Word: descente
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...lives and how Ghosh, Baghdad citizens and coalition troops must cope during wartime Reading Aparisim Ghosh's brilliantly evocative "Baghdad Diary" [Aug. 28] at the back door of my typically English bungalow on a gently warm late summer's day was utterly bizarre. From his description of the terrifying descent into Baghdad airport to the final words of his article, I was lost in his powerful rhetoric. Fortunately, we have Ghosh to describe the situation in Baghdad. Otherwise we would have to rely on the ever optimistic, honeyed official government reports, which would have us believe Iraq will soon...
Most unnerving for Osteen's critics is the suspicion that they are fighting not just one idiosyncratic misreading of the gospel but something more daunting: the latest lurch in Protestantism's ongoing descent into full-blown American materialism. After the eclipse of Calvinist Puritanism, whose respect for money was counterbalanced by a horror of worldliness, much of Protestantism quietly adopted the idea that "you don't have to give up the American Dream. You just see it as a sign of God's blessing," says Edith Blumhofer, director of Wheaton College's Center for the Study of American Evangelicals. Indeed...
...Niall Ferguson may have retired as the Laurence A. Tisch professor of history at Harvard University and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford. His latest book, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, has just been published by Penguin Press...
...much end there. According to accounts from friends, Don Stewart-Whyte, who changed his name to Abdul Waheed, converted six months ago, giving up drugs and alcohol. He grew a beard, shaved his head and started wearing traditional Islamic dress. Friends say Brian Young, who is of West Indian descent, was troubled by the decadence of Western society. Oliver Savant, now called Ibrahim, has been a Muslim for some seven years and, friends say, never mentioned politics. "He just talked about soccer and general chitchat," says a friend...
Ultimately, the path that most converts choose will be determined by the outcome of the larger struggle within Islam, between the forces of moderation and extremism. Abdula, 22, a tall, bearded Londoner of Ghanaian descent, was a devout Christian until a university friend introduced him to Islam. "I started researching more about it to try and find its faults," he says. "But I couldn't, and I was captured." Abdula (who won't give his last name) officially converted eight months ago. He supports equality for women and condemns terrorism, but he acknowledges that his perspective on the world...