Surprise

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 Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  Big chunks of shrapnel had torn gaping holes through the corrugated tin roof and slashed through the tent like the thin stabs of a knife. We had been hit by almost 150 rounds in only a few minutes. Everyone was walking around in a daze. There were a bunch of men over at the motor pool kneeling around someone on the ground. I ran over there as fast as I could, my dog tags jangling around my neck. They were kneeling around a guy I knew pretty well. Mac. I looked down and saw that he was dead. His neck was almost off and his right arm had been severed. He had hundreds of silver holes in his face and chest, looking like little puncture points. MacCarthy was dead, bleeding in the sand, his dark blue Boston eyes open and staring up at the sky. I had just seen him the morning before on the chow line after we had come in from patrol. He had smiled at me and told me how everything was down at the motor pool. But now he was dead and I picked up my bag and walked back to the bunker, thinking how MacCarthy had just looked like a thing, a mannequin. The dead, he thought, looked kind of funny in a way, kind of very ridiculous. I felt almost like laughing and when I came up to the bunker there was the short kid from New Jersey who was taking pictures of the demolished tent. He was taking pictures with a little camera with the care and precision of a guy who should be shooting some pretty trees back home. I could see that a lot of the men were laughing and joking now, laughing and joking about the same thing. It was like the boy scouts, like the boy scouts getting all chopped up in their pajamas while having a nightmare. Another crowd had gathered around a trench. It was hard to tell what had happened there, how many bodies there were. Maybe three all mangled together in a heap, a bunch of arms and legs. There was a smell of gunpowder and blood mixed with burning flesh. One of the heads was completely severed, chopped off, with the exception of a strand of muscle—that was the only thing that continued to connect the head to the stinking corpse. There was nothing any of us could do but pick up the pieces. They seemed very cold and gray and someone in back of me was taking pictures. I fished around for identification in one corpse’s dead back pocket and found a wallet. It was Sergeant Bo, one of my friends. He was the supply sergeant and had a wife somewhere. He was sort of the Sergeant Bilko of the battalion. He never went on patrol and had the most comfortable quarters of anyone, with a rug and a desk and a picture of his pretty wife.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Similar patterns are evident in the way love between women was represented in the high empire. The experience of women amorously attracted to other women is a desperately murky issue. There is all the same hostility without nearly the same volume of material, but again Ptolemy’s discussion is rich and revealing. Women who were excessively virilized would lust for unnatural unions with other women, becoming tribades . The satirical sources assume that during sex a woman would “strap on an artificial instrument of lust.” It was assumed that even in female-female pairs, there was a dominant partner; precious little is heard about women who wished to “submit” to women. In Ptolemy’s mind these relationships sometimes remained covert, but at other times women would “openly declare that their partners were their wedded wives.” Clement of Alexandria, too, denounces with righteous indignation marriages between women. A vignette in Lucian’s satirical “Dialogue of the Courtesans,” meant to amuse and titillate, describes a marriage between women; it is hardly less vituperative than Clement’s preaching. Perhaps the only testimony we have that does not come from the pen of a hostile informant is a funerary relief of the Augustan period depicting two women holding hands in a dextrarum iunctio, the prime symbol of marriage. It scarcely needs saying that same-sex marriages between women, or men, had no standing or consequence in public law, but that fact hardly diminishes the extraordinary testimony we do have for durable forms of same-sex companionship. In a peaceful and prosperous society, amid a highly urbanized and remarkably interconnected empire where marriage was valorized as an institution of the greatest moral and emotional fulfillment, same-sex pairs openly claimed, and ritually enacted, their own conjugal rights.29 It is beyond our ken to say how people truly behaved in any period of history. But at the very least it is time to lay to rest the bizarre notion, which is still sometimes expressed, that same-sex eros was, materially and ideologically, on the wane by the second century. This was the age when an emperor’s favorite could become an object of worldwide veneration. When a novelist could claim that male-love was “becoming the current fashion.” When a satirist could claim that marriage between men would soon be officially recognized. The question posed in the debates between marriage and pederasty, which figure so prominently in the literature of the era, was not an idle one. Indeed, same-sex eros was of greater interest to the Latin writers on either side of AD 100 than ever before; and as the Greek sources come to preponderance in the second century, there is no sign of abatement.