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 Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  In the early days, though, fighting was a secondary concern; the charter quoted none of the Quranic jihad verses.80 The first priority was the Greater Jihad, the struggle to become a better Muslim. Palestinians, Hamas believed, had been weakened by the inauthentic adoption of Western secularism under the PLO, when, the Charter explained, “Islam disappeared from life. Thus, rules were broken, concepts were vilified, values changed … homelands were invaded, people were subdued.”81 Hamas did not resort to violence until 1993, the year of the Oslo Accords, when seventeen Palestinians were killed on the Haram al-Sharif, and Hamas activists retaliated in a series of operations against Israeli military targets and Palestinian collaborators. After Oslo, support for the militant Islamist groups dropped to 13 percent of the Palestinian population, but it rose to a third when Palestinians found that they were subjected to harsh and exceptional regulations and that Israel would retain indefinite sovereignty over Gaza and the West Bank.82 The Hebron massacre was a watershed. After the forty-day mourning period, a Hamas suicide bomber killed seven Israeli citizens in Afula in Israel proper, and this was followed by four operations in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the most deadly of which was a bus bombing in Tel Aviv on October 19, 1994, which killed twenty-three people and injured nearly fifty. The murder of innocent civilians and the exploitation of adolescents for these actions was morally repugnant, damaged the Palestinian cause abroad, and split the movement. Some Hamas leaders argued that by losing the moral high ground, Hamas had strengthened the Israeli position.83 Others retorted that Hamas was merely responding in kind to Israel’s aggression against Palestinian civilians, which indeed had increased after the outbreak of the Second Intifada, when there were more bombings, missile attacks, and assassinations of Palestinian leaders. Ulema abroad were equally divided. Sheikh Tantawi, grand mufti of Egypt, defended suicide bombing as the only way for Palestinians to counter the military might of Israel, and Sheikh al-Qaradawi in Yemen argued that it was legitimate self-defense.84 But Sheikh al-Sheikh, grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, protested that the Quran strictly forbade suicide and that Islamic law prohibited the killing of civilians. In 2005 Hamas abandoned the suicide attack and focused instead on creating a conventional military apparatus in Gaza.

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  “The first fantasies I can recall involved having sex with men in their twenties or thirties. I had found some porn magazines of my father’s. I was around eleven. My favorite scene was of a man in his thirties approaching me from behind and pushing me up against a chain-link fence, pushing my clothes aside but always having a firm grasp on my body. Now my fiancé is in Iraq. Ninety-five percent of my fantasies involve him. We have the photos we send each other. I hear I’m kind of a small-celebrity army pinup.” “My boss; a stranger in a bar; my father’s friend. Horny and demanding and forceful. So consumed by me that he can’t help himself. . . . As an undergraduate I felt like I had to monitor my internal and external life toward consistency. In other words, if I truly believed in women’s equality with men, then I’d have to have sex and imagine sex that reflected that—no domination, no rape fantasies. One result was that I married a nice liberal man who shared my convictions on how sex should be. Seven years later we divorced.” “A really sexy girl lies back on my bed. I grind against her face with my vagina, making her eat me out kind of violently.” “Rape—which, until very recently, I had trouble admitting even to myself. It seemed to fly in the face of all my participation in Take Back the Night rallies in college, all those women’s studies courses. Men take turns holding me down.” The appeal of rape—in the mind, in the lab—haunted Meana and Chivers and took our conversations to uneasy places. Two of their sexologist colleagues, Jenny Bivona and Joseph Critelli at the University of North Texas, had gathered data from nine earlier studies and offered a sense of how commonly women turn themselves on in this way. “For the purposes of the present review,” Bivona and Critelli spelled out, “the term ‘rape fantasy’ will follow legal definitions of rape and sexual assault. This term will refer to women’s fantasies that involve the use of physical force, threat of force, or incapacitation through, for example, sleep or intoxication, to coerce a woman into sexual activity against her will.” Depending on the study, between around 30 and 60 percent of women acknowledged that they took pleasure in this kind of imagining. The true numbers, the authors argued, were probably higher. The subjects conjured the scenes while they had sex, welcomed them while they masturbated, daydreamed about them. One explanation invoked the same reasoning as the woman who said, “I didn’t have to explain myself to Jesus.” Rape fantasies removed guilt. Women embraced them to escape the shame imposed, from the beginnings of girlhood, on their sexuality, to escape the constraints imposed going back and back in time. Another theory took imagining and relishing rape as a type of taboo-breaking.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  351 In this way, the reader understands how the economic and the religious, the secular and the spiritual, were intimately connected for Defoe’s audience. Crusoe is a product of both the Neoclassical world, with its belief in rational design and universal order, and the modern sensibility that insists upon the individual’s capacity to recreate himself. Crusoe’s struggle to understand his place in God’s plan begins nine months after his shipwreck, when he is taken ill and, in his fevered sleep, has a terrible dream. Defoe’s description of Crusoe’s dream-vision recalls the language of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’ s Progress (1678). Crusoe’s reaction to his dream is to refl ect on the wickedness of his ways. He speaks of the “Stupidity of his Soul, without desire of Good, or Conscience of Evil” that overwhelmed him. When Crusoe speaks of acting like a “meer Brute,” guided only by the “principles of Nature and the Dictates of common Sense,” we should not confuse his language with that employed by the Romantics. Crusoe is describing the response of an irrational creature, one who possesses only common, that is, uncultured, sense. Overwhelmed with remorse, Crusoe recalls his father’s warning that if he rejected his place in God’s order, he would suffer God’s reproach. For the fi rst time in many years, Crusoe prays. Crusoe’s description of himself as a “meer Brute” foreshadows his discovery of a single footprint in the sand. Crusoe’s fear that the print might be the mark of Satan or indicate the presence of cannibals temporarily deprives him of his faith, but upon refl ection, he regains his confi dence in God. It is only after his faith has been tested by, ironically, the suggestion that he is not alone on the island, that Crusoe is able to pass that faith on to another. When he rescues Friday from the cannibals, he is also rescuing himself from the state of animal desires. Just as Crusoe has had to learn to honor both his earthly and heavenly father’s wisdom, so Friday learns to become the perfect child to his father, Crusoe. Crusoe’s story is a story of a man who gradually learns to master his own self, his world, and other men. As such, it is the story of the presence of England in the New World, the story of colonization. Robinson Crusoe is a narrative about the power of human reason to overcome the natural world and, thus, an embodiment of Enlightenment ideology, but not the embodiment of that

