Word: atheism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Party boss to set foot on Vatican soil, Gorbachev conferred with the Pope for an unexpectedly long 75 minutes in the library of the 16th century Apostolic Palace. Addressing John Paul II as "Your Holiness" -- no small gesture for the leader of a nation and party formally pledged to atheism -- Gorbachev promised that the Supreme Soviet would "shortly" pass a law guaranteeing religious freedom for all believers...
...events that have shaken the Soviet bloc in 1989, none is more fraught with history -- or more implausible -- than the polite encounter that will take place this week in Vatican City. There, in the spacious ceremonial library of the 16th century Apostolic Palace, the czar of world atheism, Mikhail Gorbachev, will visit the Vicar of Christ, Pope John Paul II. Before delivering formal speeches in the presence of their entourages, the two East Europeans will sit down alone to chat in Russian without interpreters...
...might someday have a multiparty system, an impressive 36% express readiness to entertain the notion. Among the general public, 40% of the men thought the Communist Party would eventually have competition, while women were more conservative, with only 27% taking that view. Another surprise: even after decades of official atheism, half of all party members say religious believers can also be members of the Communist Party...
...mutations earn him, a British subject, rough handling by police and immigration officials. Gibreel develops a visible arc of light, a halo, around his head, and must cope with the awestruck reverence of perfect strangers. His new radiance aggravates an older problem, particularly puzzling in light of his newfound atheism: his vivid cinematic dreams, in which he is cast as the Archangel Gibreel, but without a script, and then asked by a series of petitioners to deliver Allah's word...
Without this battleship of an ego, Courbet would hardly have survived the attacks of the critics of his day. What was realism to his enemies? Atheism, socialism, materialism, crudity: a denial of all decent control. An audience that doted on the rococo peasant had insuperable difficulties with Courbet's frieze of worn faces and homespun black suits in Burial at Ornans, 1850. He painted, someone gibed, the way one waxed boots. He was seen as a dangerous socialist, a besmircher of the ideal, a bucolic thug from the Franche-Comte trampling all over the classical tradition with his wooden clogs...