Yearning

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 Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  Jon and I had no dramatic arguments as we faced the end of my time in the UP. After I graduated, he helped me move to Illinois. We went to IKEA and shopped for furniture. He assembled bookshelves and a coffee table and checked the locks on the doors in my new apartment. We said good-bye in a hundred different ways without actually saying “Good-bye.” Jon’s eyes were red when he headed back home. So were mine. We stayed in touch, and for a time, there was a genuine yearning between us for the idea of what we could be. And still, that grand gesture never came. I fell back into the familiar embrace of self-loathing. I blamed myself. I blamed my body. III30I often refer to my twenties as the worst years of my life because that’s exactly what they were. From one year to the next, though, things got better in that I became more functional as an adult. I was able to accumulate degrees and get better jobs. Slowly but surely, I tried to repair my relationship with my parents and redeem myself in their eyes. In the before I had been a good girl, so I knew how to play that role. Some part of me was still willing to play that role after my lost year in Arizona so that, despite my desperate loneliness, I might still be connected to something—work, writing, family. But. During my twenties, my personal life was an unending disaster. I did not meet many people who treated me with any kind of kindness or respect. I was a lightning rod for indifference, disdain, and outright aggression, and I tolerated all of this because I knew I didn’t deserve any better, not after how I had been ruined and not after how I continued to ruin my body. My friendships, and I use that term loosely, were fleeting and fragile and often painful, with people who generally wanted something from me and were gone as soon as they got that something. I was so lonely I was willing to tolerate these relationships. The faint resemblance of human connection was enough. It had to be enough even though it wasn’t. Food was the only place of solace. Alone, in my apartment, I could soothe myself with food. Food didn’t judge me or demand anything from me. When I ate, I did not have to be anything but myself. And so I gained a hundred pounds and then another hundred and then another hundred. In some ways, it feels like the weight just appeared on my body one day. I was a size 8 and then I was a size 16 and then I was a size 28 and then I was a size 42.

• From Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988)

  One of these was Melania the Younger, heiress to an enormous fortune from her noble Roman family. According to her biographer, Melania “had from her earliest youth yearned for Christ, and longed for bodily chastity.” Her parents, however, “very forcibly united her in marriage with her blessed husband, Pinian, who was from a consular family, when she was fourteen years old and her spouse was about seventeen.”32 Melania first pleaded with Pinian to live with her in celibate marriage and then offered to give him all her wealth and property if he would agree to “leave [her] body free.” But Pinian insisted that they first have two children to ensure the family succession; after that, “both of us together shall renounce the world.”33 First they had a daughter, whom they vowed to virginity; then, a son, who died in infancy. It grieved Pinian to see Melania “exceedingly troubled, and … giving up on life,”34 and he hastily promised her that they would spend the rest of their lives in chastity. Not long afterward, when their young daughter also died, Pinian and Melania, after six years of marriage, when she was twenty and he was twenty-four, put on the rough clothes of peasants, gave up their ordinary social obligations, and fulfilled Christ’s commands. They offered hospitality to strangers, gave money to the poor and destitute, visited the prisons and the mines to inquire which prisoners were held there for debt, and provided money for their release. It was rumored that Melania and Pinian were now ready to go further—in Jesus’ words, to “sell all that you have, and give to the poor” (Matthew 19:21). At this, the slaves on their Roman estate rebelled, for they did not want to be sold, probably separately, on the open slave market, but preferred to be sold together to Pinian’s brother. Melania’s biographer says that she and Pinian suspected the brother of inciting the uprising because “he wanted to take all their property for himself; and in fact all their relatives schemed for their possessions, wanting to make themselves richer from them.”35 Pinian’s father, they suspected, intended to give their possessions to his other children.

• From Three Women (2019)

