewarded in this life strictly according to his merits; he thinks that God causes the descendants of a righteous man to flourish, while the children of the wicked are wicked (41.5). The prophets have also set their stamp on his thought, which is seen especially in his emphasis on righteousness in discussing the sacrificial system and on 'turning away' from sin. Yet all these elements - and others - are combined and neatly balanced in a way very like the Rabbinic. He is not far from the view that sacrifices atone with repentance (understood as turning away from sin and to the Lord), although the precise formulation is not yet made. Although almost all of Ben Sirach's admonitions concern the treatment of one's fellow and the sins which he excoriates are all transgressions against man and only thereby against God, and not against God alone (as would be the case in transgression of the Sabbath), 27 his demands for private and social justice are not based, as in the case of the prophets, on an appeal to an immediate 'word of the Lord', but on an appeal to 'the commandments', as is the case with the Rabbis. Man will do what is right ifhe does what God has already commanded, since God's law is eternal (cf. 24.9, on the eternality of wisdom). Charity is elevated as it will also be in Rabbinism. But the main similarity is that one sees here-in the form of 'wisdom' rather than halakah - a neat 'system' which regulates one's relations with God and man. The commandments are given by God and must be obeyed. Transgressions are punished and obedience is rewarded. Yet the transgressor who will can repent, supplicate the Lord, forsake his wrong-doing and escape the punishment of his transgression. 27 Cf. Biichler,JQR 14, p. 83 ;JQR 13, p. 472. Haspecker (Gottesfurcht beiJesus Sirach, p. 5) correctly observes that concentration on the relationships between man and man is typical of wisdom literature. 342 Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha [III The wicked and the righteous Buchler argued that there is a distinction in Ben Sirach between the 'trans- gressions of the habitual sinner' and the 'occasional lapses of the average, observant Jew'. 28 Although, as he noted, it is difficult to define 'the extent of the failure of [habitual] sinners to carry out commandments', 29 the distinc- tion seems to be correct.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  When I started to enter him, he said “Jesus Christ” out loud and grimaced with pain. The closest roommate stirred. I pulled out and he dashed for the toilet. I followed him. He sat on the toilet, door open, and said in a loud voice, “You’re really a pain in the ass,” and smiled that big unveiled smile. I stood there while he winced and talked and looked down into the toilet to see if anything had come out. His body had been tanned so often it retained a permanent swimsuit line. We didn’t go back to bed, neither then nor ever, but the next semester I had a room of my own in a boardinghouse and Mick would borrow it every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon when I was in class. He used it as a place where he could sleep with his girlfriend. Once I found a single drop of blood on my sheets. Often I could smell the scent of his clean but athletic and unperfumed body. By that time he’d been teased so much for his smile—and had even had a caricature drawn in which he was all teeth—that he’d lost his naturalness. The next year he dropped out of school and joined the paratroopers. Two days after the bachelor dinner, William Everett Hunton called me at three in the afternoon and begged me to hurry over to the law quad. When I arrived, there was Annie slumped outside his door, barefoot, wearing a pretty rose silk slip and nothing else, her beehive collapsed. She looked up at me with huge muddy eyes, but the clinch of recognition quickly relaxed and she glanced away, hopeless. “For God’s sake, Annie, get up!” I shouted, as concerned about the scandal she was making as the pain she was suffering. The minute I spoke, the door flew open and framed William. “Thank heavens you’ve come.” He looked with fear and loathing at Annie. “I see you’ve met my little doggie. Don’t pet her. We’re leaving her out here to punish her. She barked all night. You can call her Sam.” He yanked me into the room, after I caught a glimpse of a mad grin on Annie’s face at the name Sam. She even mouthed it silently. And then her mouth turned from comic to tragic, and her eyes filled with tears. As soon as he’d closed the door he leaned up against it, as though to keep Sam out. “Oh, my dear, you’d never guess the cheap paperback I’ve made of my life, pure roman de gare—why wasn’t I content to stay a thoughtless queen in quest of big dicks? This GF (by which I mean ‘genital female’ to distinguish her from us, darling, who are women by choice, not by necessity, though in your case I do see the iron hand of fate)—this GF has been turning my life into hell. I haven’t been to class for a week and, listen!” We stood stock still.

