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 Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  Before that fall, I had never lived in our house alone, as its sole adult resident. Brandon and I had had big plans for the house, but we hadn’t had the money to see them through. He’d left without complaint. You know me, he said. I’ll have fun finding a new house someday. You know I like a project. I threw out his expired prescriptions and the ominous-looking earwax-removal kit he’d never used. I got tired of seeing the garden hose lolling next to the driveway like a diseased reptile, so I went to Fred Meyer and spent $29.99 on a plastic caddy on wheels. No one has so triumphantly coiled a hose. While I futzed, I listened to podcasts. In an episode of On Being, Krista Tippett mused with Franciscan friar Richard Rohr on the nature and necessity of suffering. It’s a simplistic metaphor, Father Rohr explains, but, “Picture three boxes: order, disorder, reorder. . . . If you read the great myths of the world and the great religions, that’s the normal path of transformation. What I always tell the folks is there’s no nonstop flight from order to reorder. . . . Yeah, that disorder is part of the deal.”35 This was around the time that the sewer backed up onto the old cherry-red carpet of the basement bathroom. The sewer pipes under the yard had eroded and split and would have to be replaced, at substantial cost. This work would not be covered by homeowners’ insurance. Because we still owned the house jointly, Brandon and I split the bill, both pillaging our savings. I cried a lot, made calls to a contractor acquaintance, and scoured Yelp reviews of sewer companies. Water mitigation, asbestos abatement, trenchless sewer replacement: I would learn to use these terms correctly in a sentence. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I sat in bed one night and wrote a list of people who had been kind to me in the previous year. I wondered why they had. I wondered if I deserved it. I wondered what I did deserve, after what I had done. I had developed a feverish obsession with someone who was not my spouse; had ended my marriage of a decade, thereby stripping my child of a home with both her parents in it; and had meanwhile spent five months riding the chaotic sea of a relationship that sent me pitching with lust, self-loathing, and confusion, in that order, only to end it. I felt bruised and embarrassed, and unsure of how else I could have done it. At any given moment, I had acted the only way I knew to act. At any given moment, I knew only what I knew. The limits of my judgment, of my own good sense, humiliated me.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  THE THIRD STEP Compassion for Yourself The late rabbi Albert Friedlander once impressed upon me the importance of the biblical commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 1 I had always concentrated on the first part of that injunction, but Albert taught me that if you cannot love yourself, you cannot love other people either. He had grown up in Nazi Germany, and as a child was bewildered and distressed by the vicious anti-Semitic propaganda that assailed him on all sides. One night, when he was about eight years old, he deliberately lay awake and made a list of all his good qualities. He told himself firmly that he was not what the Nazis said, that he had talents and special gifts of heart and mind, which he enumerated to himself one by one. Finally, he vowed that if he survived, he would use those qualities to build a better world. This was an extraordinary insight for a child in such circumstances. Albert was one of the kindest people I have ever met; he was almost pathologically gentle and must have brought help and counsel to thousands. But he always said that he could have done no good at all unless he had learned, at that terrible moment of history, to love himself. We have seen that compassion is essential to humanity. We have a biological need to be cared for and to care for others. Yet it is not easy to love ourselves. In our target-driven, capitalist Western societies, we are more inclined to castigate ourselves for our shortcomings and become inordinately cast down by any failure to achieve our objectives and potential. It is a terrible irony that while many in the world are suffering from malnourishment and starvation, in the West an alarming number of women—and, increasingly, men—are afflicted with eating disorders that spring from a complex amalgam of self-hatred, fear, feelings of failure, inadequacy, helplessness, and yearning for control. 2 But this self-dissatisfaction is not confined to the West. In countries that were colonized by Europeans during the late nineteenth century, for example, people often internalized the colonialists’ negative assessment of themselves. Muhammad Abdu (1849–1905), who would become Grand Mufti of Egypt, described the corrosive sense of inferiority that had crept into the lives of the colonized: It is an age which has formed a bond between ourselves and the civilized nations, making us aware of their excellent conditions ... and our mediocre situation: thus revealing their wealth and our poverty, their pride and our degradation, their strength and our weakness, their triumphs and our defects. 