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 Sex at Dawn (2010)

  This casual approach to what anthropologists call “marriage” is anything but unusual. Early explorers, whalers, and fur trappers of the frigid north found the Inuit to be jaw-droppingly hospitable hosts. Imagine their confused gratitude when they realized the village head-man was offering his own bed (wife included) to the weary, freezing traveler. In fact, the welcome Knud Rasmussen and others had stumbled into was a system of spouse exchange central to Inuit culture, with clear advantages in that unforgiving climate. Erotic exchange played an important role in linking families from distant villages in a durable web of certain aid in times of crisis. Though the harsh ecology of the Arctic dictated a much lower population density than the Amazon or even the Kalahari Desert, extra-pair sexual interaction helped cement bonds that offered the same insurance against unforeseen difficulties. None of this behavior is considered adultery by the people involved. But then, adultery is as slippery a term as marriage. It’s not just thy neighbor’s wife who can lead a man astray, but thine own as well. A well-known moral guide of the Middle Ages, the Speculum Doctrinale (Mirror of Doctrine), written by Vincent of Beauvais, declared, “A man who loves his wife very much is an adulterer. Any love for someone else’s wife, or too much love for one’s own, is shameful.” The author went on to advise, “The upright man should love his wife with his judgment, not his affections.”13 Vincent of Beauvais would have enjoyed the company of Daniel Defoe (of London), famous still as the author of Robinson Crusoe. Defoe scandalized Britain in 1727 with the publication of a nonfiction essay with the catchy title Conjugal Lewdness: or, Matrimonial Whoredom. Apparently that title was a bit much. For a later edition, he toned it down to A Treatise Concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed. This was no desert island adventure but a moralizing lecture on the physical and spiritual dangers of enjoying sex with one’s spouse. Defoe would have appreciated the Nayar people, native to southern India, who have a type of marriage that doesn’t necessarily include any sexual activity at all, has no expectation of permanence, and no cohabitation—indeed the bride may never see the groom again once the marriage ritual has been performed. But since divorce is not permitted in this system, the stability of these marriages must be exemplary, according to the anthropological surveys. As these examples show, many qualities considered essential components of marriage in contemporary Western usage are anything but universal: sexual exclusivity, property exchange, even the intention to stay together for long. None of these are expected in many of the relationships evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists insist on calling marriage.

• From Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1997)

  The Northern Aché used to be full-time hunter-gatherers and continued to spend much time foraging in the forest even after they began to settle at mission agricultural settlements in the 1970s. In accord with the usual human pattern, Aché men specialize in hunting large mammals, such as peccaries and deer, and they also collect masses of honey from bees’ nests. Women pound starch from palm trees, gather fruits and insect larvae, and care for children. An Aché man’s hunting bag varies greatly from day to day: he brings home food enough for many people if he kills a peccary or finds a beehive, but he gets nothing at all on one-quarter of the days he spends hunting. In contrast, women’s returns are predictable and vary little from day to day because palms are abundant; how much starch a woman gets is mainly a function of just how much time she spends pounding it. A woman can always count on getting enough for herself and her children, but she can never reap a bonanza big enough to feed many others. The first surprising result from the studies by Hawkes and her colleagues concerned the difference between the returns achieved by men’s and women’s strategies. Peak yields were, of course, much higher for men than for women, since a man’s daily bag topped 40,000 calories when he was lucky enough to kill a peccary. However, a man’s average daily return of 9,634 calories proved to be lower than that of a woman (10,356), and a man’s median return (4,663 calories per day) was much lower. The reason for this paradoxical result is that the glorious days when a man bagged a peccary were greatly outnumbered by the humiliating days when he returned empty-handed. Thus, Aché men would do better in the long run by sticking to the unheroic “woman’s job” of pounding palms than by their devotion to the excitement of the chase. Since men are stronger than women, they could pound even more daily calories of palm starch than can women, if they chose to do so. In going for high but very unpredictable stakes, Aché men can be compared to gamblers who aim for the jackpot: in the long run, gamblers would do much better by putting their money in the bank and collecting the boringly predictable interest. The other surprise was that successful Aché hunters do not bring meat home mainly for their wives and kids but share it widely with anyone around. The same is true for men’s finds of honey. As a result of this widespread sharing, three-quarters of all the food that an Aché consumes is acquired by someone outside his or her nuclear family.

