Tenderness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Her first appearances before the English people were cleverly crafted to set the stage for a new type of leadership. Surrounded by all the usual royal pomp, she mixed in a common touch, making her seem both comforting and regal. She was not faking this. Having felt powerless in her youth, she could identify with the poorest charwoman of England. She indicated through her attitude that she was on their side, sensitive to their opinions of her. She wanted to earn their approval. She would build on this empathy throughout her reign, and the bonds between her and subjects became much more intense than with any previous ruler. With her ministers, the task was more delicate and difficult. It was a group of power-hungry men, with their egos and need to feel smarter than and superior to a woman. She depended on their help and goodwill to run the country, but if she revealed too much dependence on them, they would walk all over her. And so, from the first days of her rule, she made the following clear: she was all business; she would work harder than all of them; she would reduce expenditures for the court, sacrificing her own income in the process; and all activity was to be directed toward lifting England out of the hole it had fallen into. She showed early on her superior knowledge of the finances of the country and the tough side of herself in any negotiation. Upon occasion, she would flash her anger if a minister seemed to be furthering a personal agenda, and such outbursts could be quite intimidating. Mostly, though, she was warm and empathetic, attuned to the various moods of these men. Soon they wanted to please her and win her approval. To not work hard or smart enough could mean isolation and some coldness, and unconsciously they wanted to avoid this. They respected the fact that she lived up to her own high standards. In this way, she slowly placed these ministers into the same position that she had found herself in: needing to gain her trust and respect through their actions. Now, instead of a cabal of conspiring, selfish ministers, the queen had a team working to further her agenda, and the results soon spoke for themselves. By these methods, Elizabeth acquired the credibility she needed, but she made one major mistake—her handling of Mary, Queen of Scots. Elizabeth had become somewhat entitled herself, feeling in this case that she knew better than her ministers and that her personal qualms about executing a fellow queen trumped everything else. She paid a price for this policy, as she felt the people’s respect for her draining away, and it pained her. Her sense of the greater good was what guided her, but in this case the greater good would be served by having Mary executed. She was violating her own principles.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  She whispers good night and we’re gone, back into the cold spring air. It takes about two blocks of freezing cold before we decide we have to ride instead of walk. We find a boy’s bicycle with a long banana seat in somebody’s backyard and take it; Elizabeth pedals standing up and I ride on back, with my legs stuck straight out on either side. When she gets winded I take over, but I sit while I pedal, which scrunches her. I can’t help it; I’m tired. When we get to the big hill we leave the bike leaning against a tree and trudge ourselves straight up for one block and then it’s two blocks of flat ground, and then we’re at her house, sneaking back in. I go first in case somebody’s up; at least we know they won’t throw a pop bottle at me. The coast is clear. Elizabeth steps into her bedroom and suddenly we’re wide awake again. We debate about calling up the Garcias, and then, in an unusual display of restraint, don’t. Instead, we go out to the kitchen and prepare a cake mix we find in the cupboard. We take it back into the bedroom and lie on the bed in the dark, eating cherry chip cake batter with big wooden spoons. We’re wound up now, it’s impossible to think about sleeping. We discuss the Jeff Bach situation for a while. We come to the conclusion that it’s hard to like someone so blond. “I like dark-haired guys, I think,” Elizabeth says. I can see the shadow of her profile in the bed, she’s gesturing with her wooden spoon. “Me too,” I say. There is a long silence. It’s late, four A.M. or something. We’re finally getting tired again. She puts the batter on the floor next to the bed; I hand her my spoon and she drops it into the bowl. A few minutes pass. “I might like Danny Garcia,” she says tentatively. Another minute goes by. “I might like Stuart,” I say. She thinks this over. I turn on my side and she cuddles up right behind me; we sleep like two spoons whenever we’re in the same bed. “Stuart’s dangerous,” she whispers. “I know it,” I say softly, into the darkness, and then we’re both asleep. [image "art" file=Image00001.jpg] It’s nineteen seventy-something, summer, nighttime, black country road running through rural Illinois, the sky is immense. Three miles ahead are train tracks that can be sailed over if you approach them right, all four tires will leave the ground at once. We’re heading for our house, a two-story farm job with a big garden out back, a bunch of pigs that are not our responsibility, a summer kitchen with spiders and mice, and two dogs who wait patiently all day for us to get home so their lives can begin. I’ve thrown my lot in with the guy in the driver’s seat, and he with me.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  262 LECTURE 27 REBELLION AND REFORM IN LATIN AMERICA I n 1753, King Ferdinand VI of Spain bullied the pope into signing a concordat—a special agreement—effectively allowing the Spanish monarch to choose all the bishops and other important church officials throughout the Spanish empire. Later in the century, Charles III saw Catholic education and worship as a way to compel native people to learn Spanish and to keep a close eye on any tribes that might rebel. In short, as these kings consolidated their kingdoms in Europe into something resembling the modern nation state, they aimed to do the same abroad and to turn the church into a bureaucracy to help run the empire. 