  And she’s realizing, lately, that nothing in the world could possibly be more important. Nothing else matters. Or rather, everything else would matter, because when you are hot, you have the freedom and liberty to concentrate on the rest of life. You are hot, so you don’t need to take an hour in front of the mirror to look decent. You are hot, so you don’t have to try to make someone love you. You are hot, so you never have to cry, but when you do, it is because somebody has died, and you will look hot doing it. Anyhow not only was she not hot but she wasn’t even getting the kind of attention she knew was easy to get. Like the guys who worked at the 7-Eleven and the Tastee Freez. Guys with yellow zits and chains connecting their wallets to their belt loops. Not even those guys. But now with Jennifer dating Rod, it’s become a possibility. It’s almost that the only thing between Lina and having this popular boyfriend is a little bit of strategy. And to have a good strategy, you must have a practical obsession. So in a matter of weeks Lina gets to know everything about him. Man, if guys only knew, she jokes to Jennifer, how much we think about them. Lina is always honest about things like that. But Jennifer is not willing to admit she’s ever done anything similar. Like finding out every single thing about someone to whom you have never spoken. Address. Phone number by heart. And in two weeks you have dialed the first six numbers about a thousand times, and your heart explodes right before the seventh number and your finger pulses on it, but you never press it. Doing this stretches the same muscles that heroin does. Parents—their names, what each of them does for a living, and where they do it. Pet—its name, and when it gets walked. On what street route so you can go with your Walkman and you can pick out an outfit for the walk every day and you turn every corner with a heart full of mosquitoes. Jersey number. First girl he ever kissed. And then you create a story about how she sucks. You create stories in the shower about how the girl sucks and how he will not even want to talk about her because she’s not worth the breath. How he’ll almost forget her name. Even though you never will. Favorite bands, favorite movies, everything that Lina admits you should probably wait until you get to know a person before you know. His schedule of classes and where exactly to sit in the class you share and how to get there earlier than him so that he won’t think you’re trying to get close.

• From Three Women (2019)

  Maggie attends a New Year’s Eve party at Melani’s house. It’s almost all couples, and no alcohol, because Melani’s parents will be coming home sometime after midnight. It is cool at this time to have a boyfriend. To engage in routine fucking and then talk about it with other girls who have boyfriends. The guy from work whom Maggie’s seeing is out of town. He’s not a boyfriend. He reminds her of her brother David, except that he plays hockey. They haven’t yet had sex. Often that night Maggie finds herself standing alone, looking around the room. She has a queasy thought that all the couples here tonight will stay together forever. She worries that she, too, will go to bed with a Fargo boy and wake up five years later, pregnant with a third kid, watching television in threadbare Uggs. Sometime after midnight, her phone dings. It isn’t the non-boyfriend. It’s Aaron Knodel, who is newly in her phone as AK. He was Knodel at first, in her contacts. She changed it to AK while she was in Colorado, when it first began to feel like something she needed to hide. Now her heart pounds. She brings the phone close to her chest, as if cradling a bird. She looks around the room but nobody is paying attention. They have been texting all day, but now that it is definitively night, her hands begin to sweat with the wonder of it. While she’d been in Colorado he said the reason they should stop talking was that he was afraid of saying something he shouldn’t. All day Maggie has been asking, What was the thing you were afraid you would say? And all day AK has been saying, Nothing, stop, it’s nothing, just forget it. And Maggie has been like, Oh no you don’t! He promised that maybe, someday, he would tell her. And now it’s the New Year. She envisions him at some quiet, adult gathering, his wife drinking merlot with another, similar wife and her teacher having stolen to a corner of the room. He tells Maggie he’ll tell her when he sees her, but for now, just don’t worry about it. He is drinking liquor. Happy New Year, he says, and he asks if she received a New Year’s kiss, to which she responds, Yes, Melani and Sammy kissed me. There is a text silence, which she can feel between her ears, so she adds, To be funny! He writes, That doesn’t count. The words look strange and Maggie feels she has done something wrong. His superpower is that he can make her feel stupid very fast. It’s not just that he’s older, and her teacher. It’s something else, but it’s also those things. How about you? Maggie asks. I’m married, Maggie.

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

  Besides. The believer assents to things proposed to him by another, but not seen by himself: so that the knowledge of faith resembles hearing rather than seeing. Now a man does not believe in what is unseen by him, and proposed to him by another, unless he thinks this other to have a more perfect knowledge of the things proposed, than he himself has who sees not. Either therefore the believer thinks wrong: or the proposer must have more perfect knowledge of the things proposed. And if the latter also knows these things only through hearing them from another, we cannot proceed thus indefinitely: for then the assent of faith would be without foundation or certitude; since we should not come to some first principle certain in itself, to give certitude to the faith of believers. But it is not possible that the assent of faith be false and without foundation, as is clear from what we have said at the beginning of this work: and yet if it were false and baseless, happiness could not consist in suchlike knowledge. There is therefore some knowledge of God that is higher than the knowledge of faith: whether he who proposes faith sees the truth immediately, as when we believe Christ: or receive the truth from him who sees it immediately, as when we believe the Apostles and prophets. Since then man’s happiness consists in the highest knowledge of God, it cannot consist in the knowledge of faith. Moreover. Since happiness is the last end, the natural desire is set at rest thereby. But the knowledge of faith does not set the desire at rest, but inflames it: because everyone desires to see what he believes. Therefore man’s ultimate happiness does not consist in the knowledge of faith. Further. Knowledge of God has been declared to be the end, inasmuch as it unites us to the last end of all, namely God. Now the knowledge of faith does not make the thing believed to be perfectly present to the mind: since faith is of distant, and not present things. Wherefore the Apostle says (2 Cor. 5:6, 7) that so long as we walk by faith, we are pilgrims from the Lord. Yet faith makes God to be present to the heart, since the believer assents to God voluntarily, according to the saying of Ephes. 3:17: That Christ may dwell by faith in our hearts. Therefore the knowledge of faith cannot be man’s ultimate happiness. CHAPTER XLI

