Word: mysticism
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...left of old Nauvoo and learned that Smith had run his growing church from an office above his family's general store. I liked this detail. It brought the man alive for me. Unlike Brigham Young, the stern puritan who succeeded him, Smith was an improviser, a boyish mystic, brimming with charismatic, homegrown visions. In the fields beyond his store, he liked to dress up as a general and drill his personal army, the Nauvoo Legion. In 1844, the year he was murdered, he announced a quixotic candidacy for the U.S. presidency. All in all, it was as if Huck...
...generation that believes A Thousand Clowns holds all the secrets of human existence. In one of the rambling monologues that give the 1960s play and movie its enduring appeal, Murray (played by Jason Robards) reveals the mystic power of a simple three-word sentence. I can hear Robards' gravelly voice as he declares, "I could run up on the roof right now and holler, 'I am sorry,' and half a million people would holler right back, 'That's O.K., just see that you don't do it again...
...April when the Amistad docked in Mystic, Connecticut, to unload its captured cargo. It was a blustery 40 degrees, and the West Africans were dressed in rags. Iron neck yokes and chains connected one to another and prevented them from wiping the brine and dirt from their eyes...
...alternating voices of a Korean comfort woman named Akiko and her Korean-American daughter Beccah, delivers a wrenching view of war and its lasting intergenerational impact. Akiko, driven half-mad by the war, is haunted by the ghost of a woman from the camp and becomes a sought-after mystic after moving to America. But to call this a ghost story is to miss the point: Comfort Woman is really about pain, the kind that haunts and is handed down, like old, sad clothes. Writes Akiko: "I knew what it felt like to stretch open for many men ... about pain...
...20th century, and out on the margins of spiritual life there's a strange phosphorescence. As predicted, the approach of the year 2000 is coaxing all the crazies out of the woodwork. They bring with them a twitchy hybrid of spirituality and pop obsession. Part Christian, part Asian mystic, part Gnostic, part X-Files, it mixes immemorial longings with the latest in trivial sentiments. When it all dissolves in overheated computer chat and harmless New Age vaporings, who cares? But sometimes it matters, for both the faithful and the people who care about them. Sometimes it makes death a consummation...