Word: flesh
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...face of it Dorje Shugden is not an appealing prisoner of conscience. He is depicted--by friends--as a lightning-breathing terror with three bloodshot eyes, wreathed in the smoke of burning human flesh. In fact, however, as one of a pantheon of "protector deities," he exercises his wrath only in defense of a 350-year-old purist interpretation of the Dalai Lama's own Gelugpa branch of Tibetan Buddhism. For decades the High Lama himself included Shugden in his daily prayers. But in 1976 he began preaching against the god; in 1996 he discouraged Shugdenites' participation...
...promote abstinence, therefore, seems the ultimate in naivete. Yet, precisely because sex is so powerful, it must be handled with respect. Sexual intercourse can be a mystical, even sacred experience. Two individuals become completely naked and vulnerable to each other--or, as the Bible puts it, they become "one flesh." Yet in the modern trend of serial monogamy, the bond of one flesh, meant to last a lifetime, is ripped apart again and again. Chlamydia can be treated with antibiotics. What is the cure for a broken heart...
...first we were inclined to think of the tale of the teacher and her sixth-grade lover as mere daytime-television trash in the flesh--the teacher-pupil angle slipping a ghost of incest into the narrative, and no doubt a touch of mental illness. On the other hand, we have gone pretty far in exhausting the categories of the forbidden. The love that dare not speak its name has become public, ordinary and settled into domestic life, as wholesome as Fred MacMurray in a cardigan. The President's penis and its recreations are routinely discussed in public without much...
...gifted healer. Indeed, he cures one of his first patients--a dying merchant--with what seems like one-handed CPR. Musa, the revived trader, is not particularly grateful. His first thought is to sign up the young Jewish healer for a traveling medicine show. Musa is worldliness made flesh, the sort of opportunist and schemer who if asked to swap his soul for profit would probably respond, "What's the catch?" By contrast, Crace's Messiah-in-training is a bit of a stick: an inept carpenter with a stuffy nose, a functional illiterate, the kind of cheerless...
...these is Lives of the Popes. At the end of the book, he undertakes a ranking. There is, first, "Outstanding Popes," followed by "Good or Above Average Popes." John Paul II makes neither of these categories. Father McBrien rates him as less than great because he did not flesh out Vatican II. But he rates him as "Historically Important," as Gorbachev would confirm...