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

  The room was busy—perhaps twenty couples stood in loose lines, practicing the East Coast swing under the tutelage of Tomas, the studio’s stately Brazilian owner. Every Sunday evening, Tomas held a group lesson that morphed into a social dance—he called it a practice party. Tomas manned the music system, announcing with each song, “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a foxtrot!” or, “Next up, let’s rumba!” Students asked each other to dance. As they practiced their steps, instructors circulated, dispensing guidance and adjusting posture—a hand on a shoulder here, a raising of the chin there. In the four years since taking up ballroom dancing, Jim, fifty-six, with the trim build of a runner and neatly cropped red hair that reflects his Irish ancestry, had become a regular. That evening, as the last notes to Harry Connick Jr.’s “A Wink and a Smile” wound down and couples slowed their foxtrots, Tomas leaned into the microphone. With a gleam in his eye, he asked, “Okay, can everyone clear the floor except Mayumi, please?” Jim was puzzled—Tomas usually linked the songs one after another to keep everyone out on the floor. But tonight something was different. Mayumi was Jim’s instructor, so he clapped politely, then turned and headed for a folding chair. But Tomas continued, “We have a surprise performance for you all tonight—a birthday dance!” Jim froze. Today was his birthday. How on earth did they know? He hadn’t told anyone. He turned back to the dance floor and looked past the dozens of people. In an otherwise empty circle of onlookers stood Mayumi, a smile on her face, her hand outstretched toward him. * * * What a difference time and practice make. Four years previously, never in his wildest dreams would Jim have imagined himself at any kind of party, much less a dance party where he approached women, busted out a cha-cha, and did it all surrounded by mirrors and dozens of others. Jim grew up in the sixties and seventies in the Irish-Catholic section of Dorchester, a working-class neighborhood in the heart of Boston. Jim’s father, a calm and even-keeled man, worked as a groundskeeper at Harvard for thirty years; Jim’s mother was a secretary for an insurance company. Jim and his kid brother, Ryan, grew up on the second floor of what in Boston is known as a triple-decker, their apartment sandwiched between two identical others, fronted by a stoop of wooden stairs. After school, Jim and Ryan roamed the streets with the neighbor kids, many of whom were their cousins. Except when winter snowdrifts clogged the streets, the boys would play street hockey, lobbing friendly insults and taking turns fishing the puck from under boat-sized cars with vinyl roofs. Between games, they trooped back and forth to the variety store on the corner, using the change from running errands for Mom to purchase their near-daily installments of Mountain Dew and Twinkies.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  Any reading of the Bible from the margins of society requires an understanding of who Jesus is. Jesus, as God's fullest revelation of God to humanity, guides readers of the biblical text in understanding the divine character in the daily injustices of everyday life. The next chapter will explore how Jesus is seen and understood from the margins, a way of seeing that is as crucial for the dominant culture's salvation as it is for the groups that exist on the margins. CHAPTER 5Who Do You Say I Am?During Holy Week of 2001, the Discovery Channel and the British Broadcasting Corporation coproduced a television documentary titled Jesus: The Complete Story. While some interpretations based on so-called recent scientific discoveries were questionable, of interest was the attempt to re-create Jesus’ physical appearance. Using a two-thousand-year-old Jewish skull, a forensic artist created a computer-generated image of what Jesus might have looked like. Skin pigmentation and hair color were based on third-century frescoes of Jewish faces found in ruins at Dura-Europos in Syria. The final image revealed an olive-skinned man with short dark curly hair. This image of Jesus challenged the traditional one that dates from the fifth century, as well as the more modern white-skinned, blue-eyed, blond-haired Jesus popularized on stained-glass windows and portraits. For purposes of our inquiry, it really is unimportant if this reconstructed image represents how Jesus might have looked. Of greater interest is the reaction of some members of the dominant culture to this non-Eurocentric-looking Jesus, a reaction best illustrated by newspaper columnist Kathleen Parker of the Tribune Media Services in an article titled “Jesus Falls Victim to Makeover Madness.” She bemoaned the fact that “this new Jesus looks like no one familiar. The willowy, long-haired figure who in picture books attracted children…now looks like the kind of guy who wouldn't make it through airport security.” She was specifically disgusted with the new Jesus’ jaw, which “looks likely to chomp down on a brontosaurus thigh,” and his wide nose, which she calls “a snout that snorts.” She longs for the Jesus of her “childhood Bible storybook.” In short, she voices her anger that the white Jesus she grew up with is being replaced by an ethnic-looking Jesus, a Jesus who looks more like someone from the margins of society. She concludes by blasting the tendency of academic researchers to “debunk” the Aryan Jesus, insisting “that biblical revisionists won't be satisfied until they discover that Jesus was really a bisexual, crossdressing, whale-saving, tobacco-hating, vegetarian African Queen who actually went to temple to lobby for women's rights.”1 It is understandable that some from the dominant culture, like columnist Kathleen Parker, wish to maintain an image of a Jesus who, like them, is white.

