Word: affirmation
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...discovered one of the best kept secrets of Roman Catholicism: its social teaching. My mind and heart were engaged as I read, "...the conviction grows...that it devolves on humanity to establish a political, social, and economic order which will increasingly...help individuals as well as groups to affirm and develop the dignity proper to them..." (Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, paragraph 9.) In a later paragraph this church document asserts: "A human being is more precious for what he is than for what...
Challenge means loss. (A "physically challenged" person is one who used to be called "disabled" or "handicapped" -- to wit, one who has been dealt a bad blow by circumstance. To give him this more friendly sounding title is an attempt to affirm possibility on his behalf -- in other words, to be in denial...
...only political action of the year, the council drafted a letter to President Neil L. Rudenstine "affirm[ing] the council's committed support" for the University's stance against the ban on homosexuals in the military. The letter, written after Rudenstine defended the choice of Gen. Colin L. Powell as Commencement speaker, was approved nearly four hours into the council's last scheduled meeting of the year...
...condones but also encourages the acceptance of violence. We are ashamed that Harvard has chosen to honor Powell's achievements. To honor Powell is to honor the institutionalizing of killing. Our university occupies a unique position of leadership in our society and should have found a speaker whose actions affirm a respect for human life. Through its choice, Harvard has reinforced the societal tendency to valorize military institutions and has denied the importance of searching for peaceful solutions...
Indeed, despite the freshness of his diagnosis of social problems, West's prescriptions for curing them can be vague and hopelessly Utopian. He advocates a "politics of conversion" in which blacks and other oppressed people would "affirm themselves as human beings, no longer viewing their bodies, minds and souls through white lenses and believing themselves capable of taking control of their own destinies." That would translate into a new surge of grass-roots activism, the building of coalitions between now competing groups, and "large-scale public intervention to ensure access to basic social goods." In other words, critics charge, reconstituting...