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

  Epitomizing the problem in the Fourth Gospel is chapter 8, where Jesus tells the Jews “who believed in him,” “You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires” (v. 44). Here is the origin of the view, popular during the Middle Ages and still found even among well-meaning people today, that Jews are literally “children of the devil,” complete with cloven hooves and horns. Michelangelo’s statue of Moses, horned not because of John 8 but because of the Latin translation of Exodus 34:29–35, which describes “rays of light” that shone from Moses’s face, serves to confirm the forehead accessories. (I have twice been asked, each time by nice, silver-haired Protestant women, where I had my horns removed. The women, neither of whom had ever met a Jew before but both of whom had read John’s Gospel and seen pictures of Michelangelo’s horned Moses, asked in all innocence. They were both surprised and relieved to know that Jews don’t have horns. I also mentioned that we don’t have tails and cloven feet, just in case they thought that as well but were too embarrassed to ask.) For some readers, calling Jews the “children of the devil” is sufficient evidence for the label “anti-Jewish.” Others explicitly deny the charge of anti-Judaism. Again, the Pontifical Biblical Commission provides a good example. It explains that the Johannine polemic is “not made against Jews insofar as they are Jews, but on the contrary, insofar as they are not true Jews, since they entertain murderous intentions.” The distinction between “Jews” and “true Jews” can be in some cases helpful. One might, for example, claim that the “Christians” who participated in Nazi action were not “true Christians.” Then again, the Johannine Jesus is speaking to the “Jews who believed in him” (8:31). These are not the folks who, at least in chapter 8, were entertaining murderous intentions. If Jews who believe in Jesus are children of Satan, there is little hope for a positive view of those Jews who do not believe in him, especially given John’s tendency to divide the world into those who follow Jesus and those who do not. Others argue, as they did for 1 Thessalonians 2:14–16, that John is talking about Judeans and emphasizing a geopolitical or ethnic concern, not about Jewish beliefs and practices. It is true that whereas all Judeans are Jewish, not all Jews are Judean; some Jews are from Galilee, Tarsus, or Cyrene. However, as seen in the discussion concerning 1 Thessalonians 2, this is a distinction without a difference for the congregations. Any person in John’s church who heard the term Ioudaioi in the Gospel would associate that term with those who affiliate with the Jewish synagogue, observe the Jewish Sabbath, and otherwise claim to be the heirs of Abraham. In like manner, so falls the argument that John is really talking about the Jewish “leaders” rather than the Jewish people.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  “Don’t cry,” my mother yelled. “You look hideous when you cry. You look just like your father, with your fat, flat nose. I said, don’t cry!” And she slapped me. I put my hands to my face, and she wrenched them down and slapped me again and again. Then she sat down and sobbed. “You’ve ruined my life. I wish you were never born. All you ever do is make me look bad. All you ever do is humiliate me.” “I’m sorry, Mommy. I’m sorry,” I said. — I suspect my mother was unfulfilled. She was a meticulous but reluctant housekeeper and a lazy cook, preferring instead to fill her afternoons volunteering part-time as a treasurer for the school district, tapping on her calculator and filling out spreadsheets. Sometimes she asked my father if she could get a job at the bank. He always dismissed her. “You barely graduated from high school! Who would hire you?” But this is an adult assumption—a theory I’ve pieced together after watching shows about bored housewives and projecting them onto my parents’ marriage. As a child, I knew exactly why my mother was sad all the time. She was very clear on the source of her misery: me. — Here is what I have kept from my childhood: my whippings. My mother whipped me a lot. She whipped me for not looking her in the eye when speaking to her, but if I looked her in the eye with too much indignance, she whipped me again. She beat me for sitting with one leg up on the chair “like a trishaw puller” or for using American slang like “don’t have a cow, man.” Once, she beat me for half an hour with her tennis racket for opening the plastic covering on her People magazine after it arrived in the mail. Sometimes the beatings would be mild—she’d use her hands, chopsticks, my toys. Other times she would whale on me with a plastic ruler or a bamboo cane until it broke, and then she’d blame me for it. “You made me do it because you’re so stupid!” she howled. Then she turned her eyes up to the ceiling and screamed at God: “What did I do to deserve an ungrateful, useless child? She ruined my life. Take her back! I don’t want to look at her ugly face anymore.”