3 Colonialism did not end when the colonialists returned home. On both sides, old attitudes have often persisted; the inferiority engendered in some sectors of the former colonies has festered and may lie at the root of some of our current political problems. The Golden Rule requires self-knowledge; it asks that we use our own feelings as a guide to our behavior with others.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  Brandon had been on some dates. He’d kissed someone. I knew he loved me and I loved him, and I wanted him to have a good time. But he was more conflicted, caught up in how odd it felt to be with someone else. We’d told a handful of friends about our open relationship, but we both fretted about being seen. The restaurant industry is small and close-knit: Where could we go in this town without running into someone? I wished I felt proud, maybe even indignant—this is normal, what’s the fuss, etc.—but mostly I felt sheepish. Taking a stab at transparency, we told the manager at Delancey what we were up to, in case she heard whispers. A couple of weeks later, having fielded a torrent of gossip, she advised us to tell the entire staff. In a surreal scene, we assembled our employees in the Delancey dining room and, after outlining a new policy on paid leave, I formally announced our open marriage. We’d tried to convince ourselves that our marriage was strong enough, loving enough, flexible enough to accommodate the stretch we asked of it. Something about me had changed, but people are always changing, aren’t they? Just look at Brandon: when we met, he was going to be a music professor, and now he was a chef with three restaurants. We’d changed. So what? What we were doing was natural, no more ill-considered than monogamy. But it almost never felt that way. Most days I wanted to puke. I watched Brandon try not to worry as I set off to see Nora. We were terrified. He could admit it before I could, because I was busy falling in love. I remember sitting next to him on the sofa in our living room, the sofa where I’d made out with Nora. He’d come home for lunch, and we had a date to talk. Outside the window the sky was clear and unflinching, the color of a blue raspberry popsicle. I think I’m falling in love with her, I said. The refrigerator motor gurgled. I didn’t mean to, I added. I know that doesn’t help, but it’s true. He was silent. A couch spring squeaked. I wanted to see what his face looked like, but I was afraid to turn my head. It doesn’t have to change anything, I said, not sure if I believed it. We’d always been ourselves, hadn’t we? We’d been like this for a long time. We were discrete bodies, separate stars, but from the right vantage point, we’d aligned. We were a shape that made sense. We’d made a home for ourselves next to each other. But we’d never stood still, not really. We were always gliding, gradually, steadily, on our own trajectories.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘I recall that I once failed to show a proper respect for the Holy Sabbath, by making one of my servants sweep the house after nones on a Saturday.’ ‘Oh!’ said the friar. ‘This, my son, is a trifling matter.’ ‘No, father,’ said Ser Ciappelletto, ‘you must not call it trifling, for the Sabbath has to be greatly honoured, seeing that this was the day on which our Lord rose from the dead.’ Then the friar said: ‘Have you done anything else?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ replied Ser Ciappelletto, ‘for I once, without thinking what I was doing, spat in the house of God.’ The friar began to smile, and said: ‘My son, this is not a thing to worry about. We members of religious orders spit there continually.’ ‘That is very wicked of you,’ said Ser Ciappelletto, ‘for nothing should be kept more clean than the holy temple in which sacrifice is offered up to God.’ In brief, he told the friar many things of this sort, and finally he began to sigh, and then to wail loudly, as he was well able to do whenever he pleased. ‘My son,’ said the holy friar. ‘What is the matter?’ ‘Oh alas, sir,’ replied Ser Ciappelletto, ‘I have one sin left to which I have never confessed, so great is my shame in having to reveal it; and whenever I remember it, I cry as you see me doing now, and feel quite certain that God will never have mercy on me for this terrible sin.’ ‘Come now, my son,’ said the holy friar, ‘what are you saying? If all the sins that were ever committed by the whole of mankind, together with those that men will yet commit till the end of the world, were concentrated in one single man, and he was as truly repentant and contrite as I see you to be, God is so benign and merciful that He would freely remit them on their being confessed to Him; and therefore you may safely reveal it.’ Then Ser Ciappelletto said, still weeping loudly: ‘Alas, father, my sin is too great, and I can scarcely believe that God will ever forgive me for it, unless you intercede with your prayers.’ To which the friar replied: ‘You may safely reveal it, for I promise that I will pray to God on your behalf.’ Ser Ciappelletto went on weeping, without saying anything, and the friar kept encouraging him to speak. But after Ser Ciappelletto, by weeping in this manner, had kept the friar for a very long time on tenterhooks, he heaved a great sigh, and said: ‘Father, since you promise that you will pray to God for me, I will tell you. You are to know then that once, when I was a little boy, I cursed my mother.’ And having said this, he began to weep loudly all over again. ‘There now, my son,’ said the friar, ‘does this seem so great a sin to you?

