Word: matter-of-fact
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During my long walk home Tuesday, it was on a block of lower Third Avenue--that is, the Bowery--that I first felt reassured. All the storefront missions were hopping, their doors wide open. The mission workers were on the sidewalk exuding matter-of-fact competence as they offered their services--water, bathrooms, food, telephones, first aid--to the thousands of anxious strangers passing by. A few of the regular clientele, people accustomed to walking the streets dazed and dirty, stood aside, watching their temporarily down-and-out fellow citizens accept handouts...
Joan Chittister might seem an unlikely type to defy the Pope, let alone get away with it. Her dress is sensible, her voice matter-of-fact bordering on clarion, its timbre reminiscent of the kind of sister who for better or worse acquainted generations of parochial schoolers with Catholic discipline. But the liberal church activists who came to hear Chittister speak last week at a Los Angeles conference knew better. They were aware that Sister Joan, her vows notwithstanding, is a longtime feminist firebrand in the midst of a daring gambit. "If Scripture has nothing at all to say about...
...That is not much consolation to 17-year-old Afrina. When she tells her story, villagers hover nearby, some weeping. But Afrina does not cry. In a matter-of-fact way, she tells how soldiers came looking for her father last January in a village that nestles up against the gates of ExxonMobil's Cluster I gas field. They didn't find him, so they took her instead. For three days, she sat in a pool of water in a warehouse fronted by a sign that read: "You are now entering the Mobil premises." The soldiers told her to remove...
...Bush and Dick Cheney, but it gets at something real. On the eve of Father's Day, these men are straight off a 1950s Hallmark card. These guys are guys. They're guyish. The model of their masculinity is definitely retro--stern dads in suits and ties, undemonstrative, matter-of-fact, but with alleged hearts of gold. They tend not to explain much, and they're not the best at intimate chats or hand-holding sessions. Like most dads from the 1950s, they also tend to foster adolescent rebellion. Think of Jim Jeffords as a neglected teenager, finally running away...
Runup to the execution: A discomfited and slightly ridiculous solemnity overtook the anchors, as if they were trying to find the right face to put on things, the right tone under the circumstances (Funereal? Matter-of-fact? Huskily sympathetic? Sympathetic to whom, exactly...