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  “Trophima has returned to harlotry, which she used to practice with my lord the proconsul, to whom she has again joined herself.” It was a well- laid trap, because to the proconsul’s wife this news seemed like a revelation: “No wonder my husband has left me behind and for six months now refused our marital rites, for he loves his slave!” So the wife did what any archvillain in a romance would have done: she had Trophima, newly converted to the Christian faith, condemned to the brothel. Trophima—slave, concubine— was no romantic heroine of the ordinary build, but she nevertheless found herself in the archetypal testing grounds of feminine respectability. In the brothel, she prayed continuously, and when eager customers came to her, she clutched a copy of the gospel to her chest. One day an unusually insistent client entered, and, while resisting, Trophima dropped the gospel. She cried out to heaven, “Keep me from suf-fering this pollution, Lord, in whose name I esteem chastity!” An angel appeared and struck the youth dead. Th en Trophima, for what reason Gregory has omitted to relate, resurrected the dead young man, a sight “the whole city” rushed to see. Th e proconsul’s wife was killed by a demon in the public bath, a penalty for her persecution of Trophima. Nevertheless, a distraught nurse prevailed upon Andrew to resurrect the proconsul’s wife, which, in the very public atmosphere of the governor’s headquarters, he did. All were reconciled, miracles reported far and wide, newfound chastity saved. Th e romantic elements, even in the eviscerated version of the Acts that has come down to us through Gregory, are unmistakable. Th e Acts of Andrew were hardly alone. In a freestanding episode in the fi fth- century Lausiac History, the Christian adaptation of the romantic repertoire is even more evident. In a “very old book ascribed to Hippolytus,” Palladius found a story about a “certain maiden, most noble and extremely beautiful, in the city of the Corinthians, who was practicing the life of virginity.” In an age of persecution, she was denounced to the governor as a Christian. Th e “woman- mad” governor had his own designs on her, and he “tried every device [ mēchanē]” but “could not persuade the girl.” He ordered her sentenced to a brothel, where she was subjected to the usual threats. She defl ected her suitors with a ruse of her own. “I have this festering sore in a hidden place, which emits the most foul stench, and I fear it will make you hate me. Hold off from me for a few days, then make your use of me, for free.” She prayed. God, seeing her chastity, sent a young man in the employ of the Roman  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  It was a stupendous success, the birthday party, and for a week or more no one talked of anything but the party and what good Polacks Stanley’s people were. The fried bananas, too, were a success and for a time it was hard to get any rotten bananas from Louis Pirossa’s old man because they were so much in demand. And then an event occurred which cast a pall over the entire neighborhood—the defeat of Joe Gerhardt at the hands of Joey Silverstein. The latter was the tailor’s son; he was a lad of fifteen or sixteen, rather quiet and studious looking, who was shunned by the other older boys because he was a Jew. One day as he was delivering a pair of pants to Fillmore Place he was accosted by Joey Gerhardt who was about the same age and who considered himself a rather superior being. There was an exchange of words and then Joe Gerhardt pulled the pants away from the Silverstein boy and threw them in the gutter. Nobody had ever imagined that young Silverstein would reply to such an insult by recourse to his fists and so when he struck out at Joe Gerhardt and cracked him square in the jaw everybody was taken aback, most of all Joe Gerhardt himself. There was a fight which lasted about twenty minutes and at the end Joe Gerhardt lay on the sidewalk unable to get up. Whereupon the Silverstein boy gathered up the pair of pants and walked quietly and proudly back to his father’s shop. Nobody said a word to him. The affair was regarded as a calamity. Who had ever heard of a Jew beating up a Gentile? It was something inconceivable, and yet it had happened, right before everyone’s eyes. Night after night, sitting on the curb as we used to, the situation was discussed from every angle, but without any solution until . . . well until Joe Gerhardt’s younger brother, Johnny, became so wrought up about it that he decided to settle the matter himself. Johnny, though younger and smaller than his brother, was as tough and invincible as a young puma. He was typical of the shanty Irish who made up the neighborhood. His idea of getting even with young Silverstein was to lie in wait for him one evening as the latter was stepping out of the store and trip him up. When he tripped him up that evening he had provided himself in advance with two little rocks which he concealed in his fists and when poor Silverstein went down he pounced on him and then with the two handsome little rocks he pounded poor Silverstein’s temples. To his amazement Silverstein offered no resistance; even when he got up and gave him a chance to get to his feet Silverstein never so much as budged. Then Johnny got frightened and ran away.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “Oh, she had a family obligation.” They stood close, Connie quickly scanning the back of the room while Franklin’s eyes wandered over her head. “Yo, Dave, I’ve gotta talk to you before you leave! Connie, the hooch is over there, there’s some cake and stuff in the kitchen. And don’t disappear! There’s somebody I want to introduce you to.” He squeezed her shoulder and moved away, and she penetrated more deeply into the crowd, heading for the discordant light-reflective arrangement of bottles and tumbling towers of paper cups. As she approached the table and reached for the slim neck of a vodka bottle, a woman turned around and she stood facing Alice. The neat proportions of surprise, warmth and compassion in the resulting declaration—“Connie!”—suggested that Alice had been prepared for this. She made a tentative half move with her upper body that looked like the first stage of a hug; Connie half moved in response and then stopped, so Alice stopped and they paused to look at each other, slowly recovering their distance. Connie wondered if Alice was inspecting her crow’s-feet. “So, how’ve you been?” she asked. “How’s your painting?” “Good! I mean, I’m much more productive than I was when I knew you. I don’t spend half as much time tearing my hair out.” “Do you still have the feelings of resentment you had about Roger’s success?” Alice’s eyes slid sideways toward her with a short burst of expression that was like the gliding movement of a bird; this was a reference to their old discussions about Roger’s commercial success and Alice’s bitter jealousy. “Yes, I do, but I’ve dealt with it. I’m not such a bitch about it. My own productivity has made it easier.” They stood linked by a delicate membrane of remembered