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

  122 Early modern philosophers, such as Hobbes, had called for a strong state to restrain the violence of Europe, which, they believed, had been solely inspired by “religion.” Yet in France, the nation had been evoked to mobilize all citizens for war, and Fichte now encouraged Germans to fight French imperialism for the sake of the Fatherland. The state had been devised to contain violence, but the nation was now being used to release it. If we can define the sacred as something for which one is prepared to die, the nation had certainly become an embodiment of the divine, a supreme value. Hence national mythology would encourage cohesion, solidarity, and loyalty within the confines of the nation. But it had yet to develop the “concern for everybody” that had been such an important ideal in many of the spiritual traditions associated with religion. The national mythos would not encourage citizens to extend their sympathy to the ends of the earth, to love the stranger in their midst, be loyal even to their enemies, to wish happiness for all beings, and to become aware of the world’s pain. True, this universal empathy had rarely affected the violence of the warrior aristocracy, but it had at least offered an alternative and a continuing challenge. Now that religion was being privatized, there was no “international” ethos to counter the growing structural and military violence to which weaker nations were increasingly subjected. Secular nationalism seemed to regard the foreigner as fair game for exploitation and mass slaughter, especially if he belonged to a different ethnic group. In America, the colonies and later the states had lacked the manpower to maintain productivity, so by 1800 between ten and fifteen million African slaves had been forcibly transported to North America. 123 They were subdued brutally: slaves were repeatedly reminded of their racial inferiority, their families were broken up, and they were subjected to hard labor, flogging, and mutilation. None of this seemed to bother the Founders, who had so proudly asserted that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” Those who would object did so by invoking not Enlightenment principles but Christian morals. In the northern states, Christian abolitionists condemned slavery as a blot on the nation, and in 1860 president-elect Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) announced that he would prohibit it in any newly conquered territory. Almost at once South Carolina seceded from the Union, and it was clear that other Southern states would follow.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  How ‘Religion’ became a False Universal It is well known that the concept of ‘religion’ varies from one historical and cultural context to another. Some historical examples highlight the problems in assuming that the term ‘religion’ is an unproblematically valid universal category. Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican inscriptions do not contain any words that can plausibly be translated as ‘religion’. 10 Yet following the Spanish colonisation of this region, the Spanish term religión seems to have been used by early modern ethnographers working in seventeenth-century Mesoamerica as a self-evidently appropriate term to refer to a variety of indigenous cultural practices, which were then assimilated into this western cultural phenomenon. A European template was thus imposed on indigenous Mesoamerican ways of thinking. 11 A century later, Britain established a commercial base in India, which eventually led to the colonisation of the region. Once more, western observers, noting certain Indian cultural beliefs and practices that did not easily fit into existing categories (such as ‘philosophy’), designated these as forms of ‘religion’, and created the English term ‘Hinduism’ to enfold the variegated phenomena they witnessed in the Indian religious landscape. 12 Many have argued that the very idea of Hinduism was a construct of the colonial enterprise, ‘fabricated in the service of foreign interests, whether by European Orientalists or the British colonial regime.’ 13 Others have argued that colonialism gave a new significance to indigenous Indian religions as a means of preserving Indian cultural identity during the colonial period, thus encouraging the idea that Hinduism was a multi-dimensional unitary faith. To this day, Hindu scholars regularly (and rightly) complain that a group of Asian cultural beliefs and practices are still being assimilated to European categories. The same pattern can be seen in the western construction of ‘Confucianism’ as a religion, when it is better seen as a philosophy of life than as a religion . 14 Yet again, an indigenous cultural movement was forced into the preconceived ethnocentric framework of a colonial power, which misrepresents its historical particularities (above all, its own understanding and experience of the nature and social function of ‘religion’) as normative and universal. The universal concept of ‘religion’ is ultimately an outdated remnant of a colonial past, and needs to be recalibrated and rehabilitated, if not set aside as unhelpful and unreliable. Defining Religion: The Problem of Platonism It is often assumed that the recognition of a supernatural realm or transcendent dimension to life (such as belief in God) is a distinct characteristic of religion, and that the term ‘religious’ can be applied to anyone holding such a view. In conversation with Gary Wolf (the journalist who introduced the phrase ‘New Atheism’ in 2006), Richard Dawkins identified the key issue with religious believers as ‘supernaturalism’ – belief in something that lies beyond the empirical world. Yet Dawkins’ use of the word ‘supernatural’ is puzzling.

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

  [45] In this almost Victorian atmosphere, with public suspicion of obscure groupings like Christians easily turning to indignant fantasies about their licentiousness, when Christians defended their devotional practice and common life in literary ‘apologies’, many found it tempting to stress sexual renunciation, a theme of austerity that would appeal to many strands of Graeco-Roman philosophy. It was equally natural, though a little contradictory, to emphasize respectability and conformity to the norms of a society based on a male construction of family, and to make attack a form of defence by criticizing the immorality and promiscuity of Graeco-Roman society. Yet such defence was never a simple task, because even as the Church constructed its notion of Christian marriage, the enterprise was complicated by the obstinate persistence of other thoughts in its tangled inheritance from the past, in which both celibacy and a new place for women contended with the demands of family. It is to those complexities that we now turn. 7 Virgins, Celibates, Ascetics ( c .100– c .300) The writer of the Pastoral Epistles had told the women of his Church that their salvation came from childbearing. During the second century CE , Christianity experienced a powerful reaction against this thought, as both women and men sought salvation by a flight not just from general sexual activity, but even from Christian marriage: this was the beginning of the Christian monastic life. Increasingly, theological commentators were unmarried clerics even if they were not monks, and they praised marriage’s virtues with a certain condescension, or worse. Indeed, over the next thousand years, from the second to the twelfth century, Christians wrote a very great deal more about celibacy than marriage. The two themes have stayed uncomfortably entwined right down to the present day, and so we must scrutinize developments in the second century with some care. MONASTICISM : AN UNEXPECTED