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  I thought he might faint. Keep moving, I told him as I grabbed his arm. But they weren’t there to interview us. The reporters hadn’t even seen us. They had come from Chicago to interview Joseph Bernardin, the archbishop of Cincinnati, the man who had just said Mass that day. As we later learned, the pope had just named Bernardin as archbishop of Chicago, the largest archdiocese in the nation. He would soon be installed as a cardinal. From the look of terror in Danny’s eyes as we exited the church, I could see then that he would never shake off the shame of his cruel hoax, not that day, not ever. 10 Arrivals and Departures [image file=Image00015.jpg] Bedtime. My mother with Molly and Danny, a.k.a. the Diapered Duo. Wilmette, Illinois, 1965. By August 1986, I was eight months pregnant with our first child and more than a little nervous about giving birth. Larry and I had moved to Milwaukee, knowing we wanted to start a family someday and live closer to his parents or mine. Milwaukee was as close as we got. I was covering the courts and writing about legal issues for The Milwaukee Journal . As my due date drew near, I began to panic. How the hell is a baby’s head supposed to get out of my body? I asked my mother. Beats me, she said. God must be a man or he would have figured out an easier way. This was a cute answer, but, like those she gave to so many of the ques tions I had asked over the years about childbirth and caring for newborns, not a very satisfying one. My mother came up to Milwaukee to help us when Charley was born, and then again, seventeen months later, when Molly, our daughter, arrived. In many ways, those were magical days. I had my mother’s undivided attention for a full week. She was here for me, stone-cold sober and eager to help fold laundry, make dinner, and coo at these wonderful, squiggly new creatures. But I had so many questions, almost none that she could answer. What do I do if he won’t latch on? My mother shrugged. Should I give him a bath before his nap or after? She shrugged again. Is this colic? Here a shrug. There a shrug. Everywhere a shrug shrug. What do you mean you don’t know? I asked her. You had eight of these things. I don’t remember, she said. At first, I thought she was just trying to be polite, deferential, not overbearing, to let me discover the joy of motherhood on my own time, at my own pace. But I wanted direction, some practical advice that I could use to help me care for my newborns. After about the tenth time she told me I would figure it out, I finally realized that she wasn’t being coy. She genuinely did not remember. All those kids. All that laundry.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  Here is where the sad part of the story enters. God made everything so good for the Man. He set him in paradise, everything was perfect except for one thing and that one thing was the man didn’t have a counterpart. So God, being the good Father He is, already had a plan in place to take care of and provide everything the man would need. We know the plan was in place before He even made Man in that He actually extracts the female from the male. They were there together, sharing one body, but they had no way to enjoy the other, unless the one became two. God is a one-times-two kind of God who loves to take two and make them one, and yet the one still remains two. He is a relational God and we humans are made in His image and purposed to be relational creatures, just like our Designer. The two had the freedom to play, explore, and discover the over three hundred erogenous zones God gave each of them. They could frolic and enjoy one another’s bodies with absolutely not one drop of shame. Scripture says, “No shame,” even, “Naked and not ashamed.” It’s all so good, man and woman living together in paradise, the way God intended it to be. And then the serpent, the evil one, enters the story and the beautiful plan God created took a nasty turn. “The serpent was clever, more clever than any wild animal God had made. He spoke to the Woman: “Do I understand that God told you not to eat from any tree in the garden?” (Gen. 3:1). He has the nerve to start with a lie, just a little white lie to create doubt, to wedge in just a sliver of unbelief, questioning God’s goodness. God hadn’t said any tree, only one tree. I imagine there were thousands to pick from, only one did God set a boundary around. The Woman said to the serpent, “Not at all. We can eat from the trees in the garden. It’s only about the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, ‘Don’t eat from it; don’t even touch it or you’ll die’” (Gen. 3:2–3). Do you see how the serpent exaggerated? He loves to make God sound like the bad guy, the cheapskate, the withholder of fun stuff. The serpent told the Woman, “You won’t die. God knows that the moment you eat from that tree, you’ll see what’s really going on. You’ll be just like God, knowing everything ranging all the way from good to evil.” (Gen. 3:4–5) He forgot to mention God is good and wanted to provide good for His children and protect them from the burden of evil.