Word: abstractly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...baffling. It's a relief, God knows, that Americans aren't slaughtering one another (very much) over religious differences. But ecumenism goes beyond a simple agreement to disagree in peace or even a commitment to look for areas of shared belief. Ecumenism celebrates religious belief in the abstract. And that is the puzzle. Why is erroneous belief preferred over nonbelief? Spiritual brotherhood can start to look more like a conspiracy in restraint of trade. The religion cartel. We band together and solemnly agree not to poach one another's customers...
...remember "Henry," the wordless gag strip about the boy with the chipmunk cheeks? Imagine he has a stubby tail and a triangle nose - that's Frank. Now imagine "Henry"'s simple, "silent" stories taking place in a world of abstract angels, mutated frogs and other Jungian visions of the unconscious, and you have "Frank," the comic by Jim Woodring, published by Fantagraphics Books...
...talked to students about drinking, in the abstract," says Margaret Carter '96, a second-year resident tutor in Dunster House. "I've never had to personally implement the policy...
...right now, as the game of high-stakes international politics is being played out in their backyard, the people of Iraq care little for Hussein, the United Nations, weapons inspections or any other abstract ideal that is being upheld by starving them. Worrying about high politics is a luxury of the well-fed. What the people of Iraq want is an end to their suffering. They have paid the price for living under a ruler they neither chose nor support...
...light, shade, drama, color and suggestive texture--not to mention the primal infantile pleasure of smearing colored mud around on a virginal surface--associated with making a picture? The piety of this search, seen as an act of exemplary denial, is the ghost that haunts the machine of American abstraction--and the emotionless grids of LeWitt's work in particular. Not all abstraction, of course, some of which (most famously, Abstract Expressionism) is as lush as Frederic Church's skies or Marilyn Monroe's cleavage. But enough of it to make up a distinct subspecies of American abstraction...