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  This I take as a sign I can hit the one useable vein in my left arm, (The movements of tying up are such that you normally tie up the arm with which you reach for the cord.) The needle slides in easily on the edge of a callous. I feel around. Suddenly a thin column of blood shoots up into the syringe, for a moment sharp and solid as a red cord. The body knows what veins you can hit and conveys this knowledge in the spontaneous movements you make preparing to take a shot.... Sometimes the needle points like a dowser's wand. Sometime I must wait for the message, but when it comes I always hit blood. A red orchid bloomed at the bottom of the dropper. He hesitated for a full second, then pressed the bulb, watching the liquid rush into the vein as if sucked by the silent thirst of his blood. There was an iridescent, thin coat of blood left in the dropper, and the white paper collar was soaked through with blood like a bandage. He reached over and filled the dropper with water. As he squirted the water out, the shot hit him in the stomach, a soft sweet blow. Look down at my filthy trousers, haven't been changed in months.... The days glide by strung on a syringe with a long thread of blood.... I am forgetting sex and all sharp pleasures of the body -- a grey, junk-bound ghost. The Spanish boys call me El Hombre Invisible -- the Invisible Man.... Twenty push ups every morning. Use of junk removes fat, leaves muscle more or less intact. The addict seems to need less tissue....Would it be possible to isolate the fat-removing molecule of junk? More and more static at the Drug Store, mutterings of control like a telephone off the hook... Spent all day until 8 P.M. to score for two boxes of Eukodol.... Running out of veins and out of money. Keep going on the nod. Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.... Fall asleep reading and the words take on code significance.... Obsessed with codes.... Man contracts a series of diseases which spell out a code message.... Take a shot in front of D.L. Probing for a vein in my dirty bare foot.... Junkies have no shame.... They are impervious to the repugnance of others. It is doubtful if shame can exist in the absence of sexual libido.... The junky's shame disappears with his non-sexual sociability which is also dependent on libido.... The addict regards his body impersonally as an instrument to absorb the medium in which he lives, evaluates his tissue with the cold hands of a horse trader. "No use trying to hit there." Dead fish eyes flick over a ravaged vein.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  He did the best he could to look like he believed it, then slunk off to Rob's office to sulk with a cocktail. "Chef de Cuisine: Paul Kelly" was what it said on the bottom of every menu— right below the words "Executive Chef: Rob Holland." Rob, he knew, had put that there as a way of acknowledging that it was Paul who did all the work, that it was Paul who was likely to be there should a customer ask to see the chef, Paul who did the ordering, the expediting, the scheduling, the setting of specials, and, increasingly, the dirty work of screwing people over when circumstances required. He lied to purveyors, telling them that the check was on its way; lied to customers who asked if Rob was around, replying "He just stepped out a few minutes ago" when, of course, he hadn't seen Rob in days. He lied to the food mags and VIPs, loyally insisting that "the chef designs every facet of the menu" and that he "supervises every detail"; and, increasingly, he lied to the cooks. He lied every time he told them that things were okay, that they were "just having a few slow weeks." This was what a chef de cuisine did, after all, wasn't it? When he found himself bridling at the prospect of committing some new outrage on behalf of Rob Holland Incorporated, Paul liked to picture himself as loyal underboss, with Rob as capo. You did what you had to do. Once in, never out. Semper fi, Cosa Nostra forever. Someday, he'd have his own chef de cuisine and would leave the scrounging, the hustling, the lying, the bloodletting, and the bulk of the cooking, to him. That was the way it was. That was the way it would always be. He didn't mind toiling in obscurity. That wasn't the hard part. He didn't need his name on the damn menu. When he and Rob had started out at Red House, a thirty-five-seat storefront with no liquor license on the Lower East Side, it had been just the two of them and a dishwasher. Rob had worked saute, Paul was at the grill. When things got jammed, the dishwasher would step in and help plate the veggies. The kitchen had been cramped, swelteringly hot, and caked with ancient dirt. Roaches had streamed through every crack in the grease-browned walls and the floor behind the ranges, and the dishwasher hadn't been cleaned in thirty years. But Paul had never felt so pure. Merry Motherfucking Christmas, thought Paul, squeezing his temples between thumb and forefinger. Poor bastards, he thought. Poor me. Poor Rob, even. Rob, who only wanted to be loved. Paul didn't—just couldn't—hold Rob's rather meteoric rise against him. Okay, maybe he wasn't the greatest chef in the world. But he was a good cook. And to Paul, that was what mattered.