263Lecture 27—Rebellion and Reform in Latin America This lecture traces the Catholic Church in Latin America from this time of colonial rule up through the present day. Much has changed, but in some ways, the core themes remain the same: the struggle of religious leaders to assert themselves against worldly powers; the divided loyalties of a church that has always wanted to both protect its f lock and protect itself as an institution; and the challenges facing residents of Latin America at the edge of European empire. THE AGE OF INDEPENDENCE õIn 1789, the French Revolution reverberated around the world. Even if it didn’t topple the crowned heads of Europe, it set in motion the beginning of the end of European empire in Latin America. õIn 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte emerged from the turmoil of the French Revolution and crowned himself emperor of France. He invaded Spain and installed his older brother Joseph on the Spanish throne, but most of Spain refused to recognize this foreign usurper. õIn 1810, a national parliament formed in Cádiz, a part of Spain still free from French control. When Ferdinand VII regained his throne in 1814, many Spanish didn’t want to go back to the old days. The church was divided on this; many of the more senior officials appreciated the stability that a strong monarchy brought, but among the lower clergy, there was significant support for a more liberal regime that granted a greater voice to the people. 264The History of Christianity II õThis was true in the colonies as well. Take for example Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a priest in Dolores, Mexico. Most of his parishioners were Indians and mestizos, the term traditionally used for people of mixed European and Indian descent. Under the Spanish caste system, these were the groups most vulnerable to oppression and exploitation. õBut Hidalgo cared deeply for his f lock, and when royal authorities tried to crack down on local autonomy, he urged the people of Dolores to fight back. When he rang the church bells calling his parishioners to arms, he launched a rebellion that grew to include 80,000 people.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Eddie, a longtime friend of mine, had a history of getting dumped by women who were dismayed because he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—“open up.” The consensus among these women was that Eddie had a fear of commitment. “Whatever that means,” he said. They never knew how he felt about them. He would respond defensively. “What do you mean? I see you every day, don’t I? How can you not know how I feel?” When he met his wife, Noriko, she spoke almost no English, and he spoke no Japanese at all. Their courtship was literally speechless. Twelve years later, with two children in tow, he reflects on the early days. “I really think that not being able to talk made this whole thing possible. For once, there was no pressure on me to share. And so Noriko and I had to show how much we liked each other in other ways. We cooked for each other a lot, gave each other baths. I washed her hair. We looked at art. I remember one day I had just seen some amazing sculpture this homeless guy Curtis had made on Lafayette Street—he was crazy but brilliant. Try explaining that in pantomime. Whatever we couldn’t say, we showed, so I put her coat on her and led her by the hand all the way across town. Her face lit up when she saw it. It’s not like we didn’t communicate; we just didn’t talk.” When Too Much Is Still Not Enough I am not convinced that unrestrained disclosure—the ability to speak the truth and not hide anything—necessarily fosters a harmonious and robust intimacy. Any practice can be taken to a ridiculous extreme. Eddie and Noriko remind us that we can be very close without much talk. And the reverse is also true—too much self-revealing talk can still land us on the outskirts of intimacy. In the wonderful movie Bliss, a scene of passionate lovemaking—dim lights, vague body parts, and the roaring groans accompanying orgasm—is immediately followed by a couples therapy session. The therapist, played by Spalding Gray, adheres to an ideology of openness which the husband finds more than a little difficult to take. Therapist:How’s the sex?Joseph:You go first.Mary:OK. I have a confession to make. I fake my orgasms. I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want to hurt you.Joseph:You’ve never had an orgasm?Mary:Not with you.Therapist:Joseph, it’s important that Mary can tell you how she feels, and for you to be able to hear it.Obviously, knowing everything about the other, and having him know everything about us, does not always promote the kind of closeness we want. If words serve as venues of connection, they can also stage insuperable obstacles. Needless to say, I don’t advocate this kind of therapeutic intervention.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Barn in Upstate New York Many years later, I wrote part of this book in a barn on the property of the late Edna St. Vincent Millay. I didn’t know I was writing the book yet; it would take two more summers to realize it was a book about a house that was not a house and a dream that was no dream at all. But I sketched out scenes and jotted down notes and did a lot of mental excavation staring at the wall of the barn. A few weeks in, while hiking out in the woods, I came upon what looked like a mound of garbage. When I got closer, I realized what it was: a huge pile of broken and discarded bottles of gin and morphine, where Edna’s erstwhile housekeeper had taken the empties and left them. There was something horrifying about the mountain of glass. I had just finished Edna’s biography, wherein I’d learned that weeks after her husband died, she fell to her own death in her house, on the stairs, likely in a haze of intoxication. Was it a terrible accident? Suicide? Everybody has a theory. The biography made me angry. Edna treated her lovers, male and female alike, with no small amount of cruelty. She was talented but arrogant; brilliant but profoundly selfish. And yet, there among the trees, seeing the measure of her pain, the proportions of her problems, I felt a stab of sympathy. It couldn’t have been easy to be married to her, but it couldn’t have been easy to be her, either. One day, a bird slammed into my studio window. I was sitting on a yoga ball and tumbled backward in terror. Almost every residency I’ve had since, I’ve found at least one stunned bird sprawled on the ground outside my workspace. I learned: they never see the glass coming. They only see the reflection of the sky.