Word: paganism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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ACQUITTED. BRIGITTE BARDOT, 62, 1950s sex kitten turned animal-rights crusader; of charges of inciting racism; in Paris. The accusation stemmed from a Bardot letter published last year in a French newspaper decrying Muslim sacrificial slaughter of sheep, likening it to pagan rituals...
...first codices had another, equally historic impact: they gave upstart Christianity an edge over Roman paganism. While pagan scholars stuck with their scrolls like modern Luddites refusing to embrace E-mail, liberal Christians leaped at the efficiencies and portability of books. The result, argues Jack Miles, a former Jesuit who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1995 book, God: A Biography, was a "technological advantage" for early Christianity. It was too much of one for the Roman Emperors, who quickly developed their own innovation: book burning...
...glimmering pine tree beside the manger on the first Noel, just as there wasn't a bunny hiding eggs in the tomb on Easter morning. There's a lovely story about a lost woodcutter led home by fairies placing lights on trees, and the evergreens could be a pagan tradition incorporated into seasonal preparations, but nothing holy is involved. For that reason, Christmas trees do not deserve protection as religious symbols...
...pure emotion, naked, shameless, unmediated by discretion. These aren't attitudes of passion; this is the genuine article, take it or leave it. Even with our quibbles, we'll take it, and embrace it as tenderly as Bess does the man whose happiness she'd die for. In its pagan fervor, this is an almost religious experience...
...King James Version, thanks to its felicities of language and the imprimatur of the Church of England, ruled supreme and largely unchallenged among English-speaking Christians for about 350 years. Chapman's Homer, a redaction of the secular words of a pagan bard, naturally received no such binding spiritual and temporal authorization. But Chapman's translations were both thrilling enough--see Keats' sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer--and challenging enough to provoke competing versions. Since Chapman, nearly four centuries' worth of British and, later, American writers have taken on Homer...