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

  Advani never made it to Ayodhya, because he was arrested on October 23, 1990, but thousands of Hindu nationalists from every region of India had already assembled at the site to begin the mosque’s demolition. Scores of them were shot down by the police and hailed as martyrs, and Hindu-Muslim riots exploded throughout the country. The Babri mosque was finally dismantled in December 1992, while the press and army stood by and watched. For Muslims, its brutal destruction evoked the horrifying specter of Islam’s annihilation in the subcontinent. There were more riots, the most notorious being a Muslim attack on a train conveying Hindu pilgrims to Ayodhya, which was avenged by a massacre of Muslims in Gujarat. Like the Islamists, Hindu nationalists are lured by the prospect of rebuilding a glorious civilization, one that will revive the splendors of India before the Muslims’ arrival. They have convinced themselves that their path to this utopian future is blocked by the relics of Moghul civilization, which have wounded the body of Mother India. Countless Hindus experienced the demolition of the Babri mosque as a liberation from “slavery”; but others argue that the process is far from complete and dream of erasing the great mosques at Mathura and Varanasi. 68 Many other Hindus, however, were religiously appalled by the Ayodhya tragedy, so this iconoclasm cannot be traced to a violence inherent in “Hinduism,” which has, of course, no single essence, either for or against violence. Rather, Hindu mythology and devotion had blended with the passions of secular nationalism—especially its inability to countenance minorities. All this meant that the new Ram temple had become a symbol of a liberated India. The emotions involved were memorably expressed in a speech by the revered renouncer Rithambra at Hyderabad in April 1991, which she delivered in the mesmerizing rhymed couplets of Indian epic poetry. The temple would not be a mere building; nor was Ayodhya important simply because it was Ram’s birthplace: “The Ram temple is our honor. It is our self-esteem. It is the image of Hindu unity … We shall build the temple!” Ram was “the representation of mass-consciousness”; he was the god of the lowest castes—the fishermen, cobblers, and washermen. 69 Hindus were in mourning for the dignity, self-esteem, and Hindutva, the Hindu identity, that they had lost. But this new Hindu identity could be reconstructed only by the destruction of the antithetical “other.” The Muslim was the obverse of the tolerant, benign Hindu: fanatically intolerant, a destroyer of shrines, and an arch-tyrant. Throughout, Rithambra laced her speech with vivid images of mutilated corpses, amputated arms, chests cut open like those of dissected frogs, and bodies slashed, burned, raped, and violated, all evoking Mother India, desecrated and ravaged by Islam.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Manuel, the brilliant saucier at your two-star restaurant, puts on his best suit, combs his hair, dresses up his family in their Sunday best, and tries to get a table at the one-star place across the street. The aspiring actor/model/part-time maitre d' will break out in a flop sweat, trying to figure out where to hide him—if "La Migra" hasn't already grabbed him on the way to dinner. There is no deception more hypocritical, more nauseating, more willfully self- deluding than the industry-approved image of "the chef." We all know who is doing the heavy lifting, who's making that nice risotto with white truffles and porcini mushrooms, the pan-seared hamachi with sauce vierge, the ravioli of beef cheeks with sage and sauce madere . . . We know, to our eternal shame, who is more likely to show up every day, dig in, do the right thing, cook conscientiously, endure without complaint: our perennially unrecognized coworkers from Mexico, Ecuador, and points south. The ones you don't see hurling around catchphrases on the TV Food Network, or grinning witlessly at the camera after the latest freebie for the Beard House. What is the heart of the matter? The answer to this simple question: When was the last time you saw an American dishwasher? And if you saw one—would you hire him? If you're like me, probably not. The best cooks are ex-dishwashers. Hell, the best people are ex-dishwashers. Because who do you want in your kitchen, when push comes to shove, and you're in danger of falling in the weeds and the orders are pouring in and the number-one oven just went down and the host just sat a twelve-top and there's a bad case of the flu that's been tearing through the staff like the Vandals through Rome? Do you want an educated, CIA-trained American know-it-all like I was early in my career? A guy who's going to sulk if you speak harshly to him? A guy who's certain there's a job waiting for him somewhere else ("Maybe . . . like Aspen, man . . . or the Keys . . . I can cook and maybe hit the slopes on my days off, or the beach")? Or some resume-building aspiring chef ("Yeah, dude . . . I'm thinking of like leaving here next month . . . maybe going to do a stage with Thomas Keller or Dean Fearing... He rocks. . .

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

  [21] The (so far, incomplete) nemesis of Bash Camps was John Smyth, as charismatic as Peter Ball but in a completely different mould as a successful Evangelical lawyer: the conservative Methodist Mrs Mary Whitehouse was among his clients when her moral campaigns reached the law courts. An extrovert family man with easy access to certain public schools, Smyth rose to be chairman of the Iwerne Trust (the sponsor of the ‘Bash Camps’), as well as a trustee of the closely related Scripture Union. Once in contact with schoolboys, he would select some for grooming and work out his own moral chaos on them, particularly through repeated sessions of flagellation, which in some cases he continued into their life after schooldays. Gradually evidence of Smyth’s crimes began to emerge; he was nevertheless not reported to the police, but simply forced to step back from his positions of responsibility, and in 1984 he emigrated to southern Africa. There his pattern of offending continued, including the unexplained death of a young man in Zimbabwe. He himself died in South Africa before he could face trial. At the time of writing, Anglican conservative Evangelical leaders have failed to face up adequately to what happened, nor have they fully addressed the implications of other analogous behaviour in the same circle. One response has been a rebranding exercise, in which the Iwerne Trust has become the Titus Trust. [22] WEAPONIZING

