Word: minding
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Some information is more assimilable than other information. Facts, as Mark Twain noted, can be presented in such a way that they merely create "confusion of the mind and congestion of the ducts of thought." The reader's digestion of news will never be "effortless." TIME, however, tries to sift, sort, condense and explain the news by this simple standard: How much effort can an ordinarily educated and intelligent man or woman be expected to use in understanding this story? It's no use saying that 80 million Americans ought to have a thorough grasp of physics...
...Times says: "It's all very difficult, but with close attention to the homework, we may figure it out." Does TIME say: "It's a dreadful and wonderful world; some of it makes sense, some nonsense; to tell which is which is what a man has a mind...
With prayer, with humility of spirit tempering his temerity of mind, man has always sought to define the nature of the most important fact in his experience: God. To this unending effort to know God, man is driven by the noblest of his intuitions-the sense of his mortal incompleteness-and by hard experience. For man's occasional lapses from God-seeking inevitably result in intolerable shallowness of thought combined with incalculable mischief in action...
...rigorously secular mind the total paradox must, like its parts, be "unto the Jews a stumbling block, and to the Greeks foolishness." It is not irrational, but it is not the logic of two & two makes four. Theologically, it is the dialectical logic of that trinitarian oneness whose triunity is as much a necessity to the understanding of Godhead as higher mathematics is to the measurement of motion. Religiously, its logic, human beyond rationality, is the expression of a need epitomized in the paradox of Solon weeping for his dead son. "Why do you weep," asked a friend, "since...
...seeks to escape from the insecurity of freedom and finiteness by asserting his power beyond the limits of his nature. Limited by his finiteness, he pretends that he is not limited. Sensing his transcendence, man "assumes that he can gradually transcend [his finiteness] until his mind becomes identical with universal mind. All his intellectual and cultural pursuits . . . become infected with the sin of pride.. . . The religious dimension of sin," says Dr. Niebuhr, "is man's rebellion against God. . . . The moral and social dimension of sin is injustice...