Word: mystical
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...More remarkable than what he said is the fact that the pontiff chose to engage with the prevailing secular intellectual currents. "This pope cares about ideas," says TIME religion correspondent David Van Biema. "He is an intellecutal along with being a mystic, and since postmodernism challenges the harmony between faith and reason, he feels compelled to engage with it." Don't expect him to bump any French metatheorists off Comp Lit reading lists, but rare is the pontiff who displays an awareness of the prevailing wisdom in college-coffee-bar philosophy...
...first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln spoke to a nation darkened by the breaking storm of the Civil War. He closed, "The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature." In those days, long before the advent of mass education, Lincoln had no doubt that Americans maintained a communal memory of their history...
...years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation." King too relied upon America's shared memory, using Americans' knowledge of their nation's ideals to shame them into action. What happens to a nation, though, when neglect and apathy have severed those "mystic chords...
Berg had the full cooperation of the Lindbergh family and access to some 2,000 boxes of Charles and Anne Lindbergh's personal papers. His use of this rich material is masterfully judicious. Lindbergh possessed a complex character that was part genius mechanic and part mystic. All his life he demonstrated a surprising, inner-directed capacity for intellectual growth. In the last decades of his life, regretting the effects of the worldwide aviation he had pioneered ("Every year," he wrote in his journal, "transport planes seem to get more like subway trains"), he campaigned as an environmentalist, circling the world...
...those who think everyone lies about sex--that he has been persecuted just because he is President--and those who think this fate goes with the job. Presidents aren't like kings, but they aren't supposed to be like the rest of us either. The office confers a mystic expectation, a combination of Roosevelt's brains and Johnson's clout and Reagan's grace, that helps Presidents persuade Congress and the people to follow their lead. The agony of Clinton's choice was that his best chance for survival demanded that he declare himself less than we expect...