• From How the Bible Actually Works (2019)

  Judaism during the Greek period, as we’ve seen, escalated that process. And in the same way Judaism needed to adjust its ancient tradition, the early followers of Jesus needed to continue adjusting that same tradition. Well, technically, not really “in the same way.” Christianity adjusted the tradition in its own and striking ways. Judaism adapted the past and reimagined God because it had to respond creatively to the unexpected and disastrous crisis of God’s abandonment followed by God’s centuries-long delay in righting the ship. The early followers of Jesus, though they too engaged the tradition creatively, did so for a very different reason—not because of God’s apparent abandonment, but because of God’s unexpected, counterintuitive presence , namely, in Jesus of Nazareth, a crucified Messiah. Such a thing was never part of the playbook of Judaism. To be successful, a Messiah—a chosen, “anointed” leader—should not be executed by Gentiles as a criminal. Messiahs don’t lose. And that’s what we are going to be looking at now, how the story of Jesus transforms the ancient tradition and reimagines God. And that reimagining is pretty dramatic, which we will see if we take a moment to step away from the familiarity of it all. The New Testament writers talked about Jesus— paradoxically—as both the true embodiment of Israel’s ancient tradition and at the same time a surprising move by God that the tradition did not anticipate. Or to put it another way, the New Testament writers show us how profoundly new the Good News of Jesus Christ is while at the same time insisting that the story of Jesus is deeply connected to the Jewish tradition that bore and nurtured it. The New Testament writers faced the challenge of bridging the past tradition and present circumstances, and they did so with a lot of thoughtfulness and creativity. Which brings us to another pivotal moment in this book—in fact, the big punch line. Christians throughout time, including today, have had to face that very same challenge of bridging the past and their own unique circumstances. The New Testament, in other words, is our Exhibit A for how vital it is to adjust and reimagine the past to meet the challenges of a new day and time. That is what Christians do, have always done, and always will do. We are both bound to the past and charged with remaining open to the movement of God’s Spirit, which is free and never bound to tradition or our theologies that try to articulate it. Christian theology, in other words, is an exercise in wisdom —perhaps far more so than is normally thought. We are not simply maintaining the past; we

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  And so we each sang our songs separately. My career progressed: I conducted research, wrote many books, received the academic rewards and promotions I so coveted. Ten years went by. The breast cancer project that Paula had helped launch had long been completed and the findings from it published. We had offered group therapy to fifty women with metastatic breast cancer and found that, compared with thirty-six control patients, the group had vastly improved the quality of the patients’ remaining lives. (Years later, in a follow-up study published in Lancet, my colleague Dr. David Spiegel, whom I had asked many years before to become the project’s principal investigator, ultimately demonstrated that the group had significantly lengthened the lives of the members.) But the group was now history; all of the thirty women in the original Bridge Group and the eighty-six women in the metastatic breast cancer study had died. All but one. One day in the hospital corridor, a young woman with red hair and a flushed face hailed me and said, “I bear greetings from Paula West.” Paula! Could it be? Paula still alive? And I hadn’t even known. I shuddered to think that I had become a person who was unaware whether a spirit like hers still dwelled on earth. “Paula? How is she?” I stammered. “How do you know her?” “Two years ago, when I was diagnosed as having lupus, Paula came to visit me and introduced me into her lupus self-help group. Ever since she’s been taking care of me—indeed, the whole lupus community.” “I’m sorry to hear about your illness. But Paula? Lupus? I hadn’t heard.” What hypocrisy, I thought. How could I have heard? Had I even once called her? “She says it was caused by the medicine she was given for cancer.” “Is she very sick?” “You never know with Paula. Certainly not too sick to start a lupus support group, to invite all the new lupus patients to lunch, to visit us when we’re too ill to leave the house, to arrange a series of medical speakers to keep us apprised of new research in lupus. Also not too sick to launch a medical-ethics-board investigation of her cancer doctors.” Organizing, educating, nursing, agitating, starting up lupus self-help groups, castigating her doctors—sounded like Paula, all right. I thanked the young woman and later that day dialed Paula’s number, which I still knew by heart, even though it had been a decade since I had last called. As I waited for her to answer, I thought of some recent geriatric research that showed a positive correlation between personality style and longevity: cantankerous patients who are paranoid, vigilant, and assertive tend to live longer. Better a feisty, irritating, living Paula, I thought, than a placid dead one!

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  You are speeding along an empty four-lane divided highway through Greece in a little red and rented Citroen doing well over the legal 120 and more like 170 kilometers per hour. Because there was absolutely no one else on the road, no one at all, for at least an hour. That morning you started from Dodoni, Zeus’s most ancient oracular site, visited by Homer’s Odysseus and maybe not many others since, and were heading toward the northwestern corner of Greece just south of the Albanian border inland from the island of Kerkira, or Corfu. You were driving on what the map shows as little yellow squiggly lines indicating single lanes with, at best, tractors and, at worst, goats to slow your pace. Occasionally those yellow squiggly lines turned into white squiggly lines indicating all the above, but on dirt roads with potholes. Then you stumbled unexpectedly upon an on-ramp to the big pink-highlighted and black-dotted streak that your map says is still under construction. But it was clearly finished that mid-June morning in 2003, and you take it as fast as you can toward the Adriatic Sea and the modern town of Igoumenítsa, first port for the car ferries from Brindisi on the heel of the Italian mainland. From there you will turn south inland and then go along the coast to the site of Octavian and Agrippa’s victory over Antony and Cleopatra off Cape Actium on the southern promontory of the Ambracian Gulf. The motorway stops as suddenly as it began, with an end-of-freeway sign at a massive construction site for a suspension bridge over a river and a tunnel through a hill. But before you return to the little yellow and white lines on the map, you pause to read the big blue and gold sign in Greek and English, put up by the European Union, that announces the new Egnatia Odos, the new Via Egnatia. The sign emphasizes that half the cost of those cranes, bulldozers, and cement mixers in front of you is being paid by the European Union’s Community Support Framework and much of the rest is funded by the European Investment Bank. You learn later that the total cost is estimated at 1.15 trillion Greek drachmas, a currency made obsolete by the Euro but calculated in 2003 at about 300 to the dollar. You also learn later that, after the Egnatia Odos Motorway is completed and its terminal ends linked up, its 425 miles will include 1650 bridges with a combined length of 25 miles and 76 tunnels with a combined length of 30 miles.