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

  They have not recognized how shameful it is for a man to sleep with his stepmother (5:1-3) or for others to visit prostitutes (6:15-20) or for others to rely on civil law courts instead of the "wise" judgment of those in the community (6:1-9). Moreover, by foolishly thinking that they are already exalted and ruling with Christ, these believers overlook the real and present dangers in their daily exis- tence. They do not see that there are still evil forces in the world, which will infect the congre- gation if allowed to enter. They do not see, to take one of the most complicated of Paul's discussions, that if women fail to wear head coverings during church services they are susceptible to the inva- sion of evil angels who might pollute the entire body of believers (11:10; see Chapter 23); nor do they realize that those who have been united with Christ can infect the entire body when they become united with a prostitute (6:15-20). In addition, the Corinthians' sense of self-exal- tation, in Paul's judgment, has made them ulti- mately unconcerned about how to treat one another in this sinful and fallen world. Many have engaged in uncontrolled acts of ecstasy in their services of worship, prophesying and speaking in tongues not to benefit others who are in atten- dance but, in Paul's view, simply to elevate them- selves in the eyes of others (chaps. 12-14). From their own vantage point they may have under- stood their worship activities as signs of their par- ticipation in the heavenly resurrected existence that was theirs in Christ. But Paul believes these CHAPTER 19 PAUL AND THE CRISES OF HS CHURCHF5 ,79 � Figure 19.3 Painting of the Christian celebration of the Lord's Supper, from the catacomb of Priscilla (see 1 Cor 11:23-26). activities reveal something else. Those who engage in them have forgotten that the Spirit gives gifts to members of the congregation so they can benefit and serve others, not exalt themselves (especially chap. 12). Anyone who has all of the gifts that can be given by the Spirit but who fails to love the brothers and sisters in Christ is still in total poverty. This is the message of 1 Corinthians 13, the famous "love chapter," which is a favorite passage even today, especially at Christian wed- dings. The passage, however, does not speak of love in the abstract, and certainly not to modem notions of sentiment and sexual passion. Specifically it is about the use of spiritual gifts in the church. If the gifts are not used to benefit oth- ers, then they are of no use. Paul's notion that Christian love is to guide ethical behavior in this evil age explains a number of positions that he takes in this letter. One promi- nent example is his position on meat offered to idols. In rough outline, the historical situation is reasonably clear. Meat that was sold at the pagan temples could be purchased at a discount.

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

  Matthew’s Jesus identifies Jerusalem as the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it (23:37). The First Gospel even sets the scene of the “Great Commission,” in which the resurrected Jesus commands his eleven remaining male followers to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” on a mountaintop in Galilee (28:16–20) rather than in the city of Jerusalem, where, according to Luke, John, and Paul, the early church had gathered. Thus, given Matthew’s ongoing polemic against Jerusalem, “the people as a whole” who cry out for Jesus’s blood can easily mean “all the people of Jerusalem.” The reference to their children also fits this view, since the children of that Jerusalem crowd would have witnessed the destruction of the city in the year 70. Matthew blames that destruction on Jerusalem’s failure to receive Jesus as Messiah. In this argument, historical research can make a somewhat convincing case that Matthew 27:25 does not condemn all Jews as Christ killers. A few other explanations of the verse, although perhaps less convincing from a historical perspective, offer a theological rationale that some readers may find satisfying. One popular exculpatory move, this one with theological sensitivity but without evident support from Matthew’s narrative, identifies “the people as a whole” not with the Jews, but with all humanity. When Christians hear the line, “His blood be on us and on our children,” they are to see themselves as responsible for Jesus’s crucifixion; he is killed not by “the Jews” but because of human sin and in conformity to the will of God. Churches that recite the line during Holy Week understand the point. Finally, a third approach designed to remove the verse’s anti-Jewish potential suggests that “the people as a whole” who call for Jesus’s blood are ironically witnessing to if not actually accepting the cleansing blood of Jesus for themselves and their descendants. Thus the “blood cry” is a good thing. The thesis turns all Jews into “hidden Christians” wishing to participate in Jesus’s sacrifice. This explication may resolve for some readers the labeling of Jews as Christ killers, but it produces the additional problem of turning the Jews into Christian wannabes and so erasing non-Christian Jewish identity. However one interprets that fateful line today, the history of the church’s interpretation cannot be ignored. Only in the twentieth century did the view of Jews as “Christ killers” begin to wane. Within the Roman Catholic tradition, this teaching of permanent, inherited guilt was rejected in 1965 with the promulgation of Nostra Aetate . The document declares: Even though the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ (see John 19:6), neither all Jews indiscriminately at that time, nor Jews today, can be charged with the crimes committed during his passion .

