Word: humanists
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...architecture, philosophy, commerce, science-all by way of scene-setting for the great central struggle. Durant devotes a third of the book to the forces and the men leading up to the Reformation proper-the grimly erudite Oxonian, Wyclif; the austere advance runner of Protestantism. John Huss; the peripatetic humanist. Desiderius Erasmus, who could "scarce forbear" to pray to "St. Socrates" and expressed in satire what many of his contemporaries mutely felt about the late-Renaissance church. Author Durant delightedly quotes from an Erasmus dialogue written on the death in 1513 of Julius II, one of the worldlier Popes...
Lesson of Tolerance. Author William James Durant (who was raised a Roman Catholic, now describes himself as a humanist) is a tolerant man who enjoys riding above the battle. With gently malicious humor, he quotes Catholic historians when he has something anti-Catholic to say, Protestant historians when he is anti-Protestant. To Durant, the men who tried to heal the wounds of Christendom, rather than the zealots on either side, are the "good" men of the day; but he believes that "our sympathy can go to all the combatants." Concludes Durant: "A religion is at its best when...
Father Davis loses me completely when he speaks of Spanish-Jewish "coexistence." I would like some clarification on this point. Does he mean that the Spaniards of Torquemada's time agreed to let the Jew coexist with them as long as he became a Catholic? To a Humanist like myself, the sugar-coating of history is the greatest of all "sins...
...Stella Zilliacus obviously kept her eyes open and the tape recorder of her memory turned on. Real names drop like ripe plums-Nehru, H. G. Wells, Anthony Eden, Bernard Shaw-and the fictional ones seem to be readily guessable. What emerges is a wickedly witty portrait of an atheistic, humanist household headed by a zealot father who devoutly believes that religion is "nothing but a means of maintaining injustice, corruption and poverty," and a euphoric mother who dismisses all that sort of thing as "Bloomsbury talk." But the narrator's main concern is love, and the way in which...
...seems to be the moral pointed by British Novelist Elspeth Huxley,* latest explorer to go soul-searching in the jungle. Dr. Ewart Clausen, a famed Norwegian scientist, has renounced the world for his bush clinic at Luala, in French Equatorial Africa, and has become "a secular saint in the humanist calendar." From the far corners of the earth pilgrims come to sit at his feet; he proffers a bag of sticky bull's-eyes, advice, and the magic of his presence...