Word: devil
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Religion in politics is no novelty in America. Hardly an eyebrow was raised when the national head of Reform Judaism endorsed Senator Kennedy even before the primaries. But Protestant Evangelicals have generally judged politics to be the devil's playground. This year they are plunging in, too, borrowing methods and single-issue zeal that religious and secular liberals have applied to racial equality, women's rights, the environment and the Viet Nam War. Their booming religious TV and radio circuit provides a "bully" pulpit for exploring moral issues. The effect on a close presidential race could be crucial...
...Devil's Alternative, Forsyth...
This is the most piquant of the family plays, an agile display of comic irony and sociocultural observation. It takes place on a California patio, that never-ever land. It includes a middle-aged husband whose wife has been made desolate by his supposed philandering. Actually, the poor devil has long been impotent, his only mistress being an omnipresent slug of 100-proof oblivion. The couple's unemployed son lives in a '51 Pontiac in the garage. He objects to a mobile home on the grounds that it would be "too permanent." Their daughter is a nude, neurotic...
Thwarted expectations make for grumpy readers, and Freddy's manuscript, a rather dry narrative of political intrigue in 16th century Scandinavia, does not seem calculated to appease them. The chief antagonists to emerge from much torchlit huggermugger are Lars-Goren, an idealistic Swedish knight, and the Devil, who decides to help Lars-Goren's kins man Gustav overthrow the occupying Danes and become King of Sweden. Satan's motive is chiefly to perpetuate unrest and chaos. History, after all, has been running on his side: "Magellan had recently circled the globe, opening vast new avenues for greed...
...presumed good (the liberation of his homeland) while being energetically assisted by the archetype of evil. This problem leads to further questions, most of them posed by Bishop Brask, an unscrupulous and despairing Swedish prelate. Could it be that "every thing's the work of the Devil"? What if "God himself is a Devil's lie"? Is the term might makes right "profoundly true? Suppose that there is in fact no good in the world except that which survives. " How is it possible to act according to the "commandments of a god who had not spoken to anyone...