• From Escape (2007)

  I noticed during the class that he paid a lot of attention to me. Why was he looking at me? Was it my imagination? No, I realized it wasn’t. He’d ask the class a question and stare at me. He told us we were going to go down the rows and answer the questions in the book. I was second in line. I read the question, answered it, and then looked up. Brian was staring at me but didn’t say anything. Had I gotten the question wrong? I must have looked puzzled, because he snapped out of his reverie, commented that my answer was correct, and moved on to the next student. As the class continued, Brian kept encouraging me to participate. I felt confused by his attention, so I stayed quiet. During our break, Brian said to some of us that he’d send us a study guide for the GMAT class that he’d prepared if we’d give him our e-mail addresses and phone numbers. We all signed up. On another break, I overheard Brian telling someone nearby that he was divorced. After class, several of the students went to the front of the room to chat with him. I felt shy, but I didn’t want to pass up the chance to talk to someone with a degree from Harvard. I drifted up to the front along with everyone else. Brian had his eye on me. But then the dean of the business school came in and invited Brian to lunch. I could see that waiting around to talk with him was a waste of time, so I left and did not look back. It turns out that Brian told everyone he had to leave. After making apologies to the dean, he jumped in his car. Brian could see me walking down the sidewalk on the right. If he left campus, he’d have to turn left. Left meant never getting to know me. He had taken a new job in San Francisco and was already working there. Turning left was the safe decision. But he’d been making those all his life. He turned right. Brian pulled up to me in his BMW and rolled down his window. “Carolyn, I know you don’t know me and this may seem sudden, but would you like to get some lunch with me? You can ride with me or follow me in your own car. Whatever you’re more comfortable with. But I would really like to get to know you.” My heart nearly came to a halt. What a surprise. What a happy surprise. But what should I do? Should I say yes and go to lunch with a total stranger? The safe thing was to say no. But I didn’t. “I’d love to get some lunch with you,” I said, and got in his car.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  follows: first Assyria, second Media, third Persia, fourth Greece, and finally Rome. This view of history seems to have developed in Persia, since Media never had an important role in the west. People in the Near East would not have looked to Rome as the final kingdom, but would rather have hoped for a restoration of their native kingship, which had been overrun by Alexander the Great in 334–323 B.C.E. Daniel does not identify the four kingdoms, but their identity becomes clear as the book progresses. When the Babylonian kingdom falls at the end of chapter 5, the new ruler is called Darius the Mede. He is followed by Cyrus of Persia (6:28). The sequence starts over in chapter 7, which is dated to the first year of Belshazzar of Babylon. He is followed by Darius the Mede (9:1) and Cyrus of Persia (10:1), and Daniel is told that after the prince of Persia, the prince of Greece will come (10:20). The four kingdoms, then, are Babylon, Media, Persia, and Greece. Babylon replaces Assyria because it was the Babylonians who conquered Jerusalem. The presence of Media, however, can be explained only by reference to the schema of the four kingdoms. Media never ruled over the Jews, and no such person as Darius the Mede ever existed. (There were three Persian kings called Darius, all after Cyrus.) Darius the Mede, then, is invented to fit the traditional pattern of the sequence of kingdoms. It is somewhat surprising in a Jewish text to find the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, the king who had destroyed Jerusalem, depicted as a golden age. To be sure, Nebuchadnezzar is Daniel’s king, and some flattery is in order. Nonetheless, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Daniel is adapting a Babylonian prophecy here, which looked back to the glory days of Nebuchadnezzar and hoped for a restoration of a lasting Babylonian kingdom in the future. (A small number of Babylonian prophetic texts were published in the second half of the twentieth century. At least one, the Uruk prophecy, predicts a lasting Babylonian kingdom.) Daniel, however, is adapting this prophecy for Jewish purposes. He does not tell Nebuchadnezzar that the final kingdom will be Jewish; the king is free to think that it will be a Babylonian restoration. But Jewish readers know better. The mountain that develops out of the stone is Mount Zion, and the God of heaven is sure to favor his own people. Moreover, the whole statue,

• From Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1997)