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  Sadly, the Man is silent during the exchange, and neither the Man nor the Woman bother to consult with God. Consider if they would have looked at each other and said, “Hey, God has a stellar track record with us. He has only provided wondrous things for us, we live in paradise, we eat organic fruits and veggies, we swim whenever we want to, and we have a lot of fun together. We have never experienced Him withholding anything good from us. Let’s wait—He should be here soon—and we can talk this over with Him before we listen to this creepy snake.” But Man remained silent and Woman acted on her own. We see the same scenario today, with male and female and what harms our relationships with each other. The serpent planted doubt in Woman, and every woman has been marked by doubt since then. We ask ourselves, “Is God really good? Can I trust Him? Maybe I should take things into my own hands—maybe if I have sex with this guy he will love me and give me the love I so hunger for? Maybe he will be faithful to me, if I give him everything I have?” Or, “I don’t need a man or relationships. I can make it on my own.” Because this is a book on sexuality, I will point out how the Fall affected our sexual decision making. First, the Man was passive. Passivity paralyzes a man and leaves him feeling inadequate, feeling less than; in extremes, he begins to believe he is a loser. Some men get stuck in either one of two shame-inducing extremes. Either too fearful to even approach a female or, if he happens to find a woman, he hides himself from her, believing if she knew the real him she would run. Or he spends his life trying to prove his masculinity through sexual conquests—proving to himself and others that he is indeed adequate. The story continues, “When the Woman saw that the tree looked like good eating and realized what she would get out of it—she’d know everything!—she took and ate the fruit and then gave some to her husband, and he ate” (Gen 3:6). Yep, now we know it all. Lucky us, instead of male and female having paradise and a lot of sexual fun together in a committed, covenantal, safe relationship, now we have a lot of heartache; because when she ate, we all ate, and our eyes have been opened to evil, and sometimes it looks pretty tempting, especially before we count the cost of the consequences of shame.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  “God called to the Man: ‘Where are you?’” The God of pursuit has come looking for His beloved children. Adam replies, “‘I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked. And I hid.’ God said, ‘Who told you, you were naked?’” (Gen. 3:9–11). This is such a powerful question, a question that begs exploring. I wonder if God is saddened when a parent slaps his or her child’s hand because they are exploring their genitals and learning that they feel good. I wonder if God is saddened when a teenager’s body is flooded with either testosterone or estrogen and sexual feelings arise and someone says, “What is wrong with you? Your sexuality is dirty, and you better keep that under wraps. Don’t come home pregnant, young lady; and buddy, you better keep that in your pants.” Imagine if naked were normal and we weren’t freaked out that God made us sexual creatures on purpose? Imagine if we saw our sexuality as normal, but sacred, and the act of sex as something godlike and holy and fun and playful? We’d live in a different world where we would talk about sex and educate our children and integrate our values and our spirituality into the greater context of our sexuality. It would be normal to include God in our sexual decision making. Our choices would be less about what our hormones are saying and more about our character structure. But because of the Fall we have separated our sexuality from our spirituality, and we keep much of what we do with it hidden under the fig leaves—away from God and away from those we are meant to love. If our sexuality and spirituality were integrated, we might have frequent conversations with God such as; “God, would You teach me how to make love to my husband? I just haven’t been in the mood lately, and the kids are wearing me out. I don’t want to have someone grab my breasts, snuggle me, or tug on me. I need some space, and sex just doesn’t sound like fun.”—Or—“God, I need Your help in connecting sexually with my wife. I seem to be all thumbs, and I’m not touching her in a way that stirs much up. Would You help me, help us to have the kind of sex You want us to have?” If single, we might say, “Lord, I am dating this amazing person, and I am so hot on fire for him or her sexually. What do I do with my desires and longings? How do I handle wanting to have sex so bad—and yet You want me to wait until we are in a covenant relationship. How do I do this?”