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  So I told her that she was adopted and her real parents were Malcolm X and a lady I made up named Kitty O’Shea. Patty had asthma, and on Christmas morning of 1961, when I was four years old and she was two, I sat on her chest—why, I do not recall—and she had to be rushed to the hospital while I hid under her bed, convinced that I’d murdered her. Still, Patty was so cheerful and trustworthy that she was named editor of her first-grade newspaper, The Happy Times . She started keeping a diary, but maintained a strict policy of not reporting anything that might embarrass anyone or hurt their feelings. Before long, she ran out of news. By the following May, Patty abandoned journalism altogether and settled on a career in nursing. 1961, Billy: The golden boy—smart, funny, handsome, athletic, and a rascal of the first degree. His raspy voice was so appealing that Holmer once paid him a dollar just to hear him sing the ABCs. Billy and I would spend hours watching Chicago Cubs baseball games on our playroom TV, imitating pitchers’ deliveries and batters’ stances. When the score was close, we’d stand on one leg for good luck. When he was in second grade, Billy tried to sneak a pack of my mother’s cigarettes to school by zipping them into the front pocket of his windbreaker. He had a crush on his teacher that year and wore English Leather aftershave to woo her. That was the same year that his band of little hooligans lit the neighbor’s woods on fire. Everyone assumed Billy would grow up to be a wild man like Holmer, his namesake. 1963, Danny: The youngest boy was born on Billy’s second birthday, so the comparisons between the two were even more tempting. With his big, deep-set brown eyes, strawberry-blond hair, and rosy cheeks, Danny looked like a Gerber baby. He’d crawl around the playroom in his yellow Dr. Denton pajamas and curl up next to the radiator like a cat. Danny had such a sweet disposition that the manager of our local grocery store called him “the Good, Good Baby.” We called him “Duper” or “the Dupe,” for short. While Billy was running around the block naked with the little girl next door, the Dupe quietly strung rope around the necks of plastic army men he called “my guys” and dangled them from his third-floor bedroom window. Danny aimed to please. He knew that my mother loved BLT sandwiches, so he taught himself how to make them for her. His mouth curled up on one side, making it look like he was always smiling. But I always worried about that little guy. You had to keep your eye on him or he’d find himself in more trouble than he could handle. One summer day, when Danny was about three, he toddled out the back door while no one was looking.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  in his 1624 Generall Historie of Virginia . . . , “This dear bought Land with so much bloud and cost, hath onely made some few rich, and all the rest losers.” 34 Among the more insidious practices in the colony, wives and children were held accountable for their husband’s or father’s indentured period of labor. After the Natives attacked in 1622, a colonist named Jane Dickenson was held by them in captivity for ten months. When she returned to Jamestown, she was told that she owed 150 pounds of tobacco to her husband’s former master. Unable to pay, she would be forced to work off her dead husband’s unmet obligations. She appealed to the governor, writing that her treatment was identical to the “slavery” she experienced among the “cruel savages.” Had English civilization been sacrificed in this colonial wasteland? That was Dickenson’s unspoken message. Nor was her treatment unusual. John Smith acknowledged in his Generall Historie that “fatherless children” were left “in little better condition than slaves, for if their Parents die in debt, their children are made bondmen till the debt be discharged.” 35 The leaders of Jamestown had borrowed directly from the Roman model of slavery: abandoned children and debtors were made slaves. When indentured adults sold their anticipated labor in return for passage to America, they instantly became debtors, which made their orphaned children a collateral asset. It was a world not unlike the one Shakespeare depicted in The Merchant of Venice, when Shylock demanded his pound of flesh. Virginia planters felt entitled to their flesh and blood in the forms of the innocent spouses and offspring of dead servants. 36 If civilization was to be firmly planted, Jamestown would have to be given the look of a normal English village, along with efforts to promote good habits among the people. The colony needed to shed its image as a penal colony and to plant firmer roots. It needed more than tobacco. It needed herds of cattle, fields of crops, and improved relations between masters and servants. Most of all, it needed many more marriageable women. In 1620 the Virginia Company sent to the colony fifty-seven “young, handsome, and honestlie educated Maides.” Over the next three years, 157 more women made the crossing. They were thought of as emissaries of a new moral order. Company records hint at something else as well: the “greatest hindrances” to “Noble worke” rested on “want of comforts”; men deserved to “live contentedlie.” The transportation of female cargo would “tye and roote the Planters myndes to Virginia by the bonds of wives and children.” Sexual satisfaction and heirs to provide for would make slothful men into more productive colonists.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  The car crept up the hill. It moved even slower as it approached my building, and then it stopped. The front door on the passenger side opened and Sister James got out. I drew back from the window. When I looked out again, the car was still there but Sister James was not. I knew that the apartment door was locked—I always locked it when I took the rifle out—but I went over and double-checked it anyway. I heard her coming up the steps. She was whistling. She stopped outside the door and knocked. It was an imperative knock. She continued to whistle as she waited. She knocked again. I stayed where I was, still and silent, rifle in hand, afraid that Sister James would somehow pass through the locked door and discover me. What would she think? What would she make of the rifle, the fur hat, the uniform, the darkened room? What would she make of me? I feared her disapproval, but even more than that I feared her incomprehension, even her amusement, at what she could not possibly understand. I didn’t understand it myself. Being so close to so much robust identity made me feel the poverty of my own, the ludicrous aspect of my costume and props. I didn’t want to let her in. At the same time, strangely, I did. After a few moments of this an envelope slid under the door and I heard Sister James going back down the steps. I went to the window and saw her bend low to enter the car, lifting her habit with one hand and reaching inside with the other. She arranged herself on the seat, closed the door, and the car started slowly up the hill. I never saw her again. The envelope was addressed to Mrs. Wolff. I tore it open and read the note. Sister James wanted my mother to call her. I burned the envelope and note in the sink and washed the ashes down the drain. Roy was tying flies at the kitchen table. I was drinking a Pepsi and watching him. He bent close to his work, grunting with concentration. He said, in an offhand way, “What do you think about a little brother?” “A little brother?” He nodded. “Me and your mom’ve been thinking about starting a family.” I didn’t like this idea at all, in fact it froze me solid. He looked up from the vise. “We’re already pretty much of a family when you think about it,” he said. I said I guessed we were. “We have a lot of fun.” He looked down at the vise again. “A lot of fun. We’re thinking about it,” he said. “Nothing like a little guy around the house. You could teach him things. You could teach him to shoot.” I nodded. “That’s what we were thinking too,” he said. “I don’t know about names, though. What do you think of Bill as a name?” I said I liked it.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  If I am going back as far as my imaginary constructions during my childhood and adolescence, I should point out the disparity which initially existed between these constructions and my actual behaviour, especially, as I recall, at puberty. I had started reading a Hemingway novel (The Sun Also Rises, perhaps), and I was sufficiently disturbed by the description of one of the female characters, due to the fact that she was attributed several lovers, to stop reading the book. I never went back to it again. A conversation with my mother also gave me a shock. I don’t remember how we got onto the subject, I can just see her laying the table in the kitchen as she confided in me that she had had seven lovers in her life. ‘Seven,’ she said, looking at me, ‘it’s not all that many’, but there was a shy questioning in her eyes. I scowled. It was the first time I had heard anyone say out loud that a woman could know more than one man. She became a bit defensive. A long time later, when I looked back on that rare moment of intimacy, I regretted my attitude. What was seven compared to a score that was still open? When I was better informed about what sexual acts might entail, I obviously integrated them into my imaginings, but coitus achieved did not preclude the possibility of passing from one partner to another. One of the most detailed scenarios which illustrates this point of view was the following: I am the guest of a vulgar, fat man – pretending to be an uncle – at a business meal in a private salon in a restaurant. There are twenty or thirty men sitting down to eat, and my first contribution is to do the rounds, sucking each of them off under the table. I can picture their faces above me, surrendering saggily, as each of them successively, and briefly, logs out of the conversation. Then I get up onto the table and they amuse themselves finding interesting substitutes for me to take, cigars, sausages, and someone comes and eats a sausage from between my thighs. As the meal goes on, I am conscientiously fucked, some leading me off to a sofa, others taking me standing up, from behind, bent over the table, while the discussions go on. The maître d’hotel and the waiters take their chances. If my masturbating has not yet been ended by an orgasm, then the kitchen boys finish me off. Finding myself in a group of men getting on with their different jobs and stopping only to come and join me in a casual, off-hand way, is a recurring scenario. A subtle alteration turns the uncle into a stepfather, and the conference into men playing cards (or watching football), and they take turns in coming to fuck me on a sofa while the others get on with their hand (or gesticulate at the television screen).

