Word: butler
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Forbidden Planet. Some fascinating gadgets and a robot butler make life and love in outer space seem even better than in split-level suburbia (TiME, April...
...would it seem to find oneself in an assembly of assorted saints? Short of going to heaven, the best way to answer that question is to dip into the four lively and curious volumes of Butler's Lives of the Saints, just published in a brand-new bicentennial edition (Kenedy; $39.50). The saints are anything but a dull crowd...
Even in the winding-sheet prose of the Rev. Alban Butler, the saints' often wildly exciting lives and extravagant deaths provided the thriller reading for generations of 18th and 19th century Christians, who did not have the grotesqueries of horror comics and TV. A prodigiously diligent pillar of British Roman Catholicism, Hagiographer Butler labored on his lives for 30 years of spare time and published them anonymously in 1756. The present edition, drastically edited by the late Father Herbert Thurston, S.J. and British Author Donald Attwater, is virtually a new work, contains the lives of 2,565 saints...
After the Bible. Some of Butler's saints have been eliminated by modern scholarship, shortage of facts or plain obscurity (there is no all-inclusive calendar of Catholic saints). Notable among the additions is St. John Cassian. 5th century patriarch of monasticism, whose work was rated by St. Benedict as, after the Bible, the most suitable reading for Benedictine monks. Butler banned him. presumably for his leanings toward semi-Pelagianism (heretical insistence on man's perfectibility without God's help), but Attwater prefers to call him "anti-Augustinian." Other newcomers are those canonized since Butler...
...populace turns from litigation to religion. Not, however, before the Irish, who stand "on the periphery of chaos," move into dead center and, in the book's most comic turn, infect the Sassenach with their own fey reasoning. "The bog water is rapidly rising in my brain," Butler finds, and obedient to the hypnosis that compels non-Irish reporters to write in a kind of stage Irish when describing St. Patrick's Day parades, he begins to talk in the wild, oblique, subjunctive manner of the natives...