Word: altars
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Young Parent can barely wait to break out of Medford, Mass., during the late '50s. Outwardly he appears to have been quite ordinary: an altar boy who liked to plink at bottles with his .22-cal Mossberg. Yet his mind has been jump-started by books, especially Dante's The Divine Comedy. "It was not just the blood and gore," he tells a friendly parish priest, "but that the people in Hell seemed real; the ones in Purgatory and Paradise were wordy and unbelievable...
...separate attack on a male jogger. According to investigators, these were not crimes of drugs or race or robbery. Newspapers claimed that the suspects came from stable, working families who provided baseball coaching and music lessons. The youths, some barely into their teens, may not have been altar boys, but they hardly seemed like candidates for a rampage. One was known for helping elderly neighbors at his middle-income Harlem apartment complex. Another was a born-again Christian who had persuaded his mother to join his church. Only one had ever been in trouble with the police...
...young male may have been an American kidnaped from neighboring Brownsville, Texas. Besides Constanzo, authorities sought three other suspects, including the Godfather's companion, Sara Maria Aldrete, 24, a Mexican honor student at Texas Southmost College in Brownsville. Searching Aldrete's home in Matamoros, police found a blood-spattered altar and candles...
...back canals around the Temple of the Dawn, where saffron-robed monks paddle from river house to river house collecting food; in the morning you can lose yourself amid the chapels, bejeweled Buddhas and murals of the 60-acre Grand Palace, in the midst of which, atop a golden altar and dimly glowing in the dark, sits the Golden Buddha, the mysterious spiritual heart of the city. Everywhere Bangkok glitters with lavish monuments to its faith: the Marble Palace, the Golden Mount and the Golden Buddha, made of 5.5 tons of solid gold...
...priest? Why, virtually everything Powers had written till then had been about Roman Catholic clergymen in out-of-the-way Midwestern parishes. He had established himself as an uncannily intimate chronicler of their workaday / lives away from the altar: their immersions in church politics and fund raising, their intramural feuds and poker-table cronyism, their struggles with vinegary housekeepers, booze and loneliness. Not that Powers by any means fell into the cozy category of "Catholic writer"; his vision, though compassionate, was too unsparing for that. Still, a Powers book without a priest would be like -- well, a John Cheever book...