intimacy. “I hear your writing is going well.” “Yeah, it is.” Connie listed the year’s accomplishments, becoming for an annoying moment the girl from out of town who was trying to impress imperious Alice. The conversation was not what she had planned; they were talking like acquaintances at a party, perhaps because they were. “The magazine was fun at first,” she finished. “But I’m not so happy there now. I don’t have the influence that I thought I would. And it pays nothing.” “Still, it’s a good spot, right? To make connections?” “Yeah.” They stood looking in slightly different directions as the connective tissue began to dissolve in an anomaly of music and party chatter. Connie glanced sideways at Alice’s face; there were tiny lines and a faint dryness that made her skin look frail, but the bone structure and demeanor still had the imposing, impenetrable look of a fashion model staring down a lifetime of cameras. “How’s your mother?” asked Connie. Again there was the gliding appearance of open expression. “She died a few years ago. Just a little while after I talked to you last.” Another threadlike connection stretched between them, but Connie wasn’t sure what it was.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  He saw a light, a fire he thought, flickering in the distance off to the right of the village, with little dark figures that seemed to be moving behind it. He could not tell how far away they were from there. It was very hard to tell distance in the dark. The lieutenant moved next to him. “You see?” he whispered. “Look,” he said, very keyed up now. “They’ve got rifles. Can you see the rifles? Can you see them?” the lieutenant asked him. He looked very hard through the rain. “Can you see them?” “Yes, I see them. I see them,” he said. He was very sure. The lieutenant put his arm around him and whispered in his ear. “Tell them down at the end to give me an illumination. I want this whole place lit up like a fucking Christmas tree.” Turning quickly to the man on his right, he told him what the lieutenant had said. He told him to pass the instructions all the way to the end of the line, where a flare would be fired just above the small fire near the village. Lying there in the mud behind the dike, he stared at the fire that still flickered in the rain. He could still see the little figures moving back and forth against it like small shadows on a screen. He felt the whole line tense, then heard the WOOOORSHH of the flare cracking overhead in a tremendous ball of sputtering light turning night into day, arching over their heads toward the small fire that he now saw was burning inside an open hut. Suddenly someone was firing from the end with his rifle, and now the whole line opened up, roaring their weapons like thunder, pulling their triggers again and again without even thinking, emptying everything they had into the hut in a tremendous stream of bright orange tracers that crisscrossed each other in the night. The flare arched its last sputtering bits into the village and it became dark, and all he could see were the bright orange embers from the fire that had gone out. And he could hear them. There were voices screaming. “What happened? Goddamn it, what happened?” yelled the lieutenant. The voices were screaming from inside the hut. “Who gave the order to fire? I wanna know who gave the order to fire.” The lieutenant was standing up now, looking up and down the line of men still lying in the rain. He found that he was shaking. It had all happened so quickly. “We better get a killer team out there,” he heard Molina say. “All right, all right. Sergeant,” the lieutenant said to him, “get out there with Molina and tell me how many we got.” He got to his feet and quickly got five of the men together, leading them over the dike and through the water to the hut from where the screams were still coming.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Th ere was, to be sure, a stable and standardized packet of sexual norms carried by the reli- gion wherever it insinuated itself: virginity was ideal, marriage acceptable, sex beyond marriage sinful, same- sex eros categorically forbidden. Beyond this zone of consensus there were peripheral aspects of sexual life where Christian regulation lacked defi nition and sharpness— the validity of re- marriages, the mea sure of virginity’s superiority, the exact peccability of sur- plus marital congress. But the main drama of late antiquity was not the gradual resolution of questions outstanding. Th e main drama, rather, was the absorption of society by the church, the mainstreaming of the religion. Th e most astonishing development of late antiquity is the transformation of a radical sexual ideology, for centuries the possession of a small, strident band of vociferous dissenters, into a culture, a broadly shared public frame- work of values and meanings. Th e Christian vision of sexual humanity, in- cubated in the radical air of persecution, was forced, unexpectedly, into the mold of a regulatory system. Certainly Paul, who believed that the rulers of this age were “doomed to pass away,” would not have dreamed that his terse missives would become the touchstone of an entire culture.  Th e shift from an apologetic to an imperial mode was halting and not always predictable. In sum, it meant a deeper engagement with society and with the moral entanglements of the sexual agent as a part of society. Th is shift is detectible already in the Divine Institutes of Lactantius, an apology written against the backdrop of the great persecution but a work that nev- ertheless points toward the new, imperial sensibility of Christian sexual ethics. Lactantius is intensely aware of the moral agent’s embeddedness in the world. When he turns to consider the libido, “which must be severely repressed, because it does the most severe harm,” it is a faculty tempted and threatened by the habits of the Roman world. Th e dev il had contrived inge- nious tests of the moral will and institutionalized them in Roman society.  FROM SHAME TO SIN “So that no one would have to abstain from sex with another out of fear of punishment, he established brothels and exposed the sexual modesty of unfortunate women, to the ruin of the men who use them as much as the women who are forced to suff er.”

