Word: jesuits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Christianity now has relatively fewer adherents-some 950,000, split about evenly between Protestants and Roman Catholics-than it had in the decades after Francis Xavier, a 16th century Jesuit and the pioneer Christian missionary in Japan. Says the Rev. Timothy Pietsch, a Baptist missionary: "A Japanese Christian has to give his allegiance to a 'foreign' God and say that he's not first and foremost a Japanese-an impossible task...
...devil's language" is the description generally attributed to St. Francis Xavier, the 16th century Jesuit missionary. Others have seen in the intricacies of the language a major influence on Japan's intellectual and artistic styles, even on its basic national character. Yet sympathetic observers also believe that the language may represent a serious obstacle to Japan's functioning as a world power. According to former U.S. Ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer, "Japanese ideas are transmitted abroad only very weakly and through the filter of a few foreign 'experts'. .. Japanese intellectual life for the most part...
Especially controversial are the parish relief committees that have sprung up to channel food and funds to the families of the imprisoned (see box). A Jesuit priest from the city of Kalisz was sentenced to two months' imprisonment for collecting aid for the relatives of political prisoners. When the teen-age son of a relief worker died after he was mauled by the police, Cardinal Glemp lashed back, calling on the government to stop "infringing human and civic rights." Although the authorities have promised to investigate the event, Poles expect no results. When the Pope spotted the dead...
With the arguments unresolved, the Rev. Richard McCormick, a Jesuit moral theologian at Georgetown University who endorsed last week's petition, can didly admits that he is not yet sure which approach to genetic engineering is right. He signed not to prohibit research forever but to try to encourage public debate. McCormick believes the line between removing a genetic defect and manipulating the race eugenically "is all but blurred...
...unusual, indeed the bizarre, it is because, as he notes, "small items with big implications are my bread and butter." A confessed iconoclast, he likes nothing better than to take aim at major targets. Gould links that saintly man of the cloth and science, Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, to the infamous Piltdown hoax (the faked fossil, says Gould, was apparently a youthful prank by Teilhard), and displays irreverence for even his great hero Charles Darwin. Says Gould: "If I have one special ability, it is as a tangential thinker. I can make unusual connections...