Word: compendium
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Maimonides conceived his Mishneh Torah as a single unifying law code for Judaism. Although it never became that, his work substantially affected every later development in Jewish scholarship. By many accounts, Maimonides' legal compendium provided a strength that enabled Judaism to avoid factionalism during the Muslim and Christian persecutions of the Middle Ages. The Guide of the Perplexed influenced the metaphysical speculations of Thomas Aquinas and other Christian scholastics while being largely ignored by medieval Judaism. But for modern Jews, says Biblical Scholar Nahum Sarna of Brandeis University, Maimonides provides "the model of a person who is able to accept...
...With a compendium this massive, the unavoidable starting point is the familiar songs, the ones that flit by on the radio whenever a disc jockey feels guilty or important. "It Ain't Me, Babe," "Mr. Tambourine Man," "Just Like a Woman," and the other early folk-rock crossover songs that established Dylan as a popular artist as well as an intellectual hero resonate as you stare at the words on the page. At once they seem to be both more and less than what they are when sung...
...this week. The detailed document calls for improved teaching about Vatican II throughout the church, further study of the place of national bishops' conferences and a deepened commitment to the poor. One noteworthy proposal, endorsed by the Pope in his closing speech, was for a churchwide catechism, or compendium of teachings, issued under Vatican auspices to clear up confusion about the beliefs of Catholicism...
...mother Theodora wrote nonfiction, principally on the American Indian. Those who do not know these facts about Ursula K. Le Guin could probably deduce them from her 23rd book. Always Coming Home can be read as a novel, but it is really something else: a scientific-looking compendium of information about a people who might exist in the distant future. They are called the Kesh, a gentle tribe living in the nine towns of the valley of the river Na, somewhere in Northern California. Le Guin's fieldwork into their rites and customs comes decked out with maps, charts, tables...
last year, Travel Writer Jan Morris said her valedictory to cities. "I may go upstream," she wrote airily, "or strike into the mountains." Yet here she is on the shadowy streets of a once grand Mediterranean trading and resort metropolis, "a little compendium of the world's experience, historically, aesthetically, even perhaps spiritually...