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  “Is it possible that he also had some other things to buy, or some other errands to run? Is it possible that he decided to take a different route to the store than he ordinarily took, and that was where the accident occurred?” I asked. Phil seemed nonplussed. “How would Tom feel, now, if it had been you who had gone to the store one day and were killed in a car accident?” I asked. “Would he get depressed, think about committing suicide, and then join the Hare Krishnas?” Phil laughed. I knew this was a bull’s-eye. Within a few minutes it was Phil who started asking me questions. “How do you feel about the Krishnas, Steve?” Phil asked. I thought he was genuinely trying to test his “reality,” not just trying to find fault with me and write me off. “Boy. That’s a tough one,” I said, scratching my head. He then said, “I want to know.” “My role as a professional, Phil, is to do counseling and not to make value judgments on what people do with their lives. I do have personal feelings though,” I said. “I want to know what you think personally,” said Phil, quietly. “Well, to be honest, I am very concerned. You see, fourteen years ago I myself joined a religious group that my family disapproved of. I too had been depressed before I met the members and wasn’t completely sure what I wanted to do with my life. Back then, I thought that they were trying to interfere with my rights as an adult to choose what I wanted to do.” “What group?” Phil asked, with curiosity. I decided to give the formal name first. “The Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity. It is also known as the Unification Church,” I said. “Anyway, I was a devoted member of the group for more than two years. I slept three hours a night, and even did several seven-day fasts, drinking just water.” “That’s a long fast,” Phil said admiringly. I could tell that he was listening to every word I said. “Yeah. I lost an average of fifteen pounds at the end of the week. Anyway, in my group we revered the leader as one of the greatest spiritual masters who has ever lived. In fact, we believed that he had met with Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Krishna and every other great spiritual leader.”172 “You believed that?” He was amazed.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Soon after the book appeared, I began receiving calls and letters from people who had been born into groups. One of the most memorable was a letter and a follow up call from Randy Watters, a former elder at Watchtower’s Bethel, who ran FreeMinds.org. He said, “I loved your book! But can I ask you, why didn’t you mention the Jehovah’s Witnesses?” I remember being startled by his question, and immediately responded, “Why, are they a cult?” He laughed and said, “Are you kidding? I underlined the entire book!” I responded, “Really?” He told me, “Absolutely!” and I responded, “Teach me.” He told me to come to California and he would get a group of former Witnesses together—many of whom were born into the group. I could teach them about mind control and cults. They would teach me about Jehovah’s Witnesses. And so my education began. It was extremely interesting for me to learn that my book was being read by hundreds of people who were raised in the Watchtower, a group I’d encountered many times in my life, and especially while a Moonie. They would try to recruit me and I would try to recruit them. Jehovah’s Witnesses are a high-control group that absolutely denigrates former members and forbids contact of any kind, including reading anything they write. What was so interesting was that because I hadn’t written about them in the first edition, I was not on their index of banned books. The Moonies were very high profile and Jehovah’s Witnesses (JWs) knew they were a weird cult. So reading a book by a guy who was an ex-member was a curiosity for them. They would read the book expecting to learn about the Moonies and other cults, and wind up realizing they were in a cult. I remember talking with my colleagues in the counter-cult world about my realization that Jehovah’s Witnesses were a mind control cult. I met total resistance. I was told things like, “They’ve been around too long” and “They’re too large!” My reaction was, “Since when have those been criteria for evaluating a mind control cult? I thought mind control was the criterion!” I started working not only with people recruited into the Watchtower Society but also people who were born and raised in the group, and I received hundreds of letters and phone calls. Most of the folks who had read my books wanted to know, “What if I don’t have a pre-cult self to go back to? How do I get well?” I knew that I needed to begin addressing the issues for those who had been influenced from childhood by a totalistic group.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  Whenever the kids in the street saw me they’d yell, “Indoda yomlungu!” “The white man!” Some of them would run away. Others would call out to their parents to come look. Others would run up and try to touch me to see if I was real. It was pandemonium. What I didn’t understand at the time was that the other kids genuinely had no clue what a white person was. Black kids in the township didn’t leave the township. Few people had televisions. They’d seen the white police roll through, but they’d never dealt with a white person face-to-face, ever. I’d go to funerals and I’d walk in and the bereaved would look up and see me and they’d stop crying. They’d start whispering. Then they’d wave and say, “Oh!” like they were more shocked by me walking in than by the death of their loved ones. I think people felt like the dead person was more important because a white person had come to the funeral. After a funeral, the mourners all go to the house of the surviving family to eat. A hundred people might show up, and you’ve got to feed them. Usually you get a cow and slaughter it and your neighbors come over and help you cook. Neighbors and acquaintances eat outside in the yard and in the street, and the family eats indoors. Every funeral I ever went to, I ate indoors. It didn’t matter if we knew the deceased or not. The family would see me and invite me in. “Awunakuvumela umntana womlungu ame ngaphandle. Yiza naye apha ngaphakathi,” they’d say. “You can’t let the white child stand outside. Bring him in here.” As a kid I understood that people were different colors, but in my head white and black and brown were like types of chocolate. Dad was the white chocolate, mom was the dark chocolate, and I was the milk chocolate. But we were all just chocolate. I didn’t know any of it had anything to do with “race.” I didn’t know what race was. My mother never referred to my dad as white or to me as mixed. So when the other kids in Soweto called me “white,” even though I was light brown, I just thought they had their colors mixed up, like they hadn’t learned them properly. “Ah, yes, my friend. You’ve confused aqua with turquoise. I can see how you made that mistake. You’re not the first.”

