Word: ideas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...warning last year that China might try to funnel money into the U.S. election campaign. Then he took a swipe at FBI Director Louis Freeh, noting that he?s troubled by the notion that the Justice Department decides what the President needs to know, since he therefore has no idea what he has not been told. "They have a dual obligation to share with the White House and with the State Department . . . information we need to protect and advance national security and to preserve the integrity of criminal investigations," Clinton said. "Ultimately, those things almost have to be solved...
...there's a peculiar idea. Is it possible for a Christian to think of heaven too much? How can one enjoy robust faith without envisaging faith's ultimate consummation? "Heaven is the greatest good," says Peter Kreeft, a professor of philosophy at Boston College and author of the 1990 volume Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Heaven...but Never Dreamed of Asking. "It is the reason that God banged out the Big Bang 18 billion years ago. Next to the idea of God, the idea of heaven is the greatest idea that has ever entered into the heart...
...that over two millenniums human conceptions of heaven tended to alternate between God-centered visions and more humanist arrangements focused primarily on the reunion and interactions of the sainted dead. Medieval heaven, approached intellectually by the Scholastics or passionately by the mystical school of love, expanded St. Augustine's idea of the Beatific Vision, the saints' rapturous and direct communion with God. The Renaissance Catholic heaven more resembled an ongoing human-to-human celebration presided over by the Virgin Mary. But Protestant reformers of the 1500s reinstated a vision severely centered on Christ and his Last Judgment. This became...
...golden streets in a yellow Cadillac convertible." Graham went on to a magnificent career, but he dropped the Cadillac, which nonetheless haunted him for years. Late 20th century America had little patience for detailed, literal views of heaven. Two world wars and the prospect of nuclear disaster made the idea of a comfy, progressive afterlife seem suspect. Modernist attacks on God's place in this world made people allergic to bold predictions about his kingdom in the next...
That was the problem: so often, the natives didn't know who these people really were, or treat them with the deference they felt they had earned. In one of the excellent catalog essays for "Exiles and Emigres," the writer Lawrence Weschler compares their idea of themselves to "Roman nobility in the rustic provinces...as stubbornly patronizing and aloof as the locals were sometimes naive and gauche." The dachshund story sums them up--as it does the situation of most exiles in America in the late 1930s and '40s. Two dachshunds meet on the palisade in Santa Monica, California...