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  What kind of toothpaste do you use? Or do we use the same tube? What side of the bed do you sleep on? Lots of covers, none, a fan, air-conditioning, an open window, an electric blanket, heat turned up or down at night? We’re going to a party. Should we bring a gift? How expensive should that gift be? Your parents always took a gift of some sort? Why? Mine never brought a gift—isn’t that excessive? What are we going to do? Are we going to follow in the pattern of your family or mine? Or are we going to establish our own way of doing things? A holiday is coming. Your family or mine? Every other holiday with your family? But mine lives close by, yours far away. Why do you keep so many batteries in the refrigerator? Why do you hang your clothes there? I’ve noticed that when you make your breakfast, you have the strange habit of . . . And we could go on and on. It’s these details, these everyday sorts of lists that sound so minor, that are often at the heart of a marriage. They’re what you find out about the person as you begin the lifelong exploration of just who this person is. A marriage is between those two people, not us. It’s not ours, it’s theirs.17 Especially when it comes to sex. What goes on between them is a profound mystery. The mystery of the mingling of souls. What goes on under the chuppah belongs to that man and that woman. When it is shared with others, it no longer belongs to them exclusively. And its power is decreased. Because the power of their coming together is rooted in their choice to give themselves to each other and to no one else in this particular way. Out of six billion people on the planet, I choose you. And no one else. No one else gets this. No one else gets me in this specific, holy, sacred, emotional, spiritual, physical way. Its power is derived from its exclusivity. That’s why wedding ceremonies stir us like they do. The bride comes down the aisle and gives herself to this man and no one else. They have something with each other that they have with no one else. We have to be very careful what we share. Because when you give it away, you no longer have it. The Divine Hovering The chuppah is a place of confidentiality. If one partner doesn’t know whether they can trust the other, they will not share certain things. And these may be the kinds of things that if there were trust, would bring them together. Is this between you and me, or you, me, and your friends? Because that is going to change how much I tell you, how much I let you in, how much I trust you with, how much I give to you. How naked I get with you.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  He’s eventually arrested and put on a sort of trial, at which he’s asked to perform miracles. He refuses, knowing that a display of his miraculous abilities would not be true to the path he’s on.21 He’s eventually beaten and flogged. When he doesn’t fight back, he’s mocked, and he doesn’t say anything in return. He’s hung on a cross and says, “I am thirsty.”22 Naked. Bleeding. Vulnerable. Thirsty. He even quotes a well-known prayer of the day, which includes the haunting line, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”23 It was explained this way in a popular first-century hymn, recorded in the book of Philippians: “[Jesus] who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing.”24 Strength and Weakness This is not weakness as we think of weakness. Jesus knows exactly what he’s doing. There is a weakness that is truly weakness, that has nothing else to it—no depth, no intention, no greater purpose. But Jesus is intentional in what he’s doing. His vulnerability is for a purpose. There is a weakness that is actually strength. And there is a strength that is actually weakness. Take, for example, a parent who yells at their children and holds them accountable for all sorts of random tasks they were supposed to have known to do and who allows their mood to dictate the mood of the whole house. This kind of parent dominates their family with manipulative behavior and petty punishments that create chaos and insecurity for those around them. This kind of parent is using their strength, but they are actually weak. They do this because in truth, they’re broken, confused, and insecure. They have no idea what they’re doing, as a parent or as a person. The same is true for managers and bosses and teachers and anyone who uses their position of authority to coerce or manipulate or bully others. They can get people to do what they want, but it’s only because of the position they hold. Their authority is rooted in nothing larger or stronger or higher than their rank. And that can be taken away tomorrow. They may appear strong, but they are actually weak. Contrast this with people who appear weak but are actually quite strong. It’s when someone says something mean or cutting about us and everything within us wants to one-up them with an even nastier comment in return, thus winning the exchange, but we hold our tongue. We “lose” the round, but what we did took tremendous strength. And it would take even more strength to forgive them and then maybe even love them. It would all appear quite weak to the observer, unless they understood that what they were witnessing was actually strength in action.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  196The History of Christianity II õHowever, the abolitionist movement was full of Christians. From our modern perspective, most of these Christians held racist beliefs: Very few of them considered people of color to be fully equal to whites. But they believed that slavery was the work of Satan; it contradicted the biblical principle that all human beings are created in the image of God. õDifferent theologies drove their activism. For example, Quakers believed that God endowed humans of all colors with the same inner light, which puts all humans on the same spiritual footing. Quakers criticized slavery and banned their members from owning slaves earlier than many other religious groups. WOMEN REFORMERS õWomen played a huge role in the abolitionist movement. Many believed that the quest to win more freedom and respect for women was connected to the quest to free enslaved non-whites. õWhen historians tell the story of the abolitionist movement in Britain, one of the main protagonists is usually William Wilberforce, an evangelical Parliament member who campaigned in public and negotiated in