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  How attachment went with our Family of Origin (FOO) is integral to understanding how we were shaped for love relationships. In my own life, my mother could be warm and nurturing and available at times. Other times she was distant and unavailable. I later learned those were the times my father was either drinking heavily or acting out in some way. I formed a more anxious style of attaching because I was uncertain if I could count on my parents. Sometimes they were available, other times my father was stressed and highly reactive and downright frightening, and my mother was caught up in his behavior. My husband came from a family of seven children, a daycare in his home, and foster children in and out. He was in the middle and learned to be more avoidant. Together, we have worked on our attachment styles to form a more solid, secure attachment. It hasn’t happened easily or without tears, but every ounce of effort we have applied to learn how to turn toward each other instead of becoming either anxious or avoidant has been worth the secure love relationship we now share. At times, we still have some bumpy moments, but overall our attachment has grown strong and secure and is a great source of joy. Sexuality is a significant part of our story, and our parents play a role in how we feel about our sexuality and what we do with it. If our parents had a healthy view of sexuality and were comfortable talking about sex, that shaped us in a positive way. If they were unhealthy and sex was a taboo topic in the house you grew up in, sex can be a really difficult topic. If sex was treated without respect such as when porn was readily available, or off-handed sexual innuendos were tossed around, or parents were sexually unfaithful to one another, sexuality can seem dirty. If Mom and Dad modeled warmth, affection, and playful attraction, we learned our sexuality is something good. If our parents argued about sex, if one was cold and the other pouting because sex wasn’t frequent enough, we learn sex is a power struggle. Either way, our parents are wiring our brain for future sexual relationships. You may feel discouraged by this. Ron and I were at first as well. Neither set of our parents modeled healthy sexuality. There were lots of dark secrets to be sorted through. With God’s help and the help of others, we can honestly say no sexual problem, no shameful secret, nothing you are hiding from is too impossible for God to heal. THE FIRST TIME Our first sexual encounter also forms our feelings and beliefs about sexuality. For some their first sexual encounter is loving, happy, and satisfying. Sadly, for too many, their first sexual encounter may not have been a positive experience. Yet, they are lasting experiences, and sometimes we find ourselves stuck in the memories, feelings, sensations, and images of those experiences.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  “I know I’m not alone. College can seem like a time to spread your wings and get free from your high school days or maybe your parents’ rules. I get that. Nobody wanted his or her freedom more than me. My dad was a preacher and I had my bellyful of religion and rules by the time I got to college. You may be shocked I am talking so openly about sex, drugs, and religion, but these are the big issues you are going to face in the next several years. You will make choices that will impact the rest of your lives. “Kaycie and I have walked this journey out. It has been messy and at times heartbreaking. We have hurt each other, our families, and ourselves. But we have also experienced grace, compassion, forgiveness, and a new way of doing life. We have committed our lives to helping you do the same, if that’s what you want. No secrets. “Open, honest, real-life conversations and dialogues are welcome here. We don’t want to pretend we have all the answers. We don’t. We are still learning and discovering. But this we do know: God is for you, and He will not leave you even when you are at your worst. And neither will we. “Jesus wants a relationship with you. It’s a relationship with Jesus that changed my life. I’m so grateful He found me in my darkest days. I grew up in the church; I was there every time the doors were open, and I went up front every summer at youth camp to give my life to Jesus, but a week later, I took it back. I thought my dad represented God, and if God was as mean as my dad, then I didn’t want anything to do with him. “My dad would preach on Sunday and whip me for fun later the same day. The gospel became very twisted inside me. God loves me, and my dad loves God, but my dad was as mean as a snake, and I personally thought he was the devil. When I heard the way he yelled at my mom, the thuds I heard coming from their bedroom, and her quiet whimpers and bruises in the morning, it made me hate him more. When I left for college, I didn’t want anything to do with God or Jesus His son. “I came to A&M running away from it all and believing I could leave that life behind. But the nightmares and memories didn’t leave me so I started using porn and drinking. That worked for two years to numb the pain inside me. When it stopped working, I tried something stronger and when I found myself needing more and more to get the same high, I knew I needed help. Honestly, I had no clue where to find help. The church only told me what was wrong with me.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  “I know many addicts did not receive sufficient bonding from their parents or most significant caregiver. God wanted every child to receive secure attachment, which means the child knew his or her parents would be available, warm, and nurturing, not perfect, but would work to build trust with the child. Dr. Daniel Siegel says it like this, ‘Being a we often begins in our infancy. Yet, over one third of us have had a history of insecure attachment and did not have a reliable experience of joining in where we were respected as individuals who were worthy of being a part of a linked and vibrant whole.’3 “For children who did not get that type of attachment, they typically develop one of two styles of attachment: anxious or avoidant. The anxious attacher feels insecure and afraid when attachment isn’t going well and typically ramps up emotionally to try to reconnect. The avoidant tamps down emotionally and moves away from attachment, believing he or she cannot trust attachment. “The brain develops from the bottom to the top (our primal brain resides at the bottom and our pre-frontal cortex, our smart brain, resides at the top), and from right to left. The right side is the relational side of your brain, the left is the logical; and the left side was intended to help make sense of the right side. If the child, whose main task is to experience joyful, trusting connections with mother and father during its first eighteen months of life, did not receive these positive feelings to minimize and regulate stressful feelings, the child becomes the adult who has poor affect regulation. In other words, these adults have a hard time or an inability to calm and soothe themselves when stressed or to reach out to another human being for containment. “You can understand how this person reaches for some sort of substance to calm the brain. God’s ideal was we would reach for mommy or daddy to comfort, smile, reassure, and soothe our discomforts; but when that doesn’t happen the child learns people cannot be trusted, and they must find ways on their own to soothe the distress. “Because caregivers didn’t provide what was needed for this child, shame gets deeply wired into the limbic system, where memories are stored. Shame is generally programmed by the time we are two years old. This is why we oftentimes don’t have the language to describe our shame; we just have feelings of shame.