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Th e truth is that many a Roman of the high empire would not recognize his experience in the pages of some modern treatments that deemphasize the charged eroti- cism of Mediterranean culture in the Roman world. Nothing gives the lie to the myth of the pent- up pagan couple like the artistic tastes of the impe- rial era. Erotic art fl ourished in the Roman Empire, in both commercial and domestic contexts. Indeed, the stark ubiquity of sex as a preferred aes- thetic theme has even made the identifi cation of ancient “brothels” a vexing challenge; what modern cultures might regard as obscene or pornographic was an ordinary part of bourgeois and elite domesticity. No one was shielded from the facts of life in Roman antiquity. Men, women, and chil- dren were surrounded by lush paintings of venereal acts in various stages of consummation. Truly elite villas, like the Villa Farnesina, often placed sensual art in bedrooms. At other times the placement was more public. Some of the most important specimens of Roman domestic art survive, of course, in the mural frescoes buried under the ashes of Vesuvius, long se- questered in the Pornographic Cabinet of the Naples Museum. Among the more striking examples of Roman erotic art is a beautiful painting from the house of a banker, Caecilius Iucundus, the son of a freed slave who built a successful enterprise off ering fi nancial ser vices in the bustling port city. He commissioned the painting, in the portico of his villa’s garden, of a man and woman nude in bed, attended by a slave. Th e painting’s original place- ment was aimed at maximum visibility; it has been argued that Iucundus wanted to imitate the sort of luxuriant image prized by the high social elite to advertise his own refi nement and experience of the good life.  THE MORALITIES OF SEX IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE  Th e stunning fi nds of Pompeii are nonpareil, but in the more scattered and exiguous evidence of the second and third centuries we fi nd that the repre sen ta tion of eros remained a standard element of domestic pre sen ta- tion across the Roman period. An upper- class house of the third century in Ostia presents lovemaking in the most direct and frank fashion, depicting men and women in a range of conjunctions. In the view of an authority on erotic art, this house is valuable proof that the same ideology and sensibility so well preserved under the ash at Pompeii remained alive in a period for which well- preserved domestic paintings are much rarer. Literary evidence also suggests the continuity— and geographic reach— of erotic art. Clem- ent of Alexandria fumes against the erotic aesthetics of the culture sur- rounding him in late second- or early third- century Roman Egypt.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  “Okay, I’m going to find you a date. She’s going to be the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen, and you’re going to take her to the matric dance and you’re going to be a superstar.” The dance was still two months away. I promptly forgot about Tom and his ridiculous deal. Then he came over to my house one afternoon and popped his head into my room. “I found the girl.” “Really?” “Yeah. You have to come and meet her.” I knew Tom was full of shit, but the thing that makes a con man successful is that he never gives you nothing. He delivers just enough to keep you believing. Tom had introduced me to many beautiful women. He was never dating them, but he talked a good game, and was always around them. So when he said he had a girl, I didn’t doubt him. The two of us jumped on a bus and headed into the city. The girl lived in a run-down block of flats downtown. We found her building, and a girl leaned over the balcony and waved us inside. That was the girl’s sister Lerato, Tom said. Come to find out, he’d been trying to get with Lerato, and setting me up with the sister was his way in—of course, Tom was working an angle. It was dark in the lobby. The elevator was busted, so we walked up several flights. This girl Lerato brought us into the flat. In the living room was this giant, but I mean really, really enormous, fat woman. I was like, Oh, Tom. I see what you’ve done here. Nicely played. Tom was a big joker as well. “Is this my date?” I asked. “No, no, no,” he said. “This is not your date. This is her older sister. Your date is Babiki. Babiki has three older sisters, and Lerato is her younger sister. Babiki’s gone to the store to buy groceries. She’ll be back in a moment.” We waited, chatted with the older sister. Ten minutes later the door opened and the most beautiful girl I have ever seen in my life walked in. She was…good Lord. Beautiful eyes, beautiful golden yellow-brown skin. It was like she glowed. No girl at my high school looked anything like her. “Hi,” she said. “Hi,” I replied.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  On the evening of the first Good Friday, nobody was coming up with anything that would look like even the first stirrings of an “atonement theology.” The first impetus for such a thing came, by all accounts, on the third day after Jesus’s execution. Just as his followers had not at all been expecting him to be crucified, so, after his crucifixion, they were certainly not anticipating that he would be bodily raised from the dead. The shock, the initial incomprehension, the lingering doubts, and the breathless excitement of the stories at the end of all four gospels convey perfectly both what seems to have happened and the fact that nobody was expecting it. In the languages of the day, “resurrection” didn’t mean “going to heaven”; it didn’t mean that Jesus, or perhaps his “soul,” had “survived” in some nonbodily sense. That was precisely what it did not mean. There were words to denote that kind of non-bodily postmortem survival. Many people in many cultures would have found it quite normal to envisage such a survival for someone recently dead. The word ‘resurrection’ was different. It meant a new bodily life after a period of being bodily dead. Many first-century Jews believed in “the resurrection of the body” in this sense. But for them it was to be a great final event in which all God’s people would be raised from the dead in the end. It would be the launching point of God’s new world, his new creation, the “age to