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  134 T annaitic Literature [I on the side ofinnocence (lekaf zekut) is judged by God as innocent' (favour- ably, lizekut). 41 Conversely, breaking a single commandment could be said to lead to the loss of the share in the world to come promised to every Israelite: And these are they that have no share in the world to come: he that says that there is no resurrection of the dead prescribed in the Law; and [he that says] that the Law is not from Heaven, and an Epicurean. R. Akiba says: Also he that reads the heretical books, or that utters charms over a wound and says, I will put none of the diseases upon thee which I have put upon the Egyptians: for I am the Lord that healeth thee (Ex. 15.26). Abba Saul says: Also he that pronounces the Name with its proper letters. 42 (Sanhedrin 10. 1; p. Peah 16b [I.I]) Anyone who employs verses from the Song of Songs for secular entertainment has no share in the world to come. (T. Sanhedrin 12.10) A man who counts out money for a woman from his hand into hers or from her hand into his, in order that he might look at her will not be free from the judgment of Gehenna even if he is [in other respects] like our Master Moses .... (Baraita Erubin 18b; ET, p. 125) R. Eleazar of Modiim said: If a man profanes the Hallowed Things and despises the set feasts and puts his fellow to shame publicly and makes void the covenant of Abraham our father [obliterates circumcision], and discloses meanings in the Law which are not according to the Halakah, even though a knowledge of the Law and good works are his, he has no share in the world to come. (Aboth 3.12) 43 The most important passages in this connection, however, are those which state that those who sin with the intention of denying the God who forbade the sin break or cast off the yoke. That is to say, they exclude themselves from the covenant and consequently from the world to come. Since accepting the covenant meant accepting the commandments, refusal of the command- ments is refusal of the covenant. Such phrases as 'he who does so and so casts off the yoke' should be understood in just this way. The particular sin mentioned is either tantamount to denying God explicitly or is a deliberate sin against one's fellow which violates not only the letter of the law but its basic moral principles and which could only have been committed with calculation and intent. The main example of the first type of sin is idolatry.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  Appendix 2IIt appears, then, that the Christianity of the first centuries defined two regular and distinct modalities according to which the individual needed to manifest themselves “in truth” if they were to liberate themselves from evil: on one hand, a great penitential ritual that was unique and comprehensive, that involved the whole of their existence and reshaped their entire life, sometimes in a definitive way; on the other, a continuous practice of examination and vigilance that attempts to apprehend and disclose the deepest stirrings of the soul. On one hand an alethurgy in which the “truth-doing” of gestures, attitudes, tears, mortifications, and forms of life seems to far outweigh the formulations of discourse; on the other an alethurgy in which “truth-telling” seems to impose an all-but-exhaustive verbalization of the secrets of the soul. Exomologesis as manifestation of sinful being can be set against exagoreusis as enunciation of the movements of thought. This opposition seems to be justified both from the standpoint of the technology appropriate to each of these practices and from that of their institutional context. The technique of exomologesis of the penitent involves the structuring, radical intensification, and highlighting of a set of discontinuities: a break with one’s former life, whose forms and marks one abandons; an estrangement from the community, toward which one humbles oneself to show how unworthy one is of remaining a member; a break with one’s own body which one abandons to hunger, misery, lack of care; a clash between life and death, since by placing oneself like Lazarus at the threshold of the tomb one contrasts the death of the body—which one accepts—to the eternal life of the soul—which is its recompense. In this interplay of discontinuities, ruptures, and clashes, the truth comes to light in the form of a manifestation. It is not the wrongs committed that appear in their details, with their conditions and their author’s share of responsibility; it’s the very body of the sinner, the sinful body, as the first transgression has marked it: destined to die, defiled by impurities, troubled by needs it cannot satisfy. And this manifestation is not simply the revealing of a hidden figure: it is a test for the subject, or rather the subject itself. A test in two senses: since by practicing the rigor of this relentlessly and as long as possible (or at least for the set time span), the sinner will “win” his reconciliation: and like a metal subjected to the test of fire, the impurities that were blended with their soul will separate out and be burned up in the fierce struggle of the penitent against himself. The penitent’s exomologesis is a double manifestation (of the renunciation of what one is and of the being of defilement and death that one renounces) as a purifying test of oneself conducted by oneself.