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  “Your friend here seems more of a landscape man, not portraits. Let’s look around.” I take his outstretched hand. We wander past a few more prints, and I notice a couple nodding at me, smiling broadly as if they know me. It must be because I’m with Christian, but one young man is blatantly staring. Odd. We turn the corner, and I see why I’ve been getting strange looks. Hanging on the far wall are seven huge portraits—of me. I stare blankly at them, stupefied, the blood draining from my face. Me: pouting, laughing, scowling, serious, amused. All in super close up, all in black and white. Holy shit! I remember José messing with the camera on a couple of occasions when he was visiting and when I’d been out with him as driver and photographer’s assistant. He took snapshots, or so I thought. Not these invasive candid shots. Christian is staring, transfixed, at each of the pictures in turn. “Seems I’m not the only one,” he mutters cryptically, his mouth settling into a hard line. I think he’s angry. “Excuse me,” he says, pinning me with his bright gaze, and he heads to the reception desk. What’s his problem now? I watch mesmerized as he talks animatedly with Miss Very Short Hair and Red Lipstick. He fishes out his wallet and produces his credit card. Shit. He must have bought one of them. “Hey. You’re the muse. These photographs are terrific.” A young man with a shock of bright blond hair startles me. I feel a hand at my elbow and Christian is back. “You’re a lucky guy.” Blond Shock says to Christian, who gives him a cold stare. “That I am,” he mutters darkly, as he pulls me over to one side. “Did you just buy one of these?” “One of these?” he snorts, not taking his eyes off them. “You bought more than one?” He rolls his eyes. “I bought them all, Anastasia. I don’t want some stranger ogling you in the privacy of their home.” My first inclination is to laugh. “You’d rather it was you?” I scoff. He glares at me, caught off guard by my audacity, I think, but he’s trying to hide his amusement. “Frankly, yes.” “Pervert,” I mouth at him and bite my lower lip to prevent my smile. His mouth drops open, and now his amusement is obvious. He strokes his chin thoughtfully. “Can’t argue with that assessment, Anastasia.” He shakes his head, and his eyes soften with humor. “I’d discuss it further with you, but I’ve signed an NDA.” He sighs, gazing at me, and his eyes darken. “What I’d like to do to your smart mouth.” I gasp, knowing full well what he means. “You’re very rude.” I try to sound shocked and succeed. Has he no boundaries? He smirks, amused, but then his face falls. “You look very relaxed in these photographs, Anastasia. I don’t see you like that very often.”

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

  AMBROSE. The holy Evangelist has especially remarked, that many thought the child should be called after his father Zacharias, in order that we might understand, not that any name of his kinsfolk was displeasing to his mother, but that the same word had been communicated to her by the Holy Spirit, which had been foretold by the Angel to Zacharias. And in truth, being dumb, Zacharias was unable to mention his son’s name to his wife, but Elisabeth obtained by prophecy what she had not learnt from her husband. Hence it follows, And she answered, &c. Marvel not that the woman pronounced the name which she had never heard, seeing the Holy Spirit who imparted it to the Angel revealed it to her; nor could she be ignorant of the forerunner of the Lord, who had prophesied of Christ. And it well follows, And they said unto her, &c. that you might consider that the name belongs not to the family, but to the Prophet. Zacharias also is questioned, and signs made to him, as it follows, And they made signs to the father, &c. But since unbelief had so bereft him of utterance and hearing, that he could not use his voice, he spoke by his hand-writing, as it follows, And he asked for a writing table, and wrote, saying, His name is John; that is, we give no name to him who has received his name from God. ORIGEN. (non occ.) Zacharias is by interpretation “remembering God,” but John signifies “pointing to.” Now “memory” relates to something absent, “pointing to,” to something present. But John was not about to set forth the memory of God as absent, but with his finger to point him out as present, saying, Behold the Lamb of God. CHRYSOSTOM. But the name John is also interpreted the grace of God. Because then by the favour of Divine grace, not by nature, Elisabeth conceived this son, they engraved the memory of the benefit on the name of the child. THEOPHYLACT. And because with the mother the dumb father also agreed as to the name of the child, it follows, And they all marvelled. For there was no one of this name among their kinsfolk that any one could say that they had both previously determined upon it. GREGORY NAZIANZEN. (Orat. vi.) The birth of John then broke the silence of Zacharias, as it follows, And his mouth was opened. For it were unreasonable when the voice of the Word had come forth, that his father should remain speechless.