  The glaring exception to the kingpin principle is human female menopause. In all women within a short age span, it shuts down decades before expected death, even before the expected death of many hunter-gatherer women. It shuts down for a physiologically trivial reason—the exhaustion of functional eggs—that would have been easy to eliminate just by a mutation that slightly altered the rate at which eggs die or become unresponsive. Evidently, there was nothing physiologically inevitable about human female menopause, and there was nothing evolutionarily inevitable about it from the perspective of mammals in general. Instead, the human female, but not the human male, has become specifically programmed by natural selection, at some time within the last few million years, to shut down reproduction prematurely. That premature senescence is all the more surprising because it goes against an overwhelming trend: in other respects, we humans have evolved delayed rather than premature senescence. ····· Theorizing about the evolutionary basis of human female menopause must explain how a woman’s apparently counterproductive evolutionary strategy of making fewer babies could actually result in her making more babies. Evidently, as a woman ages, she can do more to increase the number of people bearing her genes by devoting herself to her existing children, her potential grandchildren, and her other relatives than by producing yet another child. The evolutionary chain of reasoning rests on several cruel facts. One is the human child’s long period of parental dependence, longer than in any other animal species. A baby chimpanzee starts gathering its own food as it becomes weaned by its mother. It gathers the food mostly with its own hands. (Chimpanzee use of tools, such as fishing for termites with grass blades or cracking nuts with stones, is of great interest to human scientists but of only limited dietary significance to chimpanzees.) The baby chimpanzee also prepares its food with its own hands. But human hunter-gatherers acquire most of their food with tools, such as digging sticks, nets, spears, and baskets. Much human food is also prepared with tools (husked, pounded, cut up, et cetera) and then cooked in a fire. We do not protect ourselves against dangerous predators with our teeth and strong muscles, as do other prey animals, but, again, with our tools. Even to wield all those tools is completely beyond the manual dexterity of babies, and to make the tools is beyond the abilities of young children. Tool use and tool making are transmitted not just by imitation but by language, which takes over a decade for a child to master.

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

  We went home and told my mom what had happened. Well, she just flipped. She went down to the school grounds looking for these two guys. They had disappeared by this time, but left this material scattered all over the playground like they were disseminating this stuff everywhere. She went around collecting the stuff and throwing it away. I didn’t understand why she was so upset because it was just, you know, naked boobies or whatever. To me it wasn’t even a real huge deal. But my mom’s intense reaction, and the fact that we never talked about it, left a strong imprint on me. After a while my curiosity about porn just kind of died off. Sexual thoughts took a back seat to other things, like being part of a little club with some of the neighborhood boys, riding bikes, having BB gun wars, getting involved with sports and school, and that sort of thing. It wasn’t until one summer, seven years later when I was thirteen years old, that I saw some more porn. It was a hot summer. My parents would go off to work and leave my brother and me at home with enormous tasks to do on our ranch. We hated it. The way that we rebelled and killed time was to watch a porn video my brother had recorded off a decoded XXX channel and a Playboy channel at my cousin’s house. We knew pornography was taboo because of my mom’s reaction to it after the playground incident. We also knew that we had to hide what we did, because if we got caught watching this stuff, there would be hell to pay. I watched it anyway, partly because my brother said it was great, and also because I was now old enough to get a good sexual rush when doing it. At first I couldn’t masturbate, didn’t know how. But it didn’t take long to move into it. My first orgasm came from looking at that videotape. Soon, instead of being upset and dreading all the chores they were making us do, we were enjoying it when my parents left. The desire for the hunt and the fantasy kicked in at that point. Even when my parents were home I’d be replaying the videos in my mind. I began masturbating daily, multiple times a day. I know now that my behavior was compulsive. At the time, of course, I had no clue what I was doing. All I knew is that it felt good and it was something I wanted to do as often as possible.

• From Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1997)

  A hint that the large human penis serves as some sort of signal may be gained by watching what happens when men take the opportunity to design their own penises, rather than remaining content with their evolutionary legacy. Men in the highlands of New Guinea do that by enclosing the penis in a decorative sheath called a phallocarp. The sheath is up to two feet long and four inches in diameter, often bright red or yellow in color, and variously decorated at the tip with fur, leaves, or a forked ornament. When I first encountered New Guinea men with phallocarps, among the Ketengban tribe in the Star Mountains last year, I had already heard a lot about them and was curious to see how they were used and how people explained them. It turned out that men wore their phallocarps constantly, at least whenever I encountered them. Each man owns several models, varying in size, ornamentation, and angle of erection, and each day he selects a model to wear according to his mood, much as each morning we select a shirt to wear. In response to my question as to why they wore phallocarps, the Ketengbans replied that they felt naked and immodest without them. That answer surprised me, with my Western perspective, because the Ketengbans were otherwise completely naked and left even their testes exposed. In effect, the phallocarp is a conspicuous erect pseudo penis representing what a man would like to be endowed with. The size of the penis that we evolved was unfortunately limited by the length of a woman’s vagina. A phallocarp shows us what the human penis would look like if it were not subject to that practical constraint. It is a signal even bolder than the widowbird’s tail. The actual penis, while more modest than a phallocarp, is immodestly large by the standards of our ape ancestors, although the chimpanzee penis has also become enlarged over the inferred ancestral state and rivals men’s penises in size. Penis evolution evidently illustrates the operation of runaway selection just as Fisher postulated. Starting from a 1½-inch ancestral ape penis similar to the penis of a modern gorilla or orangutan, the human penis increased in length by a runaway process, conveying an advantage to its owner as an increasingly conspicuous signal of virility, until its length became limited by counterselection as difficulties fitting into a woman’s vagina became imminent.