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  3 “And if anyone still [appears as a prophet and falsely] prophesies, then his father and his mother who gave birth to him will say to him, ‘You shall not live, for you have spoken lies in the name of the LORD ’; and his father and his mother who gave birth to him shall pierce him through when he prophesies. 4 “And in that day the [false] prophets will each be ashamed of his vision when he prophesies, and they will not wear a hairy robe [of true prophets] in order to deceive, 5 but he will [deny his identity and] say, ‘I am no prophet. I work the ground, because a man sold me as a slave in my youth.’ 6 “And one will say to him, ‘What are these a wounds between your arms?’ Then he will answer, ‘Those wounds I received in the house of my friends.’ 7 “Awake, O sword, against My Shepherd, And against the Man, My Associate,” Declares the LORD of hosts. “Strike the Shepherd so that the sheep [of the flock] may be scattered; And I will turn My hand and stretch it out against the little ones [of the flock]. [Matt 26:31 , 32 ] 8 “It will come about in all the land,” Declares the LORD , “Two parts in it will be cut off and perish, But the third will be left alive. [Hos 2:23 ; Rom 11:5 ] 9 “And I will bring the third part through the fire, Refine them as silver is refined, And test them as gold is tested. They will call on My name, And I will listen and answer them; I will say, ‘They are My people,’ And they will say, ‘The LORD is my God.’ ” Zechariah 14 God Will Battle Jerusalem’s Foes 1 B EHOLD, A day is coming for the LORD when the spoil taken from you (Jerusalem) will be divided in your midst. 2 For I will gather all nations against Jerusalem to battle, and the city will be captured and the houses plundered and the women ravished; and half of the city will be exiled, but the rest of the people will not be cut off from the city. 3 Then the LORD will go forth and fight against those nations, as when He fights on a day of battle. 4 In that day His feet shall stand on the Mount of Olives, which lies before Jerusalem on the east; and the Mount of Olives will be split in half from the east to the west by a very large valley, and half of the mountain will move toward the north and half of it toward the south. [Is 64:1 , 2 ] 5 You will flee by the valley of My mountains, for the valley of the mountains will reach to Azel; and you will flee just as you fled from the earthquake in the days of Uzziah king of Judah.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  2 The things [the doctrine, the precepts, the admonitions, the sum of my ministry] which you have heard me teach a in the presence of many witnesses, entrust [as a treasure] to reliable and faithful men who will also be capable and qualified to teach others. 3 Take with me your share of hardship [passing through the difficulties which you are called to endure], like a good soldier of Christ Jesus. 4 No soldier in active service gets entangled in the [ordinary business] affairs of civilian life; [he avoids them] so that he may please the one who enlisted him to serve. 5 And if anyone competes as an athlete [in competitive games], he is not crowned [with the wreath of victory] unless he competes according to the rules. 6 The hard-working farmer [who labors to produce crops] ought to be the first to receive his share of the crops. 7 Think over the things I am saying [grasp their application], for the Lord will grant you insight and understanding in everything. 8 Remember Jesus Christ [the ever-living Lord who has] risen from the dead, [as the prophesied King] descended from David [king of Israel], according to my gospel [the good news that I preach], [Ps 16:10 ] 9 for that [gospel] I am suffering even to [the point of] wearing chains like a criminal; but the word of God is not chained or imprisoned! 10 For this reason I [am ready to] patiently endure all things for the sake of those who are the elect (God’s chosen ones), so that they too may obtain the salvation which is in Christ Jesus and with it the reward of eternal glory. 11 This is a faithful and trustworthy saying: If we died with Him, we will also live with Him; 12 If we endure, we will also reign with Him; If we deny Him, He will also deny us; 13 If we are faithless, He remains faithful [true to His word and His righteous character], for He cannot deny Himself. An Unashamed Workman 14 Remind the people of these facts, and solemnly charge them in the presence of God to avoid petty controversy over words, which does no good, and [upsets and undermines and] ruins [the faith of] those who listen. 15 Study and do your best to present yourself to God approved, a workman [tested by trial] who has no reason to be ashamed, accurately handling and skillfully teaching the word of truth. 16 But avoid all irreverent babble and godless chatter [with its profane, empty words], for it will lead to further ungodliness, 17 and their teaching will spread like gangrene. So it is with Hymenaeus and Philetus, 18 who have deviated from the truth. They claim that the resurrection has already taken place, and they undermine the faith of some.