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

  If a man's son keeps saying, 'I will, I will', to his father's bidding, but does not do what his father says, then he does not fulfill his father's will. But if another son says: 'I do not wish to obey', but then goes and does his father's bidding-he indeed fulfills his father's will. So also with men: not he is in the Father's will who says: 'I am in the Father's will', but he who does what the Father wishes. I and the Father are OneTable of ContentsThe true food of everlasting life is the fulfillment Of the Father's will GIVE US OUR DAILY BREADAFTER that the Jews wished to condemn Jesus to death, and he went away into Galilee and lived with his relations. The Jewish feast of tabernacles was come, and the brothers of Jesus prepared to go to the feast, and called him to go with them. They did not believe in his teaching and said to him:You say that the Jewish service of God is wrong and that you know the real way to serve God by deeds. If you really think that no one but you knows how to serve God come with us to the feast. Many people will be there and you can declare before them all that the teaching of Moses is wrong. If they all believe you, then your pupils also will see that you are right. Why hide yourself? You say that our service is wrong, and that you know the true service of God: well then, show it to everybody. And Jesus said: You have a special time and place in which to serve God, but for me there is none. I work for God everywhere and always. That is just what I show to people. I show them that their service of God is wrong and that is why they hate me. Go you to the feast, and I will go when I am ready. And his brothers went, but he remained behind, and only went up at the middle of the feast. The Jews were shocked that he did not honor their feast and delayed coming to it, and they disputed about his teaching. Some said that he was right, while others said that he only disturbed the people. In the middle of the feast Jesus went into the Temple and began to teach the people that their service of God was wrong, and that God should be served not in a temple and by sacrifices, but in the spirit and by deeds. They all listened to him and wondered that he, an unlearned man, should have such wisdom. And Jesus, knowing that all wondered at his wisdom, said to them: My teaching is not my own, but His that sent me. If any man wishes to do the will of the spirit that sent us into life, he will know that I have not invented this teaching but that it is of God.

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  To non-statisticians, these raw numbers—especially toward the end of the chart— may look incredible. But in fact they are simply the result of an exponential curve. If 25,000 to 30,000 Christians were added in the half century between 100 and 150 CE, then at the very same rate of growth, during the half century between 250 and 300 CE, something like 2 million or 2.5 million Christians would be added. The enormous numbers provided by a steady rate of growth can be seen especially at the end of the graph. If there were just 2.5 million to 3.5 million Christians in the year 300, the church would have to grow only at a rate of 26 percent to reach 30 million by the year 400. The nature of this exponential curve can be seen in the following tables: NUMBER OF CHRISTIANS FROM 20 CE TO 400 CE 35,000,000 5 30,000,000 -~ 25,000,000 20,000,000 ~ 15,000,000 - 10,000,000 ~ 5,000,000 ~ ne iF 300 30 60 100 150 200 250 S12 400 NUMBER OF CHRISTIANS FROM 20 CE TO 400 CE 4 35,000,000 30,000,000 ~ 25,000,000 > 4 20,000,000 4 15,000,000 10,000,000 ~ 5,000,000 ~ I need to stress that we are not talking about implausible rates of growth, even though the numbers at the end of the period are staggering. For the fourth century, if the rate really was around 25 percent per decade, that would only mean that every hundred Christians would need to convert just two or occasionally three people a year. In that regard, it is important to remember that conversions include everyone who begins to adopt Christian practices. If the head of a household converts, and he brings his wife and three children into the fold so that they too adopt the new faith, then you have five new members. We know these kinds of “family conversions” occurred from the very beginning of the Christian movement. They are recounted in the book of Acts as a matter of course as if there was nothing at all unusual about members of a household joining the paterfamilias (or even the materfamilias) in the faith. And so, when Paul and his companions are in Philippi, they convert a wealthy woman named Lydia, and immediately “she and her household were baptized” (Acts 16:14-15). Soon thereafter an unnamed jailer learns he must believe in Jesus to be saved, and “he and his entire family were baptized without delay” (Acts 16:33). I am not saying these accounts are necessarily historical. But the author of Acts saw nothing at all unusual in an entire family joining in the new faith of the head of the household.

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  If the very occasional references to Christians in the pagan sources of our period are exaggerated, the numerous references in texts written by Christians themselves are far more so. That is true from the very beginning, starting with our first account of the Christian movement, the New Testament book of Acts. Right after Jesus’s resurrection, in Acts 1:14, we are told that the Christian cohort consisted of the eleven remaining disciples, several unnamed women, Jesus’s mother, and_ his brothers. But then, in the very next verse, we learn that “in those days” there were 120 believers. How did a hundred people convert in the space of a verse? The conversions continue apace soon after this. As we have seen, on the day of Pentecost, just fifty days after Jesus’s crucifixion, Peter converted three thousand Jews (Acts 2:41); soon thereafter, he converted another five thousand (Acts 4:4). In the next chapter, multitudes more convert (Acts 5:14). At this rate the entire empire will be Christian by the year 50. No Christian author is more profligate in his exaggerations than the apologist and theologian Tertullian, writing about a century after Acts at the end of the second and beginning of the third century. In his defense of the Christian faith, the Apology, Tertullian claims that pagans are aghast at the massive conversions to the faith: “The outcry is that the state is filled with Christians—that they are in the fields, in the citadels, in the islands” (Apology 1). In another work he indicates that “our numbers are so great—constituting all but the majority in every city” (To Scapula 2).2 His most famous statement absolutely revels in the sheer dominance of the Christian religion: We are but of yesterday, and we have filled every place among you—cities, islands, fortresses, towns, market-places, the very camp, tribes, companies, palace, senate, forum—we have left nothing to you but the temples of your gods . . . . For if such multitudes of men were to break away from you, and betake themselves to some remote corner of the world, why, the very loss of so many citizens, whatever sort they were, would cover the empire with shame... . Why, you would be horror-struck at the solitude in which you would find yourselves . .. . You would have to seek subjects to govern. You would have more enemies than citizens remaining. For now it is the immense number of Christians which makes your enemies so few—almost all the inhabitants of your various cities being followers of Christ. (Apology 37)

