Word: moralisms
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...champions would be difficult to identify even if the sport were not unwieldy by nature. On the first day of every new year, the country caucuses at a number of 70,000-seat fruit and flower stands in the hope of an ultimate result that is both tidy and moral. As in any morality play, the characters are wildly oversimplified and the ending can still be confusing...
...play that is explicitly about great emotions. But the hard gloss reduces the subtler depths of Twelfth Night to mere giggles and kickshaws. Seeing these productions together may enable modern audiences to understand why earlier critics revered the Bard's tragedies but undervalued his comedies, overlooking their moral complexity and their glimpses of humiliation and pain in commoners' everyday life. The stress on low comic exaggeration also robs Twelfth Night of much of its social consequence: there is little sense that the battle between Sir Toby Belch and Malvolio has anything to do with the decline of the old gentry...
...what is the alternative to a movie kiss? In Sleeper, Woody Allen had his characters at a futuristic cocktail party pass around a shiny metal sphere that when fondled produced a narcissistic ecstasy. In Tom Jones, Tom and the ribald Mrs. Waters consume a memorable dinner that is the moral equivalent, or the immoral equivalent, of a passionate night in bed. Perhaps in screenplays of the future, kisses will be blown on the wind like pheromones. The signals of passion might be changed: an ear might be nibbled, for example, or the nape of a neck nuzzled. Actual kissing...
...rediscovering sin. In their viewpoint, humanity was good by nature, awaiting perfection through social reform and education. Although Niebuhr was thoroughly a modernist in theology and did not believe in the literal truth of Scripture, he found the doctrine of the Fall--humanity's lapse from its original moral purity--to be a telling myth. The race, he asserted, is ineradicably given to self-deception, and in the real world the search for moral righteousness is filled with ambiguity. His approach became known as Christian Realism...
...never commanded an army, never held political office, never made a fortune nor ruled a corporate empire. He had no use for the trappings of worldly power; his clout came from the urgency of his message and his unwavering moral courage. Of this century's heroes, the man he most closely resembled was his model, India's Mohandas K. Gandhi. Combining Christian idealism with Gandhi's principle of nonviolent resistance, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. awakened the conscience of the U.S. and the world to the plight of America's blacks. More than any other single person, King...