Word: humanists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...anger everyone with a special interest. It is to the credit of Hong Kong's Ann Hui, the 36-year-old director of Boat People, that she has chosen the latter course. Her film is not a meticulous precis of Vietnamese politics; it is a fast-paced, humanist melodrama centering on one family that, in the chaos of reconstruction that faced the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam after the fall of Saigon in 1975, finally determines to flee the country on an agonizingly slow boat through the China...
Nature has many ways of saying "Do not understand me too quickly," and Thomas is constantly watchful for the exception that disproves the rule. Both as scientist and humanist, he finds that doubt is his most reliable ally. Bewilderment, as he also calls it, is the 20th century's family secret: "Hidden in the darkest closets of all our institutions of higher learning, repressed whenever it seems to be emerging into public view, sometimes glimpsed staring from attic windows like a mad cousin of learning...
...ominous nights, three British prisoners run variations on the national character. Hicksley-Ellis (Jack Thompson) conducts his impotent belligerence by the book; ragged, resilient Jack Celliers (David Bowie) has the clear eyes and defiant smirk of a Kipling hero; Lawrence (Tom Conti), the camp translator, is an Oxbridgian humanist seeking a tunnel into the Oriental mind. Men are strong; men are shot; men fight on for their peculiar codes of honor. This is an art-house Bridge on the River Kwai, with neither bridge nor river, only a fatal, futile game that each side plays with different rules...
...Unitarian Universalist Association to delete mention of God from its founding statement of principles [June 27] mocks the Unitarianism and Universalism of William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker and Hosea Ballou. If this radical proposal is ratified, the association should seriously consider changing its name to the Humanist Feminist Association...
...fine cutting edge of his comic vision comes, as always, from the sense that there is hell to pay. The author, a resident staffer at The New Yorker, was raised a Dutch Calvinist, and he is a past master at striking antithetical poses. He is at once the liberal humanist, tolerantly condoning free expression and yearnings of the flesh; he is also the hooded inquisitor, meting out appropriate punishment whenever anyone tries to have a little...