Word: cult
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...emotions, their rages and outrages - into their accounts of the way we lived, publicly and privately, in a very troubled time. The downside of their efforts - especially in Thompson's case - was a highly unreliable subjectivity. It was covered over by Thompson's stylishness and eventually subsumed by the cult of personality that accreted around him. Eventually, Gibney's documentary concludes, it was celebrity that did Thompson in; his personality, more than any event he was covering, became the story, which was not as interesting as he and his acolytes thought...
...What makes the cult of the santos malandros stand out, however, is its moral ambiguity. Santiago Rondon, a "spiritual consultant" in La Pastora, one of the capital's oldest neighborhoods, describes the tradition as a windshield wiper swinging between good and not so good. "It goes this way and it goes that way," says Rondon. "One day the santos malandros help a desperate mother keep her child off drugs; the next day they help you score some cocaine. It's the duality of life, but that's the way real life functions." And there's always the danger, acknowledged...
...santos malandros are the latest pantheon to be incorporated into the broader cult of Maria Lionza. Among the others are the Corte Medica, consisting of doctors believed to be responsible for healing miracles. Its best-known figure, Jose Gregorio Hernandez, is currently in the process of being canonized by the Catholic Church. But inclusion of the santos malandros has raised controversy among devotees of espiritismo (also known as santeros). That's because they are regarded as spirits with a "low light," who, in order to gain redemption in death, must undo the harm they did in life...
...Though the "A" and the "J" visible on "The Colossus canvas appear to be finally persuading more experts that Juliá is the painting's true author, some still allow for the possibility of Goya's authorship. "Over recent years there has been a veritable cult of a sort of 'Goya code' of looking at scratch marks, odd jottings, odd shapes in old paint and anything that might be hidden just below the surface and making a lot out of it," says University of Essex Goya scholar Sarah Symmons. "Who might have painted a bit of the picture...
...face and body are improbable, arresting and unique; she's simply not designed to play ordinary people. We don't doubt her skills as a serious actress, but she's much more seductive and satisfying as a fantasy or cartoon character. Or a saint from some fertility cult: Holy Jolie...