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  The two-story house wasn’t impressive—it smelt like leftover pizza, stale beer, and looked like nobody’s mother had been to visit in the last three decades. Someone picked up the kitchen, but it wasn’t clean. A&M chairs filled in for furniture in the living room and what was once the kitchen table was filled with week-old newspapers, coupon fliers, accounting books, and an old pizza box with one piece of dried up pepperoni left. Jeff looked hungrily at the box but decided to pass, wondering how long it had been there. Trevor and Jeff stood in the living room, their belongings lumped at their feet looking a little lost, when Kevin came rumbling down the stairs. “Hey guys!” He stuck out his hand and shook each of theirs. Jeff looked him square in the eyes and gave him a firm handshake. Trevor’s was less convincing and he didn’t completely make eye contact. Kevin, raised in LA, knew that evasive look way too well. He sensed Trevor had a few secrets much like he did. “Let me show you the palace,” Kevin said as he rolled his eyes. Later, a stillness settled over the house as the lights went out one by one. Kevin tossed in his bed as the familiar dream haunted his sleep. He was chasing after his mother, screaming for her in the dark, he was small, vulnerable, and alone. Aching penetrated each throb of his panicked heart. The cold sweat awakened him with a sudden realization he was not alone. He shared this room with Jason. Hot shame replaced his cold sweat. The next morning Kevin rolled over relieved to see Jason’s bed a crumpled, empty mess. Kevin wondered how someone that large slept comfortably in a twin bed. About that time, Jason showed up dripping from his morning run in the Texas heat. “Hey,” he said, “do you want to go to this thing with me today? It’s a campus ministry that’s a really big deal here, almost everyone goes, and you could meet most of the guys I hang out with.” “Um—sure—yeah, I guess.” Later, Kevin convinced Jeff and Trevor to go with them. Blaring from the coliseum was Tim McGraw’s song, “Humble and Kind.” Kevin thought that was interesting. The only time he attended anything religious was his grandmother’s church, where they opened a musty hymnbook and sang songs from prehistoric times. He always pictured people wearing old western clothes, bonnets, and buns, with long skirts, and shirts buttoned to the neck. He loved the warmth of his grandmother and how she smelt like cookies, but her church made him fidget and pray to the God up there this would soon be over.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  We ask you—urge is more like it—that you keep on doing what we told you to do to please God, not in a dogged religious plod, but in a living, spirited dance. You know the guidelines we laid out for you from the Master Jesus. God wants you to live a pure life. Keep yourselves from sexual promiscuity. Learn to appreciate and give dignity to your body, not abusing it, as is so common among those who know nothing of God (1 Thess. 4:1–5). “Man, I wish I’d known something about this kind of a life. You may think Kaycie and I have it all together. The truth is the first time we met was in a dark basement at a frat party. We sat across from a coffee table splattered with beer bottles, pot, and cocaine. We shared a line of cocaine, got high, and slept together for the first time without hardly sharing a word or knowing each other’s last names. We were so lost we didn’t know up from down, and we sure didn’t give dignity to our bodies. Instead, we abused our bodies and took from each other what we thought would remove the empty, lonely pit we found ourselves in. “If that wasn’t enough, I was also addicted to porn and Kaycie—well, she will tell you her own story. A month before graduation, Kaycie discovered she was pregnant. That little redhaired guy, yeah, he was the result of our college days. Don’t get me wrong; I love Sam. He’s a gift and a big part of why we both got sober. We have needed a lot of help. The hardest part and the one with the strongest grip on my mind was the porn. My older brother introduced me to it, and before I knew it, I started planning my days around losing myself in what I once thought was the best drug I ever discovered. It was my dirty little secret. I thought it hurt no one until two months after Sam was born, Kaycie found me late one night indulging in my private life. “It was humiliating, so I tried to put it off on her and the new baby. After all, I justified, we weren’t exactly having a ton of sex since she got pregnant and had the baby. It wasn’t until I got help that I realized how completely selfish I was and how my secret was hurting the people I loved.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  Kaycie was grateful for the interruption when the waiting-room door swung open. The familiar smile of her therapist shook her brain out of the negative rehearsal. She dumped her overloaded purse filled with baby wipes, crackers, and gummy bears at her feet and settled into the familiar sofa. Olivia’s smile always calmed her and reassured Kaycie she wasn’t some hopeless freak. “Kaycie, where would you like to start today?” Kaycie took a deep breath and heard herself exhale before she said, “It’s not all James. The healthier he gets, the more I can see my own issues. I want to work on me. I have faced and grieved the one-night stand and the porn issues, but I think I need to take the focus off of James—it keeps me stuck in the past and avoiding my own issues. I need your help to move forward.” “Kaycie,” Olivia looked at her with a twinkle in her eye, “I have been hoping you would come to this place. You have done the hard work of facing the marital issues, and I am celebrating that you are ready to face your own. Besides, a healthy marriage consists of two individuals who are doing the hard work of healing their own souls. So let me ask, where would you like to start working on you?” Kaycie nervously clutched her hands in her lap, “Well, James and I have a theme with the students, “No secrets,” but to be honest, I have never shared with anyone my biggest secret. And I’m not sure I have told myself . . .” Kaycie stiffened as a red rash crept up her chest and onto her neck. “My senior year of high school, I had two youth pastors. One was incredible; he was round-faced with a warm, dimpled smile. He adored his wife and four little boys. He was completely dedicated to the youth group. He loved God and really wanted the best for all of us. I trusted him.” Olivia nodded and leaned in knowing there was more.

