Word: godly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...works dating from around the 16th century B.C. to the 2nd century A.D. proves. For Thrace was the land whence came Orpheus, mythical musician-king who enchanted the most ferocious beasts and defied Pluto, the king of the underworld; it was the country where the Horseman--a god combining aspects of Apollo, Dionysos and Asclepius--was at once the object of popular veneration and emulation. People and culture were sufficiently influenced by neighboring Greece, Persia, Western Europe and even Scythia to create a rich variety of artifacts, and yet the Thracians and their creations have always been mysterious...
...dead warrior's wives would vie madly with one another for the privilege of being the one "favored" by being killed so as to join the husband in death. Then, too, a segment of the population, the Getai, told an interesting legend about resurrection. It seems that the god Zalmoxis told man that he would enjoy eternal life after death. When Zalmoxis died he was resurrected three years later, and though the Greek commentator Herodotus speculated that perhaps Zalmoxis had merely hidden in a prepared foxhole all that time during his "death," this primitive monotheism puzzled the writer greatly...
...god of common sense...
...first there reigns a state of newborn innocence, snuffed out suddenly by the burning of a neighbor's child in a plane crash. "God is a brute and traitor, abandoning us to time," writes Dillard. She despairs of earthly happiness: "You can get caught holding one end of a love, when your father drops, and your mother; when a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone . . ." But in the end, she witnesses a baptism that heralds her own reawakening of faith. One Christian sect, she reads, posits a substance known as "Holy the Firm...
...ostentatious, as in her description of the Pacific coastline, "the fringey edge where elements meet and realms mingle, where time and eternity spatter each other with foam." But at their best, Dillard's sentences have a clean, penetrating edge. "The higher Christian churches," she writes, "come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism. . . as though they knew what they were doing ... If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute." Henry David Thoreau could not have put it much...