Word: affront
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Protestant churches have been equally outspoken. The National Council of Churches, which represents 40 million Protestants, supports a bilateral nuclear freeze. The 1.6 million-member American Baptist Churches declared in December that "the presence of nuclear weapons and the willingness to use them is a direct affront to our Christian beliefs and commitments." Even members of the evangelical movement, which has been generally noted for its political conservatism, have raised their voices against the arms buildup. Says the Rev. Kim Crutchfield of the Chapel Hill Harvester Church, a Pentecostal church in Atlanta: "We are not talking about Russians or Chinese...
...Soviet leaders must have wanted to intervene dozens of times in the past year," says a Western diplomat in Moscow. But the Soviets also realized the diplomatic and economic consequences would be costly: they would risk armed resistance by the proud Poles, exacerbate relations with the U.S. and Europe, affront the Third World nations they were so ardently wooing, and take on responsibility for the Polish economy...
...taking up the chant. The movement is not limited to predictable leftist or pacifist church circles; it has entered the religious mainstream. This month the 37 regional executives of the American Baptist Churches called the very existence of nuclear weapons, much less willingness to use them, "a direct affront to our Christian beliefs." The bishops of the United Methodist Church proclaimed in November that "all other issues pale" by comparison. Billy Graham sees a moral crisis that "demands the attention of every Christian...
Squirrels, the first affront of the evening, is a pedantic and ingrown mockery. David Mamet has trundled out the theme of a reversal between two artistes, the aged veteran and the anxious ingenue, and bandied "concepts" about the stage for the better part of an hour before switching the characters' roles in a sleight of hand so fast it would have dazzled Houdini. The reversal, developed with delicious deliberation in A life in the Theater, happening so awkwardly here, so long after we have lost all interest in the characters, serves only to leave an unpleasant taste of dissatisfaction...
...with writing funny, energetic pans than with gauging a company's potential for growth or assessing the future of theatre in the region. It's a matter of attitude: for John Simon and his less literate disciples, a bad work of art is a cigar in an elevator, an affront that must be answered in kind. In Great Britain, on the other hand, a serious artist may fail, have his work taken apart, and still be treated civilly by critics and audiences: there is a middle ground between shutting one's eyes to the deficiencies of an obviously inferior work...