Word: myths
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...train from Washington to his home of Springfield--was an intense ambiguity: stories circulated regularly about him as a religious doubter, a teller of vulgar stories, an uncouth and awkward man, a usurper of power. But Republicans saw him as a great asset and tried to build a myth that would last--and do the party lasting good. In May 1865, the Republican editor Josiah Holland interviewed the President's law partner William Herndon at length. When the subject of religion came up, Herndon told him, "The less said, the better," doubting that the pious Holland would want the details...
...civil rights movement shone a spotlight on inequality and discrimination, Lincoln's image came in for a beating. The myth of Lincoln as the black man's best friend was hard to square with his own words, from the Lincoln-Douglas debates, that he had "no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races" and that "there is a physical difference between the two, which in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living upon the footing of perfect equality." In a 1968 piece for Ebony, "Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?", Lerone Bennett...
...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...
Vladimir Horowitz never forgot. Last week, more than 60 years after that poignant admonition, he returned to the Soviet Union, to the rodina of myth and memory, the homeland of the soul that dwells in the hearts of all Russians, no matter where they live. "I have never forgotten my Russia. I remember the smells when the snow melts and the spring arrives," says Horowitz, 81. "I had to go back to Russia before I died. It brings an Aristotelian unity to my life, like a coda in music. It is the right time to go back...
DIED. Mircea Eliade, 79, Rumanian-born historian of religions, authority on spiritual myths and symbols and longtime (1957-85) professor at the University of Chicago, whose works of encyclopedic research and interpretation, including The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949), The Sacred and the Profane (1959) and his definitive three-volume A History of Religious Ideas (1979-85), introduced to the West an appreciation of Eastern religions and of the parallels of thought and practice in vastly different cultures; in Chicago...