• From The Varieties of Religious Experience

  The most curious record of sudden conversion with which I am acquainted is that of M. Alphonse Ratisbonne, a freethinking French Jew, to Catholicism, at Rome in 1842. In a letter to a clerical friend, written a few months later, the convert gives a palpitating account of the circumstances.(121) The predisposing conditions appear to have been slight. He had an elder brother who had been converted and was a Catholic priest. He was himself irreligious, and nourished an antipathy to the apostate brother and generally to his “cloth.” Finding himself at Rome in his twenty‐ninth year, he fell in with a French gentleman who tried to make a proselyte of him, but who succeeded no farther after two or three conversations than to get him to hang (half jocosely) a religious medal round his neck, and to accept and read a copy of a short prayer to the Virgin. M. Ratisbonne represents his own part in the conversations as having been of a light and chaffing order; but he notes the fact that for some days he was unable to banish the words of the prayer from his mind, and that the night before the crisis he had a sort of nightmare, in the imagery of which a black cross with no Christ upon it figured. Nevertheless, until noon of the next day he was free in mind and spent the time in trivial conversations. I now give his own words. “If at this time any one had accosted me, saying: ‘Alphonse, in a quarter of an hour you shall be adoring Jesus Christ as your God and Saviour; you shall lie prostrate with your face upon the ground in a humble church; you shall be smiting your breast at the foot of a priest; you shall pass the carnival in a college of Jesuits to prepare yourself to receive baptism, ready to give your life for the Catholic faith; you shall renounce the world and its pomps and pleasures; renounce your fortune, your hopes, and if need be, your betrothed; the affections of your family, the esteem of your friends, and your attachment to the Jewish people; you shall have no other aspiration than to follow Christ and bear his cross till death;’—if, I say, a prophet had come to me with such a prediction, I should have judged that only one person could be more mad than he,—whosoever, namely, might believe in the possibility of such senseless folly becoming true. And yet that folly is at present my only wisdom, my sole happiness.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  On his way to this assignment, Miltitz was loaded for bear. He had with him letters speaking very clearly and harshly about Luther, calling him a “child of Satan, son of perdition, scrofulous sheep, and tare in the vineyard,” and so on.14 But a strange thing happened as Miltitz made his way to Saxony with his arsenal of papal brèves and the fabled Golden Rose. Everywhere he stopped along the way, he saw that the public sentiment in Germany was disturbingly, was overwhelmingly for Luther. When he arrived in Nuremberg on December 18, Miltitz met with Scheurl, who confirmed this unpleasant development, and Scheurl used this information to influence Miltitz to take a somehow more conciliatory approach. Scheurl then put himself forth as a mediator, informing Spalatin that Luther should accept Miltitz’s requests in a friendly way. Scheurl clearly felt this was the only way forward that could avoid the disaster of Luther’s being sent to Rome and branded a heretic, while at the same time it would not require Luther to recant, which anyone who understood him knew he clearly would never do. We see in Scheurl’s meeting with Miltitz how much more complicated the situation was than we might be inclined to believe. Miltitz explained to Scheurl that Rome was in fact highly displeased with Tetzel’s indulgence sermons, which had caused the whole mess. Miltitz went so far as to declare Tetzel a Schweinehund (literally “pig dog”). Miltitz even said that the highly vaunted Prierias had himself been dressed down by Rome for his hastily written response to Luther’s writing. And he explained that it was mostly Luther’s widely disseminated Sermon on Indulgences and Grace that had everyone up in arms, for it had been widely circulated in German, and had therefore greatly damaged the church in the eyes of the faithful. In this, we observe how this thing that would come to be called the Reformation progressed due to forces beyond the control of the principal players. The new technology of printing and the subsequent hunger for printed works catapulted many of Luther’s writings to distances and into places he had no intention of their going. When he had his Sermon on Indulgences and Grace printed, he had no idea it would get the traction that it did and spread his ideas far and wide without any context, and end up injuring the church. We can never know if the way such things happened harmed the cause of reformation or whether without such things happening the Reformation itself would ever have taken place at all.

