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This chapter interprets some of Johnson's Lives of the Poets as non-satirical, corrective responses to Pope's Peri Bathous and The Dunciad. Richard Blackmore, for instance, ‘Father of the Bathos’ and loudest of the braying dunces, gains a moral advantage over the author who had ridiculed him. In the Lives, it is shown that Johnson articulated his preference for a Christian scale of values. Also elicited are the competing senses of 18th-century ‘condescension’ as a good and as a bad quality, dependent on whether the writer has Christian or classical precedents in mind. It teases out the motives behind Johnson's solicitous reactions to Blackmore and to Isaac Watts. The chapter concludes by discussing his commemoration of a semi-literate, indigent physician, ‘On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet’: an example of his distinctive art of sinking.

Chapter 5 considers a few of William’s theological concerns. In the absence of a theological treatise, it is not possible to provide a systematic account of his theology. Still, his biblical commentaries say much about a few of his key theological perspectives. Conspicuous among these is a comprehensive view of divine revelation, which is consistent with his comprehensive view of biblical history. For him, the prophets, apostles, and evangelists were complemented as channels of revelation by the church’s doctors and even the preachers of his own time. Without presuming to have auctoritas, he viewed his own work as a commentator as an instrument of revelation. By restating, organizing, and synthesizing the texts of previous Christian and non-Christian writers and by complementing them with his own remarks, William ventured to become one of them and to contribute to the tradition in which he stood.

The chapter discusses the naming conventions which showed various signs of deference, condescension, and even affection towards blacks and whites. Customs and even laws served to segregate the two races. Nonetheless, humane relations still existed between whites and blacks but such instances were regarded as exceptions. Rural race relations were delineated affecting every aspect of life in the New South. Segregation was fast becoming the norm and segregation laws swept the nation. The railroad system was the point of most contention as regards segregations as it was the main form of transportation during that time. Racial discomfiture sometimes leads to overt conflict and even violence. Thus, statewide railroad segregation peaked during this time. The chapter also discusses the significant change on interracial social relations particularly in terms of sex and marriage.

This chapter focuses on the changing attitudes to those who were deemed to live in the more important England, and the ethnological theories that established their ancient title to it. English natives such as these were discovered in the poorer and more marginal places. In spite of the profound cultural conservatism, not to say condescension, the return of the native did have positive effects. Certain kinds of poor people came to be valued and even, in a way, honored.

The chapter is devoted to the poetry of Emily Dickinson, with particular focus on the incarnational metaphors that inform much of her work. As a result, one gains further insight into the tensions that obtain between theological and poetological concerns.

This chapter focuses on the attitudes of the Japanese, who came to Shanghai on board the Senzaimaru in 1862, toward Westerners in the city. One of the main objectives of the mission to Shanghai was to observe and assess the international community engaged in international commerce. To achieve that goal, the Japanese had to interact with and examine the Westerners in Shanghai. This chapter considers what they had to say about how the Westerners were behaving in the city. In particular, the Japanese noted the Westerners' arrogance and condescension with respect to the Chinese. The chapter also looks at Shanghai customs and the admiration of the Japanese for the West's technical achievements.

In this chapter Mapes elaborates on the rhetorical strategies of historicity, simplicity, lowbrow appreciation, pioneer spirit, and locality/sustainability. She turns to a data set of 90 corresponding Instagram (@nytfood) posts, documenting the multimodal tactics by which food media writers and users perform a kind of acceptable or “palatable” eliteness. One such tactic is the framing of “rough” and “refined,” and the juxtaposition of various forms of supposedly low and highbrow cultural artifacts or practices. These tactics, in turn, help establish two interdependent strategies or rhetorics for manufacturing status in capitalist society: fetishism and condescension. She argues that these two processes support the production and maintenance of elite authenticity and class privilege.

In setting the theoretical and methodological proclivities of this book, this chapter begins to synthesize two decades of sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological scholarship on globalization, commodification, leadership talk, reflexivity, and the regimentation of ideologies about language and social relations. The chapter highlights the paucity of work on translingual practices and processes of globalization in the growing field of leadership talk, while pointing to ways in which translingual practices can be conceptualized. These efforts to reconceptualize translingualism are framed in terms of how the medium of such practices might be conceptualized, as well as how such practices relate to sociological ideas about condescension and anthropological ideas about rapport and reciprocity.

This chapter considers Didymus’ historical status as an independent teacher distinct from the supposed Alexandrian Catechetical School. It explores the setting of his schoolroom, before turning to his understanding of the role of the teacher within Christian faith. Both Christ and the perfect Christian are seen to be primarily and necessarily teachers, since Didymus conceives illumination as a participative and imitative state. In line with much ancient thought, pedagogy is seen as mimetic, but the teacher must not only model virtue and wisdom but actively condescend to the level of the pupil. Close parallels are drawn between the condescension and sojourning of the Word in the unique soul of Jesus and that of the teacher in his student, which opens up a useful set of responses to the kenotic proof texts cited by ‘Arian’ opponents but perhaps also leads towards the stance of the Isochristoi of the sixth century.

This chapter argues that the moral value of unconditional forgiveness is more complicated and constrained than it is often taken to be. When we unconditionally forgive, we engage with someone in a way that doesn’t take seriously their perspective about the meanings and values at stake in our relations with them. Other things being equal, this is problematic; it is normatively condescending, belittling the place of the other person’s moral agency in our relations with them. This doesn’t mean that unconditional forgiveness is always bad or impermissible. It does, though, complicate how we should think about its moral value.

Protestantism’s radical concept of divine grace does not simply disappear with what Weber calls the ‘disenchantment’ of the secular age; it transmutes itself into other complex and powerful cultural defences against fatality, the contingent and unpredictable. Ideas have a habit of migrating in unexpected ways and in this chapter tries to outline one of those migrations: that is, the displacement of grace from religion into class through the reception of Milton in Jane Austen. The focus of the chapter is, then, the way the literature of the Restoration lives on in the inter-textual relationship between Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Paradise Lost (1674), especially as that relationship is mediated through one of Austen’s favourite novels, Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1754). Most importantly, the story the chapter tells is not so much one of disenchantment as one of re-enchantment or the aestheticization of class.