back rooms for decades to build alliances with politicians and businessmen to end the British slave trade in 1807. But one of his most remarkable collaborators was an evangelical woman named Hannah More, who essentially served as Wilberforce’s chief propagandist. õShe worked alongside Wilberforce to try to swing the tide of British political opinion. In 1788, she published a long poem on slavery. Here are a few lines, which were fairly radical for their time: Whene’er to Africa’s shores I turn my eyes, Horrors of deepest, deadliest guilt arise; I see, by more than Fancy’s mirror shown, The burning village, and the blazing town: See the dire victim torn from social life, See the sacred infant, hear the shrieking wife! 197Lecture 20—Christian Missions and Moral Reform õMore really wanted her white reader to imagine the full, human life that enslaved people had in Africa before traders wrenched them from their families. She didn’t base her case for abolition on scripture verses: She was writing for an audience beyond likeminded evangelicals, and her main rhetorical weapon was human empathy. õThe Quaker abolitionist Elizabeth Heyrick took another approach, one that aimed more at people’s pocketbooks. She went around her hometown, Leicester, in central England, and tried to persuade all the grocers to stop stocking sugar products and anything else produced by the slave plantations of the West Indies.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  could feel the distance separating themselves from the monarch, and how little their rulers really considered them. This feeling of entitlement also blunted their political effectiveness. The government ministers were cowed and intimidated by someone like Henry VIII, and so their energy went into appeasing the king rather than using their own intelligence and creative powers. With this sense of entitlement, rulers paid less attention to the details of governing, which were too boring; wars of conquest became their chief means of getting glory and providing riches for the aristocracy, even though such wars drained a country’s resources. These rulers could be incredibly selfish—Henry VIII had Elizabeth’s mother executed so he could marry his latest mistress, not caring how tyrannical this made him seem to the English. Mary, Queen of Scots, had her husband murdered so she could marry her lover. It would be easy for Elizabeth to delude herself and simply expect the loyalty that came with her august position. But she was too smart to fall into that trap. She would deliberately go in the opposite direction. She would feel no sense of entitlement. She would keep in mind the weakness of her actual position. She would not passively expect loyalty; she would turn active. She would earn the trust and credibility she required through her actions over time. She would demonstrate that she was not selfish, that everything she did was motivated by what was for the greater good of the country. She would be alert and relentless in this task. She would alter the way people (her subjects, her ministers, her foreign rivals) perceived her —from an inexperienced and weak woman to a figure of authority and great power. By forging much deeper ties with her ministers and the commoners, she would overcome people’s natural fickleness and channel their energies for the purpose of rebuilding England. Her first appearances before the English people were cleverly crafted to set the stage for a new type of leadership. Surrounded by all the usual royal pomp, she mixed in a common touch, making her seem both comforting and regal. She was not faking this. Having felt powerless in her youth, she could identify with the poorest charwoman of England. She indicated through her attitude that she was on their side, sensitive to their opinions of her. She wanted to earn their approval. She would build on this empathy throughout her reign, and the bonds between her and subjects became much more intense than with any previous ruler. With her ministers, the task was more delicate and difficult. It was a group of power-hungry men, with their egos and need to feel smarter than and superior to a woman. She depended on their help and goodwill to run the country, but if she revealed too much dependence on them, they would walk all over her. And so, from the first days of her rule, she made the following clear: she was all

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  You would need to strip yourself of all of the trappings that come with ultimate power and authority. That’s how love works. It doesn’t matter if a man has a million dollars and wants to woo a woman, if she loves him for his money, it isn’t really love. If you were an almighty being who made the universe and everything in it, you would need to meet people on their level, in their world, on their soil . . . like them. This is the story of the Bible. This is the story of Jesus. The Upside-Down Empire Consider the story just for the sheer poetry of it. Jesus is born to teenage peasants under questionable circumstances. His mother gets pregnant before marriage.10 He’s born amid the dung and straw of a stable. He’s placed in a feeding trough.11 His brothers and sisters think he’s out of his mind,12 and after his first sermon in his hometown, the people he grew up with form a mob and try to kill him.13 And who does Jesus identify with? The outcasts, the people of the land who aren’t good enough, clean enough, wealthy enough, and pure enough to be a part of the establishment. He’s invited to dine with the elite and the rich, which he does numerous times, but he also eats with the lowest of the low—and he enjoys it. He enjoys them. He touches people with infectious skin diseases,14 he lets questionable women touch him,15 he lays his hands on dead bodies,16 and he engages in conversation with promiscuous women alone in the middle of the day.17 His entire life is about the stripping away of power and control. Jesus always chooses the path of love, not power. Inclusion, not exclusion. Connection and solidarity rather than rank and hierarchy. Touch rather than distance. Compassion rather than control. He comes on a donkey, not a horse.18 Weeping and broken, not proud and triumphant.19 This path Jesus has chosen, which he continues to choose day after day, takes on some ominous undertones. He finds himself at odds with those in power. Partway through the Gospels—the accounts of his life—he starts dropping hints that this path he’s on is going somewhere. Somewhere that involves suffering and even death. His hints, which start turning into predictions, are about a conflict that he sees as inevitable.20 A conflict between love and controlling power. As we read the Gospels, we find Jesus’s message putting him more and more in conflict with the religious and political leaders of his day. He’s threatening their power. This is what love does, it threatens the empires of power and control and wealth and manipulation.