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  We make the interests of our relevant group central to our thought and action, and hence we give ourselves with all our loyalty and power to our group, to its security and success, and to its conquest and domination of competing groups. Thus result the social, group sins of historical life: sins of class, race, religion, nation, and gender. These communities support, defend, and secure the individuals within them—as the social power of men over women aids each man in his domination of women. Thus the pride of communities—make an idol of themselves which idol each member then proceeds to worship—represents the major form of sin in history, and not just immoralities. It is thus that people who individually may be “good” can, as we saw, unconsciously yet also consciously sin through the pride and cruelty of their group. And in each small community and home, as well as in the largest groups, the same pride can show itself and the same injustice result. One final point: No individual or community can face squarely the fact that they do make themselves the center of their universe; this idolatry is too devastating for any of us freely to admit. Hence, says Niebuhr, we deceive ourselves that what we do is right, in fact our moral or religious obligation. Anxiety is the engine of deception and self-interest. Nations and peoples go to war mainly for self-interest; and though that be the fundamental ground, they will argue that they are really defending God, their sacred tradition, or, in our secular day, peace, order, and democracy. This claim, that what they do for themselves they really do for “values,” makes it very difficult both for individuals and their communities to admit their driving self-interest. If they do, they seem to be denying all that is of value in their community, tradition, or religion. To confess is thus the height of spiritual self-transcendence, transcendence even over one’s own self-interest and guilt. As Niebuhr put it, the final paradox is that we are most free when we admit our unfreedom, our sin, and when we repent inwardly. To Niebuhr the myth of the Fall expresses or discloses this situation of ourselves and of all other humans: in each the fault of all, in all the fault of each, as Friederick Schleiermacher put it. This myth—and Niebuhr was one of the first to use the word “myth” in this connection—is thus true , but it is not literally true. It points to a true dimension or aspect of all of our lives, not to an actual historical event. It discloses, but it does not explain, our situation. Like the symbol of the good creation or that of the image of God, the symbol of “original sin” provides the most fundamental framework for our self-understanding. None of these religious symbols, said Niebuhr, anymore than the symbols relevant to God, can be taken literally.

• From The Porn Trap: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Problems Caused by Pornography (2008)

  Given how much porn exists in our environment, it is not surprising that ease of access, especially to things that often seem to have little or no financial cost and can be looked at privately, is one of the most significant factors in whether or not someone develops an adult porn relationship. Not that long ago, in order to use porn you had to go out, pay for it, come home, and hope to get lucky enough to find something that would turn you on. With the Internet, you can sit in your office or home and easily access categories of porn that you find exciting. In addition, whether you go looking for it or not, chances are you’ll be exposed to porn through teasers, pop-ups, and ads on other sites. You may find yourself in this situation almost every time you turn on your computer, constantly having to choose whether to tune porn in or tune it out. The cultural shift into high-tech porn appears to be changing porn use patterns for many people. According to a recent survey in Men’s Health magazine, 71 percent of men say they looked at porn more since the advent of the Internet, and one in two men wonder if they interact with porn too frequently or for too long. Easy access is one of the major factors that led to Corey’s porn relationship. He said, “Cybersex pulled me in. The convenience and ease of narrowing a search to the kind of image I wanted to see were powerful attractions. I could indulge my interest in pictures of feet and young girls. Knowing there were other people on the Internet looking at the same things made me feel more ‘normal’ about what I liked. The difficulty of finding the kinds of porn I wanted in a store, the amount of time it took, and the cost of buying magazines and videos had served to limit me in the past.” Victor, a fifty-one-year-old social worker now into his fourth year of abstinence from porn, noticed a dramatic increase in his porn involvement when he discovered what he could get over the Internet. “From time to time during my marriage I would get a hold of some printed pornography,” he told us. “Although I found it compelling, I was uncomfortable keeping it around, so I would destroy it. This happened several times over twenty years. Then in 1998 I became exposed to pornography on the Internet and my fascination with porn very rapidly progressed to a full-blown pornography addiction. Until then, I had been able to keep my porn use under control. I never used cocaine, but I identify with the observation that Internet pornography is the ‘crack cocaine of sexual addiction.’ It certainly was for me.”