• From How the Bible Actually Works (2019)

  Israelites would have considered such a shameful death as an act of God’s love. All this makes me wonder at what point are we not reimagining God in ways that fit our here and now? Don’t we all go beyond what the Bible says and imagine God for ourselves? Whether we realize it or not, isn’t that happening all the time? I think it is. Rather than recoiling at the thought, we should embrace, as we’ve seen, the fact that reimagining God is modeled for us within the Bible itself. Do we really think we are so above the fray of the human drama that we can avoid it? Maybe that is exactly what God wants. In fact, what is the story of Jesus and the Good News if not a reimagining of the “God of the Bible”? It’s What Christians Do Jesus’s crucifixion, for example, represents a major reimagining of God. Child sacrifice for Israelites is condemned in no uncertain terms in the Old Testament. It is abhorrent and listed as one of the abominations committed by King Manasseh (whom we met earlier) that led to the exile. And yet central to the story of Jesus is God the Father doing that very thing while at the same time turning the idea of Old Testament sacrifice on its head. Now God is the one offering a sacrifice for humanity rather than humans sacrificing to God, as it always was. What’s going on here? Is this God up to something new? Yes. The New Testament writers did not reject the God of the Old—they reimagined God, because the gospel in their time and place demanded it. The God-language of their Jewish tradition could not fully account for what the (Jewish) New Testament writers believed God had done in Jesus of Nazareth in their time. The same goes for the resurrection. This was off script. Not only was the idea of people rising from the dead in general not really a thing in the Old Testament, * but the notion that Israel’s king would alone be raised from the dead after being executed by another power was utterly and completely unexpected— ridiculous, in fact. Yet, this is what Jesus followers believed God did. And so God had to be reimagined. No one struggled with this more than the apostle Paul, who pored over his Bible to find creative ways to connect Israel’s story with this unexpected turn in Jesus.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  For the Stoics, it takes the form of willi ng acceptance of wh atever occurs. Shaftesbur y seems to return to a positi on close to this. But in general, Deism has affinities with this ancient philosophi cal religion, with which many think ers in the eighteenth century felt a strong sympa thy, against its Christi an supplanter. The drawing together of God and ma n took a quite different form amon g the Hebrews. There the separatio n of God from the cosm os remain s strong. God's holiness (kodesh) contrasts with the merely profane in the universe .7 But surpr isingly, God calls on Israel to be his people. At the beginning, this involved someth ing like a patron-clien t relation , in this respect like all the surro unding peopl es who had "their" gods. But it also involved some thin g mor e, that Israel become a "holy people" (Exodus 19: 6, Leviticus 20: 7), that is, a people consecrated to God, hence themselves set apart from amo ng the natio ns. You must lay them [ the nations] under ban. You must make no covenant with them nor show them any pity ... For you are a people consecrated [k adosh} to Yahweh your God; it is you that Yahweh our God has chosen to be his very own people out of all the peoples on the earth. (Deuter onomy 7: 2., 6, JB; also Leviticus 2.0:2 6) In other words , it was a people calle d to live God's way; not to live by the ordinary ways of other peoples, "paying their dues" to a tutelary deity, but to live by a law given by God. Israel became, in a sense, a theocracy. The convergence thus takes the form of humans being drawn into God' s purposes. But there is also a movement the other way, as it were. God wills and furthers the good of his people. This, of course, fits with the "norma l", widely recognized patron-client model . But there is a difference. That the dedication to God goes beyond mere "paying of dues" is reflected in the story of the Akedah , Abraham's readiness to sacrifice Isaac at God's comman d. God asks for a total giving, and in return "the Lord provi des" (Genesis 2.2.: 14). Further, the notion develops with the prophets that service to God involv es justice and help to the oppressed. "What are your endless sacrifices to me ? says Yahwe h. I am sick of holocausts of rams and the fat of calves . .. Your hands are covered with blood, wash, make you rselves clean.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Frankish power in the West, the elimination of Byzantium, the ecclesiastical ascendancy of Rome and its claims to be the residual legatee of the empire in the West; and last but not least the development of sacramental kingship. The ambiguity, however, lay in the Pope’s role, as Charlemagne instantly recognized, when the nature of the ceremony caught him by surprise. Was the Pope donating him the empire, or merely acknowledging his de facto possession of it by imposing the sacramental seal and thus making it de jure ? Or to put it another way, did Charlemagne by receiving the crown from the Pope’s hands in some way acknowledge papal superiority to his own imperial status? Leo III had decorated the Lateran with a huge wall-painting of Christ, flanked on one side by Constantine and Sylvester, and on the other by Charlemagne and Leo. This evaded the issue. In the eighth century, theory tended to reflect the fact that the Pope was in need of Frankish protection, and therefore inferior. Royal ecclesiastics drew a distinction between the eastern emperor, who had always been crowned by the Church since 457, but was not anointed, and the western king, who was. The western Church had taken the anointing straight from the Old Testament; when Samuel performed the anointing, ‘the spirit of the Lord came upon David’. Thus the king became Christus domini, the Lord’s Anointed. He was supreme on earth. Charlemagne was told in 755, by one of his bishops: ‘Always remember, my king, that you are the deputy of God, your king. You are set to guard and rule all his members, and you must render an account on the Day of Judgment. The bishop is in a secondary place, being simply the Vicar of Christ.’ Writing to Charlemagne in 799, Alcuin put it another way: ‘There have so far been three positions in the world of the highest rank: the Pope, who rules the see of St Peter, the prince of the apostles, as his vicar... the imperial dignity and secular power of the second Rome [Byzantium]... and the royal dignity, in which the dispensation of our Lord Jesus Christ has placed you as the ruler of the Christian people, in power more excellent than the other two, in wisdom more distinguished, in the dignity of your rule more sublime. On you alone depends the whole safety of the churches of Christ.’ Obviously, when the coronation of 800 amalgamated the second and third roles, Charlemagne’s authority was confirmed and enhanced: his ruling duties embraced the entire Christian people. Alcuin saw Charlemagne as sacerdos as well as rex – like Melchisadech. He was head of the Church as well as the State. He told him: ‘You

