Word: notional
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...anymore. "We are losing the notion of sin," Pope Benedict XVI warns, as attendance at confession plummets. The culture celebrates what once it sanctioned: parents encourage pride as essential to self-esteem; a group of self-rising French chefs has petitioned the Vatican that being a gourmand is no sin. Envy is the engine of tabloid culture. Lust is an advertising strategy; anger, the righteous province of the aggrieved. Most days I'd give anything for some sloth. It was the moral philosopher Mae West who observed that "to err is human, but it feels divine." (She also advised, "When...
This is the most confounding part of the notion of social sin. Sin, unlike crime or folly, is a spiritual notion: for Muslim or Jew or Christian, sin is the saboteur that keeps us from grace, separates us from God. The new list is about what separates us from one another; it makes abstract the failings that once were intimate and in the process may make sin smaller, not bigger or more relevant. Private faith already speaks to public duty, as Mohandas Gandhi suggested with his version of the seven deadly sins: "Wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, science without...
Caldeira modeled the effects on climate that Crutzen's notion of spreading sulfur particles into the air would have and found that geoengineering might be able to compensate for a doubling of the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Even more impressive was the price tag: somewhere between a few hundred million dollars and a couple of billion dollars a year, compared with the unknowable cost of decarbonizing the entire world. But the drawbacks are serious. Worsening air pollution is a risk. We'd have to keep geoengineering indefinitely to balance out continued greenhouse-gas emissions, and the motivation...
...involved in seemed like a kangaroo court. “I felt like they had already decided the version of events they were going to accept as fact before actually engaging in the investigation,” he says, “and that because they had this singular notion of what had happened, they weren’t willing to consider anything—any statements, any hard evidence—that didn’t jibe with their preconceived sequence of events...
With the season still in its infant stages, Chenoweth and his coaches know there is still more work to be accomplished. It’s a scary notion for other schools to consider; Harvard is just warming up. And Chenoweth has only just fired his pistons...