• From A History of God (1993)

  The Greeks, on the other hand, were passionately interested in logic and reason. Plato (ca. 428–ca. 348 BCE) was continually occupied with problems of epistemology and the nature of wisdom. Much of his early work was devoted to the defense of Socrates, who had forced men to clarify their ideas by his thought-provoking questions but had been sentenced to death in 399 on the charges of impiety and the corruption of youth. In a way that was not dissimilar to that of the people of India, he had become dissatisfied with the old festivals and myths of religion, which he found demeaning and inappropriate. Plato had also been influenced by the sixth-century philosopher Pythagoras, who may have been influenced by ideas from India, transmitted via Persia and Egypt. He had believed that the soul was a fallen, polluted deity incarcerated in the body as in a tomb and doomed to a perpetual cycle of rebirth. He had articulated the common human experience of feeling a stranger in a world that does not seem to be our true element. Pythagoras had taught that the soul could be liberated by means of ritual purifications, which would enable it to achieve harmony with the ordered universe. Plato also believed in the existence of a divine, unchanging reality beyond the world of the senses, that the soul was a fallen divinity, out of its element, imprisoned in the body but capable of regaining its divine status by the purification of the reasoning powers of the mind. In the famous myth of the cave, Plato described the darkness and obscurity of man’s life on earth: he perceives only shadows of the eternal realities flickering on the wall of the cave. But gradually he can be drawn out and achieve enlightenment and liberation by accustoming his mind to the divine light.

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (1984)

  One might think that Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium constituted an exception: in telling of the bisection of primeval human beings due to the wrath of the gods, their separation into two halves (males and females, or both halves being of the same sex, depending on whether the original individual was androgynous or entirely male or female), it seems to go far beyond the problems of the art of courtship. It raises the question of the nature of love; and it could pass for an amusing approach—ironically placed in the mouth of Aristophanes, the old adversary of Socrates—to the theses of Plato himself. Doesn’t it speak of lovers who are searching for their lost half, just as Plato’s souls remember and long for what used to be their homeland? However, restricting ourselves to the parts of the speech that concern male love, it is clear that Aristophanes also tends to answer the question of consent. And the thing that makes his speech and his irony unusual and a bit scandalous is that his answer is completely affirmative. Moreover, his mythical tale upsets the generally accepted principle of dissymmetry of age, feelings, and behavior between the lover and the beloved. He posits a symmetry and equality between the two, since he has them originate in the division of a single being; the same pleasure and the same desire attract the erastes and the eromenos to one another. A boy will naturally love men if he is half a male being: he will “take pleasure” in “lying beside males” and in “being entwined with them” (sympeplegmenoi).10 And far from revealing a feminine nature, this shows that he is the mere “tally” of a being that is entirely male. And Plato amuses himself by having Aristophanes reverse the reproach that the latter, in his comedies, had so often aimed at the politicians of Athens: “in after years they are the only men who show any real manliness in public life.”11 In their youth they gave themselves to men because they were looking for their male half; for the same reason, once they are adults they will pursue boys. “Loving boys” and “cherishing lovers” (to be paiderastēs and philerastēs)12 are the two sides of the same being. Hence, to the traditional question of consent, Aristophanes gives an answer that is direct, simple, and entirely affirmative, and he thereby abolishes the game of dissymmetries that structured the complex relations between man and boy: the whole question of love and right conduct thus becomes nothing more than the problem of finding one’s lost half.