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Time passed on the Scottish quay and brightness moved in from the sea. Then a man was walking towards us, holding two enormous cardboard boxes like a couple of oversized suitcases. Strangely alien suitcases that didn’t seem to obey the laws of physics, because as he walked they moved unpredictably, in concert neither with his steps nor with gravity. Whatever is in them is moving, I thought with a little thump of my heart. He set the boxes down, ran his hand through his hair. ‘I’m meeting another falconer here in a bit. He’s having the younger bird. Yours is the older. Bigger too,’ he said. ‘So.’ He ran his hand through his hair again, exposing a long talon scratch across his wrist, angry at its edges and scurfed with dried blood. ‘We’ll check the ring numbers against the Article 10s,’ he explained, pulling a sheaf of yellow paper from the rucksack and unfolding two of the official forms that accompany captive-bred rare birds throughout their lives. ‘Don’t want you going home with the wrong bird.’ We noted the numbers. We stared down at the boxes, at their parcel-tape handles, their doors of thin plywood and hinges of carefully tied string. Then he knelt on the concrete, untied a hinge on the smaller box and squinted into its dark interior. A sudden thump of feathered shoulders and the box shook as if someone had punched it, hard, from within. ‘She’s got her hood off,’ he said, and frowned. That light, leather hood was to keep the hawk from fearful sights. Like us.

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

  At the time, this was a specifically Western development: a Greek traveller who made it all the way to Compostela in the early twelfth century was apparently taken aback to hear St James admiringly called ‘a knight of Christ’.[11] Not just saints, but God himself: it is an equal surprise to enter the crypt of Auxerre Cathedral in Burgundy, where the vault is dominated by a fresco of Christ himself at the end of time, riding a white horse in knightly fashion and leading a warrior-band of mounted angels (see Plate 6). The motif is rare in the New Testament, but here it directly illustrates a scene from that exceptional text, the Book of Revelation (19.11–16).[12] The thought had an immediate resonance for the cleric commissioning the fresco: almost certainly Humbaud, Bishop of Auxerre, protégé of Pope Urban II and himself an active promoter of the First Crusade. Humbaud actually died on his return journey from a Jerusalem pilgrimage in 1115.[13] In the background was a new rhetoric of classifying Christian society three ways: those who prayed, those who fought and those who laboured (oratores, bellatores, laboratores was a common summary of these categories). Two sets of fighters emerge from the scheme: clergy fighting Satan with their prayers, and soldiers fighting God’s enemies on earth (for instance, in contemporary Anglo-Saxon England, the ‘pagan’ Danes). The lay laboratores would be expected to get on with providing resources for the other two groups. The threefold classification occurs quite suddenly around the year 1000, to be found in the devotional and pastoral writings of one of the Anglo-Saxon monastic reformers, Ælfric of Eynsham Abbey, and very soon also in Francia, influentially in a popular satirical poem by the eleventh-century Bishop Adalbero of Laon. The neatness of it is probably why it appealed to a western European society that was in reality becoming much more complex than that, and where it might be possible to change one’s social position; where, for instance, did the increasing commercial life of towns fit into it? Even within its unrealistic simplicity, it was primarily a man’s effort to categorize men, saying nothing useful about the role of women but providing a convenient way of discussing why secular men should keep away from appropriating Church lands – and, increasingly also, why priests should not take wives, a practice only suitable for the two categories of laypeople. That was about to become a major issue in Western society, as we will see.[14]

