Word: paganisms
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...suggestion of pagan worship implied in the name has since been renounced by the orchestra. Pierian is a self-sustaining organization which lives upon the proceeds of its concerts. Since the Pierian was incorporated under the laws of Massachusetts in 1903, the student officers of the orchestra are also officers of the corporation...
...letter to St. Augustine of Canterbury* in 601, Pope Gregory the Great laid down a general principle of conversion that overzealous missionaries have often forgotten. Its gist: adapt much, change little. Speaking of the pagan Anglo-Saxons, Gregory sagely observed: "If they can go to their old temples . . . they will feel more at home in the worship of the true God. . . . We must act as those climbing a high hill, proceeding by small steps rather than by long leaps...
...Jersey Council of Christian Churches last week asked President Truman to change the name of his private plane. Said the Council: the "Sacred Cow" is "offensive to the Christian conscience of our land . . . has a pagan association which is not healthful to the minds of our young people...
Lent was also the season in which the church prepared pagans for baptism at Easter. To onetime heathens, Lent (from the Anglo-Saxon word for spring) came naturally: like many primitive peoples, they had observed a springtime period of self-denial to encourage germination of their new-sown crops. Church fathers readily admitted that Lent was in part an adaptation from pagan "natural religion." Then, as now, they also thought it not unfitting to remind Christians that Lenten self-denial is a good spring tonic for body as well as soul...
...presence of the religious greatness of the damned, in the presence of genius of disease and "the disease of genius, of the type of the afflicted and the possessed, in whom saint and criminal are one. . . . It is incomparably easier and more wholesome to write about divinely pagan healthfulness than about holy disease. We may amuse ourselves at the expense of the former, the fortunate children of nature and their artlessness; we cannot amuse ourselves at the expense of the children of the spirit, the great sinners and the damned. ... I would find it utterly impossible to jest about Nietzsche...