Word: occultation
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Ever the provocateur, Wolfe is enjoying the controversy. Agreeing cheerfully that his piece is indeed self-serving, he now adds to his list of targets Italian best-selling writer Umberto Eco, whose latest novel, Foucault's Pendulum, is a phantasmagorical venture into the occult. "Eco," Wolfe says, "is a very good example of a writer who leads dozens of young writers into a literary cul-de-sac." Harper's plans to throw more fuel on the bonfire. Editor Lapham will devote a large part of his January issue to responses and rebuttals to Wolfe...
...mainline leaning for liberal politics and low-cal theology drew on a sort of rationalism that, in the view of Richard Mouw of California's Fuller Theological Seminary, is no longer fashionable. "We are experiencing a reaction against modernity," says Mouw. "We are getting magic and the occult and the New Age. There's a return to a premodern world view." Mouw, an Evangelical, asserts that the churches were seriously mistaken in seeking to duck the age-old questions: "Who am I as a human being before God? How can I face my own death? How can I be forgiven...
...plot, embedded in the 500 pages of mystic history, concerns three editors in a Milan publishing house who are working on a series about the occult arts. They become fascinated by a secret plan supposedly concocted by the Knights Templar to dominate the world by harnessing its magnetic currents. The Templars, Eco explains in a 20-page aside, were one of the great military monastic orders at the time of the Crusades and were suppressed after the King of France accused them, probably falsely, of homosexuality and sorcery...
...Fleet Street, we didn't think anything was extraordinary," laughs Burt. "It was the American journalists who thought we were unusual. Most of them are corrupted by journalism school into dreary, humorless utopians out to save the world. They are Puritans who should stay on Plymouth Rock. Ghosts? The occult? We don't say these stories are true; we just report them." The methods tabloids use to substantiate their sometimes unlikely stories are often ingenious. To prove UFOs have been frolicking in Wisconsin, reporters will wrangle a policeman or pilot to say "Sure." And in a pinch, some editors have...
...wasp hovers above the children"), Hoffman establishes a rhythm of inevitability. She sketches a bosky world in Massachusetts, populates it with wholesome families and engaging eccentrics. One young woman with modest paranormal powers seems like a character prewired for film directors who might want to plug in an occult package. But in the book she represents a sensitivity to mysteries of life and death that Amanda's family is too preoccupied to appreciate...