Word: luster
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...music. The Bach Society's performance was truly gorgeous--all moonlight and velvet shadow. The chorus blended into a cool wave of sound, plumbing the music's dreamy depths without sacrificing a sparkling diction. The soloists, particularly soprano Ellen Burkhardt, were uniformly fine. The orchestra matched them in ethereal luster as a glossy violin solo, the ripple of a harp, and a punctuation of prancing fanfares closed the evening in shimmering enchantment...
...Synod was originally considered one of the major reforms of the Second Vatican Council and of Paul's papacy. It was the chief structural means for collegiality (power sharing between the Pope and the bishops). But its luster dimmed once Paul made it clear that Synod recommendations could be accepted, modified or ignored at his will. At the last Synod, in 1974, Paul limited the agenda to evangelization. Bishops struggled for weeks to broaden the meaning of that topic, then finally scrapped most of their final report. In the three years since, the Pope has taken no action...
Rubens never forgot the lesson of Venetian art: with every object, from a wineglass to a woman's belly, brought to its fullest luster as substance, "luxury" meant completeness of being. There is something quite transcendental about Rubens' incessant delight in the material world. Every dimple or blush on the skin of Helene Fourment, the child wife of his old age (she was 16, he 53, when they were married in 1630), is both the record of desire and a proclamation of God's generosity. Rubens' world was tumescent; even the eyes in his portraits, large...
...preacher. Intervention in the European war, he said at the time, was being promoted by something like a conspiracy of "the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration." Relations grew strained with friends and even his in-laws, who favored intervention. His hero's luster dulled. Novelist J.P. Marquand, a friend, explained indulgently, "You've got to remember that all heroes are horses' asses." Lindbergh became the most glamorous evangelist of "America first." Roosevelt compared him to a "copperhead." Lindbergh resigned from the Army Air Corps Reserve, and after Pearl Harbor, F.D.R. refused to take him back...
...Nixon gang made money off Watergate, there could be no fix. When it came to Theo Kojak, the Knapp Commission was out-to-lunch. He just couldn't be bought: the nation's last honest cop. Maybe the nation's last honest man. And what added to his luster was his incredible omnipotence; Kojak simply never made a mistake. He might be wrong for 59 minutes but in the last minute of the show he'd figure out everything. Never wrong, never out-foxed. Not even by the upper-crust criminals wearing Pierre Cardin suits who would sneer...