Word: paganisms
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...Jesus' Second Coming has persisted through history, even though predictions about its timing have inevitably proved premature. The first Christians thought he would return to earth within their lifetime. As the Goths decimated imperial legions in the 4th century, St. Ambrose of Milan saw the Antichrist among the pagan invaders and proclaimed that the end of the world was nigh. A 12th century Cistercian abbot, Joachim of Flora, was quite precise: the Age of the Spirit, which he saw as the culmination of human history, would begin between A.D. 1200 and 1260. William Miller, the Baptist layman who founded...
Still, Ranke-Heinemann is not a litmus-test feminist. Although some feminist cults yearn for paganism to supplant Judaism and Christianity, Ranke-Heinemann contends that Catholicism went wrong when it spurned the healthy outlook of the Jewish Bible and absorbed hostility toward sex from certain pagan groups. On abortion, she notes that ancient Judaism and Christianity joined in opposing the pro-choice stance of paganism. Her fury is aimed only at the official Catholic teaching that it is better to let a pregnant woman die than to perform an abortion...
...these decorations are traditional and secular. In fact, most have their roots in pagan folk rituals. There are no creches or crosses in the Union. But the Union management treats Christmas as if it were another secular national American holiday, like Thanks-giving or the Fourth of July...
Hannukah, then, is an attempt at pluralization of the holiday season. (Interestingly, the traditional December 25 date of Jesus' birth is said to have been created by early Christians for a similar purpose--to coincide with pagan Roman festivals.) There's no reason why that shouldn't be respected for itself. If Harvard is going to go out of its way to celebrate one religious holiday, we should at least make appropriate concessions to the multiplicity of religions here...
...like Greek gods who were the very rivers and streams they represented in myth, language itself is an inextricable, physical feature of Heaney's pagan world. This takes on a literal dimension in "Alphabets" (1987), where the letter A is "two rafters and a cross-tie" and the number 2 "a swan's neck and a swan's back...