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

  There was a much wider reason for monasticism developing as a fruitful outgrowth of Christian institutions: for all those without power amid the massive inequalities of Graeco-Roman society, it gave an unparalleled opportunity to seize one’s own fate and exercise personal choice. In that respect, monasticism was like martyrdom, which has been neatly described as an ‘equal opportunity employer’, guaranteeing immediate admission to heaven.[51] Martyrdom at the hands of Christianity’s enemies in government and society was not nearly as frequent in Christian experience during the first three centuries CE as later Christian legend would have it, whereas the option of monastic or anchoritic life was a choice increasingly available to devout and strenuous Christians as the Church expanded. Moreover, monasticism gained new momentum and purpose from the profound change in Christianity’s fortunes that quite unexpectedly appeared in the opening years of the fourth century: its sudden acquisition of power in wider society. Our story will now be told in this new context for a further millennium and a half. Part ThreeThe Coming of Christendom8Suddenly in Power (300–600)When at the beginning of the fourth century the aspiring Emperor Constantine I abruptly decided to show especial favour to the Christian God, it produced one of the most surprising and enduring turns in the course of Mediterranean history, comparable to the much less enduring campaign for religious transformation by the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhnaten sixteen hundred years before. There was nothing else like this moment in the previous history of the Roman Empire: the special favour shown from the 190s by Septimius Severus and his sons to the North African god Serapis, and the later cult of the Sun-God embraced by the eccentric young Emperor Elagabalus (Akhnaten replayed as farce), were merely adjustments within the Classical pantheon. The steady march of Christian power during the fourth century was fragile and might have been reversed, as was demonstrated by Constantine’s nephew the Emperor Julian, who, after a Christian upbringing, was shrewdly aware of the Church’s potential weaknesses. Yet Julian’s rather effective moves against Christian ascendancy were ended with his death in battle in 363, after only two years on the imperial throne. Following that, emperors resumed Constantine’s alliance with the Church hierarchy, and by the beginning of the fifth century, a new project was in train in Mediterranean society: ‘Christendom’ – an integrated, monopolistic, hierarchical Christian society that endured for centuries, in some places to within living memory.[1]

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  Perhaps most surprising is the fact that the ultimate triumph of Christianity did not require the conversion of the emperor Constantine. As I have been stressing throughout this book, that conversion was indeed important, one of the most breathtaking moments in Christian history. Christianity went from persecuted minority to favored religion, nearly in one fell swoop. Certainly this opened the floodgates in the sense that now the upper classes within the Roman administration —that rarefied 1 percent of the educated, cultured, and wealthy elite—could see their way to adopting the Christian faith. Christian buildings could now be constructed with no dread of reprisal. The masses could join the faith without fearing for their lives or property. And Christianity grew enormously—from, say, two and a half or three million at the beginning of the fourth century to thirty million at the end. But it would be a mistake to think that it was Constantine’s conversion alone that facilitated the Christianization of the empire. If Christianity had simply continued to grow at the rate it was growing at the time of the emperor’s conversion —or even less—it still would have eventually taken over. It is impossible to say what would have happened if Constantine had not converted. One could argue that, had the Romans been even more determined to stamp out the faith, they could have done so. Or one could argue the opposite: that even more rigorous Roman opposition would have hardened the Christians’ resolve and made them more fervent in the propagation of their religion, making true Tertullian’s claim that the blood of martyrs was the seed of the church. We will never know what might have happened. But we do know what did happen. Constantine converted at an opportune moment. Christianity was poised to grow exponentially even as its rate of growth slowed. The masses did begin to pour in. The emperor showered favors on a religion that excluded the possibility of all other worship. From that point on, looking at the matter in hindsight, the pagan cults of Rome were doomed. An exclusive commitment to the one God of the Christians destroyed the other religions in its wake. Within eighty years of Constantine’s conversion, the transformation would be both massive and official, Rome would become predominantly and officially Christian. Chapter 7 Christians Under Assault: Persecution, Martyrdom, and Self-Defense

