Word: cassã
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...offer to assume a post at Harvard University, having achieved unexpected fame with his book, “The Varieties of Religious Illusion.” The combination of this secularist tract—and its appendix refuting 36 arguments for God’s existence—with Cass??s clear-eyed empathy for religious belief has turned him into an overnight celebrity, dubbed by Time Magazine as “the atheist with a soul...
...Grand Rebbe, expected to succeed his father as the Hasidim’s spiritual guide. Cass bears witness to Azarya’s agonizing choice between denying the secular world that so engages him or leaving his communal responsibilities and attending MIT—a struggle which informs Cass??s own thinking on religion’s roots and allure. While in the past Cass waits to discover what Azarya will decide, in the present readers wonder whether Cass will prevail in his upcoming religion-and-reason debate at Harvard against a neoconservative Nobel Laureate...
...story is not entirely an intellectual adventure. Throughout the novel, Goldstein uses playful, everyday occurrences to creatively broach serious topics, deftly interweaving such diverse concepts as probability theory, the mind-body problem, and theodicy with Cass??s relationship issues and dinner conversations. Of course, innumerable thinkers over many centuries haven’t definitively solved the problem of evil, and Goldstein isn’t going to do it over dessert, but she does succeed in accessibly introducing a classic conundrum to her audience in the flow of her storytelling. So long as readers recognize that the positions...
Cavaradossi, of course, is an artist. So is Tosca: as a celebrated singer, she premieres a cantata on the same night that Scarpia arrests Cavaradossi. Subtler, though, is the way in which Cass??s Scarpia is framed as a sort of artist. Scarpia has an extensive, obsessive conception of the way he wants the world to be, and the elaborate, not entirely rational course of events he plans in order to force himself on Tosca is far more sophisticated than the artistry of either Cavaradossi or Tosca...
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