Word: monk
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...painted at the height of Zurbaran's career, in the late 1630s. This is not the St. Francis of earlier legend, warbling to the birds of Assisi about Brother Sun and Sister Moon. Spanish Catholicism in the 16th and 17th centuries invented a new St. Francis, a death-haunted monk whose images would force the faithful to think about their own dissolution...
...hear the defectors tell it, you have to be an unemployed monk with rich friends to run comfortably. The nominating process, the product of accident rather than design, imposes crushing demands. At some point each hopeful must ask a cruel question: Am I a thick-skinned workaholic unconcerned about my . family's privacy, with enough ambition and money to carry me through more than 30 primaries and hundreds of fund raisers...
...record of consistency has been notched by Edith Pargeter, a prolific British writer and translator (of Czech poetry, among other pursuits). Under the nom de crime Ellis Peters she has produced The Rose Rent (Morrow; 190 pages; $15.95), her 13th highly evocative novel about Brother Cadfael, a 12th century monk in the abbey town of Shrewsbury. Like his 20th century soulmate, Father Brown of the G.K. Chesterton stories, Cadfael attractively suggests that the highest act of faith is the use of reason. Robert Barnard, whose mordantly funny one-off mysteries are as good as any currently being produced, has tended...
...indulges the fantasy that he is a novelist. The book, which began as a benign hoax in the April 1, 1985, issue of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, is based on a charming conceit: a narrator suffering from writer's block tells the story of Sidd Finch, a British-born Buddhist-trained monk who can throw a baseball 168 m.p.h with unfailing accuracy. Sidd, short for Siddhartha, joins the New York Mets in spring training and hooks up with Debbie Sue, a Florida beachgirl and playmate of porpoises. Plimpton employs real Mets as characters, digresses into baseball lore, horn playing...
...example, the good woman of the title is Shen Te (Priscilla Smith), a ho' in pre-war Setzuan. A sort of Oriental Mary Magdalene, she is the only person in the province willing to house three Gods (Isabell Monk, Harry S. Murphy and Thom Molinaro) on a fact finding mission from heaven. The deities--who obviously left home without it--reward Shen Te with a small fortune and the admonition to continue being good...