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

  Highly stylized videos notwithstanding, one can never know what goes through the mind of suicide bombers at the moment when they drive trucks into a building or detonate bombs in a crowded marketplace. To imagine they do this entirely for God or that they are impelled solely by Islamic teaching is to ignore the natural complexity of all human motivation. Forensic psychiatrists who have interviewed survivors found that the desire to become a hero and achieve posthumous immortality was also a strong factor. Other would-be martyrs cited the ekstasis of battle that gives life meaning and purpose, a feeling that is close to religious exaltation, as we have seen. In fact, it is said, the Hamas rank-and-file lived not for “politics, nor ideology, nor religion … but rather an ecstatic camaraderie in the face of death ‘on the path of Allah.’ ”94 Life under occupation held little attraction for many of the volunteers; their bleak life in Gaza’s refugee camps made the possibility of a blissful hereafter and a glorious reputation here on earth powerfully alluring. But then all communities throughout history have praised the warrior who gives his life for his people. Palestinians also honor those who are killed involuntarily in the conflict with Israel; they too are shahid, because as the ahadith made clear, any untimely death was a “witness” to both human finitude and the nation’s plight.95 It further complicates the question of faith and terrorism that the suicide killer has been revered as a hero in other religious traditions as well. In the story of Samson, the judge who died pulling the Temple of Dagon down upon the Philistine chieftains, the biblical author does not agonize over his motives but simply celebrates his courage.96 Samson “heroically hath finished a life heroic,” the devout Puritan John Milton likewise concluded in Samson Agonistes:97 Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail Or knock the breast; no weakness, no contempt, Dispraise or blame; nothing but well and fair, And what may quiet us in a death so noble.98 Far from inspiring horror, Samson’s end left those who witnessed it with a sense of “peace and consolation … and calm of mind, all passion spent.”99 Not coincidentally, Israel calls its nuclear capacity “the Samson Option,” regarding a strike that would inevitably result in the destruction of the nation to be an honorable duty and a possibility that the Jewish state has freely chosen.100 The anthropologist Talal Asad has suggested that the suicide bomber is simply acting out this same appalling scenario on a smaller scale and can therefore “be seen to belong to the modern Western tradition of armed conflict for the defense of the free political community. To save the tradition (or to found its state) in confronting a dangerous enemy, it may be necessary to act without being bound by ordinary moral constraints.”101

• From Jesus to Constantine (Great Courses) (2004)

  Let me be fodder for the wild beasts [said Ignatius to the Roman Christians]. That is how I can get to God. I am God’s wheat, and I am being ground by the teeth of wild beasts to be made a pure loaf of bread for Christ. I would rather that you fawn the beasts, so that they may be my tomb, and no scrap of my body be left. Thus, when I have fallen asleep, I shall be a burden to no one. Then, I shall be a real disciple of Christ. Then, the world will see my body no more. What a thrill I shall have from the wild beasts that are ready for me. I hope they will make short work of me. I shall coax them on to eat me up, all at once, and not hold off, as sometimes happens. Now is the moment I am beginning to be a disciple. May nothing seen or unseen begrudge me making my way to Jesus Christ. Come, fire, cross, battling with wild beasts, wrenching of bones, mangling of limbs, crushing of my whole body, cruel tortures of the devil. Only let me get to Jesus Christ. Thus, he went on, talking about how he wanted to imitate the passion of Christ, the death of Christ, so that he would be worthy of meeting Christ in the afterlife. As I pointed out—well, I didn’t need to point it out—this longing for violent death may sound pathological to our ears, but for him, it was only logical. This world was of no importance to Ignatius. What mattered was the other world, the world of God, which he could attain by imitating the martyrdom of Christ himself. This appears to have been a view of many of the early Christian martyrs. Not only were they thinking that the afterlife would be much better for them if they suffered this torment, but if they refused to suffer, they themselves would go through the torment. They were also thinking about imitating Christ’s own martyrdom. To sum up, it is difficult to actually know how many Christians went to face their deaths in this way. We don’t know what the numbers are because nobody recorded the numbers. The church father Eusebius, who recorded some of these incidents, sometimes said that six people were killed here, ten 207 people killed there. By and large, though, we don’t know how many people actually died, and I should point out that the people writing the accounts of the martyrdoms were always Christians who survived, so that these persecutions were not going after every Christian; a lot of people were left to witness the event, and wrote about it. It is difficult to know, then, how many Christians had to face death this way.

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

  The ultimate good is also known as comprehension (comprehensio), a word suggested by Philippians 3:12: “I follow after, if I may by any means apprehend” (comprehendam). The term is not, of course, used in the sense according to which comprehension implies enclosing; for what is enclosed by another is completely contained by it as a whole. The created intellect cannot completely see God’s essence, in such a way, that is, as to attain to the ultimate and perfect degree of the divine vision, and so to see God to the extent that He is capable of being seen. For God is knowable in a way that is proportionate to the clarity of His truth, and this is infinite. Hence He is infinitely knowable. But infinite knowledge is impossible for a created intellect, whose power of understanding is finite. God alone, therefore, who knows Himself infinitely well with the infinite power of His intellect, comprehends Himself by completely understanding Himself. Nevertheless comprehension is promised to the saints, in the sense of the word, comprehension, that implies a certain grasp. Thus when one man pursues another, he is said to apprehend (dicitur comprehendere) the latter when he can grasp him with his hand. Accordingly, “while we are in the body,” as the matter is put in 2 Corinthians 5:6 ff., “we are absent from the Lord; for we walk by faith and not by sight.” And so we press on toward Him as toward some distant goal. But when we see Him by direct vision we shall hold Him present within ourselves. Thus in Canticles 3:4, the spouse seeks him whom her soul loves; and when at last she finds him she says: “I held him, and I will not let him go.”