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

  What is noticeable about the prophetic literature even in its earliest surviving phase is the emphatic connection it makes between sexual misconduct, more often than not on the part of women, and infidelity to the God of Israel. It is not surprising that this eventually led to the ejection of God’s wife from her place of honour (though, of course, the causality might be the other way round). Hosea was a prophet of the eighth century whose diatribe is one of the earliest to survive in written form. He shaped his bitter denunciation of the people’s betrayal of God around what he at least claimed was his own personal tragedy: a direct divine command to marry a woman he already knew to be promiscuous, and soon to be the mother of illegitimate sons and daughters – ‘children of harlotry’. This extreme form of enacted prophecy was a mirror to the religious unfaithfulness of Israel, the dark reversal of God’s promise of fatherhood to Abraham; Hosea interrupts even the promises of national restoration in his text’s latter half with more sexual denunciation.[25] This theme of personal sexual humiliation mirroring a cosmic tragedy is extremely powerful: it has resonated with the fears and miseries of countless individuals through three millennia, as well as providing a dark but plausible explanation of communal misfortune. Equally extravagant on the theme of promiscuous unfaithfulness was the later prophet Ezekiel, both prophet and sometime priest in the last years of the Jerusalem Temple at the beginning of the sixth century BCE. The sexual theme in the collection is not as all-consuming as in Hosea, but when the denunciation of sexual and religious faithlessness does emerge, it is startlingly and brutally uninhibited. At what is now Chapter 23, verse 20, for instance, a harlot is portrayed in nostalgic mood for her time back in Egypt, and ‘her paramours there, whose members were like those of donkeys, and whose emission was like that of stallions’. That is the attempt of the New Revised Standard English translation to be relatively decorous while still faithful to the text; James Davidson’s more full-throated recent rendering of it gives the male lovers ‘cocks as big as donkeys’ ’, and their sperm ‘as copious as that of horses’. That passage ends (23.45–48) with God smacking his divine lips at the thought of the violent execution by stoning of such promiscuous women in Israel.[26] Small wonder that the text of Ezekiel that we now have is so damaged (see above, Chapter 1). *

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

  Ironically, an incident in Genesis 19 that has bequeathed Christian societies the word ‘sodomy’ was little used in ancient Judaism for condemnations of specifically same-sex activity (see Plate 26). Sodomy in any case long continued to refer to a much wider range of sexual activity not leading to procreation. The outrage committed in the ill-fated city of Sodom certainly had a sexual element in it, for the men of the city sought to humiliate a couple of travellers by male rape (Gen. 19). Nevertheless, the outrage is the rape, not the gender of the victim: God punished Sodom for an inexcusable breach of the hospitality conventionally to be offered to travellers in the ancient world. That is demonstrated by an incident in Judges 19, supposedly much later but evidently in reality the model for the Sodom narrative at Gen. 19: dwellers in the city of Gibeah rape a male visitor’s ‘concubine’ as a substitute for raping the man himself. ‘If Genesis 19 condemns homosexuality, then clearly Judges 19 condemns heterosexuality,’ tartly observes one modern commentator.[28] Jesus evidently considered the sin of Sodom to be inhospitality. Advising his disciples on how to treat houses or towns who rejected them and their message, he observed that it would be worse for such communities than for Sodom and Gomorrah on the Day of Judgement (Matt. 10.15). By contrast, his Jewish near-contemporaries Philo of Alexandria and Josephus did indeed identify Sodom’s sin as same-sex activity. Their observations were part of a growing hostility in Jewish literature from the second century BCE and after, which denounced Graeco-Roman unequal same-sex relationships, a genre of relationship that is simply not mentioned in the Hebrew Bible itself. By now, Hasmonean Judaism had won its victories against the intervention of Hellenistic monarchs, and the abomination of Greek nude male gymnastics concentrated Judaean minds on the general Mediterranean sexual custom, which they rejected as symbolic of Hellenism.[29] It is a further irony that one of the purest examples of the heroic same-sex love of equals from the ancient Mediterranean is to be found in the Hebrew Bible: the saga of David and Jonathan, told now in texts between 1 Samuel 18 and 2 Samuel 1. Jonathan was the eldest son of King Saul; David and Jonathan loved each other ‘passing the love of women’, in the words of a song which lamented Jonathan’s admittedly well-timed subsequent death in battle (2 Sam. 1.26). At one particularly torrid moment in their relationship, ‘they kissed one another, and wept with one another, until David recovered himself.’ Thus runs the Revised Standard Version of 1 Sam. 20.41 in English, though it has the honesty to add the alternative reading of the verb, that David ‘exceeded’. That is the word that the English scholars creating the King James Version of 1611 had decided was closest to the Hebrew meaning in this passage.

