Word: faithfulness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Congress and the press than would be expected of a man of his record and rather benign personality. All this has produced a sense of regret in the President himself. "The duty of our generation of Americans," he noted last week, "is to renew our nation's faith-not focused just against foreign threats, but against the threat of selfishness, cynicism and apathy...
...visitor, however sympathetic, is prone to feel that the hope is deluded. The stripped-down Protestant faith of the townsmen should have readied them for that. Where two or three are gathered together, there first of all is Satan: pride of self, envy, greed. While it seems a near certainty that Plains' magnetism for tourists will diminish (when I was there, I saw a mere 300 a day-lots of parking, no crush), it also seems certain that the green crossroads and its 600 souls can never lapse into pre-Carter life. The cause is not Jimmy...
...birds wing off in a hundred different directions. Writing of life in general, he notes: "We are closer to the ants than to the butterflies. Very few people can endure much leisure." On belief: "Religions are kept alive by heresies, which are really sudden explosions of faith. Dead religions do not produce them." And, "Miracles are like jokes. They relieve our tension suddenly by setting us free from the chain of cause and effect." Love receives a whole chapter. "When the coin is tossed, either Love or Lust will fall uppermost. But if the metal is right, under...
...find themselves confounded. Jastrow blows phantom kisses like neutrinos across the chasm between science and religion, seeming almost wistful to make a connection. Biblical fundamentalists may be happier with Jastrow's books than are his fellow scientists. He writes operatically: "For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries...
There are enough sons-of-bitches here to convince me of the first part; the latter is a matter of faith. The way to prove that faith, though, is to force these men and women to recognize the burdens of their own mortality. Not, however, by violence or building takeovers--those will only bring the sons-of-bitches to the fore. Instead we must face them quietly but resolutely, showing them the frequent cruelty of what they do, never letting them forget that there are other, more severe judges of their actions. We must haunt them with their own humanity...