Word: erasmus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...indeed, is a thorn in Johnson's side. For Johnson sees Christian history largely as a pendulum, swinging between the repressive "total society" envisioned by Augustine and the individualistic, more private Christianity espoused by Pelagius and like-minded successors-particularly the great irenic humanist of the early Reformation, Erasmus of Rotterdam. The political analogies are not coincidental. Johnson believes that men can be self-governing. He sympathizes with the views of Erasmus and Pelagius. Indeed, he argues, the essential optimism of such humanists is closer to the message of the Apostle Paul than the deep pessimism of Augustine...
...send him off to school. The schools were not, by and large, free. Nor were they compulsory in the sense that every child in a certain area had to attend them. Some fortunate boys were educated in grammar schools with college in mind: they studied the Bible, Erasmus, Aesop, Ovid, Cicero, Vergil, Homer, Hesiod; Latin and Greek. Above all, there was what might be called a strongly moral education. Such an education for the colonists was by definition religious-God's will made known to the child...
...debilitating fragmentation, Chiang performed a critical service for the nation, one that paved the way for greater centralization under the Communists. But in the final analysis, given the scope of his problems, it is not surprising that he was unable to construct a durable political system. "In great things," Erasmus once wrote, "it is enough to have tried." Chiang's try was on a grand scale. His failure in the end diminishes but should not obscure his historical importance...
...Kant's "Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone," Nietzsche's "The Birth of Tragedy." As you read a few lines here, a few there, the printed words slowly vanish and are replaced by an image of yourself dressed in Renaissance robes, poring over an illuminated manuscript in an Erasmus-like tower. You lean over and look out the window at the little groups of women walking to market and children playing tag, a couple of lovers smiling at one another in the grass, and a frown comes over your face, you shake your head, and, with a slight disdainful...
...pieces of American fiction (see following reviews). Both are profoundly American in style and subject: Roth's The Great American Novel, a satiric fantasy about a mythical baseball league; Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, a surrealist account of a car dealer in the Midwest. Vonnegut is the Erasmus of the black comedians, who feels life as tragedy but tries to see it as a joke that can be ruefully shared. Roth at 40 is some sort of jet-propelled dervish who whirls through literature, demolishing forms, spinning off royalty checks, and leaving everybody (including Roth himself perhaps...