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

  Amid Mark’s general lack of comment on Jesus’s parentage, there is one remarkable moment where he ventriloquizes the people of Jesus’s home town as offensively calling Jesus ‘the son of Mary’ as well as brother of James, Joseph, Simon and Judas. This phrase ‘son of Mary’ would normally indicate that the addressee’s father was unknown. Matthew, Luke and an echo of the story in John all briskly alter the alarming usage to highlight Joseph, only Matthew keeping any reference at all to Mary; but Matthew and Luke then provide two different accounts of the circumstances of Jesus’s birth in their Infancy Narratives. [8] In Matthew, Joseph is the main actor, and in Luke, Mary. Matthew tells the story of Joseph’s initial horror at Mary’s pregnancy; he has to be instructed by an angel in a dream not to follow his instinct to repudiate his young betrothed, for this child is the Messiah (Matt. 1.18–22). Matthew, of all the Gospel writers, is the most concerned to link Jesus’s ministry to the Judaic past, and his narrative here is in dialogue with the terms of Judaic law in Deuteronomy (Deut. 22.20–29), which discusses what should happen when a betrothed virgin is seduced or raped. The penalty in Deuteronomy is execution by stoning: kindly Joseph instead resolves to end the betrothal quietly, even before the angelic intervention. Luke seems more indirect than Matthew, but when in his story the angel Gabriel tells Mary of her pregnancy, she immediately asks him how that can be, since she has no husband (Luke 1.34). In fact, Luke goes much further than Matthew. Among the songs he incorporates into his Infancy Narratives are two hymns of victory, still commonly used in the various Christian regular daily rounds of worship called ‘Offices’. One is attributed to John the Baptist’s father Zacharias (the canticle ‘Benedictus’ used for instance in Anglican Morning Prayer), and the other to Mary herself (the ‘Magnificat’ of Anglican Evensong). Not all their content is relevant to their present context, and it has been plausibly suggested that they are martial songs borrowed from the Maccabean period more than a century before, but their general message of renewal and the overthrow of existing power suits Luke’s purpose. [9] Significant therefore is Mary’s proclamation in the Magnificat that God ‘has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden ’ (Luke 1.48). Those Revised Standard Version translations underplay the shock value of these words to their early Christian readers. ‘Low estate’ renders tapeinōsis , which in its many shades of meaning stretches to ‘humiliation’, ‘disgrace’ or ‘baseness’: ‘handmaiden’ hardly hits the essence of doulē , which starkly means ‘female slave’, and which would therefore immediately suggest someone available for the humiliation of sexual assault. It was thus perfectly appropriate for Jane Schaberg to suggest the possibility that, in his use of this vocabulary, Luke is portraying Mary as the victim of rape.

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

  XVI, who as Cardinal Josef Ratzinger and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the former Roman Inquisition) had done his best to rein in Pope John Paul’s wilder theological impulses. In May 2006 a statement about Maciel was issued on behalf of Benedict’s own successor as Prefect, that the Church had decided ‘taking account of the advanced age of the Reverend Maciel and his delicate health – to renounce any canonical process and to invite the Father to a reserved life of prayer and penance, renouncing every public ministry’. That was the extent of any action against Maciel before his death in 2008. [17] At last the Vatican was showing signs of taking the abuse problem seriously, but the damage had been done, and Benedict’s sense of its daunting scale was one factor in his unanticipated resignation in 2013. The wider world was losing its patience. The crisis was larger than sexual abuse; it was a general abuse of clerical power and prestige by damaged or frightened personalities among the clergy, particularly in covering up abuse where it was unearthed. Certain states founded on their Catholic identity, such as the Canadian province of Quebec or the Kingdom of Belgium, saw church attendance plummet, but nowhere has the reaction been more extreme than in the Irish Republic. The tipping point came in the 1990s when certain prominent priests, notably the extrovert Bishop of Galway Eamonn Casey, were revealed as having clandestine female partners and children. Back in Archbishop McQuaid’s days, ‘everyone knew…and at the same time they managed not to know’ about ecclesiastical misuse of power; now the revelations poured out in increasing detail. [18] Particularly devastating was the Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into the Mother and Baby Homes published by the Irish government in 2020, which included details of archaeological work on the site of a sewage tank containing the remains of illegitimate babies from a Catholic-run children’s home in Tuam. On cherished shibboleths in the Vatican I construction of a Catholic family, the Irish population and its representatives in the Dáil (Parliament) now repeatedly exercised their right of rejection, despite strong attempts from the Church authorities to influence the votes. In 1993 male homosexual practice ceased to be illegal; in 1995 a referendum approved divorce (a result which was now backed by all the Republic’s political leaders); in 2015, Ireland became the first country in the world to introduce equal marriage for same-sex couples by popular vote; and in 2018 a decisive two-to-one referendum vote led to an end on the ban on abortion. Already in 2011, the Republic had pointedly closed its embassy in the Vatican, while Archbishop McQuaid’s posthumous reaction to an openly gay man becoming Taoiseach (Prime Minister) in 2017 is not recorded.

