Word: benignity
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What idea is more beguiling than the notion of lightsome spirits, free of time and space and human weakness, hovering between us and all harm? To believe in angels is to allow the universe to be at once mysterious and benign. Even people who refuse to believe in them may long to be proved wrong...
...emphasis on angels as divine intermediaries, theologians worry, just creates a greater distance from an ever more abstract God. And to the extent that angels are always benign spirits, it evades any reckoning with the struggle between good and evil. "I'm certain that if we are to solve the problems on earth, we will have to do it ourselves," says playwright Tony Kushner. The angel in his play in no way is meant to absolve humans of tough choices and hard spiritual work. "New Age theology says we live in a benign universe where all you have...
...toughest tricks is getting genes into the right spot in the body. Up to now, researchers have generally used benign viruses to carry the genetic material DNA into cells, but there are fears that the seemingly nonthreatening transport vehicles could sometimes cause viral infections. Last week scientists at the University of Michigan and the University of Pittsburgh reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they had succeeded in injecting DNA directly into human cells. Instead of riding a virus, the DNA was encased in liposomes, harmless little bubbles...
...line infamous for pickpockets. Each morning he sets off on foot at a brisk pace, crossing over cobblestones to arrive at 9 a.m. at the palazzo that once bore the title of the Roman and Universal Inquisition. Soft-spoken and courteous, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, 66, looks too benign to be an inquisitor. But his Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is the Roman Inquisition's latest incarnation, and as the Catholic Church's chief enforcer of dogma, the Cardinal stands in direct succession to the persecutors of Galileo and the compilers of the index of banned books. The weight...
...Right intellectuals traffic in under the free-speech cultural agency is an extra-democratic bid to entrench privileged cultural enclaves and status enclaves. hate-speech of the type that Mansfield traffics in (viz. homosexuality "undermines civilization") is not just another disinterested quest via the free-market agency for a benign pedagogical outcome...