Word: imperfectly
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...divorced remarried Catholics are barred from the sacraments. But annulments are plentiful--if you can prove that your marriage was from the outset so dysfunctional it wasn't a marriage at all. So complete failures can be rescued, but human messes are unforgivable, and fresh starts for the imperfect ruled out of bounds. Similarly, homosexuals are informed that they are born that way, but no sexual intimacy is permissible, because it cannot lead to procreation. But the infertile are married every day; postmenopausal spouses are allowed active sex lives. Only lay Catholic homosexuals are given no option for sexual intimacy...
Most of the book, however, is not of this high caliber. Morin’s failure is most pronounced in the scenes in which Lois works on an abstract painting of a woman in white, an imperfect black square named Max and a garden. The triangular symbolism in her painting works too hard to imitate her life. Similarly, a subplot involving Maximilian, the Austrian Emperor of Mexico, and his white-clad queen is completely extraneous. The little history lesson could hardly be more boring or less relevant...
...potential human rights abuses and massacres, what group would the Staff choose for such an important task? And if the fact that Israel is the target of the inquiry particularly troubles the Staff, why should Israel be evaluated by a different organization than other nations? The United Nations is imperfect, as are all institutions, but creating an ad hoc commission packed with Israel’s allies would hardly allow a legitimate investigation...
...imperfect business—sometimes people weren’t cured at all, sometimes the pain or the cancer went into remission and then returned weeks or months or years later. And I must admit that I was never cured of anything (though I knew people who were) and that I never even fell over under the weight of Spirit (though my parents did, even before they believed). So there are loose threads in this miraculous tapestry for a skeptic to tug at, if she chose...
...That Zen got off to such a rocky start in America isn't really such bad news as Downing and his subjects sometimes intimate it is. If the insights made available by a spiritual institution are separate?and bigger?than the imperfect individuals who achieve and transmit them, that means they're still valid even after those individuals lose the thread and mess up. American Zen, that peculiar hybrid of Japanese and American sensibilities that was planted on California's shores in the '60s by Suzuki, Baker and others, may have been damaged by the scandals and embarrassments that Downing...