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

  necessary disclosure, I was involved in the early stages of GCM’s development. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12 13 . This mordant coinage of the Anglo-Catholic socialist priest Fr Kenneth Leech began differently ordered, as ‘lace, gin and backbiting’, in Leech’s letter to the Catholic Standard (Nov. 1975), 3, then reported in the Church Times , 12 Dec. 1975. Popular usage gave it the more punchy formulation; see K. Leech, ‘Beyond gin and lace: homosexuality and the Anglo-Catholic subculture’, in Speaking Love’s Name: Homosexuality: some Catholic and socialist reflections , Jubilee Group Pamphlets (London, 1988), 16–27, at 16. Matthew Bemand-Qureshi helped me excavate this intellectual genealogy. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13 14 . See W. Whyte, ‘OutRage! Hypocrisy, episcopacy, and homosexuality in England, 1968–1995’, in K. Cubitt (ed.), The Church and Hypocrisy , Studies in Church History 60 (forthcoming). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14 15 . J. Cornwell, The Pope in Winter: The dark face of John Paul II’s papacy (London, 2004), 234–46. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15 16 . F. Martel, In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, homosexuality, hypocrisy (London, 2019), 279–97, and 82, 123. For a summary discussion of the whole problem against a long-term background, see J. Cornwell, The Dark Box: A secret history of confession (London, 2014), ch. 10. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16 17 . Vatican Press Office statement, 19 May 2006: clumsily translated from the Italian http://nationalcatholicreporter.org/update/maciel_communique.pdf (accessed 19 Dec. 2023). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17 18 . A phrase of the novelist John Banville, reviewing O’Toole, We Don’t Know Ourselves , Times Literary Supplement , 17 Dec. 2021, 3–4. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18 19 . Fuller, ‘Catholicism in 20th-century Ireland’, 497, 504, 507; C. Gribben, The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland (Oxford, 2021), 205–6. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19 20 . While there is as yet no monograph on the Ball affair, a devastating account of his activities is provided by Dame Moira Gibb’s independent report, ‘An abuse of faith’, commissioned by the Church of England: churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2017-11/the-independent-peter-ball-review.pdf (accessed 11 Jan. 2024). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20 21 . A scathing newspaper article on the Bash Camp atmosphere from a female Evangelical insider and first-hand witness is A. Atkins, ‘Inside the sexual apartheid of John Smyth’s summer camps’, Daily Telegraph , 3 Feb. 2017. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21 22 . Currently the best way of following the story is the Independent Report, J. Pickles and G. Woods, Review into the Abuse by John Smyth of Pupils and Former Pupils of Winchester College (Winchester, 2021), commissioned by the College and published with admirable honesty on the internet: https://www.winchestercollege.org/assets/files/uploads/john-smyth-review-winchester-college-jan-2022- final.pdf (accessed 2 Dec. 2023). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22 23 . A sympathetic analysis of Johnston is A. Atherstone, ‘Christian family, Christian nation: Raymond Johnston and Nationwide Festival of Light in defence of the family’, in J. Doran, C. Methuen and A. Walsham (eds), Religion and the Household , Studies in Church History 50 (Woodbridge, 2014), 456–68.

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

  Those who fell under Eastern skies or on their way to the East received the benefits of special indulgence for sins committed and were esteemed in the popular judgment as martyrs. John VIII., 872–882, pressed by the Saracens who were devastating Italy, had promised to soldiers fighting bravely against the pagans the rest of eternal life and, as far as it belonged to him to give it, absolution from sins.302 This precedent was followed by Urban II., who promised the first Crusaders marching to Jerusalem that the journey should be counted as a substitute for penance.303 Eugenius, 1146, went farther, in distinctly promising the reward of eternal life. The virtue of the reward was extended to the parents of those taking part in Crusades. Innocent III. included in the plenary indulgence those who built ships and contributed in any way, and promised to them "increase of eternal life." God, said the abbot Guibert, chronicler of the First Crusade, invented the Crusades as a new way for the laity to atone for their sins, and to merit salvation.304 The rewards were not confined to spiritual privileges. Eugenius III., in his exhortations to the Second Crusade, placed the Crusaders in the same category with clerics before the courts in the case of most offences.305 The kings of France, from 1188 to 1270 joined with the Holy See in granting to them temporal advantages, exemption from debt, freedom from taxation and the payment of interest. Complaint was frequently made by the kings of France that the Crusaders committed the most offensive crimes under cover of ecclesiastical protection. These complaints called forth from Innocent IV., 1246, and Alexander IV., 1260, instructions to the bishops not to protect such offenders. William of Tyre, in his account of the First Crusade, and probably reading into it some of the experiences of a later date, says (bk. I. 16), "Many took the cross to elude their creditors."306 If it is hard for us to unite the idea of war and bloodshed with the achievement of a purely religious purpose, it must be remembered that no such feeling prevailed in the Middle Ages. The wars of the period of Joshua and the Judges still formed a stimulating example. Chrysostom, Augustine, and other Church Fathers of the fifth century lifted up their voices against the violent destruction of heathen temples which went on in Egypt and Gaul; but whatever compunction might have been felt for the wanton slaying of Saracens by Christian armies in an attitude of aggression, the compunction was not felt when the Saracens placed themselves in the position of holding the sacred sites of Palestine.