come.” It would happen to all God’s people in the end, not to one person, inconveniently and out of sequence (as it were) in the middle of history, with all the muddle and mess of the world still going on around it. As I and others have argued in detail elsewhere, the only way we can make sense of the first century is to say that Jesus’s first followers really did believe he had been bodily raised from the dead and that this meant that God’s “new age” had somehow begun. The only way we can make sense of that belief is to say that they were not deluded or deceived, but were telling the truth, even though it was a truth for which the world was unready: that Jesus really was fully and bodily alive again, indeed more fully and more bodily alive than before. He had gone through death and out the other side, and his body itself was the start of the new creation. This wasn’t a matter of “resuscitation,” but of a new, transformed kind of body. And—though this takes more explanation, to which I alluded in the previous chapter—this new body seemed to be equally at home in the two interlocking dimensions of created reality, what the Bible calls “heaven” and “earth,” that is, God’s space and our space. All of this and much more is given with the extraordinary and totally unexpected event of Jesus’s resurrection.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  will was not an obvious outgrowth of the textual tradition. It thus all the more starkly requires explanation. Frede has no doubt where the Christians found the idea: in imperial Stoicism. What Epictetus created, the early Christian theologians pop u lar ized, if in slightly debased form. Free will is thus construed as one of the greatest intellectual heists in the annals of philosophy. Justin and Tatian were trained in the philosophical schools of the Roman Empire and openly admired Stoic ethics, so it can be inferred that they “got their notion of a free will” from the schools. Origen is alleged to have plundered contemporary philosophy for his theological ends; his account is “through and through Stoic.” Th e Christians, in their theological squabbles, adopted “Stoic ideas” as expedience dictated. Th e role of Christianity in the development of the concept was not so derivative. Th e early Christians had an uncanny ability to provide decisive answers to precisely the same questions that endlessly fl oated in the air at the “schools of the phi los o phers,” where there was “nothing at all but the assertion and controversy of stale dogma without end.” Certainly Justin would have been startled to learn that he aped his notion of a free will from Stoicism. In his Second Apology, Justin explicitly takes aim at Stoic determinism. “Th e Stoics have declared that all things come about through the compulsion of Destiny. But in the beginning God created the race of men and angels with autonomy, so that it will be with justice that they undergo the punishment of the eternal fl ames for their transgressions. It is the very nature of all creation to be capable of evil or righ teousness.” For Epictetus, free will was an achieved state; for Justin, it was a native endowment. For Epictetus, free will was the carefully cultivated prize of the sage; for Justin  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N it was a universal attribute of mankind. For Epictetus, free will was the serenity of resignation in the face of the smallness and fi nitude of existence: “Don’t make your death into the material for a tragedy. It is just time for the material of which you are constituted to be restored to those elements from which it came.” For Justin, free will was a corollary of God’s solicitude for man’s works and a precondition of eternal judgment. Justin’s discovery of free will cannot, without severe injustice to both parties, be attributed to the infl uence of Epictetus.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Into this enveloping cityscape of tremu- lous paganism crept a missionary with a startling message. “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?”  We meet the community of Christians Paul founded in Corinth through the tantalizing but imperfect prism of the letters he wrote, some six years after fi rst visiting the city, when challenged by the unexpectedly fractious relations in a small apocalyptic movement. Word reached Paul in Ephesus that the Corinthian Christians were feuding, split on a range of mundane problems, from marriage and manumission to sacrifi cial meat. In the pa- tient response of the apostle that has come to be known as First Corinthi- ans, fi erce disagreement over proper sexual behavior lurches to the surface. Such dissent was surely inevitable. Nowhere did the moral expectations of the Jesus movement stand in such stark contrast to the world in which its adherents moved. Corinth in par tic u lar was not famous for its sexual vir- tue. In recent de cades the reputation of Roman Corinth has enjoyed the sort of undeserved rehabilitation that comes only when generations of gross exaggeration allow overcorrection to pass as healthy revision. It is true that Corinth had fi rst earned its notoriety in centuries long past. But the laxity of the Corinthians in venereal aff airs was not just hoary legend. In the words of a second- century admirer, Corinth was a city “more dear to Aph- rodite than all cities that exist or have existed.” Th e eroticized atmosphere of Corinth was the predictable attribute of a wealthy, imperial crossroads; even against the indulgent backdrop of late pagan sensuality, Corinth stood out as louche.  It is unsurprising that the inchoate sexual code of the Christian gospel— terse yet austere— came to a head here. More surprising are the extremes around which members of the Corinthian community had polarized, in full belief that their radically divergent views were consistent with the de- mands of the messianic religion.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  And don’t disappear! There’s somebody I want to introduce you to.” He squeezed her shoulder and moved away, and she penetrated more deeply into the crowd, heading for the discordant light-reflective arrangement of bottles and tumbling towers of paper cups. As she approached the table and reached for the slim neck of a vodka bottle, a woman turned around and she stood facing Alice. The neat proportions of surprise, warmth and compassion in the resulting declaration—“Connie!”