Word: humanity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...lives of his earliest companions. Yet a majority of his followers continue to expect it. In the face of so long an uncertainty, how has his following not only endured but grown so hugely through two millenniums? And what can be expected of his long potent holding power over human imagination and hope in the near and distant future? If benign Christian institutions and the capacity to believe in a God who loves his creation should weaken fatally, if the artistic inspiration of the figure of Jesus should wane--as it has in some of the West today...
...fair-minded reader, with a normal human capacity for storytelling, might well consume all four Gospels in a night and conclude that their individual accounts bear enough relation to one another to suggest that they spring from a common event. Their internal differences are occasionally extreme, and their views of the nature of Jesus range from Mark's affirmation that he was the "beloved Son of God" to John's flat claim that Jesus was the Word, that eternal aspect of God who created the world and who has a continuing interest in the life of worldly creatures--ourselves above...
...reader might be asked to return to Mark, not only the oldest but the clearest Gospel, and to deduce the full story it means to tell. In its brevity and speed--some 12,000 words in English, a mere pamphlet--Mark implies a far more complicated process of human growth than its outline specifies...
...other Gospels and producing a usefully expanded narrative. It will not, of course, be a narrative for which one can begin to claim spiritual, doctrinal or historical authority, but since restrained imagination--as it thinks its way into the lives of others--remains our strongest means of human understanding and compassion, such an expansion seems an honest reaction to the Gospels' limited provisions. My attempt is always to open more and more dark corners of a story to human possibility...
...concedes that trading with Castro, now 73, could prop him up in the short run. More important, she insists, is ensuring that his successor is market- and democracy-minded. And since Castro blames the embargo for worsening Cuba's moribund economy--a cover for his own socialist blunders and human-rights abuses--why not take away his alibi? Even Cuba's leading dissident, Elizardo Sanchez, agrees. "After the fall of the Soviet Union," he says, "the worst strategy to take against a closed society like Cuba is to tighten its isolation...