Word: bestial
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...Discovery is mostly my mania," he wrote. His biographer answers him back: "Burton's real passion was not for geographical discovery, but for the hidden in man, for the unknowable and therefore the unthinkable. What his Victorian compatriots called unclean, bestial or Satanic, he regarded with almost clinical detachment. In this respect he belongs more properly...
...hotly debated the controversial recommendations of a government commission that came out in favor of relaxing the laws against homosexuality. When the suggestions were first introduced as legislation, the outcry was so shrill that the bill was overwhelmingly defeated, amid cries that the whole idea was "scandalous," "filthy" and "bestial." But in ten years, the mood in Parliament - and in the country - has changed. Last week the House of Commons passed the bill over token opposition, and it will soon go on the statute books...
Barth has produced a black Bible that proceeds not to revelation but to further mystification. At bottom, he seems to be saying that even the bestial can be beautiful if the beholder believes it to be so. He faults man's failure to distinguish pragmatically between truth and belief. And, as in his earlier writings, he bleakly seems to say that anything can be true if it is in the nature of the believer to believe...
...martyrs die in vain? Foxe thinks not. Great crowds gathered to see the burnings, and many were shaken to the depths by the shining faith of the victims and the bestial exertions of their executioners. As the century advanced, the crowds became more hostile to "the popish oppressours," and the cause of Protestantism so prospered that it became the state religion under Elizabeth, who at the suggestion of her bishops made a historic advance in the practice of religious toleration. The custom of burning heretics was abandoned in England. During the 17th century, most heretics were known as papists...
...Hague for 600 florins. A surviving letter, signed by the artist, describes the work as "Daniel amidst many lions, which are taken from the life. Original, the whole by my hand." Rubens is often dismissed as a rote fabricator of effulgent flesh, of plump nudes and pillared panoramas of bestial warriors. His Daniel is, otherwise, dramatic proof of the baroque at its turbulent best...