—suggested that Alice had been prepared for this. She made a tentative half move with her upper body that looked like the first stage of a hug; Connie half moved in response and then stopped, so Alice stopped and they paused to look at each other, slowly recovering their distance. Connie wondered if Alice was inspecting her crow’s-feet. “So, how’ve you been?” she asked. “How’s your painting?” “Good! I mean, I’m much more productive than I was when I knew you. I don’t spend half as much time tearing my hair out.” “Do you still have the feelings of resentment you had about Roger’s success?” Alice’s eyes slid sideways toward her with a short burst of expression that was like the gliding movement of a bird; this was a reference to their old discussions about Roger’s commercial success and Alice’s bitter jealousy. “Yes, I do, but I’ve dealt with it. I’m not such a bitch about it. My own productivity has made it easier.” They stood linked by a delicate membrane of remembered intimacy. “I hear your writing is going well.” “Yeah, it is.” Connie listed the year’s accomplishments, becoming for an annoying moment the girl from out of town who was trying to impress imperious Alice. The conversation was not what she had planned; they were talking like acquaintances at a party, perhaps because they were. “The magazine was fun at first,” she finished. “But I’m not so happy there now. I don’t have the influence that I thought I would. And it pays nothing.” “Still, it’s a good spot, right? To make connections?” “Yeah.” They stood looking in slightly different directions as the connective tissue began to dissolve in an anomaly of music and party chatter. Connie glanced sideways at Alice’s face; there were tiny lines and a faint dryness that made her skin look frail, but the bone structure and demeanor still had the imposing, impenetrable look of a fashion model staring down a lifetime of cameras. “How’s your mother?” asked Connie. Again there was the gliding appearance of open expression. “She died a few years ago. Just a little while after I talked to you last.” Another threadlike connection stretched between them, but Connie wasn’t sure what it was. “That must’ve really been hard. I’m sorry.”

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Buddy Martin’s participation turned out to be the key. In his turn alone with George, he began to cite specific Bible verses, and asked George what he thought each meant. Since the BCC had programmed George to believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, he could hardly object to examining it. Slowly, one passage at a time, Buddy began to show George that, although the group claimed to be following the Bible, in fact they were taking passages out of context, and deliberately ignoring other verses that affected their meaning. This was the opening by which George began to admit the possibility that the group might be less than perfect. With that foothold established, George became willing to listen to Ellen and me. I gave him some background on the cult’s leader, Kip McKean, including his own recruitment and indoctrination by Chuck Lucas into Crossroads, a cult in Gainesville, Florida, back in the 1970s.160 It was there that McKean likely learned to use the mind control methods he now used. George had never heard of Crossroads. We showed him a letter written by McKean in March 1986 to Crossroads Church leaders, saying he “owed his very soul” to them.161 George was shocked. Then we produced a 1977 letter from the elders of the Memorial Church of Christ in Houston, Texas, where McKean had been a minister. The elders announced they were firing McKean because of his un-Biblical teachings.162 With that as a starting point, we could begin discussing with George the characteristics of destructive cults and mind control. In this case, without the letters from McKean and the Memorial Church elders as frames of reference, it would have been impossible to show George what had happened to him. Then I discussed with George the specific behavioral components of mind control, making sure to explain Lifton’s eight criteria of Chinese Communist thought reform. Next I described what it was like for me inside the Moonies. Back then, many people had a negative view of the Moonies (except Moonies themselves, of course), so telling my own story usually helped to minimize any thought-stopping and defensiveness. The parallels between groups become blatantly apparent, and the person I’m speaking with usually makes a lot of connections without prompting. This information was very intense and troubling for George. He needed to regulate the flow of what he was hearing. Every couple of hours, he would stand up and announce that he needed to go for a walk and pray. This happened several times each day over the three days. At night I stayed at a nearby bed and breakfast where I was able to rest and map out strategy. Each time George walked out the door, we were never quite sure whether he would return. It would be easy for him to stick his thumb out and hitchhike back to Boston, or phone the cult for a ride. But to try to stop him would have ensured his lack of trust in us thereafter.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  He paused dramatically. “After I told all of ’em what I’d done, everybody said I needed to make it right. That’s what I’m tryin’ to do.” He paused again to let me take it all in. “Hey, y’all gonna buy me a damn soda, or am I just gonna sit here all day looking at them damn vending machines and pouring my heart out?” He smiled for the first time since we’d been together. Michael jumped up and walked over to buy him a drink. “Hey, Jimmy, Sunkist Orange, if they got it.” For more than two hours, I asked questions and Ralph gave answers. By the end, he did, in fact, blow my mind. He told us about being pressured by the sheriff and the ABI and threatened with the death penalty if he didn’t testify against McMillian. He made accusations of official corruption, talked about his involvement in the Pittman murder, and revealed his earlier attempts to recant. He ultimately admitted that he had never known anything about the Morrison murder, had no clue what had happened to her or anything else at all about the crime. He said that he had told lots of people—from the D.A. on down—that he had