Word: ancient
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...life that faces Red China's peasantry in the communes is regimented beyond the dreams of ancient Sparta. Each commune, averaging about 21,000 inhabitants, is ruled by a party committee that controls everything from food distribution to funerals. Organized into work brigades, the inhabitants of the communes mostly have no set jobs, can be shunted on a day-to-day basis from farm work to military or industrial duties. Ultimately, private property is to be utterly abolished and already the most "advanced" communes have compelled the peasants to surrender the personal garden plots they were allowed to keep...
...DOGMA. Pius XII spectacularly stiffened the fabric of faith by promulgating the ancient dogma of the Virgin Mary's bodily assumption into Heaven (in doing so he was the first Pope in history to make such public exercise of the 1870 dogma of papal infallibility). In 1950 in the encyclical Humani Generis he cracked down hard on Catholic teachers, priests and philosophers whose speculations might carry them away from the dogmas of -the church and the formal system of thought laid down by St. Thomas Aquinas. ¶ NATIONALISM. Pope Pius laid claim once more to the church...
...ancient, ponderous rituals began. Swiss Guards drew a heavy iron chain across the Gandolfo Palace entrance, and in Rome the great bronze doors of St. Peter's clanged shut. Attendants removed the flannel pajamas in which the Pope died and dressed the body in a white silk cassock and an ermine-trimmed crimson velvet cape. Sister Pasqualina, the German nun who had been the Pope's devoted housekeeper, had a small ritual of her own. She assembled the Pope's half-dozen pet birds and, carrying their cage and two suitcases, left for an unannounced destination...
...immense green stretches of vista, the tall poplar rows iridescent against the sky, the sensual green of the sunbathed leaves--and, then, the sudden blue swathe of the indescribable Loire, broad and slow and stately--moving with easy grandeur through the ancient terrain" seem hard to read. His lovers often speak in terms of "Whooooosh," "Buffle, Buffle," and "Squuunch," which are things you would have overheard through thin bedroom walls in the hotels of New York, Paris and Barcelona, had you followed their jet-paced trek...
...mountains. The rich lowlands belonged to the Philistine "cities of the plain." Now the Judean hills belong mostly to Arabs, while the Israelis occupy former Philistine territory. If Tell Goliath proves to be Mamshat, it will be an exception: a city of the plain that was Jewish in ancient times and is today part of modern Israel...