• From Another Country (1962)

  She lit another cigarette and she listened. There was a horseback rider on the bridle path, a pale girl with a haughty, bewildered face. Cass had time to think, unwillingly, as the rider vanished forever from sight, that it might have been herself, many years ago, in New England. “That neighborhood was terrific,” Vivaldo said, “you had to be tough, they’d kill you if you weren’t, people were dying around us all the time, for nothing. I wasn’t really much interested in hanging out with most of those kids, they bored me. But they scared me, too. I couldn’t stand watching my father. He’s such an awful coward. He spent all his time pretending—well, I don’t know what he was pretending, that everything was great, I guess—while his wife was going crazy in the hardware store we’ve got. And he knew that neither me nor my brother had any respect for him. And his daughter was turning into the biggest cock teaser going. She finally got married, I hate to think what her husband must have to promise her each time she lets him have a little bit.” He was silent for a moment. Then, “Of course, he’s an asshole, too. Lord. I used to like to just get on a bus and go to some strange part of town by myself and just walk around or go to the movies by myself or just read or just goof. But, no. You had to be a man where I come from, and you had to prove it, prove it all the time. But I could tell you things”——He sighed. “Well, my Dad’s still there, sort of helping to keep the liquor industry going. Most of the kids I knew are dead or in jail or on junk. I’m just a bum; I’m lucky.” She listened because she knew that he was going back over it, looking at it, trying to put it all together, to understand it, to express it. But he had not expressed it. He had left something of himself back there on the streets of Brooklyn which he was afraid to look at again.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  2. Conversely, it would be just as incorrect to see on the side of the laypersons nothing but the solemn forms of public penance. Among them, as well as among the monks, there was a whole gradation of diverse practices going from the canonical forms that marked one’s belonging to the order of penitents to the subtle modalities of direction. First of all, one should note the difference, indicated from the origin, between serious sins that call the purification of baptism into question, and the little daily failings that show how far one still is from complete perfection. The three great “falls” that had occasioned, in the second century, long discussions about penance were idolatry, homicide, and adultery. Subsequently, the system of sins and the distinction between those that necessitated canonical penance and those for which it wasn’t necessary became much more complicated. Two axes of distinction emerged: that of the public and the hidden, on the one hand; that of the serious and the minor, on the other. One sees the idea affirmed that the public nature of penance, apart from its functions of humiliation and of the sinner’s manifestation, must have the role of responding to the public awareness of the fault; the example must compensate for the scandal. But conversely, if the transgression is secret, and if no one has any reason to be scandalized or to find a bad example in it, the stir of the spectacular exomologesis risks having harmful effects. Hence the idea that the hidden fault must be atoned for rather with a “private” penance: “We must strike back at all those sins that have been committed in front of everyone and more secretly at those that have been committed in a secret way.”15 In the same spirit, Saint Leo, a bit later, will criticize the (perhaps local) practice of publicly reading the list of faults committed by the sinners16 and will recommend not disclosing the details except in secret confession. The arguments given in the fifth and sixth centuries for non-public forms of penance are interesting, moreover, in that they clearly show a discontent with those solemn routines, a reluctance to yield to such humiliations, and a tendency to postpone till the last period of one’s life the acceptance of a penitential status that loses all its content as a result. Whence Saint Leo’s counsel of human prudence: while it is good, he says, not to refuse to blush before men when one has committed a fault, yet there are sins that it is best not to make public, because they might serve the enemies of those who confess them in that way.17 Pomerius will go even further in the Vita contemplativa [since] he advises those who are loath to confess their faults to impose their own penance on themselves and to voluntarily withdraw from the communion.18 In any case, this will be a binary system (public fault—public penance; private fault—private penance) that the theologians of the Carolingian epoch will emphasize, basing themselves on the authority of Saint Augustine.