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  The owner of the farm grew sunflowers, and in the fields their luminous heads were always turned toward the light—one morning he drove us into their midst to show us how they followed the sun’s path across the sky. The land around us was so flat you could see black thunderclouds slit through with lightning in every direction; storms so distant they never arrived. I had never been so far from home. Every night, after the campers went to bed, I would sit and talk with Joel. He spoke openly, honestly of his faith; how he struggled with his own imperfections: pride and jealousy and—his voice dropping low—lust. “I’m supposed to be a man of God,” he said one evening as mosquitoes chewed up our limbs in the darkness. “But I feel so weak. I feel like every day I fight against my instincts, and half the time my instincts win.” He put his head into his hands. I reached out and touched his arm, and he didn’t shrug it away. When he spoke next, I felt the vibrations of his voice in my fingers. “I’m supposed to lead all of these people and be an example, but sometimes I wonder if I’m the right person for the job. Maybe it should be someone better.” I’d never heard anyone talk this way about himself. “I don’t know what God wants from me,” he said, finally. “As a leader, and as a man.” I wanted to cry. I considered my own lusts and shortcomings, the way my life was coming apart. My parents wouldn’t stop fighting. An assault was years in my past and yet continued to interfere with my sleep, my ability to receive touch. I thought often about sex, even though it frightened me. I was always crying, always uncertain. What, I wondered, did God want from someone like me? One night, Joel and I took our sleeping bags outside and slept next to each other under the stars. I’d never seen a sky like that, unstained by city light. The Milky Way was stunningly clear; starmatter smeared across the black. There were new constellations here, on the bottom of the world. The planets gleamed; satellites slipped across the sky. When I woke up, there was a dung beetle pushing a small brown ball through the grass inches from my nose. I am normally terrified of insects, but at that moment, instead, I was cracked open, ready for wonder. In the beetle’s determination and slow progress, I saw indescribable splendor. When Joel woke, we walked to the pool and stared at the edge of the still and glassy water. He pulled off his shirt. He had a rectangular insulin pump attached to his abdomen; this vulnerable detail tugged on some mysterious thread inside me. He unhooked his pump, and turned to me, arms outstretched, and let me push him in. When he came up from the blue, he grabbed my ankle and pulled me in with him.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  THE FROG KINGIt was too early for there to be so much light, so that when I woke my first thought was of snow. We had pulled the drapes before sleeping but they did almost nothing to darken the room, the snow caught scraps from streetlamps and neon and cast them back up. It was bright enough to see R. still sleeping beside me, cocooned in the blanket I had bought after the first night we spent together, when I woke shivering to find him bound tight in the comforter we were sharing, swaddled beside me. He repeated the word all that day, apropos of nothing, swaddled, swaddled, he had never heard it before, the sound of it made him laugh. He would sleep for hours still, if I let him he would sleep the whole day. He loved to sleep in a way I didn’t, sliding into it at every chance, whereas almost always I slept poorly, uneasily, I woke finally with a sense of relief. He complained if I woke him—I’m on holiday, he would say, let me sleep—but he complained more if I let him sleep too long. We only had ten days together, his winter vacation, which he had decided to spend in Sofia while everyone else he knew went home. Mornings were my time to work, to spend with my books and my writing, my time to be alone; I would get up soon but for now I kept looking at him, his face bearded and dark, smoothed out by sleep. It was all I could do not to touch it, as I did often when he was awake, cupping his cheek in my palm or reaching around the curve of his skull. He had shaved his head at the end of the semester, I liked to run my hand around and around it until he ducked and told me to stop, annoyed but laughing, too; even annoyance was part of the pleasure we took in each other, we were that early in love.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  He lay on me for some time, not moving or rather moving only to press me down, to ease out my pain and my will; he spread his length along mine, reaching until his hands were at my hands, coaxing free the fingers I had curled, and his feet found their place at my ankles, and then it was as if with his whole body he eased me, stretching and relaxing me at once. It was a delicious feeling, and again I admired his skill, how well he knew his instrument, how much I would take and how to bring me back from it. He was gentle, as he lay there he spoke to me, crooning almost, calling to me again Kuchko, the term of abuse that had become our endearment, spokoino, he said, relax, be calm. And I obeyed him, I could feel that fluid ache drain as he lay on top of me, moving just slightly, pressing me down and at the same time stretching me, pulling tenderly on each of my limbs, though soon his movement became something else. He had remained hard, though my own excitement had waned, had flowed out as the pain flowed in; and now it was his hardness I felt, he ground it into me, making my excitement return, not all at once but like an increasing pressure that provoked its own movement in response, a movement of my hips upward just slightly and back. It was a suggestion of movement, really, all that was permitted by his bulk on top of