• From Jesus to Constantine (Great Courses) (2004)

  This view can be seen most clearly in the writings of one of the first Christians known to be martyred after the New Testament period, an author whose name was Ignatius of Antioch. Ignatius was the bishop of the major city, Antioch, in the early second century. Around the year 110, roughly 90 years before Perpetua, Ignatius was arrested in Antioch, apparently for Christian activities, and he was sent off to Rome to be thrown to the wild beasts. While en route to Rome to face his own martyrdom, Ignatius wrote a number of letters, and we still have these letters. This is another, quite remarkable corpus of writings that we have, letters written by a Christian who is about to be martyred, en route to Rome, where he is to be thrown to the wild beasts. Six of these letters, he wrote to various churches, representatives of which he had met on the way. Thus, we have six letters written to various churches, in which he tells the churches how to deal with their particular problems, how to be unified, that they ought to follow their bishops, that they ought to be submissive to what their bishops say. He tried to get rid of heresy in these various churches. He was concerned about their welfare. However, one of the letters was not written to a church that had sent representatives to meet him along the way, one of the letters was written to the Christians in the city of Rome, where he was going. He wrote the Christians in Rome in order to urge them not to interfere with the proceedings against him once he arrived. He didn’t want them to stop his 206 execution, since, in his view, it was by dying a violent death that he would be united with Christ, and therefore, as he said, he would “attain to God.” We have these seven letters. These seven letters have survived through the Middle Ages, down to today, and they make for very interesting reading, especially this letter to the Romans. Let me read several parts of this letter. This may sound rather pathological to you, but one person’s pathology is another person’s common sense. This was common sense for Ignatius:

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

  Hum ans long for God. Within this perspective, it is quite possible to conceive that our starting point in the search for the highest good might lie within -in our longing and our sense of incompletene ss. Thi s after all is just a transpositio n of Augustine's favou red path to a proof of the exist ence of God, through an awareness of my Moral Sentiments · 2.57 imperfection . Pascal was the first to explore this disquie t in thoroughly moder n tim es, whic h remain relevant today. In the next chapter, we shall see a Deist theory which makes our in ner motivation central, but whic h is nevertheless not projectivist. And even outside a theistic perspective, it is qui te possible to conceive that the best theory of the good, that whic h gives the best accoun t of the worth of things and lives as they are open to us to discern, may be a thoroughly realist one- inde ed, that is the view I want to defend, wit hout wanti ng to make a claim about how things stand for the univ erse 'i n itself' or for a un iverse in which there were no huma n beings. A realistic view is perfectly compatible with the thesis that the bou ndaries of the good, as we can grasp it, are set by that space whic h is opened in the fact that the world is there for us, wit h all the meaning s it has for us-w hat Heidegger called 'the cleari ng'.44 Once a thesis of one of these kinds is accepted, then in sofar as we can account at all for the exist ence of this space in whic h the good appears, it cannot simp ly be in terms of the un iverse as a self-manifesting reality ; it has also to be in terms of our own mak e-up. The ancient view now tends to appear naive. We are tempted to say that its naivety consists in explicatin g the good in terms of the un iverse 'an sich '. But this is anachroni stic. The majority tradition among the ancients didn 't raise the ques tion to which a theory of good in thi ngs an sich is one answe r. This presu pposes that we sharply separate mi nd.from natu re. But the very concept of 'eidos ' or Form resists this separation. The very essence of things is an entity closely related to mind (n ous) and reason (logos) .45 The Ideas for Plato are not jus t objec ts waiting to be perceived ; they are self-manifesting; the Idea of Ideas is itsel f a sou rce of light , following his master image. The logos is ontic . But for us moder ns, the quest ion ins istently arises.