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  Interestingly, Matthew’s text also describes a radical change of mind on the ethnic issue, but in this story, it is Jesus himself who undergoes a transformation as he receives his resurrection body and the power that comes with it. The pre-resurrection Jesus is staunchly committed to a closed-ethnic approach to Gentiles. We see this in several passages, 26 but perhaps most clearly in Matt 10:5–6,27 as Jesus instructs his disciples to programmatical y avoid not only Gentiles, but even Samaritans. While the blessings of the kingdom, such as healing and exorcism, are not restricted to Israel exclusively (we shall return to this later when dealing with salvation), the kingdom is clearly not for the nations. Yet. No Gentile ever becomes a disciple in this gospel, even though some rare individual examples affirm their loyalty to Jesus, as conquered subjects would their sovereign. 28 Indeed, in Matthew’s list of rules for the future ekklēsia, Gentiles typify the archetypal outsider: the unrepentant sinner (Matt 18:17). In a somewhat unexpected narrative turn, however, the post-resurrection Jesus, invested with all power not only on earth but also in heaven (Matt 28:18), opens up the ethnical y defined gate of discipleship to allow non-Jews to enter (28:19–20). There has been much debate as to what exactly the resurrected Jesus’ sudden interest in Gentiles 24 Cf. Acts 15:8–10. As seen here and elsewhere, the basic understanding of the production of theology and the rulings that often follow with it in Acts (and in Paul) is that these are human activities trying to make sense of what the divine (which is ultimately unknowable and uncontrol able; cf. Rom 11:33– 36) has already accomplished. In this post-factum sense-making activity—theology—searching biblical texts that il uminate what is presented as God’s acting based on certain experiences in the here-and-now plays an important, but not isolated part (Acts 15:14–15). Theology, in these texts, is thus not primarily constructed based on analysis of biblical texts (“biblical theology” represents a phenomenon quite foreign to the authors of the biblical texts), but builds on an understanding of God as a present reality capable of new, surprising, and history-changing interventions in the world. 25 For further discussion, see Anders Runesson, “Paul’s Rule in All the Ekklēsiai (1 Cor 7:17–24),” in Introduction to Messianic Judaism: Its Ecclesial Context and Biblical Foundations (ed. David Rudolph and Joel Willits; Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2013), 214–23. 26 E.g., Matt 15:24: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” 27 Matt 10:5–8: “These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: ‘Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, proclaim the good news, “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment.’ ”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “Then what? Had you eaten breakfast at home? Or in Mill Valley? Try to picture it. Let your mind wander freely back to that morning. Close your eyes, if it helps.” Halston closed his eyes. After three or four minutes of silence, Ernest wondered whether he had fallen asleep and in a soft voice prodded, “Halston? Halston? Don’t move, stay where you are, but try to think aloud. What are you seeing in your mind?” “Doctor”—Halston slowly opened his eyes—“did I ever tell you about Artemis?” “Artemis? The Greek goddess? No, not a word.” “Doctor,” said Halston, blinking his eyes and shaking his head as if to clear it, “I’m a little shaken. I’ve just now had the oddest experience. As though a rent suddenly appeared in my mind, letting all the uncanny events of that day pour through. I don’t want you to think I’ve been deliberately withholding this from you.” “Rest assured, Halston. I’m with you. You started to talk about Artemis.” “Well, I’m just sorting things out—I’d better start from the beginning of that accursed day—the day before I wound up in the emergency room. . . .” Ernest loved stories and sat back, full of anticipation. He had the strongest feeling that this man, with whom he had spent three puzzling hours, was now going to reveal the key to a mystery. “Well, Doctor, you know I’ve been single for almost three years and a little cautious—more than a little—about another—er—liaison. I informed you that I was greatly injured, emotionally and financially, by my ex-wife?” Ernest nodded. A glance at the clock. Damnit, only fifteen minutes left. He would have to move Halston along if he was to hear this story. “And this Artemis?” “Well, yes, back to the point, thank you. It’s funny, but it was your question about breakfast that morning that triggered something. It’s coming clearly now—stopping to breakfast at a café in the center of Mill Valley, sitting down at a large, empty table for four. Then the café got crowded, and a woman inquired if she could share my table. I looked up at her, and I confess I liked what I saw.” “How so?” “Extraordinary-looking woman. Beautiful. Perfect features, fetching smile. My age, I guess, around forty, but a lithe body, like a teenager. A body, as American films put it, to die for.” Ernest gazed at Halston, a different, animated Halston, and felt himself warming to him. “Tell me.” “A ‘ten.’ Like Bo Derek. Small waist and a most impressive bosom. Many of my Brit friends prefer androgynous women, but I hereby plead guilty to large-breast fetishism—and, no, Doctor, I don’t want to change that.” Ernest smiled reassuringly. Changing Halston’s—or his own—adoration of breasts was not on his agenda. “And?”

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  Over the years Arly’d mentioned both coke and crack. But now, in the late eighties, when I ran into him in the theater he usually had a hip bottle of Dewars with him. A couple of times, holding it up and looking at it in the light from the theater’s wall lamp, he told me, “Man, scotch is what saved me from being a crack-head!” And once, already tipsy, he came ringing my doorbell with a quart bottle already half empty. While we were sitting on my maroon living room rug, talking about one thing and another, suddenly he reached out, pulled me to him, and, with his eyes closed, kissed me for ten or fifteen uninterrupted minutes—which he’d certainly never done before in the theater! When we broke, he said, “Now—I ain’t never done that before! I mean with a guy. That was interesting. First I was trying to pretend like your beard was pussy hair or something. But I didn’t even really have to do that!” Good stuff, that Dewars. In 1984 I’d written a novel with a character based on Arly, about whom I’d tried to imagine what it would be like running into after a decade’s absence. The reality was less dramatic, more unusual, and probably—for some—more predictable. In the summer of ’93, when I was sitting out on my stoop reading, around the corner came a rotund fellow on a crutch, with natty tan slacks carefully pinned up on his missing leg, a single polished loafer (I seem to remember that he wore no sock; but possibly the one he wore was the same coffee-and-cream tan as his skin), hair thinning on the top, and his arm around an extraordinarily attractive and fresh-looking black-haired woman. Arly must have been forty, even forty-two by then. No, it hadn’t been ten years since I’d seen him, but it had been at least three. “Hey, man. I was wondering if I was going to run into you today. This is my wife, man—isn’t she beautiful?” (The woman couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three.) “We been married about six months now—well, she ain’t really my wife. But we been livin’ together—in my mother’s apartment. For six months. My mom, she went back to Colombia, so I got the apartment now. She don’t speak no English, but she loves to take care of me—” he gave me a quick wink—“almost as good as you used to. Isn’t she beautiful, man? She’s just twenty years old. Isn’t she the most beautiful woman in the world?” I’ll tell you, you could make a case for it. With her arm around Arly’s shoulder, her bright dark eyes, her white blouse and printed peasant skirt, she looked like a girl in love.