me, but it was enough to make him laugh again, that low, quiet, satisfied laugh I heard against my ear. Iska li neshto, he said, does she want something, and I did, I wanted something very much. He was moving more now, not just grinding but lifting his hips, which shifted his weight to his knees, which dug into the hollows of my own knees and pinned me more insistently down. He began to move more forcefully, rubbing the length of himself against me, and I could hear his breath quicken with the effort of it. Then he lifted himself more, and without moving his hands from my wrists he positioned his cock to fuck me, though he couldn’t fuck me, I thought, he was dry and had done nothing to prepare me, with his hands or his mouth, and I felt myself tighten against him as he pressed forward, moving not violently but insistently. Wait, I said, speaking the word I had almost said before, wait, I’m not ready, but he said again spokoino, relax, be calm, he didn’t try to enter me now but fell back to that insistent rubbing. He spoke softly as he rose again, crooningly, You’re ready, he said, you want it, open to gospodar. Ne, I said, ne, wait, you need a condom, using the word gumichka, little rubber.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  The egg is warm as my insides, he thinks. It’s an old remedy. “The egg, it heals even the worst bruises,” says his grandma. She works on the violet lump shining, like a plum, on the boy’s face. As the egg circled, its smooth pressure on the bruise, the boy watched, under a puffed lid, his grandma’s lips crease with focus as she worked. Years later, as a young man, when all that remains of the grandma is a face etched in his mind, the boy will remember that crease between her lips while breaking open a hard-boiled egg on his desk on a winter night in New York. Short on rent, it would be eggs for dinner for the rest of the week. They would not be warm, but cold in his palm, having been boiled by the dozen earlier that morning. At his desk, drifting, he’ll roll the moist egg across his cheek. Without speaking, he will say Thank you. He’ll keep saying it until the egg grows warm with himself. “Thank you, Grandma,” says the boy, squinting. “You fine now, Little Dog.” She lifts the pearly orb, and places it gently to his lips. “Eat,” she says. “Swallow. Your bruises are inside it now. Swallow and it won’t hurt anymore.” And so he eats. He is eating still. — There were colors, Ma. Yes, there were colors I felt when I was with him. Not words—but shades, penumbras. We stopped the truck one time on the side of a dirt road and sat against the driver door, facing a meadow. Soon our shadows on the red exterior shifted and bloomed, like purple graffiti. Two double-cheese Whoppers were warming on the hood, their parchment wrappers crackling. Did you ever feel colored-in when a boy found you with his mouth? What if the body, at its best, is only a longing for body? The blood racing to the heart only to be sent back out, filling the routes, the once empty channels, the miles it takes to take us toward each other. Why did I feel more myself while reaching for him, my hand midair, than I did having touched him? His tongue tracing my ear: the green pulled through a blade of grass. The burgers started to smoke. We let them. — I would work for the farm for two more summers after that first one—but my time with Trevor would stretch through all the seasons in between. And that day, it was October 16—a Thursday. Partly cloudy, the leaves crisp but still on their branches.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  HE HAD SEEN SNOW for the first time that winter, and he loved to be out in it, to stand with his arms outstretched as it fell, his mouth open to the sky. We went out that afternoon, the snow already tracked through but still lovely; the streets were quiet for the holiday, all the shops were closed. We were wearing the scarves I had found when I opened the presents under the tree, which were long and knit in the same pattern, one yellow and one blue; we wouldn’t ever be boyfriends who wore the same clothes, R. said, but one shared thing was acceptable, having one shared thing was nice. We didn’t go far, just halfway down the block, where I whistled, a short upward swoop I repeated three times, the usual signal. She might not be here, I had said, she isn’t always, she goes other places or maybe somebody takes her in, but she came quickly enough from her usual spot around the back of the building. She was beautiful in her way, tawny and medium-sized like most of Sofia’s street dogs, too skinny and with mange along one side. She was happy to see us, I thought, happy as she always was to get attention, though she lacked the confidence of some of the other dogs; she stayed near the wall, wagging her tail but not coming too close at first. Even when she let us pet her she tried to keep her distance, cringing in a sidling motion that brought her body within our reach but kept her head angled away, a mixture of eagerness and fear. Somebody had taught her that, I thought, somebody had beaten her, or many people had, but not in this neighborhood, here everyone was kind to her, she was a sort of communal pet. She lost some of her shyness when R. pulled the packet of treats out of his coat pocket, clumsy in his mittens, which he had to take off before he could tear open the packet and pull out one of the strips of leathery meat. She started whining when she saw it, prancing closer, and he crooned her name, Lilliyana, though that didn’t mean anything to her, it was just a name he had invented, it suited her, he thought. Ela tuka, he said, a phrase I had taught him, come here, and he held out the treat so she could take it, which she did by stretching her neck and pulling back her lips, taking hold of it with her front teeth, like a deer plucking a leaf. He had bought the treats the night before, when we were buying supplies; she should have Christmas dinner too, he said. She let us pet her more vigorously then, finally coming close, even pressing her side against his legs as she begged for a second piece, which he gave her, though that was all for today, he told her, there would be more tomorrow. She seemed to accept this, she didn’t keep begging once we turned away, as most dogs would have, I thought; she disappeared behind the building again to whatever shelter she had found.