• From How to Deal with Angry People (2023)

  CHAPTER 4 THE CONTAGIOUSNESS OF ANGER “I Absolutely Snapped” In May of 2010, a group came together in Columbus, Ohio to protest the Affordable Care Act (ACA), President Obama’s signature healthcare initiative (often referred to as Obamacare). The protest itself was one of many happening across the United States and wouldn’t necessarily have been noteworthy on its own had it not been for a viral video that captured a particular person behaving very badly. Like a lot of these protests, a group of counter-protesters arrived as well and this particular counter-protest included a man named Robert Letcher who was holding a sign that read “Got Parkinson’s? I do and you might. Thanks for your help.” Letcher is sitting down in front of the anti-ACA protesters when a man leans down and lectures him, condescendingly, “If you’re looking for a handout, you’re in the wrong end of town. There’s nothing for free over here. You have to work for everything you get.” Meanwhile, another man comes over and says, “No, no, I’ll pay for this guy. Here you go.” He tries to hand Letcher money, which Letcher doesn’t take, so he drops the bill on him. “Start a pot,” he says, “I’ll pay for you.” He then starts to walk away, but turns back and yells, “I’ll decide when to give you money.” He then crumples up another bill and throws it at Letcher, yelling even louder, “No more handout!” The crowd behind them seems to be egging him on, applauding his hostility and calling Letcher a communist. Taken together, what you have is a particularly troubling sight where a large

• From How to Deal with Angry People (2023)

  Essentially, the implication here is that there is something wrong with the person’s personality in a way that causes emotional, behavioral, and social problems. We see this pattern in the way people think, feel, and interact with others. Examples of personality disorders include narcissistic personality disorder, paranoid personality disorder, and antisocial personality disorder. This last one, antisocial personality disorder, tends to jump out to students as particularly interesting. People with antisocial personality disorder have a habit of disregarding and violating the rights of others. They harm people both physically and verbally. They lie to people and exploit them for financial gain. They routinely get into physical fights and they often show very little remorse for any of these wrongdoings. For students this disorder is interesting because their minds often jump to topics of serial killing and other examples of violent offenders they’ve been exposed to through the media.* This is, of course, fascinating to me too, but I’m more intrigued by this disorder because it’s one of just a handful of places in the DSM where anger or a synonym for anger is listed as a symptom of a disorder.† In this case, it’s “irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by frequent physical fights or assaults.” What students inevitably want to talk about with this or any personality disorder (including borderline personality disorder, which is another place in the DSM that includes anger as a symptom) is what causes them. They want to know if a person is born antisocial or if it’s a product of their upbringing and environment. It’s a great question with an exceedingly complicated answer. These disorders, like many others, are pervasive and all encompassing. Essentially, the question students are asking is “What causes our personality?” and there isn’t just one answer to that question. Case Study: Nathan – “I don’t want to be a tyrant” A one-time client of mine, Nathan‡ , was working with me to address his own anger problems. The pattern for him was fairly predictable. Most of the time, he wasn’t an angry guy. In fact, he was relatively laid back. He was a successful college student at the time, had a lot of friends who seemed to like him and get along with him, and he was always very pleasant in our therapy sessions. I never once saw him angry in our interactions. The predictable pattern, though, was that he would go out on weekends with his girlfriend, get angry over something she did, and snap at her. He was never physically abusive to her, but he was undeniably verbally and emotionally abusive. He admitted all of this, telling me that he would yell at her, say cruel things to her, and yell at her friends when they tried to intervene. Sometimes alcohol was a catalyst here, but not always.