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  ©2001 The Teaching Company 39 B. C a s e l l a , a n o l d m u s i c i a n f r i e n d o f Dante’s, sings one of the “oldies but goodies” for Dante, putting to music one of Dante’s own poems in Canto 2. 1. C a t o r e b u k e s h i m a n d s a y s t h a t t h e p i l g r i m m u s t m o v e o n . 2. W e l e a r n t h e i m p o r t a n c e o f g o i n g f o r w a r d r a t h e r t h a n backward. C. I n C a n t o 3 , D a n t e m e e t s M a n f r e d ( d . 1 2 6 6 ) , a b a s t a r d s o n o f t h e Emperor Frederick II and a violent arch-Ghibelline. 1. M a n f r e d w a s k i l l e d a t t h e B a t t l e o f B e v e n e n t o , a G u e l f victory. 2. M a n f r e d w a s a n e n e m y o f D a n t e ’ s f a m i l y a n d p a r t y . T h e Guelf victory at Bevenento led directly to the Alighieri family’s return to Florence. 3. I t i s a r e a l s u r p r i s e t o s e e h i m a m o n g t h e s a v e d . 4. W e l e a r n o f t h e p o w e r o f a f i n a l c o n v e r s i o n a t t h e e n d o f l i f e . 5. W e a l s o l e a r n t h a t s a l v a t i o n d o e s n o t d e p e n d o n f a m i l y affiliation. Readings: William Cook and Ronald Herzman, The Medieval World View, Chapters 7–9. Dante, Purgatorio, Cantos 1–3. Rachel Jacoff, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Dante, Chapter 12.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  The children were entering high school when I began to write my memoir. They had been visiting the Center since their infancy and came to know my “uncles” and “aunts” as extended family. However, they knew nothing of the history of my family’s life there, until it started spilling out as they asked questions. They were astonished, then curious, and soon became skeptical, most particularly my daughter, as she matured, graduated from high school, and attended college. She found my childhood deeply disturbing, and on one trip home from college, she demanded that I “drop everything,” as she put it, until I finished my book. Now I have finished it. Epilogue T he Center of my childhood was much changed by the mid-1970s. Leonard Feeney, under the auspices of Cardinal Madeiros of Boston and Cardinal Wright of Worcester, had become reconciled with Rome in the early 1970s and died in 1978 a few days shy of his eighty-first birthday. After more than a decade, the infighting among factions at the Center in Still River simmered down, and the two communities found a way to split up and yet remain on speaking terms with each other. I had taken no sides in their conflicts, and each of the separate entities reached out to me in a warm and welcoming way. In a turnabout, they sought me out for advice, most particularly on matters that had to do with finance, and I was happy to help them in whatever way I could. St. Therese’s House became a Benedictine abbey, changing its name to St. Benedict Abbey. It remains a vibrant community today. The Big Sisters at St. Ann’s House became a pious union of nuns under the Catholic Diocese of Worcester, teaching catechism and preparing children for First Communion, for which they are beloved by Catholic families in the local community. A number of the original Center members moved to Petersham, Massachusetts, and established their own Brother/Sister Benedictine monasteries, St. Mary’s Monastery and St. Scholastica Priory, under the auspices of Pluscarden Abbey in Scotland. Three other splinter groups settled in Ohio, New Hampshire, and California. [image file=Image00040.jpg] During the late 1970s, on one of my visits to Still River, I was astonished, as I entered the library, to find Betty Sullivan sitting in the red leather wing chair next to the piano. She caught my eye as I approached and her face lit up—as much as her doleful eyes would allow. She no longer looked decrepit. It was evident that whatever mental illness she had suffered years earlier was at least under control. For the next couple of hours, we shared reminiscences and caught up on our lives.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  THEOPHYLACT. It may be that by camel, we should understand the animal itself, or else that thick cable, which is used for large vessels. BEDE. (ubi sup.) How then could either in the Gospel, Matthew and Joseph, or in the Old Testament, very many rich persons, enter into the kingdom of God, unless it be that they learned through the inspiration of God either to count their riches as nothing, or to quit them altogether. Or in a higher sense, it is easier for Christ to suffer for those who love Him, than for the lovers of this world to turn to Christ; for under the name of camel, He wished Himself to be understood, because He bore the burden of our weakness; and by the needle, He understands the prickings, that is, the pains of His Passion. By the eye of a needle, therefore, He means the straits of His Passion, by which He, as it were, deigned to mend the torn garments of our nature. It goes on; And they were astonished above measure, saying among themselves, Who then can be saved? Since the number of poor people is immeasurably the greater, and these might be saved, though the rich perished, they must have understood Him to mean that all who love riches, although they cannot obtain them, are reckoned in the number of the rich. It goes on; And Jesus looking upon them saith, With men it is impossible, but not with God; which we must not take to mean, that covetous and proud persons can enter into the kingdom of Heaven with their covetousness and pride, but that it is possible with God that they should be converted from covetousness and pride to charity and lowliness. CHRYSOSTOM. (ubi sup.) And the reason why He says that this is the work of God is, that He may shew that he who is put into this path by God, has much need of grace; from which it is proved, that great is the reward of those rich men, who are willing to follow the 1discipline of Christ.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  28. Therefore in the resurrection whose wife shall she be of the seven? for they all had her. 29. Jesus answered and said unto them, Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God. 30. For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven. 31. But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, 32. I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. 33. And when the multitude heard this, they were astonished at his doctrine. CHRYSOSTOM. The disciples of the Pharisees with the Herodians being thus confuted, the Sadducees next offer themselves, whereas the overthrow of those before them ought to have kept them back. But presumption is shameless, stubborn, and ready to attempt things impossible. So the Evangelist, wondering at their folly, expresses this, saying, The same day came to him the Sadducees. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. As soon as the Pharisees were gone, came the Sadducees; perhaps with like intent, for there was a strife among them who should be the first to seize Him. Or if by argument they should not be able to overcome Him, they might at least by perseverance wear out His understanding. JEROME. There were two sects among the Jews, the Pharisees and the Sadducees; the Pharisees pretended to the righteousness of traditions and observances, whence they were called by the people ‘separate.’ The Sadducees (the word is interpreted ‘righteous’) also passed themselves for what they were not; and whereas the first believed the resurrection of body and soul, and confessed both Angel and spirit, these, according to the Acts of the Apostles, denied them all, as it is here also said, Who say that there is no resurrection. (Acts 23:8.) ORIGEN. They not only denied the resurrection of the body, but took away the immortality of the soul. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. For the Devil finding himself unable to crush utterly the religion of God, brought in the sect of the Sadducees denying the resurrection of the dead, thus breaking down all purpose of a righteous life, for who is there would endure a daily struggle against himself, unless he looked to the hope of the resurrection? GREGORY. (Mor. xiv. 55.) But there are who observing that the spirit is loosed from the body, that the flesh is turned to corruption, that the corruption is reduced to dust, and that the dust again is resolved into the elements, so as to be unseen by human eyes, despair of the possibility of a resurrection, and while they look upon the dry bones, doubt that they can be clothed with flesh, and be quickened anew to life.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  All this comes to a crunch in one particular confrontation: They brought to Jesus a man who was possessed by a demon that made him unable to see or speak. Jesus healed him, so that the sick man was able to talk and see. All the crowds were astonished. “He can’t be David’s son, can he?” they said. The Pharisees heard this. “The only reason this fellow can cast out demons,” they said, “is because he’s in league with Beelzebul, the prince of demons!” Jesus knew their thoughts. “Suppose a kingdom is split down the middle,” he said to them. “It’ll go to rack and ruin! If a city or a household is split down the middle, it’s doomed! And if the satan drives out the satan, he’s split down the middle—so how can his kingdom stay standing? “What’s more, if I cast out demons by Beelzebul, whose power are your people in league with when they cast them out? Yes, they’ll tell you what’s what! But if I’m casting out demons because I’m in league with God’s spirit—well, then, God’s kingdom has arrived on your doorstep! “Look at it like this. Suppose you want to break into a strong man’s house and steal his belongings. How are you going to do that unless you first tie up the strong man? Then you can plunder his house to your heart’s content. If you’re not with me, you’re against me. Unless you’re gathering the flock with me, you’re scattering it. “So let me tell you this: people will be forgiven for every sin and blasphemy; but blasphemy against the spirit will not be forgiven. If anyone speaks a word against the son of man, it will be forgiven. But if anyone speaks a word against the holy spirit, it won’t be forgiven, either in the present age or in the age to come.” (Matt. 12:22–32)