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  future where they fail, and that will hurt them much more. We all need someone who loves us but who also understands that it’s better for our long-term happiness to speak out loud the unpleasant truth when the path we are on is one we need to abandon. That’s the point of what Daniel Kahneman said. When you find that friend, ask them to be your quitting coach, to be that person who helps you figure out when to abandon course. If Daniel Kahneman, whose life’s work has been studying cognitive biases and decision errors, needs a quitting coach, then everybody needs one. Kahneman’s happens to be fellow Nobel laureate Richard Thaler. Most of us aren’t lucky enough to have somebody of that stature play that role for us, but we should all try to find someone to be that person in our life who tells us the truth, whether it’s a close friend, a mentor, a coworker, a sibling, or a parent. They just have to be someone who has our long-term best interests at heart and is willing to tell us what we need to hear, not what we want to hear. Of course, almost all of us have experienced the opposite, where someone spared our feelings rather than helping us see the situation for what it was. You break up with someone and, all of a sudden, your close friends tell you, “I thought you should have ditched them months ago.” Or you quit your job and people in your family say, “I could tell you were miserable. It sure took you a long time to figure that out.” Of course, when they tell us those things, we all have the same reaction: “If you knew that all along, why didn’t you say so earlier?” And the answer is always the same: “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.” You can get over hearing that you should quit something. But if you spend months or years in a job or a relationship that’s not contributing to your long- term happiness, that’s time you can never get back. Andrew Wilkinson experienced this himself after he had to fire the CEO of one of his businesses. Several of his friends told him they could see for a while that it was necessary. When he asked, “Then why didn’t you tell me?” they said, “We didn’t want to upset you.” That was aggravating to hear as Wilkinson immediately realized that if his friends had been honest about what they saw, he would have gotten to the

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  That night, bellydown on the hardwood, your face resting on a pillow, you asked me to scrape your back. I knelt beside you, peeled your black T-shirt over your shoulders, unhooked your bra. Having done this hundreds of times by now, my hands moved on their own. As the bands fell away, you grabbed the bra, pulled it out from under you, and tossed it aside. Heavy with sweat from the day’s work, it landed on the floor with the thud of a knee brace. The chemicals from the nail salon rose from your skin. I fished a quarter from my pocket, dipped it into the jar of Vicks VapoRub. The bright eucalyptus scent filled the air and you started to relax. I dunked the coin, coating it with the greasy ointment, then dabbed a thumb’s worth across your back, down your spine. When your skin shone, I placed the coin at the base of your neck and pulled it outward, across your shoulder blades. I scraped and rescraped in firm, steady strokes, the way you taught me, until russet streaks rose from under the white flesh, the welts deepening into violet grains across your back like new, dark ribs, releasing the bad winds from your body. Through this careful bruising, you heal. I think of Barthes again. A writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother, he says after the death of his own mother, in order to glorify it, to embellish it. How I want this to be true. And yet, even here, writing you, the physical fact of your body resists my moving it. Even in these sentences, I place my hands on your back and see how dark they are as they lie against the unchangeable white backdrop of your skin. Even now, I see the folds of your waist and hips as I knead out the tensions, the small bones along your spine, a row of ellipses no silence translates. Even after all these years, the contrast between our skin surprises me—the way a blank page does when my hand, gripping a pen, begins to move through its spatial field, trying to act upon its life without marring it. But by writing, I mar it. I change, embellish, and preserve you all at once. You groaned into the pillow as I pressed along your shoulders, then worked down through the stubborn knots. “This is nice. . . . This is so nice.” After a while, your breathing deepened, evened out, your arms slack, and you were asleep. —

• From Cleanness (2020)

  She pressed against me more insistently, rubbing the top of her head against my jeans. She wanted a treat, and wanted more to be let inside. She had been a house dog once, I had heard, years ago she had belonged to a foreign teacher who left her behind when he went back to the States, she loved to sleep in our houses. But we had been told it wasn’t allowed; she was almost always dirty, and though she was treated for fleas and ticks you could never be sure, she was an outdoor dog now, we shouldn’t encourage her. But there was no one around to admonish me, and so Ela, I said to her, come on, and then I stood, successfully this time, maybe because Mama kept her side pressed against me, as if to prop me up as I kept one hand braced against the brick wall of the house. She whined at the door as I fumbled the key into the lock. Okay, Mama, I said soothingly again, okay. I would take the box of treats from the cabinet above the sink, I would put towels down on the kitchen floor so she would have a soft place to lie down. She was dirty but what was a little dirt, I thought as I turned the latch, I should have let you in a long time ago, I said, I’m sorry. I pushed the door open and she went ahead of me into the house, going just a few feet before she dropped onto the tile of the entranceway, a spot she claimed as if it had long been hers, and gave a quick deep sigh as she laid her head on her paws. She kept her eyes on me as I tossed my keys in the little dish by the door, her tail more subdued but still striking the wall beside her as I put my bag down, waiting for the dizziness to pass. Okay, Mama, I said again, you sleep there, we’ll sleep and in the morning we’ll feel better, though I feared I wouldn’t feel better, in body and spirit both I thought I would likely feel much worse. And then, because the dizziness didn’t pass or maybe because I wanted her warmth next to me, I lowered myself to the floor, I stretched myself out beside her and laid one hand on her flank. We’ll sleep, I said again, and she rolled onto her side, her stomach toward me, and placed one of her paws against my chest. It would leave a mark, I knew, I would have to scrub it out in the morning, but what did it matter, I thought as I closed my eyes, what does it matter, why not let it stay.