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

  are told that she took root in the holy tent and was established in Zion. In short, Wisdom found its home in the Jerusalem temple, the place where God had made his name to dwell according to Deuteronomy 12. The idea of Wisdom finding a home on earth is important background for the prologue of the Gospel of John, which speaks of the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us. Wisdom in Ben Sira does not become flesh. It is not embodied in a human being. But it does find a particular dwelling place on earth in Jerusalem and the temple. The poem goes on to describe how Wisdom flourished in her new home by comparing it to various plants (palm trees, terebinths, vines). In vv. 19-22 Wisdom invites people to eat of her fruits and promises that those who partake of her will hunger and thirst for more. Here again we have language that is later taken up in the Gospel of John. In John 6:35 Jesus says: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” Although one speaks of hungering for more and the other of never being hungry again, the idea is basically the same. Both Wisdom in Ben Sira and Jesus in the Gospel offer a kind of food that is unlike any other. The most surprising statement of all, however, is found in Sir 24:23: “All this is the book of the covenant of the Most High God, the law that Moses commanded us as an inheritance for the congregations of Jacob.” Wisdom, in short, is nothing other than the Torah of Moses. Just as Wisdom was said to be created before all ages, later Jewish tradition would affirm that the Torah was created before the creation of the world (Midrash Rabbah on Genesis 1). The identification of Wisdom and the Torah can be understood in two different ways. On the one hand, it can be taken to mean that the Torah is the exclusive source of wisdom; on the other, it may mean that the Torah is one privileged formulation of wisdom that in principle can be found anywhere. Hellenistic Judaism usually took the relation of the Torah and Greek wisdom in the latter sense. Plato, it was said, was Moses speaking Greek. Ben Sira was not as deeply immersed in Hellenistic culture as were the Jews of Alexandria, such as the author of the Wisdom of Solomon or the philosopher Philo. But he, too, recognized that the Torah was not the exclusive source of wisdom. In 39:4 he says that the scribe who devotes himself to the study of the law of the Most High

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Love, then, requires connection. This means that when you’re alone, thinking about those you love, reflecting on past loving connections, yearning for more, or even when you’re practicing loving-kindness meditation or writing an impassioned love letter, you are not in that moment experiencing true love. It’s true that the strong feelings you experience when by yourself are important and absolutely vital to your health and well-being. But they are not (yet) shared, and so they lack the critical and undeniably physical ingredient of resonance. Physical presence is key to love, to positivity resonance. The problem is that all too often, you simply don’t take the time that’s needed to truly connect with others. To the contrary, contemporary society, with its fast-changing technology and oppressive workloads, baits you to speed through your day at a pace that’s completely antithetical to connection. Feeling pressured to accomplish more each day, you multitask just to stay afloat. Any given moment finds you plotting your next move. What’s next on your never-ending to-do list? What do you need and from whom? Increasingly, you converse with others through e-mails, texts, tweets, and other ways that don’t require speaking, let alone seeing one another. Yet these can’t fulfill your body’s craving for connection. Love requires you to be physically and emotionally present. It also requires that you slow down. My second-born was such a good sleeper that my husband or I could place him in his crib awake and he’d happily drift off to sleep all on his own. Our firstborn was altogether different. He needed to be in our arms while he drifted off. He also needed a particular motion, one that we couldn’t achieve in the comfort of a rocking chair, but only by walking. For at least the first year of his life, then, my husband or I would slowly pace across the tiny nursery, holding him in our arms, for up to thirty minutes or more. He trained us well. We learned that we could only place him in his crib after he’d succumbed to a deep sleep. Anything less would lead to another long bout of pacing.

• From The Myth Made Fact: Reading Greek and Roman Mythology through Christian Eyes (2020)

  Whether or not they literally believed that Saturn once dwelt in Italy and reigned over a golden age, the revelers who partook in the Saturnalia were hungry for a kind of closeness to the divine that they knew intuitively they had lost but for which they continued to yearn. {N4} Sermons on the nativity too often focus on Christmas as the first step on the road to Calvary. It is that, but it is also something more. Taken in and of itself, Christmas marks a return to the human/divine intimacy of Eden. It holds out the hope that the world can turn back to the Age of Gold. The mythmakers of the Middle Ages were perhaps right to say that on the night Christ was born in Bethlehem, the animals were given the power of speech. I don’t believe that actually happened any more than I believe Saturn and the Titans lived in Italy. But I know what those stories mean : They mean innocence regained, a world where all strife between God, man, and the natural world has been healed. The Church was right to invite its pagan converts to trade in their celebration of the Saturnalia for a celebration of the birth of Christ. The transition was a natural and human one that played on the same age-old yearning. Christmas speaks to the mind and the soul, but it speaks as well to the heart and the imagination, to the good pagan within all of us who knows that what we need most of all is Immanuel, “God with us” (see Matthew 1:23). A pplications Explain to your students that there are some Christians who refuse to celebrate Christmas because it contains pagan elements, not only in terms of its date but in traditions such as the Christmas tree. Then discuss frankly whether this prohibition is fair and consistent with the Bible. List arguments for both sides and make sure to treat both sides with respect.Have students list those parts of the Christmas celebration that they most love. Then ask them which parts draw them closer to Christ and the real meaning of Christmas, and which draw them away.Christmas carols surely bring us closer to Christ, but what about secular Christmas songs? Do they contain a kind of wonder and joy that can enhance the true magic of the Incarnation (God becoming man in Jesus), or are they merely distractions from it?Have students list their favorite Christmas movies and shows. What aspects of Christmas do they capture?