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

  I had an unusually tough hymen and unsuccessfully attempted intercourse with one lover who, confronted with my inexorable virginity, became impotent. At twenty-one, I found this shattering. Was it my fault? It was particularly hard in light of early molestation. When I did manage my first time, it was with a trusted (and undaunted) friend. It took us several awkward tries. It hurt but it was also a relief. As with all sexual acts, trust is vital. It isn’t just a matter of trusting that your lover will respect your needs and take care of you. You also have to trust your own body; you have to know this is something your body wants. You have to believe that your body can open up and relax and have a good time. Bad experiences with penetration, childhood molestation, adult rape, clumsy partners, or even carelessly done vaginal exams may make a woman’s body reluctant to open up to the possibility of sexual pleasure. I was in an abusive relationship for a couple of years, and for some time after that I couldn’t have orgasms, even with lovers who were not at all abusive. It was like my feeling of self-trust had been damaged, because I had allowed that abuse to happen to me. In the nineteenth century, it was quite normal for women to experience intercourse as painful and unpleasant. A wife did her duty by her husband; if she enjoyed sex, it was an unexpected bonus. Things have changed, and nowadays, a man is “supposed” to take the time to make his wife happy in bed (and many truly want to do so). Unfortunately, those Victorian ideas still lurk in our subconscious, and there are women who expect intercourse to be painful on a regular basis, not just the first time. And if they believe this, then they will hold their bodies tightly to forestall the pain. A tight vagina does not generally welcome penetration, but there are plenty of things a couple can do that don’t involve penetration, which will lead to the woman getting more and more turned on, so that at some point she may feel the desire to have something inside her. Start with nothing bigger than one finger, just at the entrance to the vagina. This is a classic situation where lots of lubrication will make everything feel better. Don’t be afraid of making a mess. The Astounding Vagina

• From How the Bible Actually Works (2019)

  To put it another way, each Gospel is its own unique retelling of the life of Jesus centered on the needs of each writer’s community of faith. We’re in wisdom territory here again, folks. The Gospel writers weren’t thinking, “Gee whillikers, I hope my story wins the accuracy contest and winds up making it into the Bible.” They were more like pastors leading and encouraging everyday people to make sense of their lives as they walk the path of faith and trust in God. Each in its own way, the Gospels are answering the question, “How do you connect with the Savior here and now?” Each Gospel is tailored for an audience, which means the Gospel writers were not simply focused on the life of Jesus, but—as wisdom demands—reading the situation. John’s Gospel, for example, is the maverick of the four. Most of what Jesus says and does here isn’t found in the other three. There is no one simple answer for why this is so, but we can see that John was clearly crafting his story for his community. John pits Jesus against “the Jews” rather than specifically the religious elite (scribes, lawyers), as the other three Gospels do. That has come across— understandably—as anti-Semitic and historically has been used to justify vilifying Jews (throughout much of German history at least as far back as Martin Luther and in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ ). But charging John with anti-Semitism doesn’t cut it. The term is freighted in our day with a lot of history that isn’t relevant for John’s time. Many scholars have surmised that John’s language actually gives us a window into the struggles of his community. When John was written (probably somewhere in the 90s CE), there was no “Christianity” per se. Christianity as a distinct faith didn’t really hit the ground until a bit later in the second century, when it emerged as a largely Gentile faith. But John was written when Jewish–Gentile division was just beginning, and Jewish believers especially might have been ostracized, thrown out of syna gogues, and otherwise given a hard time. John’s so-called anti-Jewish rhetoric was a commentary on his day. In other words, John’s phrasing was an act of wisdom : he was translating the Jesus story for his situation. It should therefore not be taken to be a timeless template for Jewish–Christian relations, but neither is it to be tossed aside as simply bigoted. Supporting today John’s rhetoric is not a sign of faithfulness to scripture, but a failure to accept the sacred responsibility of making the ancient text our own for our time. By aligning ourselves with John’s rhetoric we would, ironically, not be following what John is actually doing—which is bringing the Jesus story

• From Quiet (2012)