• From How to Deal with Angry People (2023)

  hard to be, good at those things, so the implication that I’m not doing them well is hurtful to me. When someone notices I made an error – no matter how small – that suggests I’m not doing a good job in one of these roles, it serves as a threat to an important part of my self-identity, and it hurts. It may not be as obvious as the examples here. Our identity can be broad and diffuse and challenged in all sorts of vague and unexpected ways. A great basketball player may feel attacked when challenged about some other sport simply because they identify as an athlete. The challenge feels like an attack on their natural athletic ability. A person who values kindness may feel threatened when told they came across as rude or impolite during an interaction. They see the feedback as a threat to their identity as a kind and considerate person.* There are a number of personal characteristics that might make you more likely to become defensive when someone is angry with you. You might be insecure or lack confidence. You might be anxious or have difficulty asserting yourself when challenged. You might have a history of trauma or abuse that makes these situations more emotionally taxing for you. You may have had defensiveness modeled for you in the same way other emotional expressions are modeled and it became a learned behavior. Just like any emotional experience, the roots of defensiveness can be complicated and extend beyond the specific thing that provoked it. Of course, where the feedback is coming from matters too, and so does the environment in which you get the feedback. Take, for instance, a 2019 study by Levi Adelman and Nilanjana Dasgupta that explored how people react to “ingroup criticism.” 60 Ingroup criticism is negative feedback that comes from inside. It’s when a teammate, spouse, or colleague tells you that you need to do something differently. In this paper, which includes three separate studies, the authors explored how people took in criticism under different sets of circumstances. Participants were assigned to a “threat” or a “no-threat” group. The “threat” group read an article about how the economy was stagnating and how this could lead to lower wages and a worse quality of life. Within those two groups, participants also read an article about how the stagnating economy was the result of American’s poor work ethic (so the participants, who were all

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  First of all, regarding the causal chain, Cassian underscores the fact that the vices are not independent of each other, even if each of them can be attacked, more specifically, through one of the others.70 A causal vector links them together: it begins with gluttony, which originates with the body and kindles fornication; then this first pair engenders avarice, understood as attachment to earthly goods; which gives rise to rivalries, disputes, and anger; from which is produced the dejection of sadness, which provokes disgust with the whole monastic life and the listlessness of acedia. Such a concatenation assumes that one will never be able to vanquish a vice without triumphing over the one on which it depends. “If we always overcome the earlier ones, the later ones will be checked; and through the extermination of those that lead the way, the rest of our passions will die down without difficulty.”71 At the origin of the others, the gluttony-fornication pair, like “a tall spreading tree,”72 must be uprooted—whence the ascetic importance of fasting as a means of defeating gluttony and cutting off fornication. It’s where the ascetic exercise has its basis, because it is the beginning of the causal chain. The spirit of fornication is also in a singular dialectical position in relation to the last vices listed, and pride in particular. Actually, for Cassian, pride and vainglory don’t belong to the causal chain of the other vices. Far from being engendered by those, they are produced by the victory that one wins over them:73 “carnal” pride toward others through the show that one makes of one’s fasts, one’s chastity, one’s poverty, and the like, and “spiritual” pride that makes one think that this progress is due solely to one’s own merits.74 A vice connected with the defeat of vices, precipitating a fall all the heavier as it comes from on high. And fornication, the most shameful of all the vices, the most humiliating, is the consequence of pride—a punishment but also a temptation, a test that God sends to the presumptuous to remind them that the weakness of the flesh always threatens them if grace does not come to one’s rescue. “Because one has long enjoyed purity of heart and body, as a natural consequence […] deep inside oneself, one glorifies oneself to a certain extent […] but, for one’s good, the Lord acts as if he has abandoned him: the purity that gave him so much assurance begins to be clouded; in the midst of spiritual prosperity, he sees himself falter.”75 In the great cycle of combats, at the moment when the soul no longer has to struggle against itself, the goads of the flesh are felt anew, marking the necessary incompletion of this struggle and threatening it with a perpetual recommencement.