• From The City of God

  I am considerably surprised that such learned men, men who pronounce all material and sensible things to be altogether inferior to those that are spiritual and intelligible, should mention bodily contact in connection with the blessed life. Is that sentiment of Plotinus forgotten?--"We must fly to our beloved fatherland. There is the Father, there our all. What fleet or flight shall convey us thither? Our way is, to become like God."[349] If, then, one is nearer to God the liker he is to Him, there is no other distance from God than unlikeness to Him. And the soul of man is unlike that incorporeal and unchangeable and eternal essence, in proportion as it craves things temporal and mutable. And as the things beneath, which are mortal and impure, cannot hold intercourse with the immortal purity which is above, a mediator is indeed needed to remove this difficulty; but not a mediator who resembles the highest order of being by possessing an immortal body, and the lowest by having a diseased soul, which makes him rather grudge that we be healed than help our cure. We need a Mediator who, being united to us here below by the mortality of His body, should at the same time be able to afford us truly divine help in cleansing and liberating us by means of the immortal righteousness of His spirit, whereby He remained heavenly even while here upon earth. Far be it from the incontaminable God to fear pollution from the man[350] He assumed, or from the men among whom He lived in the form of a man. For, though His incarnation showed us nothing else, these two wholesome facts were enough, that true divinity cannot be polluted by flesh, and that demons are not to be considered better than ourselves because they have not flesh.[351] This, then, as Scripture says, is the "Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus,"[352] of whose divinity, whereby He is equal to the Father, and humanity, whereby He has become like us, this is not the place to speak as fully as I could. 18. _That the deceitful demons, while promising to conduct men to God by their intercession, mean to turn them from the path of truth._

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  A truly unexpected, personal consequence of adopting Darwin’s aesthetic view of life has been the discovery of new insights into the evolutionary impact of sexual coercion and sexual autonomy. When Patricia Brennan first proposed to work with me on the evolution of duck genitalia, I thought to myself, “Well, I’ve never worked on that end of the bird before.” I figured we would learn a lot of interesting anatomy, but I never imagined how the project would grow or that the results would transform my view of evolution so profoundly and raise so many surprising new directions and implications. Of course, it has long been clear that sexual coercion and sexual violence are directly harmful to the well-being of female animals. But the aesthetic perspective allows us to understand that sexual coercion also infringes upon their individual freedom of choice. Once we recognize that coercion undermines individual sexual autonomy, we are led, inexorably, to the discovery that freedom of choice matters to animals. Sexual autonomy is not a mythical and poorly conceived legal concept invented by feminists and liberals. Rather, sexual autonomy is an evolved feature of the societies of many sexual species. As we have learned from ducks and other birds, when sexual autonomy is abridged or disrupted by coercion or violence, mate choice itself can provide the evolutionary leverage to assert and expand the freedom of choice. In the later chapters of the book, I have proposed that the evolutionary struggle for female sexual autonomy played a critical role in the evolution of human sexuality and reproduction and was a critical factor in the evolution of humanity itself. But if this is true, why aren’t the women of the world enjoying the proposed fruits of this evolutionary process—universal fulfillment of sexual and social autonomy? The ongoing existence of rape, domestic violence, female genital mutilation, arranged marriage, honor killings, everyday sexism, economic dependence, and political subservience of women in many human cultures might seem to be direct evidence to falsify this view of human evolutionary history. Are we forced to acknowledge that such behaviors are an inescapable part of “human nature”—a part of our evolutionary legacy that humans will never overcome? I think not, and sexual conflict theory can help us to understand why.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  the incidence of cancer to be much higher (or much lower) than it is in the larger population. The deeper truth is that there is nothing to explain. The incidence of cancer is not truly lower or higher than normal in a county with a small population, it just appears to be so in a particular year because of an accident of sampling. If we repeat the analysis next year, we will observe the same general pattern of extreme results in the small samples, but the counties where cancer was common last year will not necessarily have a high incidence this year. If this is the case, the differences between dense and rural counties do not really count as facts: they are what scientists call artifacts, observations that are produced entirely by some aspect of the method of research—in this case, by differences in sample size. The story I have told may have surprised you, but it was not a revelation. You have long known that the results of large samples deserve more trust than smaller samples, and even people who are innocent of statistical knowledge have heard about this law of large numbers. But “knowing” is not a yes-no affair and you may find that the following statements apply to you: The feature “sparsely populated” did not immediately stand out as relevant when you read the epidemiological story. You were at least mildly surprised by the size of the difference between samples of 4 and samples of 7. Even now, you must exert some mental effort to see that the following two statements mean exactly the same thing: Large samples are more precise than small samples. Small samples yield extreme results more often than large samples do. The first statement has a clear ring of truth, but until the second version makes intuitive sense, you have not truly understood the first. The bottom line: yes, you did know that the results of large samples are more precise, but you may now realize that you did not know it very well. You are not alone. The first study that Amos and I did together showed that even sophisticated researchers have poor intuitions and a wobbly understanding of sampling effects. The Law of Small Numbers My collaboration with Amos in the early 1970s began with a discussion of the claim that people who have had no training in statistics are good “intuitive