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

  [image file=image_rsrcDZB.jpg] Global JihadIn the early 1980s a steady stream of young men from the Arab world made their way to northwestern Pakistan, near the Afghan border, to join the jihad against the Soviet Union. The charismatic Jordanian-Palestinian scholar Abdullah Azzam had summoned Muslims to fight alongside their Afghan brothers.1 Like the “fighting scholars” who flocked to the frontiers during the classical period, Azzam was convinced that repelling the Soviet occupation was a duty for every able-bodied Muslim. “I believe that the Muslim ummah is responsible for the honor of every Muslim woman that is being violated in Afghanistan and is responsible for every drop of Muslim blood that is being shed unjustly,” he declared.2 Azzam’s sermons and lectures electrified a generation distressed by the suffering of their fellow Muslims, frustrated by an inability to help, and youthfully eager to do something about it. By 1984 recruits were arriving in ever-larger numbers from Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Yemen, Egypt, Algeria, Sudan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Iraq.3 One of these volunteers was the scion of a great family fortune, Osama bin Laden, who became the main sponsor for the Services Bureau established in Peshawar to support his comrades, organize recruitment and funding, and provide health care, food, and shelter for Afghan orphans and refugees. President Ronald Reagan also spoke of the Afghan campaign as a holy war. In 1983, addressing the National Association of Evangelicals, he branded the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” “There is sin and evil in the world,” he told his highly receptive audience, “and we’re enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might.”4 It seemed entirely proper to Reagan and CIA director William Casey, a devout Catholic, to support Muslim mujahidin against atheistic Communists. The massive aid package of $600 million (annually renewed and matched each year by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States) transformed the Afghan guerrilla forces into a military juggernaut that battled with the Russians as fiercely as their ancestors had fought the British in the nineteenth century. Some of the Afghan fighters had studied in Egypt and been influenced by Qutb and Maududi, but most were from rural societies, and their Sufi devotion to saints and shrines was wholly untouched by any hint of modern Islamic thought.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  344 Lecture 51: Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz In her reply to Sor Filotea, Sor Juana asserts that she wishes to defer to Church authority, but she also wishes study in order to understand God. She is confl icted between the demands of the religious life and her thirst for knowledge, an inclination that she considers either “a gift or a punishment from Heaven.” The intent of her “Reply” is to show that neither her religious vocation nor her gender bars her from the pursuit of learning. She has to situate her learning in relationship to God’s wishes, and she has to represent herself both as a woman (and, therefore, not usurping men) but also as an intellectual woman. The very act of questioning God’s will might be seen as sacrilegious, but Sister Juana insists that it is the very intelligence that God has given her that allows her to question its value to God. Arguing from the authority of biblical and classical sources, Sister Juana confesses that she has often turned to secular matters because she dared not defy gender, age, and above all, custom. She does not wish to teach, nor to write—except when commanded to do so—but only to study. Sister Juana refuses to repudiate her studies, claiming them as appropriate to God’s work but recognizing that they distract her from the spiritual life of the convent. To emphasize the naturalness of her desire for learning, Sister Juana tells the story of her early life. She keeps the two competing claims in balance: The desire to learn is not to be condemned because it was natural, but at the same time, her own desire drove her to acquire more knowledge and, perhaps, to become “unnatural” in her desire. Sister Juana’s account of her progress as a scholar emphasizes this contrast between the natural and the unnatural located in her body: She wished to be dressed in boy’s clothing and sent to study in Mexico City; not learning Latin quickly enough, she cut her hair as punishment. Entering religious orders, Sor Juana fi nds that convent life has its own distractions and that wherever she goes, her desire to learn accompanies her. The very act of questioning God’s will might be seen as sacrilegious, but Sister Juana insists that it is the very intelligence that God has given her that allows her to question its value to God.