• From The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (2000)

  Fisher’s other idea, the concept of runaway sexual selection, attracted more interest because it sounded much stranger. In fact, it was so strange that Thomas Hunt Morgan had first aired the idea in 1903 as a counter argument against sexual selection. Morgan asked what would happen if female birds had a tendency to prefer plumage slightly brighter than the males of their species currently possess. He realized that the males would evolve brighter plumage under the pressure of female choice, but that the females would still not be satisfied. They would just move the goal posts, demanding still more extreme ornamentation. Morgan mocked, “Shall we assume that … the two continue heaping up the ornaments on one side and the appreciation of these ornaments on the other? No doubt an interesting fiction could be built up along these lines, but would anyone believe it, and, if he did, could he prove it?” To Morgan, the possibility of an endless arms race between female preferences and male ornaments was an evolutionary impossibility that exposed the whole idea of sexual selection as a fallacy. But Fisher was used to integrating equations for exponential growth, and understood the speed and power of positive-feedback processes. He realized that an arms race between female preferences and male ornaments, far from undermining the theory of sexual selection, could offer an exciting possibility for explaining sexual ornamentation. The idea of runaway sexual selection appeared in Fisher’s masterpiece of 1930, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. Whenever attractive males can mate with many females and leave many offspring, the sexual preferences of females can drive male ornaments to extremes. Fisher suggested that when this happens, female preferences will evolve to greater extremes as well. This is because a female who prefers a super-ornamented male will tend to produce super-ornamented sons, who will be super-attractive to other females, and who will therefore produce more grandchildren. Evolution will favor super-choosy females for this reason. Yet the choosier the females become, the more extreme the male ornamentation will become in response. Both sexes end up on an evolutionary treadmill. The female preferences and male ornaments become caught up in a self-reinforcing cycle, a positive-feedback loop. Fisher speculated that whenever the most ornamented individuals gain a large reproductive advantage, there is “the potentiality of a runaway process, which, however small the beginnings from which it arose, must, unless checked, produce great effects, and in the later stages with great rapidity.” This runaway process, Fisher claimed, could make ornaments evolve with exponentially increasing speed. They would evolve until the ornaments become so cumbersome that their massive survival costs finally outweigh their enormous sexual benefits: “both the feature preferred and the intensity of preference will be augmented together with ever-increasing velocity, causing a great and rapid evolution of certain conspicuous characteristics, until the process can be arrested by the direct or indirect effects of Natural Selection.” I shall explore the runaway process more thoroughly in the next chapter.

