Word: ancient
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...broken down at any given moment. (Miraculously, however, a new law requiring dog walkers to clean up after their pets is being widely obeyed.) They know that many once grassy parks have long since been scuffed to baldness. But most great cities have been dirty and dangerous-for example, ancient Rome, 18th and 19th century London. New Yorkers are now more in a mood to think that their city offers incomparable compensations...
...similarly frustrating efforts in Biafra, Northern Ireland and the Middle East, his Ostpolitik was the most successful. His overtures to the Communist world helped to win the church such concessions as limited freedom to teach, nominations of new bishops and permission for public festivals. They also settled such ancient controversies as the 18-year isolation of Hungary's Cardinal Mindszenty at the U.S. Legation in Budapest...
People in earlier civilizations and some primitive tribes up to modern times did dream-and believe-that personal names held mortal power. In The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer tells how the ancient Egyptians and aboriginal Australians alike took pains to protect their secret true names-and the vital power they contained-from falling into the possession of outsiders. Aging Eskimos, Frazer also records, sometimes take new names in the belief they thus get a fresh start in life. Such superstitions have waned in today's civilizations. Still, as Noah Jacobs points out in Naming-Day in Eden, people...
...Book of Abraham, the scripture that includes the priesthood ban, was said by Smith to be his translation of ancient scrolls written by Abraham, and purchased by Smith in 1835. He had indeed bought some old scrolls; lost for a century, they were rediscovered in a New York museum in 1967. After studying them, various Mormon scholars have concluded that they were not nearly ancient enough to be Abraham's and further, that the scrolls might not be an authentic translation after all, but instead might have provided the "catalyst" that fired Smith's imagination and opened him to direct...
...author also explores the dark division of his Western heart. He invokes Kierkegaard's "sickness of infinitude" and looks back wistfully to a presumed time when ancient mystics and so-called children of nature were said to view existence as whole, seamless cloth. Matthiessen skillfully condenses philosophies, religions and ideas, but pays for stylistic niceties with oversimplifications. To write, as he does, that "the advent of the industrial revolution made new barbarians of the peoples of the West" says nothing about the old barbarians who existed in those fabled holistic ages. Was there ever really a time when mankind...