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

  He was the first to cast off the Jewish prejudices against the unclean heathen and to fraternize with the Gentile converts at Caesarea and at Antioch; and he was the first to withdraw from them in cowardly fear of the narrow-minded Judaizers from Jerusalem, for which inconsistency he had to submit to a humiliating rebuke of Paul.292 But Peter was as quick in returning to his right position as in turning away from it. He most sincerely loved the Lord from the start and had no rest nor peace till he found forgiveness. With all his weakness he was a noble, generous soul, and of the greatest service in the church. God overruled his very sins and inconsistencies for his humiliation and spiritual progress. And in his Epistles we find the mature result of the work of purification, a spirit most humble, meek, gentle, tender, loving, and lovely. Almost every word and incident in the gospel history connected with Peter left its impress upon his Epistles in the way of humble or thankful reminiscence and allusion. His new name, "Rock," appears simply as a "stone" among other living stones in the temple of God, built upon Christ, "the chief corner-stone."293 His charge to his fellow-presbyters is the same which Christ gave to him after the resurrection, that they should be faithful "shepherds of the flock" under Christ, the chief "shepherd and bishop of their souls."294 The record of his denial of Christ is as prominent in all the four Gospels, as Paul’s persecution of the church is in the Acts, and it is most prominent—as it would seem under his own direction—in the Gospel of his pupil and "interpreter" Mark, which alone mentions the two cock-crows, thus doubling the guilt of the denial,295 and which records Christ’s words of censure ("Satan"), but omits Christ’s praise ("Rock").296 Peter made as little effort to conceal his great sin, as Paul. It served as a thorn in his flesh, and the remembrance kept him near the cross; while his recovery from the fall was a standing proof of the power and mercy of Christ and a perpetual call to gratitude. To the Christian Church the double story of Peter’s denial and recovery has been ever since an unfailing source of warning and comfort. Having turned again to his Lord, who prayed for him that his personal faith fail not, he is still strengthening the brethren.297 As to his official position in the church, Peter stood from the beginning at the head of the Jewish apostles, not in a partisan sense, but in a large-hearted spirit of moderation and comprehension. He never was a narrow, contracted, exclusive sectarian.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  Haw Haw! Can't let you choke at this rate -- I'd get a warning from the President. And what a disgrace if the dead wagon cart you out alive. My balls would drop off with the shame of it and I apprenticed myself to an experienced ox. One two three pull.' " The sail plane falls silent as erection, silent as greased glass broken by the young thief with oldwoman hands and cancelled eyes of junk.... In a noiseless explosion he penetrates the broken house, stepping over the greased crystals, a clock ticks loud in the kitchen, hot air ruffles his hair, his head disintegrates in a heavy duck load.... The Old Man flips out a red shell and pirouettes around his shotgun. "Aw, shucks, fellers, tweren't nothing.... Fish in the barrel.... Money in the bank ...roundheeled boy, one greased shot brain goose and he flop in an obscene position.... Can you hear me from where you are, boy? "I was young myself once and heard the siren call of easy money and women and tight boy-ass and lands sake don't get my blood up I am subject to tell a tale make your cock stand up and yipe for the pink pearly way of young cunt or the lovely brown mucous-covered palpitating tune of the young boy-ass play your cock like a recorder... and when you hit the prostate pearl sharp diamonds gather in the golden lad balls inexorable as a kidney stone.... Sorry I had to kill you.... The old grey mare aint what she used to be.... Cant run down an audience... got to bring down that house on the wing, run or sit.... Like an old lion took bad with cavities he need that Amident toothpaste keep a feller biting fresh at all times.... Them old lions shit sure turn boyeater.... And who can blame them, boys being so sweet so cold so fair in St. James Infirmary?? Now, son, don't you get rigor mortis on me. Show respect for the aging prick.... You may be a tedious old fuck yourself some day.... Oh, uh; I guess not.... You have, like Housman's barefoot shameless catamite The Congealed Shropshire Ingenue set your fleet foot on the silo of change.... But you cant kill those Shropshire boys... been hanged so often he resist it like a gonococcus half castrate with pencillin rallies to a hideous strength and multiplies geometric.... So leave us cast a vote for decent acquittal and put an end to those beastly exhibitions for which the sheriff levy a pound of fiesh." Sheriff: "I'll lower his pants for a pound, folks. Step right up. A serious and scientific exhibit concerning the locality of the Life Center. This character has nine inches, ladies and gentlemen, measure them yourself inside. Only one pound, one queer three dollar bill to see a young boy come three times at least -- I never demean myself to process a eunuch -- completely against his will .

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  147 o In Constantinople, he studied biblical exegesis with the great theologian Gregory of Nazianzus. o Jerome spent three years as the secretary and counselor to Pope Damasus I, one of the most powerful of the early bishops of Rome. Damasus assigned him the task of translating the entire bible into Latin in order to provide a standard text (the Vulgate) to replace the many “Old Latin” versions. o Jerome moved to Bethlehem in 389, where he lived as a hermit until his death in 419/20. Among his many writings, his Lives of Eminent Men is an indispensable biographical source for early Christian history. His commentaries on biblical books also show careful attention to historical realities and linguistic accuracy. o Jerome’s towering achievement was undoubtedly the Vulgate translation of the Old Testament (from Hebrew) and the New Testament (from Greek), which provided the standard text for medieval Latin Christianity. • The final doctor, Augustine of Hippo (354–430), is by far the best known man of late antiquity because of his autobiographical Confessions (composed in 397/98). It is a remarkable composition, both as the first truly introspective analysis of a personal life in antiquity and as a sustained song of praise to God. o Born in North Africa of a pagan father and a devout Christian mother (Monica), Augustine was educated in rhetoric and lived what he later considered a dissolute life, siring an illegitimate son. o He converted to the dualistic religion called Manichaeism (a combination of Persian and Christian Gnostic systems), attracted by its ascetical appeal. He embraced its radical dualism between matter and spirit, which seemed to offer Augustine’s intellectual soul some liberation from his passion- driven body.

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

  thought: What kind of yoke is that of two believers, sharing one hope, one desire, one discipline, one and the same service? Both are brethren, both fellow-servants; there is no difference of spirit or of flesh…Together they pray, together prostrate themselves, together perform their fasts; mutually teaching, mutually exhorting, mutually sustaining. Equally are both in the Church of God; equally at the banquet of God; equally in straits, in persecutions, in refreshments. [35] 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.