Word: minds
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Republic of China, Mao's position was immeasurably strengthened. Despite all that the Chinese people had endured, it seems not to have been too hard for Mao to persuade them of the visionary force and practical need for the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s. In Mao's mind, the intensive marshaling of China's energies would draw manual and mental labor together into a final harmonious synthesis and throw a bridge across the chasm of China's poverty to the promised socialist paradise on the other side...
...studied on scholarship, worked her way to Oxford and took two degrees, in chemistry and law. Her fascination with politics led her into Parliament at age 34, when she argued her way into one of the best Tory seats in the country, Finchley in north London. Her quick mind (and faster mouth) led her up through the Tory ranks, and by age 44 she got settled into the "statutory woman's" place in the Cabinet as Education Minister, and that looked like the summit of her career...
...then in 1991 Centesimus annus came in, a 25,000-word encyclical on the 100th anniversary of Leo XIII's Rerum novarum, the momentous condemnation of liberalism and materialism. Materialism meant then what it means today. By liberalism, Pope Leo had in mind contemporary movements that sought, in the name of "modernism," to free human beings from traditional attachments to church and family. In the centennial encyclical, Pope John Paul reiterated his frequent admonitions. The worker or manager who reports to duty at the shop every morning inflamed by the desire to make a better widget and sell more...
John Paul II is by every measurement as cosmopolitan in experience and steeped in erudition as anyone who comes to mind. He speaks eight languages fluently, he is the author of scholarly books and dissertations and has traveled in virtually every country in the world. One supposes that, notwithstanding, he is not by personal experience familiar with the kind of thing one can pick up to read in urban kiosks or turn to view on late-night television. But you'd still deduce that Pope John would not be surprised by anything he read or saw: he has been exposed...
...spiritual presence in the final round of the great revolutionary challenge that began soon after the turn of the century and sought no less than to alter Western assumptions about human life. But that role is not really what the critics want to dwell upon. What's on their mind is the stands Pope John Paul has taken on--women. On their right to take holy orders, to abort a fetus, to frustrate insemination by artificial means. And they want to talk about the overexercise of papal authority, about the discipline he has exercised over dissident theologians...