• From Jesus to Constantine (Great Courses) (2004)

  Ignatius was the bishop of Antioch, arrested for Christian activities, and sent to Rome to be thrown to the wild beasts. En route, he wrote six letters to various churches that had sent representatives to greet him on the way. He wrote one other letter to the Christians in Rome, urging them not to interfere with the proceedings against him once he arrived, because it was by a violent death that he would be united with Christ and, thus, “attain to God.” The longing of Ignatius for violent death may seem pathological to modern ears, but it was only logical for him: This world was of no importance to him; what mattered was the other world of God, which he could attain by imitating the martyrdom of Christ. V. It is difficult to know how many Christians actually had to face death in this way (because the writings about the martyrs presuppose so many survivors, we can assume that not many were actually killed). A. Some evidently recanted of their Christian faith—or at least pretended to do so—when put to the test. B. Others, though, submitted themselves to public torment and death, because in doing so they were escaping the real and eternal suffering that would come to non-believers in the afterlife and because in dying this way, they could imitate their Lord and master, Christ. Essential Reading: Bart Ehrman, After the New Testament, chapter 3. Everett Ferguson, Church and State in the Early Church (especially the articles by de Ste. Crois and Sherwin- White). Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self. Supplementary Reading: H. Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs. Robert Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them. Questions to Consider: 1. Can you imagine ways in which the persecution and martyrdom of Christians may have actually helped the Christian mission? 2. Why do you suppose that such people as Perpetua or Ignatius—who presumably had so much to offer people in this world and who could have no doubt led happy lives here—were so eager to sacrifice their bodies and leave this world? 197 Lecture Thirteen—Transcript Christian Reactions to Persecution In the previous lecture, we saw some of the reasons for the violent opposition to Christians throughout the Roman Empire. Christians were seen as a threat to society because they refused to worship the state gods. Disasters that struck could be seen by pagans, then, as divine retribution for cities that harbored such atheists. Christians were called “atheists” because they didn’t worship the gods of the state. Although today, we would think of an atheist as someone who did not believe in God, in the ancient world, an atheist was someone who did not believe in sacrifice to the gods.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The jamaat produced few books or pamphlets, but an article written for al-Dawah in 1980 by Isam al-Din al-Aryan sums up their main ideas. Sayyid Qutb was clearly an inspiration; the jamaat believed that it was time for Egyptians to shake off the Western and Soviet ideologies that had dominated the country for so long, and return to Islam. Egypt was still in effect controlled by infidels, and there could be no true independence unless there was a great religious awakening.38 The jamaat did not confine themselves to the discussion of ideas, but applied the Islamic ideology creatively and practically to their own circumstances. In 1973, the students began to set up summer camps in the major universities.39 They studied the Koran, prayed together at night, and listened to sermons about the Golden Age of Islam, the career of the Prophet, and the four rashidun. By day, there were sporting activities and classes in self-defense. For a few weeks, the students lived, thought, and played in a wholly Islamic setting. It was, in a sense, a temporary hijrah, a migration from mainstream society to a world where they could live out the Koran and experience for themselves its impact on their lives. They learned what it was like to live in an environment which really did endorse the teachings of scripture. The camps gave them a taste of an Islamic utopia, in marked contrast to the inauthentically Muslim life of the regime. Preachers and speakers discussed the bitter disappointment of the modern experiment, which may have worked beautifully in Europe or America, but which only worked to the advantage of the rich in Egypt.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  345 She must understand sacred theology, but also she must learn all the other disciplines: logic, rhetoric, physics, music, arithmetic, architecture, civil law and canon law, history, astrology. The torment of desiring to study, yet also desiring to be part of her community condemns her to struggle against herself, like St. Jerome. Despite her great acclaim, she has been subject to the most painful persecution from those who love her and wish to save her soul. She is martyred to her own excellence, just as Christ was. To be forbidden her books, she insists, cannot dampen her natural curiosity. Even the kitchen and the preparation of food is to her a laboratory for experimental science. Had Aristotle had to prepare food, she claims, he would have written more. In the second half of her “Reply,” Sister Juana turns to history to support her claim that knowledge is appropriate for a woman, citing women from the Old Testament, from classical history and texts, as well as contemporary women scholars. To deny women learning just because they are women is to believe that men are wise just because they are men. All who are not capable of wisdom should be prevented from studying, writing, and teaching. What objection can exist, says Sister Juana, to letting older women teach young girls? The claim that biblical authorities support the prohibition against women teaching is the interpretation of the historical ignorant. Sister Juana comes to the Atenagórica letter itself, insisting it was written with the permission of the Church. She disagreed with the Jesuit teacher, but his opinion is not a revelation that must be accepted blindly, and others may disagree with her. Even her verses, she claims, are not heretical but follow the model of verses in the Bible and classical texts. She describes her work as if it were her child and laments that it has arrived like an orphan at the doors of Sister Filotea, who has had to name it. It has other blemishes born out of haste, illness, and want of guidance, and thus, she has failed to include important evidence. Sister Juana’s struggle is unrelenting and unresolvable. Despite her wish to be obedient and to curtail her intellectual inquiries, the scholar will out— even as she regrets that she wrote the letter, she wishes she had written a better one! This is the same Sister Juana who, within two years, would sell her entire library and renounce the use of pen and ink; the same Sister Juana