  She advises asking students to discuss hot-button subjects like “Boys have life a lot easier than girls do.” Johnson, who is a frequent public speaker on education despite a lifelong public speaking phobia, knows firsthand how well this works. “I haven’t overcome my shyness,” she says. “It is sitting in the corner, calling to me. But I am passionate about changing our schools, so my passion overcomes my shyness once I get started on a speech. If you find something that arouses your passion or provides a welcome challenge, you forget yourself for a while. It’s like an emotional vacation.” But don’t risk having children make a speech to the class unless you’ve provided them with the tools to know with reasonable confidence that it will go well. Have kids practice with a partner and in small groups, and if they’re still too terrified, don’t force it. Experts believe that negative public speaking experiences in childhood can leave children with a lifelong terror of the podium. So, what kind of school environment would work best for the Mayas of the world? First, some thoughts for teachers: Don’t think of introversion as something that needs to be cured. If an introverted child needs help with social skills, teach her or recommend training outside class, just as you’d do for a student who needs extra attention in math or reading. But celebrate these kids for who they are. “The typical comment on many children’s report cards is, ‘I wish Molly would talk more in class,’ ” Pat Adams, the former head of the Emerson School for gifted students in Ann Arbor, Michigan, told me. “But here we have an understanding that many kids are introspective. We try to bring them out, but we don’t make it a big deal. We think about introverted kids as having a different learning style.” Studies show that one third to one half of us are introverts. This means that you have more introverted kids in your class than you think. Even at a young age, some introverts become adept at acting like extroverts, making it tough to spot them. Balance teaching methods to serve all the kids in your class. Extroverts tend to like movement, stimulation, collaborative work. Introverts prefer lectures, downtime, and independent projects. Mix it up fairly. Introverts often have one or two deep interests that are not necessarily shared by their peers. Sometimes they’re made to feel freaky for the force of these passions, when in fact studies show that this sort of intensity is a prerequisite to talent development. Praise these kids for their interests, encourage them, and help them find like-minded friends, if not in the classroom, then outside it. Some collaborative work is fine for introverts, even beneficial. But it should take place in small groups—pairs or threesomes—and be carefully structured so that each child knows her role.

• From Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints, and Other Abject Subjects (2008)

  6o Chapter 2 and likeness not of Yaldaboath and his fellow rulers but of the divine pler- oma itself. In a lengthy and intricate, even perversely loving process, the archons construct the human body, part by part. (It is not yet, however, a "fleshly" body.) 39 The end result embarrassingly exposes the limits of their power: "their product was completely inactive and motionless for a long time." Again the divine pleroma intervenes to fool Yaldabaoth, urging him: "Blow into his face something of your spirit and his body will arise." The false God falls for the trick: "The body moved and gained strength, and it was luminous" (19). Recognizing belatedly that the human whom they have created is now superior to them, the archons attempt to reassert their con- trol by refashioning its body out of "matter": "This is the tomb of the newly-formed body with which the robbers had clothed the man, the body of forgetfulness; and he became a mortal man." The Apocryphon adds: "But the Epinoia of the light which was in him, she is the one who was to awaken his thinking" (21). Epinoia is here the name given to the luminous trace of Sophia that initially passed into Yaldabaoth and has now left him, becoming the life and light of the enfleshed human creature. Placing the human in paradise, the archons desire to seal the tomb of its mortality by poisoning the creature with the fruit of "the tree of their life" (21). But there is another tree in the garden, "what they call the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which is the Epinoia of the light." The archons try to hide the tree from Adam "that he might not look up to his fullness and recognize the nakedness of his shamefulness." Through divine inter- vention, Adam is nonetheless persuaded to eat and thus enabled to know his own shame, which will (as with Sophia) initiate his redemption. Again the Apocryphon reads Genesis against its grain: "It is not the way Moses wrote." The archons cause the sleep of forgetfulness to fall upon Adam; they try to bring Epinoia out of his rib. The operation is unsuccessful: "But the Epinoia of the light cannot be grasped. Although darkness pursued her, it did not catch her" (22). Genesis is here once more interpreted through the filtering lens of John's gospel. When Adam awakes to behold Eve/ Epinoia-who is also "our sister Sophia, she who came down in innocence in order to rectify her deficiency"-his true identity as a child of light is suddenly revealed to him like an image in a mirror. Yet again Yaldabaoth attempts to gain control of the now ambiguously pluralized humans by humiliating them. In this iteration, humiliation takes the dramatically shaming form of rape. Desiring the luminous Eve/ Epinoia-desiring to possess and control her-Yaldabaoth begets in her two sons, Eloim and Yave. Yet the divine foreknowledge has already

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (1976)

  One could plot a line going straight from the seventeenth-century pastoral to what became its projection in literature, “scandalous” literature at that. “Tell everything,” the directors would say time and again: “not only consummated acts, but sensual touchings, all impure gazes, all obscene remarks … all consenting thoughts.”5 Sade takes up the injunction in words that seem to have been retranscribed from the treatises of spirtual direction: “Your narrations must be decorated with the most numerous and searching details; the precise way and extent to which we may judge how the passion you describe relates to human manners and man’s character is determined by your willingness to disguise no circumstance; and what is more, the least circumstance is apt to have an immense influence upon the procuring of that kind of sensory irritation we expect from your stories.”6 And again at the end of the nineteenth century, the anonymous author of My Secret Life submitted to the same prescription; outwardly, at least, this man was doubtless a kind of traditional libertine; but he conceived the idea of complementing his life—which he had almost totally dedicated to sexual activity—with a scrupulous account of every one of its episodes. He sometimes excuses himself by stressing his concern to educate young people, this man who had eleven volumes published, in a printing of only a few copies, which were devoted to the least adventures, pleasures, and sensations of his sex. It is best to take him at his word when he lets into his text the voice of a pure imperative: “I recount the facts, just as they happened, insofar as I am able to recollect them; this is all that I can do”; “a secret life must not leave out anything; there is nothing to be ashamed of … one can never know too much concerning human nature.”7 The solitary author of My Secret Life often says, in order to justify his describing them, that his strangest practices undoubtedly were shared by thousands of men on the surface of the earth. But the guiding principle for the strangest of these practices, which was the fact of recounting them all, and in detail, from day to day, had been lodged in the heart of modern man for over two centuries. Rather than seeing in this singular man a courageous fugitive from a “Victorianism” that would have compelled him to silence, I am inclined to think that, in an epoch dominated by (highly prolix) directives enjoining discretion and modesty, he was the most direct and in a way the most naïve representative of a plurisecular injunction to talk about sex. The historical accident would consist rather of the reticences of “Victorian puritanism”; at any rate, they were a digression, a refinement, a tactical diversion in the great process of transforming sex into discourse.