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  Because Adam and Eve had this shame that is not ashamed to confess, their fault is not irremissible. And if their fault resulted in the fall of men, their modesty, which uncovers in concealing, is like the first form of what will appear as redemption. As against the serpent and Cain, who belong to the race of malediction, Adam and Eve, like David, are placed on the genealogical tree of salvation. And by their confession, in this exegesis by Chrysostom, this doubtless fundamental idea in Christianity emerges very clearly: that sin, at the very moment it contravenes God’s will or breaks his law, makes an obligation of truth come into effect. The latter has two aspects: one must recognize oneself as the author of the committed act and recognize that this act is evil. It is this obligation of truth that Cain evaded with his “I don’t know,” which added a truth crime against God to the blood crime against his brother. It is this obligation that Adam, Eve, and David submitted themselves to, thus redeeming the disobedience of the law through obedience to the principle of truth-telling. At the core of the economy of sin, Christianity placed the duty of truth-telling. But the exegeses of John Chrysostom, which are there only as examples and a first indication, make it clear that this duty of truth doesn’t simply have an instrumental role in the procedure of forgiveness: a way to obtain it, or to lessen the penalty. The crime scarcely committed, a debt of truth is contracted with God. This debt is so essential, so fundamental, that if one settles it, even the gravest sin can be pardoned; but if one shirks it, not only does the committed transgression remain, but one commits another one that is necessarily more serious, since it is pointed directly at God. It is significant that Saint Ambrose, commenting on the same passage of Genesis (4:9–15) as Saint John Chrysostom, affirms like him that in Cain, God punished the man who didn’t tell the truth more than the man who killed his brother. “Non tam majori crimine parricidii quam sacrilegii.”91 Where Chrysostom spoke of impudence, Ambrose speaks of sacrilege. Not that there is any difference of severity between them. Anaideia, in Chrysostom, designated the violation of the relation of “modesty” which the sin causes the sinners to contract with God; it is this infraction that Ambrose, in the juridical Latin vocabulary, designates as a sacrilegium. A little later, Saint Augustine will give Cain’s non-avowal an apparently quite different meaning. He also stresses that the question posed by God is nothing more than a test offered to Cain so that he might possibly save himself; for God knew exactly what had been done. But by answering “I don’t know” Cain gave in a sense the first figure of the Jews’ refusal to hear the Savior. Cain rejects the call to recognize the truth of his crime; the Jews will reject the call to recognize the truth of the Gospel. One mendaciously says that he doesn’t know what the voice of blood is crying out and what God recalls. The others mendaciously deny what the blood of Christ is crying and what the Scripture had heralded. “Fallax ignoratio, falsa negatio.”92 But by thus shifting the lesson of Cain from the avowal of faults to faith in the Gospel, Saint Augustine doesn’t modify anything basic in what the Homilies on penance and De paradiso were saying. He strongly and explicitly links together what Chrysostom and Ambrose, in the text in question, left implicit: namely that the obligation of truth in relation to transgressions is deeply connected to the obligation of truth in relation to the Revelation. Truth-telling and believing, veridiction in regard to oneself, and faith in the Word are or should be inseparable. The duty of truth, as belief and as confession, is at the center of Christianity. The two traditional meanings of the word “confession” include these two aspects. In a general way, “confession” is the recognition of the duty of truth.