Word: deacons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...white Christians an oppressed minority in Nebraska? At least one judge thinks so -- but that might have more to do with his removal from office for setting off fireworks in his colleagues' offices, among other peculiar juridical habits. Former Douglas County judge Richard "Deacon" Jones, who was fired from his position by the state Supreme Court for "a continuing pattern of misconduct," claims that the scales of justice just can't handle fat jurists, and has filed a discrimination complaint with the state's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission...
...Wednesday, full of charges of racketeering and grand theft, is the devil's work. In the only interview since then, Lyons, 56, told TIME he was a man at peace--"I can sleep comfortably again"--and ready to fight. "My daddy was a strong Baptist deacon and he gave me this good name. It doesn't mean trickster, deceiver," he said, folding his hands under his robes. "I look forward to getting my good name back...
Suddenly, after the puzzling signals began to billow [from the Sistine Chapel chimney], the Vatican's ranking Cardinal-deacon in the Sacred College, appeared at the Window of the Benediction in St. Peter's Basilica. His Latin words boomed out over loudspeakers: "Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum. Habemus Papam!" (I announce to you a great joy. We have a Pope!) "He is the Most Eminent and Most Reverend Lord Cardinal Albino Luciani, who has taken the name of John Paul the First...
These people, particularly the men, are fascinating mixtures of virtues and vices: proud, independent, argumentative, close-minded. The twins, Deacon and Steward Morgan, grandsons of one of Haven's founding fathers, are angry at the way the town's young people have begun to act up, loitering around the communal oven with radios blaring--it is the '60s, remember--and questioning the authority of the elders. Something is polluting Ruby, the Morgans and others like them believe, threatening the one place in the world where they have ever felt safe...
...blame for this disruption on the strange women in the Convent is a tale of Faulknerian complexity and power. Morrison once wrote a Cornell master's thesis on Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, and the Mississippian's incantatory prose rhythms still crop up in her writing. Here is Deacon musing on the past as he drives around in Ruby: "He [Deacon's grandfather] would have been embarrassed by grandsons who worked twelve hours five days a week instead of the eighteen-to-twenty-hour days Haven people once needed just to keep alive, and who could hunt quail for pleasure rather...