Word: angels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Saigon government. Word soon reached Saigon's functionaries that any village that was to be regarded as government-controlled should be marked with flags-which reminded some observers of the origin of Passover, when the ancient Jews smeared their doors with blood to keep away the angel of death. Often using paint procured by American district advisers with U.S. funds earmarked for "high-impact projects," pacification cadres and Popular Force soldiers began painting the most hotly contested villages first. In many cases, armed guards had to be sent in to get the flags painted...
WHETHER God is dead or not, his angels seem to be. The angel in 1970 is mere commercial décor-a mothlike doll with pink wings and a smirk of good cheer, dangling amid the glitter balls on a thousand plastic Yule trees or twanging its polystyrene harp in the window of a Brooklyn store. In fact, Christmas is about the only area of our culture in which angels survive at all. An archangel, Gabriel, told the Virgin Mary that she would bear the son of God; it was an angel (progenitor of a billion Christmas cards) who appeared...
...Macy's angel, that one. The awe that angels inspired in those who saw them, the terrible sense of epiphany, the momentary contact with God's blazing ambassador-all this has been lost in a welter of tinsel and feathers. The tongues of angels now speak with the voice of Muzak. It was not always so. Angels have an older ancestry than Christianity itself, and the most copious sources for named angels are not the New or even the Old Testament but Talmudic and Mohammedan writings. Still, for nearly 2,000 years the belief in angels was vital...
Zero Population Growth. The angel of popular culture today is to his forebears what the last American buffalo, ailing in some future zoo, will be to the mighty herds that roamed the West: a token, a remnant of a spiritual breed that will never return. In the 13th century, Doctor of the Church Albertus Magnus held that there were nine choirs of angels, "each choir at 6,666 legions, and each legion at 6,666 angels." That made 399,920,004, all fluttering and hymning in orbit around the throne of God. Of these, one-third were flung down with...
...That is what an angel is, an idea of God." So said the great mystic, Meister Eckhart. But ideas have no visual form, and the struggle to make angels concrete absorbed the energies of Europe's artists for nearly 1,000 years. The angel became one of the master images of religious experience...