Word: magic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Dickens updated in Harlem, Singer in a magic shtetl...
...lyric short stories and novels, Singer's prose is suffused with drama. In the theater, his work becomes prosaic. The notion of a girl deceived by a man who does not change his costume or his appearance demands a magic that neither the manic cast nor Director Stephen Kanee can sustain. For this tenuous fantasy, an entertainment tax is difficult enough. A credulity tax is insupportable. - Stefan Kanfer
Like poetry, preaching is always a mystery. Each Sunday brings the danger of failure, and with that the question of potential impact. In his intriguing little book on preaching, Telling the Truth, Novelist and sometime Preacher Frederick Buechner describes the magic moment when the minister steps into the pulpit. In the pews sit a college student there against his will, a banker who twice contemplated suicide that week, a contractor on the take, a pregnant girl who feels life stir within her, a teacher hiding his homosexuality. "The preacher pulls the little cord that turns on the lectern light...
...that plugging holes to keep cold air out and hot air in actually works?and saves money. This may not add up to Jimmy Carter's "moral equivalent of war," but the President's description of the energy crisis no longer seems absurd. Heat itself has regained its elemental magic, and keeping warm has become a tribal obsession. The season of Great Cold approaches. Scrape flesh from animal skins. Gather food. Drag tree limbs from the forest and pile them inside the mouth of the cave. Recite incantations. Make fire...
Sheen tried several times to revive his old TV preaching magic, but the times had changed. It was only in the year or two before his death that America's grimmer sense of history seemed to run his way again. One of Sheen's basic messages was against self-indulgence. He told Americans that the Antichrist would come, "talking of peace, prosperity and plenty." Modern man, he insisted, seeks promises of salvation without a cross, wants a "Christ without his nails." Then the bishop would thunder: "There is no pleasure without pain, no Easter without Good Friday...