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

  My friends had welcomed me into their homes, and they answered as best they could the questions I asked. They took me to Mass with them (usually on Saturday, after skating at the now-defunct Lincoln Park roller rink, to the 5:00 PM service at St. Julie Billiart Church on Slocum Road in North Dartmouth). It was not until I was in high school that I actually read the New Testament. The Gospel of Matthew started off just fine: a genealogy with five women, Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary. Nothing wrong here. Then came the virgin birth, the magi, the temptation, and the Sermon on the Mount. But as I continued to read, I began to see all too clearly where that priest had found his hateful teaching. Verses such as Matthew 27:25, the cry of “the people as a whole” that Jesus should be crucified and that “his blood be on us and on our children,” provided the rationale for branding all Jews at all times “Christ killers” and therefore for killing them. The Gospel of John, with its repeated use of the word “Jew,” seemed a litany of hate. Peter’s sermons in Acts about the responsibility of the Jews for Jesus’s death (2:23; 4:10) . . . Paul’s statement in Romans that the Jews are “enemies of God” for the sake of the Gentiles (11:28) . . . First Thessalonians’ comments about “the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets . . . and displease God, and oppose all everyone” (2:15) . . . The list went on, and the pain continued. Yet I had, fortunately, been inoculated against seeing only hate. My Christian friends had modeled for me the grace and friendship that are at the heart of the church; my parents had told me that Jesus was a Jew speaking to other Jews, and that his basic message was exactly the same as that of Judaism: to “love the Lord your God” and to “love your neighbor as yourself.” So I knew that, although the New Testament could be read as being anti-Jewish, it did not have to be read that way. Unless we Jews understand the beliefs and practices and histories of our Christian neighbors and unless Christians understand Jews and Judaism—we’ll never achieve the shalom (“peace”) that the children of Abraham (including Muslims) all claim to be seeking. Thus I write not only as an academic who teaches New Testament in a predominantly Protestant divinity school but also as a Jew—and a member of an Orthodox synagogue—who recognizes the beauty of the Christian tradition, the harm that has been perpetrated in its name, and the several means by which its basic, important messages of justice and peace can be heard anew. Further, I am convinced that interfaith conversation is essential if we are to break down the prejudices that have kept synagogue and church in enmity, or at best tolerance, for the past two millennia.

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

  Rather, I wanted the dress with the matching white patent-leather shoes. To provide me some consolation, my mother bought me a wedding gown for my Barbie doll. I’d dress Ken in his groom suit, with the jacket on backwards and with white construction paper for the clerical collar. Then, practicing what I learned from my friends, I’d have Barbie, in her bride dress, take Communion from Ken every morning before school. Second, that year a friend on the school bus said to me, “You killed our Lord.” “I did not,” I responded with some indignation. Deicide would be the sort of thing I would have recalled. “Yes, you did,” the girl insisted. “Our priest said so.” Apparently, she had been taught that “the Jews” were responsible for the death of Jesus. Since I was the only one she knew, I must be guilty. But at the time I did not understand the reasons for the charge or have the means to address it. I was convinced that priests wore special collars to keep them from lying. Since the priest wasn’t dead, the charge had to be true. When that horrible trip from school was finally over—and thank heaven these were the 1960s, when mommies met their kids at the bus stop—I was in hysterics. Calming me down, my mother learned what had so traumatized me. She assured me that my friend had misspoken. Calls were made, and—to the enormous credit of the local diocese—this hateful teaching was stopped. But I had become obsessed. I initially concluded that the priest had misinterpreted his Bible. It must have been a translation error, I thought, since even in second grade I knew from Hebrew school that it was easy to make a translation error. So I decided I’d learn to read the Christian Bible (no one told me it was in Greek), find the problem, solve it, and then go on to do other things, like learn how to knit or to establish world peace. That was forty-three years ago; I’m still working. The following year, by the way, was the publication of Nostra Aetate, the Vatican document stating that all Jews are not directly responsible for Jesus’s death. I also asked my parents if I might attend catechism with my friends. I had Hebrew school two days a week after school; my friends had catechism the other two days. So my parents agreed. “As long as you remember who you are,” they said, “go learn.” On occasion I’d go, and I loved it! When I couldn’t go, I’d pump my friends for the stories they were learning, and I’d listen to Sunday morning Mass on television (whenever I could skip Sunday school) to get more details. My general reaction to Gospel stories was one of familiarity. Jesus meets a woman at a well and concerns about marriage emerge, just as with Abraham’s servant and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, Moses and Zipporah. Jesus is a good shepherd, just like David.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  the nation. The highly exclusive Order of the First Families of Virginia was established in 1912, its members claiming that their lineage could be traced back to English lords and Lady Rebecca Rolfe—whom we all know as the ennobled and Anglicized Pocahontas. 16 Statues are the companions of elite societies in celebrating paternal lineage and a new aristocracy. They tell us that some families (and some classes) have a greater claim as heirs of the founding promise. Municipal and state leaders have supported the national hagiography in bold form by constructing grand monuments to our colonial city fathers. The version of John Winthrop that the Revolutionary John Adams had favored, dressed in Shakespearean or Tudor- Stuart attire and with an ornate ruff collar and hose, first graced the Back Bay of Boston in 1880. But the largest such memorial is the twenty-seven-ton statue of William Penn perched atop City Hall in Philadelphia. After it was completed in 1901, no structure in the entire city was permitted to be taller than Penn’s Quaker hat until 1987, ensuring that the founder’s sovereign gaze towered over the City of Brotherly Love, commemorating the colonizing act of territorial possession. In British law, ownership was measured by standing one’s ground— that is, holding and occupying the land. Land itself was a source of civic identity. This principle explains as well the totem value of “Plymouth Rock,” the large stone discovered long after the last Pilgrim breathed New England air, christened in the eighteenth century as the first piece of land on which the Mayflower settlers stood. 17 Commemoration of this kind begs the following questions: Who were the winners and losers in the great game of colonial conquest? Beyond parceling the land, how were estates bounded, fortunes made, and labor secured? What social structures, what manner of social relationships did the first European Americans really set in motion? Finding answers to these questions will enable us to fully appreciate how long-ago-established identities of haves and have-nots left a permanent imprint on the collective American mind. Americans’ sketchy understanding of the nation’s colonial beginnings reflects the larger cultural impulse to forget—or at least gloss over—centuries of dodgy decisions, dubious measures, and outright failures. The “Lost Colony” of Roanoke was just one of many unsuccessful colonial schemes. Ambitious- sounding plans for New World settlements were never more than ad hoc notions or overblown promotional tracts. The recruits for these projects did not necessarily share the beliefs of those principled leaders molded in bronze—the