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  306The History of Christianity II õBut fundamentalist and evangelical missions exploded, and Catholics and Mormons did quite well too. During the Cold War, many of these conservative missionaries saw themselves as evangelists not only for the gospel, but also on behalf of American civil religion. In other words, they were spiritual foot soldiers in the global battle against communism. õOne example: the evangelist Bob Pierce, a Baptist minister. As a traveling preacher, he spent a lot of time in Korea. He was overwhelmed by the suffering he saw, especially the suffering of children who had lost their parents in war. In 1950, he founded a Christian charity called World Vision to help care for those orphans, although World Vision’s mission soon expanded to include a lot of different kinds of relief work— everything from disaster relief to help for victims of sex trafficking. õPierce was convinced that the charity and preaching shouldn’t go in only one direction: Korean Christians had a lot to teach Americans, too. He published a book called The Untold Korea Story in which he raved about Korean Christians’ religious zeal. õIn the decades since then, World Vision has grown into a huge international organization that works in more than 90 countries, and its theology has become more ecumenical. Evangelicals, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox Christians all work there. 307Lecture 31—Culture Wars and the Christian Right THE 1960s AND 1970s õNext, this lecture will turn to the origins of the movement that has come to be known as the Christian right. That term refers to the organizations and activists that grew up in the late 1970s with the aim of mobilizing voters to restore the authority of the Bible in the public sphere and to roll back many of the social changes of the 1960s. õThe Christian right is not synonymous with conservative Christians or evangelicals. Many Christians who call themselves evangelical or conservative have dissented from some of the ideas and tactics of the activists about to be covered. õThe worldview that motivated these activists grew from the early Cold War cultural and geopolitical situation. Below are five of their primary principles. 1. America is a Christian nation. A traditional reading of the Bible should rule over every sphere of culture. 2. White, native-born Protestants—and a few others who agree with them—should be in charge of that culture, at least in America. The racial component is a complicated one, often not explicit; it has troubled many conservative Christians. But most scholars (including most Christian scholars) agree that it is very important to understanding this movement. 3. The ideal family is the heterosexual nuclear family, where sex is bound within marriage and the wife submits to her husband’s authority. 4. The free market is the only Christian way to do business. 5. It’s America’s duty to defend these values around the world.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  This fact is not lost on the poor of the earth, who recognize God's solidarity with them, as articulated in the songs slaves sung: Poor little Jesus boy Made him to be born in a manger World treated him so mean Treats me mean too.3 To understand Jesus from the social location of the poor is to create a sacred space where the marginalized can grapple with their spiritual need to reconcile their God with their struggle for justice and dignity. For many who read the Bible from the margins, Jesus’ poverty is attested by the sacrifice offered by his parents at his birth. According to Luke, “And when the days of [Mary] cleansing were fulfilled according to the Law of Moses…[they] offered a sacrifice according to the Law of the Lord, a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons” (2:22–24). The law as stated in the twelfth chapter of the book of Leviticus required her to offer a lamb for her child, but if she could not afford one, then the sacrifice would be two turtledoves or two young pigeons. Mary made use of the offering of the poor. Jesus’ poverty was not limited to his birth. Jesus lived the life of an itinerant preacher, a life marked by privation. Referring to himself in Luke, Jesus would say, “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the heaven nests, but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head” (9:58). He wandered throughout Judea without money in his purse. Several incidents indicating Jesus’ lack of funds are recorded in the biblical text. For example, when questioned if he paid the didrachma (Temple tax), Jesus instructed Peter to find the necessary funds to pay the tax in the mouth of the first fish Peter hooked (Matt. 17:22–27). When asked if one should pay tribute to Caesar, Jesus asked to be shown a tribute coin rather than producing one himself (Luke 20:20–26). In order to survive financially, Jesus relied on the charity of others. “He traveled through every city and village…and the twelve were with him, also certain women…who were ministering to him of their possessions” (Luke 8:1–3). Jesus also stressed his solidarity with the ultradisenfranchised by referring to himself as the good shepherd, as recorded in John 10:11. Today, when we think of a shepherd, we envision a wise, humble pastor who lovingly cares for his flock. Unfortunately, that was not how people saw shepherds during Jesus’ time. No social status was so limited and tenuous, so close to no status at all, as that of the shepherd. The shepherd lived apart from what was considered civilization, among the company of the most miserable outcasts of society. From the margins, the shepherd occupied a slavelike space, usually guarding someone else's flock with his or her life.4 Then, too, Jesus came from the uncelebrated region of Galilee. Nazareth was so insignificant to the religious life of Judaism that the Hebrew Bible never mentions it.