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

  The most obvious way to read ‘exceeded’ is physical and sexual: either as erection or orgasm. This reading of the original text nevertheless already worried later generations of Hebrew readers, which has resulted in a good deal of confusion in its transmission. The Greek of the Septuagint kept the final phrase candidly but awkwardly as ‘until a (or the) great consummation’, and one surviving early Latin translation followed suit.[30] By contrast, other alarmed early commentators moulded a new direction for the phrase, with David ‘weeping the more’ than Jonathan’s tears; these included the early Christian Syriac translation known as the Peshitta, and later the Vulgate, the classic fourth-century Latin translation by Jerome of Stridon, who was no friend to sexual activity of any sort. That has been a lifeline for those modern translators embarrassed by any suggestion of physicality in the relationship of David and Jonathan; so on this matter, Evangelical Protestant scholars uncharacteristically side with the Pope’s translator Jerome rather than those of Protestant King James. None of them can do much about a much less disputable text, 1 Sam. 20.30, where the relationship is said to be ‘to the shame of your mother’s nakedness’. That clearly implies something sexual.[31] The shame implied in 1 Sam. 20.30 is not going to please modern advocates for gay rights, but it is not the overall tone of the David/Jonathan story, which lacks any other element of moralizing (and of course pairs it with multiple heterosexual exploits on David’s part). In fact, its sexual element is secondary but significantly complementary to its political purpose. Whatever the original truth of the tale, if any, the elaborate exposition is clearly intended to deal with the embarrassment of David’s usurpation and his murder of his king: the natural heir, Jonathan, passes his royal right over to the usurper by the intensity of his love.[32] As a piece of Solomonic royal propaganda, it comes from much the same chronological era as the Greek epic in which Achilles and Patroklos cemented their passion for each other. It did not have successors in the Hebrew Bible (see Plate 20). *

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

  The majority of them not only do not keep themselves in their former inaccessible grandeur, but, on the contrary, are becoming more and more democratized, and even keep low company, throwing off their last external prestige, that is, violating precisely what they are called upon to maintain. The same takes place among the military. The military men of the higher ranks, instead of encouraging the coarseness and cruelty of the soldiers, which are necessary for their business, themselves disseminate culture among the military, preach humanitarianism, and frequently themselves share the socialistic convictions of the masses, and reject war. In the late plots against the Russian government, many of those mixed up with them were army men. The number of these military plotters is growing larger and larger. Very frequently it happens, as was the case lately, that the soldiers, who are called upon to pacify the inhabitants, refuse to shoot at them. Military bravado is directly condemned by army men themselves, and frequently serves as a subject for ridicule. The same is true of judges and prosecuting attorneys: judges, whose duty it is to judge and sentence criminals, manage the proceedings in such a way as to discharge them, so that the Russian government, to have men sentenced that it wants to have sentenced, never subjects them to common courts, but turns them over to so-called military courts, which represent but a semblance of courts. The same is true of prosecuting attorneys, who frequently refuse to prosecute, and, instead of prosecuting, circumvent the law, defending those whom they should prosecute. Learned jurists, who are obliged to justify the violence of power, more and more deny the right to punish, and in its place introduce theories of irresponsibility, and even not of the correction, but of the cure of those whom they call criminals. Jailers and superintendents of hard-labour convicts for the most part become defenders of those whom they are supposed to torture. Gendarmes and spies constantly save those whom they are supposed to ruin. Clerical persons preach toleration, often also the negation of violence, and the more cultured among them try in their sermons to avoid the lie which forms the whole meaning of their position and which they are called upon to preach. Executioners refuse to carry out their duties, so that in Russia capital punishment can frequently not be carried out for want of executioners, since, in spite of the advantages held out to make hard-labour convicts become executioners, there is an ever decreasing number of such as are willing to take up the duty. Governors, rural judges and officers, collectors of taxes, publicans, pitying the people, frequently try to find excuses for not collecting the taxes from them. Rich men cannot make up their minds to use their wealth for themselves alone, but distribute it for public purposes.