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  The bus is too hot. The fabric under my arms is damp, and I can smell myself. Something is wrong with me. But I don't have to tell anyone. Brandon doesn't have to know, remember? The woman in the men's suit doesn't either. She has no idea that a single glance in my direction, her eyes on my skin, would keep me awake all night, fantasizing. It's my secret. I'll keep it here, with me. I can visit my secret whenever I want. Knowing this feels luxurious. That's the word for it. Luxurious. The place where I keep this secret is padded and dim, the feeling when you lie back in the bath and the water covers your ears. I can climb inside it anytime I want, anywhere—on the bus, in a swiveling chair in the jury box—and I can think of her. No one has to know.

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

  The woman said to Peter, “You are not also one of this man’s disciples, are you?” He said, “I am not.” (John 18:15–17) It is significant that nothing is said about that other disciple who is presumably the same as the Beloved Disciple, denying Jesus! The transference of that peculiarly or even uniquely Markan literary-theological structure from Mark 14:53–72 into John 18:13–27 persuades me to accept, at least as a working hypothesis, the dependence of John’s passion account on Mark’s. Hence my third major presupposition about the intracanonical gospels is that Jolin is dependent on the synoptic gospels at least and especially for the passion narratives (here I agree with Maurits Sabbe [1991: 355–388, 467–513; 1994; 1995]) and for the resurrection narratives (with Frans Neirynck [1982: 181–488; 1991: 571–616]). Once again, if that is wrong, everything I build on it is invalid. And again, the same goes for the opposite position. PRESUPPOSITIONS ABOUT THE EXTRACANONICAL GOSPELS Exactly the same principles used in determining relations between the intracanonical gospels are used for those between intracanonical and extracanonical gospels. For direct literary dependence: in this situation, genetic relationship is established by finding specific stylistic traits of one gospel within another gospel and using redactional confirmation to explain why that latter version used the former as it did. In the absence of such traits giving evidence of direct literary dependence in either direction, independence may be hypothetically proposed. For indirect literary dependence: in this situation, where no specific stylistic traits of one gospel are present in another, redactional confirmation is the only method available to argue in either direction. Those principles will be exemplified in what follows, but an even more basic problem must first be faced. Fixing the Evidence? Why is it necessary to make a distinction here between intracanonical and extracanonical gospels if exactly the same principles establish dependence or independence among them all? Go back and read the epigraph to this section, a passage from Luke Johnson’s book The Real Jesus , with its accusations that my method is “fixed”; that I have given an early date and independent status to “virtually all apocryphal materials” and a correspondingly late date and dependent status to “virtually all intracanonical materials”; and that my only arguments are citations from “like-minded colleagues.” Something clearly happens to collegial courtesy, scholarly integrity, and academic accuracy when extracanonical gospels enter the debate. But, since principles and not just polemics are concerned in that indictment, let me use it to review my methodology. First, it is very, very serious to charge that another scholar has “fixed” his research methodology. Our only integrity as scholars is not to be right and correct but to be honest and public. “Fixing” data entails a deliberate intention to deceive. When one scholar accuses another of fixing the evidence, somebody has lost his integrity. Others will have to decide whether it is Johnson or myself.