Word: long
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...credentials by declining to meet with the leading group of gay Republicans. He's against hate-crimes legislation aimed at protecting minorities, gays and women, but he's for set-aside programs that give 10% of government contracts--and maybe more--to firms owned by women and minorities as long as there are no "quotas...
...fact remains that the substance of Jesus' teaching is the basis on which many Christians establish their faith. Its piercing good sense, imaginative eloquence, the breathtaking stringency of his ethical demands and his simultaneous patience and compassion are crucial to the intimacy that so many establish with this long gone man. The promises he makes in the Gospel of John, in the resonant (and quite literal) King James translation, have strengthened endangered men and women from the terrors of Roman martyrdom till today--"Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father...
Whatever Jesus' final expectation, that reign did not arrive in his lifetime or in the 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...
...believes himself a direct recipient of such care. Fifteen years ago, as I was about to undergo five weeks of withering radiation for a 10-in.-long cancer inside my spinal cord, I found myself--an outlaw Christian who had, and has, no active tie with a church--transported, thoroughly awake, to another entirely credible time and place. I was lying on the shore of the Lake of Galilee with Jesus' disciples asleep around...
Then Jesus came forward and silently indicated that I should follow him into the lake. Waist deep in the water, I felt him pour handfuls down the long fresh scar on my back--the relic of unsuccessful surgery a month before. Jesus suddenly told me, "Your sins are forgiven." Appalled by my dire physical outlook, I thought ungratefully, "That's the last thing I need"; so I asked him, "Am I also cured?" He said, "That too." Then, as though I'd forced his hand, he turned and climbed ashore with me well behind...