Word: humanity
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...might have become more mellowed. It shows in the studied elegance of his tailoring, in a precision of speech that comes natural to him from long habit but seems a bit affected to unfriendly ears, and above all in a fierce reluctance to admit his mistakes, no matter how human and understandable they may have been. Some of his perfectionism traces back to a sense of being an outsider. As a Jew, he has sometimes felt the wounding edges of anti-Semitism (and again last week, that ugly term popped up). For all his wealth (he is a millionaire...
...nerves. The most effective method is a vicious appeal to voodoo believers, who are convinced that Duvalier is powerful because of ouangas that he planted about Port-au-Prince. As every practitioner of voodoo knows, the surest way to deprive a charm of its power is to apply human excrement. Last week the President's enemies went after what was supposed to be one of his strongest ouangas: the grave of his father, a tailor, who died last year. Grave robbers pried open the above-ground family tomb in Port-au-Prince's cemetery, hauled out the coffin...
...proved to be a lengthy allegory about man's journey through life "in the spiritual void" that sucks him at last to his own destruction. The curtain rises on the interior of a spaceship dominated by the towering electronic brain, a mechanism so advanced that it is nearly human. Ranged in front of it as ghostlike silhouettes, the passengers chant a lament for the planet Doris (actually the Earth) they just left behind...
...persuade the pious to abandon their beliefs. Incredibly enough, well over a third of those who either flatly reject all belief in God or else hold that there are no adequate grounds for deciding the question, nevertheless think that "on the whole, the Church stands for the best in human life," though it suffers from certain minor human shortcomings! And a substantial majority, though naturally denying the orthodox of the Incarnation, still feel that "Christ should be regarded ... as a very great prophet or teacher." "Whether or not he lived, many of his teachings are well worthwhile," an agnostic notes...
...distinguished theologians themselves sometimes forget, that these are only metaphors. Only religious discourse has evolved expressions powerful enough to convey how pressing political concerns have become today because the latter alone today speaks meaningfully of what once the former alone could speak of: that is, the "salvation" of the human "soul...