• From How the Bible Actually Works (2019)

  Judaism during the Greek period, as we’ve seen, escalated that process. And in the same way Judaism needed to adjust its ancient tradition, the early followers of Jesus needed to continue adjusting that same tradition. Well, technically, not really “in the same way.” Christianity adjusted the tradition in its own and striking ways. Judaism adapted the past and reimagined God because it had to respond creatively to the unexpected and disastrous crisis of God’s abandonment followed by God’s centuries-long delay in righting the ship. The early followers of Jesus, though they too engaged the tradition creatively, did so for a very different reason—not because of God’s apparent abandonment, but because of God’s unexpected, counterintuitive presence , namely, in Jesus of Nazareth, a crucified Messiah. Such a thing was never part of the playbook of Judaism. To be successful, a Messiah—a chosen, “anointed” leader—should not be executed by Gentiles as a criminal. Messiahs don’t lose. And that’s what we are going to be looking at now, how the story of Jesus transforms the ancient tradition and reimagines God. And that reimagining is pretty dramatic, which we will see if we take a moment to step away from the familiarity of it all. The New Testament writers talked about Jesus— paradoxically—as both the true embodiment of Israel’s ancient tradition and at the same time a surprising move by God that the tradition did not anticipate. Or to put it another way, the New Testament writers show us how profoundly new the Good News of Jesus Christ is while at the same time insisting that the story of Jesus is deeply connected to the Jewish tradition that bore and nurtured it. The New Testament writers faced the challenge of bridging the past tradition and present circumstances, and they did so with a lot of thoughtfulness and creativity. Which brings us to another pivotal moment in this book—in fact, the big punch line. Christians throughout time, including today, have had to face that very same challenge of bridging the past and their own unique circumstances. The New Testament, in other words, is our Exhibit A for how vital it is to adjust and reimagine the past to meet the challenges of a new day and time. That is what Christians do, have always done, and always will do. We are both bound to the past and charged with remaining open to the movement of God’s Spirit, which is free and never bound to tradition or our theologies that try to articulate it. Christian theology, in other words, is an exercise in wisdom —perhaps far more so than is normally thought. We are not simply maintaining the past; we

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  While many people said no, to Jia’s surprise way more people said yes. “Yes, you can use my backyard for soccer practice.” “Yes, you can sit in the driver’s seat of my police car.” “Yes, you can give a lecture to my college class.” “Yes, you can make an announcement on this Southwest flight.” “Yes, this dancing Santa will teach you how to Dougie.” “Yes, I can make the Olympic rings out of Krispy Kreme donuts for you in fifteen minutes flat.”1 Now, you don’t have to ask a dog groomer for a haircut, as Jia did. But just like Jia, it’s important to take action—to face your fears. So pick a few things that scare you. Not pee-in-your-pants scare you, just things that scare you a little. In technical speak, facing your fears is called exposure, which sounds like either a misdemeanor or something that happens at latitude, but really, it’s just a fancy name for practice. * * * Ali was a client of mine many years ago, but in my mind he remains the king of social anxiety exposure. The first time we practiced together, he was reluctant. So we started out with simple tasks at the hospital where I worked. First I asked at the information desk for directions to the cafeteria. Next it was Ali’s turn. Then we each stopped a hospital volunteer, identifiable by their salmon-pink blazers, and asked directions again. Within half an hour, Ali was getting into it. As we were walking down the busy main corridor, without any prompting he stopped a complete stranger and asked for directions to the parking garage. He thanked her and let her walk on. But then he started improvising, riffing on his own practice. He stopped another stranger to ask for directions, but this time, when the young man directed him to head one way down the corridor Ali walked the opposite way. The young man jogged after him: “Hey, man, no, this way.” Ali feigned sudden comprehension and thanked him as the man smiled and wished him a good day. I hung back and watched in proud astonishment. Ali was like an exposure DJ, remixing the best of them and having fun with it. Then he asked a third stranger for directions and, with a twinkle in his eye, asked the stranger which way was “left.” The stranger didn’t even blink. “That way,” he said, pointing. No one raised an eyebrow. Ali was elated. “I could stand on my head and no one would care!” he exclaimed. As we parted after our session, I peeked out my office door, half-expecting to see him standing on his head in the middle of the waiting room.