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

  Early readers of the Infancy Narratives were not slow to pick up the general implications of what they were saying. When Christians and Jews became increasingly at odds, some Jews hardened their perception into anti-Christian sexual polemic. John’s Gospel records what sounds like an early example of this, in an angry argument presented as directly between Jesus and ‘the Jews’: they sneer ‘We were not born of fornication, we have one Father, even God’ (John 8.41). A story arose, first surviving from a literary attack on Christianity by the late second-century Greek writer Celsus, that Jesus was the son of a Roman soldier called Pantera. Pantera is indeed a surname attested from the period – the gravestone of a legionary with the name can now be viewed in Bad Kreuznach in Germany. The tale may be not so much a malicious fabrication as a confusion, based on a genuine surname of Pantera in Joseph’s family; certainly, that was the contention of the occasionally reliable Christian polemicist Epiphanios in the fourth century, drawing as he claimed on an ancient tradition.[11] Given the nature of the Infancy Narratives as theological exposition, there is no contradiction between their theological claims and the historical untidiness that is likely to lie behind them. Both Gospel writers have built their stories round illegitimacy, a difficult premise that no one is likely to have created just for the sake of it. The New Testament repeatedly refers to the sinlessness of Jesus, but nowhere does it associate that with the circumstances of his birth, whether from a virgin or not. The ‘virgin’ element comes from Matthew. He prefaces his Infancy Narratives by quoting a saying of the prophet Isaiah, nine centuries before, that ‘a virgin shall conceive and bear a son’ (Isa. 7.14; Matt. 1.23). In fact, Matthew was reading his Isaiah in the Greek of the Septuagint, which has translated the ‘young woman’ of Isaiah’s Hebrew text (‘almah) by the word which in Greek normally signifies a virgin (parthenos); he thus sparked a long and expanding Christian devotional tradition to Mary as virgin.[12] Yet is Matthew enunciating the doctrine of the virginal conception as understood by later Christians? He could equally well be seizing on the underlying idea of this Isaianic passage in the Septuagint that matches his overall message: in a time of crisis for the people of God, God chooses not a king or military genius to save a remnant, but the most vulnerable of young women and her infant son.[13]

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

  Admittedly, in that quotation one does not hear anything directly about the physical dimension of marriage, though Tertullian was insistent on the virtue of marriage for the bringing up of Christian children. He could remind a follower of the revisionist theologian Marcion that ‘if there be no marriage, there is no sanctity.’[36] The North African was caught between his strong desire to defend marriage against gnostics, Marcionites or any other Christian who denigrated human physicality, and his equally strong sympathy with Paul of Tarsus’s gloomy thoughts on fornication. In the course of his career, Tertullian’s conversion to the rigour of Montanist Christianity darkened his view of marital sex. ‘[Marriage] too, in the shameful act which constitutes its essence, is the same as fornication,’ he said; and he underlined that this applied even to a Christian’s first marriage. It is significant that 150 years later, Jerome was able to quarry Tertullian’s writings, often without acknowledgement, for his own relentless denigration of marriage in general (below, Chapter 9).[37] Moreover, all through his career, Tertullian was one of the loudest Christian voices opposing any second marriage after bereavement, let alone divorce. On more than one occasion he commended the legendary (and of course pre-Christian) Queen Dido, who in the version of her story told in Tertullian’s native North Africa chose to cast herself on a funeral pyre rather than remarry – so much for Paul of Tarsus’s remark that it was better to marry than burn with lust.[38] * Tertullian was an increasingly rare and marginalized figure in Christian theology as a married man writing about marriage. Moreover, he had the disadvantage of writing in Latin, which in his time was still the third language of Christianity after Greek and Syriac. What proved really decisive was the contribution of teachers and writers in Christian groups around Alexandria’s thriving and venerable schools of Greek higher education – at the turn of the second and third centuries, the greatest fount of long-lasting theological discussion in mainstream Christianity. Clement of Alexandria’s extended consideration of marriage was certainly not short on informed detail: Peter Brown notes that Clement’s early twentieth-century editors felt that his discussion of married sexual intercourse was embarrassingly frank, and that he ought to have known better.[39] Nevertheless the line that Clement took on marriage was to defend it by faint praise; not as far from encratite condemnation of the fleshliness of sex as one might expect.

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

  The external condition of men is the same: some are the violators, as before, and others are the violated; but the view of the violators and the violated upon the meaning and worth of the position of either has changed. The violating people, that is, those who take part in the government, and those who make use of the violence, that is, the rich, no longer represent, as formerly, the flower of society and the ideal of human well-being and grandeur, toward which all the violated used to strive. Now very frequently it is not so much the violated who strive after the position of the violators and try to imitate them, as the violators, who frequently of their own free will renounce the advantages of their position, choose the condition of the violated, and try in simplicity of life to emulate the violated. To say nothing of the now openly despised occupations and offices, such as those of spies, agents of secret police, usurers, saloon-keepers, a large number of occupations of violators, which formerly used to be considered respectable, such as those of policemen, courtiers, members of courts, the administration, the clergy, the military, monopolists, bankers, not only are not considered by all to be desirable, but are even condemned by a certain most respectable circle of men. There are now men who voluntarily renounce these positions, which heretofore were considered to be above reproach, and who prefer less advantageous positions, which are not connected with violence. It is not only men of the state, but also rich men, who, not from a religious feeling, as used to be the case, but only from a peculiar sensitiveness for the germinating public opinion, refuse to receive their inherited fortunes, considering it just to use only so much as they earn by their own labour. The conditions of the participant in the government and of the rich man no longer present themselves, as they presented themselves formerly and even now present themselves among the non-Christian nations, as unquestionably honourable and worthy of respect and as divine blessings. Very sensitive, moral men (they are for the most part the most highly cultured) avoid these conditions and prefer more modest ones, which are independent of violence. The best young men, at an age when they are not yet corrupted by life and when they choose a career, prefer the activities of physicians, technologists, teachers, artists, writers, even simply of agriculturists, who live by their own labour, to positions in courts, in the administration, in the church, and in the army, which are paid by the government, or the positions of men who live on their own incomes.