Word: belief
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Diseases that have high profiles and vocal activists - such as aids, tuberculosis and malaria - attract far more interest and money from big donors and governments, based partly on the mistaken belief that they kill the most children. Celebrities don't host concerts to fight diarrhea. Of 29 child-health specialists at major international development agencies surveyed by the Rotavirus Vaccine Program - a charity based in Seattle, Washington - 40% named aids, tuberculosis and malaria as the three greatest childhood killers. In reality, the top three are pneumonia, diarrhea and malaria. "This problem isn't getting the attention it deserves," says Wandee...
...that type of faith, doubt is not a threat. If we have never doubted, how can we say we have really believed? True belief is not about blind submission. It is about open-eyed acceptance, and acceptance requires persistent distance from the truth, and that distance is doubt. Doubt, in other words, can feed faith, rather than destroy it. And it forces us, even while believing, to recognize our fundamental duty with respect to God's truth: humility. We do not know. Which is why we believe...
...much so that the collection could have been subtitled Seven Short Stories to Read Before You Die. But Malouf's writing is too subtle for that. With his characters carrying the flickering flame of belief, these stories are beautifully crafted articles of faith. Comparing man's plight to that of the indestructible cockroach, Dulcie Porter muses: "The cockie statistics were impressive, but when it came to survival you couldn't beat people, that was her view." Such robust inner lives are alone worth celebrating in these miraculous short stories...
...British-French-Israeli invasion of Suez, Lyndon Johnson with the Vietnam War, Ronald Reagan when he deployed Pershing and cruise missiles despite Continent-wide protests. So maybe if we just wait a while, the ship will right itself, buoyed up by a vast ocean of common experience and belief: a commitment to democracy and free markets, intensifying economic links, a shared culture that ranges from the Magna Carta to Montesquieu to Madonna to Mastercard to mtv. In one sense that has to be right. In a world still complex and dangerous, Europeans know they will not often find more natural...
...Rowling books are forbidden in their homes. But one little boys admits, quite cheerfully, that when he is staying with his divorced father, he is permitted to read them. Let us not wonder if it was religious differences that drove his father forth. Or if religious belief is one way his former wife compensates for a broken marriage. Let's instead concentrate on the enveloping power of secularism in America, the way it seeps in everywhere, no matter how many towels you stuff under the door. It is, of course, an essentially unstoppable and hydra-headed power, which is probably...