been coerced to testify falsely against Walter. If even half of what he said was true, there were a lot of people involved in this case who knew, from the mouth of his sole accuser, that Walter McMillian had had nothing to do with the murder of Ronda Morrison. Ralph was on his third Sunkist Orange when he stopped his stream of confessions, leaned forward, and beckoned us closer. He spoke in a whisper to Michael and me. “You know they’ll try to kill you if you actually get to the bottom of everything.” We would learn that Ralph could never let a meeting end without dropping some final dramatic insight, observation, or prediction. I reassured him that we would be careful. — On the drive back to Montgomery, Michael and I debated how much we could trust Myers. What he told us about the McMillian case all made sense. His story at trial was so implausible that it was easy to believe that he had been pressured to testify falsely. The corruption narrative that he seemed intent to expose was harder to assess. Myers claimed to have committed the Vickie Pittman murder under the direction of another local sheriff; he laid out to us a widespread conspiracy involving police, drug dealing, and money laundering. It was quite a tale.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  Fufi could do all sorts of tricks. She could jump super high. I mean, Fufi could jump. I could hold a piece of food out above my own head and she’d leap up and grab it like it was nothing. If YouTube had been around, Fufi would have been a star. Fufi was a little rascal as well. During the day we kept the dogs in the backyard, which was enclosed by a wall at least five feet high. After a while, every day we’d come home and Fufi would be sitting outside the gate, waiting for us. We were always confused. Was someone opening the gate? What was going on? It never occurred to us that she could actually scale a five-foot wall, but that was exactly what was happening. Every morning, Fufi would wait for us to leave, jump over the wall, and go roaming around the neighborhood. I caught her one day when I was home for the school holidays. My mom had left for work and I was in the living room. Fufi didn’t know I was there; she thought I was gone because the car was gone. I heard Panther barking in the backyard, looked out, and there was Fufi, scaling the wall. She’d jumped, scampered up the last couple of feet, and then she was gone. I couldn’t believe this was happening. I ran out front, grabbed my bicycle, and followed her to see where she was going. She went a long way, many streets over, to another part of the neighborhood. Then she went up to this other house and jumped over their wall and into their backyard. What the hell was she doing? I went up to the gate and rang the doorbell. This colored kid answered. “May I help you?” he said. “Yeah. My dog is in your yard.” “What?” “My dog. She’s in your yard.” Fufi walked up and stood between us. “Fufi, come!” I said. “Let’s go!” This kid looked at Fufi and called her by some other stupid name, Spotty or some bullshit like that. “Spotty, go back inside the house.” “Whoa, whoa,” I said. “Spotty? That’s Fufi!” “No, that’s my dog, Spotty.” “No, that’s Fufi, my friend.” “No, this is Spotty.” “How could this be Spotty? She doesn’t even have spots. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” “This is Spotty!” “Fufi!” “Spotty!” “Fufi!” Of course, since Fufi was deaf she didn’t respond to “Spotty” or “Fufi.” She just stood there. I started cursing the kid out. “Give me back my dog!” “I don’t know who you are,” he said, “but you better get out of here.” Then he went into the house and got his mom and she came out. “What do you want?” she said. “That’s my dog!” “This is our dog. Go away.”

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  I was sitting on the living room couch at my sister’s home, when my father appeared unexpectedly. He sat down next to me and asked, “ How are you doing?” When I said “fine,” he stood up. He said, “That’s great!” He took my crutches to the other side of the room. Suddenly, on cue seven more people appeared and announced that they had come to “talk to me about my affiliation with the Unification Church.” I was shocked, and realized I was trapped. I told them to call my office and make an appointment to speak with me. Since I was thoroughly programmed, I immediately “knew” that the deprogramming team had been sent directly by Satan. In my terror, their faces looked like images of demons. It was very surprising to me, then, when they turned out to be warm and friendly. They spent several hours talking at me about what they knew to be wrong with the Moonies. As a committed member, I did thought-stopping, sang “holy songs,” chanted and prayed silently to keep from hearing them. After all, I had been told all about deprogramming by leaders of the group. I wasn’t going to allow my “faith in God” to be broken by Satan. I kept telling them that they needed to make an appointment and that I did not want to speak with them. The next morning my father said that we were going to go for a drive to see my mother. What had actually happened, I learned later, was that the Moonies had called to see why I hadn’t reported in and were on their way to rescue me. Believing that my mother would be sympathetic and put an end to the deprogramming, I eagerly hobbled on my crutches and got into the back seat of the car, with my broken leg outstretched. My father was driving, and two of the deprogrammers sat next to him. I became angry, though, as my father passed the exit from the Long Island Expressway to my parents’ home. While it might seem hard to believe, my first impulse was to kill my father by reaching over and snapping his neck. I actually believed it was better to do that than betray the Messiah! As a member, I had been told many times that it was better to die or kill than to leave the church.42 At that point, however, I was still confident that they could never break me. I knew I would have other chances to escape, so I decided not to kill my father, myself and the others in the car. When we arrived at the apartment in which the deprogramming was scheduled to continue, I refused to get out of the car without a fight. I threatened my father with extreme violence. I told him that I would fight to my death and if I bled to death, it would be on his conscience.