Word: paganisms
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Sacred as it was to Judaism, Jerusalem also attracted pagan conquerors. In 586 B.C., the city and its Temple were destroyed by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, who marched most of its inhabitants off to captivity -a tragedy that inspired the Psalmist to some of his most wistful lamentations. Thanks to the generosity of King Cyrus of Persia, who conquered the Babylonians, the Jews returned 48 years later to rebuild the Temple. In the next centuries, though, Jerusalem was conquered time and again by Greeks, Egyptians and finally the Romans, who adopted Herod as their vassal King. Although hated by Orthodox...
...prose that might seem a trifle fetid for a true-confession magazine. At Catholic girls' colleges, he says, "to French kiss or not to French kiss is usually the question. Keeping the teeth closed becomes the ancient badge of the martyrs who refused to sacrifice to the pagan gods of Rome. She firms her lips and guards her tongue with all the ardor of a convent under siege...
...part of an enterprisingly varied season that has included Sophocles' Electra and Noel Coward's Design for Living. The company displays more stamina than sparkle and sometimes throws itself at the play as well as into it, but Director Robert Kalfin wisely stresses the drama's pagan good humor rather than its repetitive class dialectics...
...Vietnamese festival of Tet combines the qualities of Christmas and the end of Ramadan, the Hindu feast of lights and the pagan rites of spring. To welcome the Lunar New Year, Vietnamese housewives last week prepared mounds of hanh chung - rice cakes covered with a stew of pork fat, pickled onions and rancid fish sauce. Fathers wrapped money in red paper for the children and raised the cay neu, a 30-ft. bamboo pole topped with offerings of betel nuts to propitiate the spirits. Before Tet begins, the good spirits of forest and stream, garden and hearth, head...
...slum and with a group of sympathetic clerics and unemployed workers went to the tiny island of lona, off the west coast of Scotland. It was a meaningful and symbolic choice: from lona during the sixth century, the Irish missionary St. Columba set forth to Christianize the wild and pagan Scots. There MacLeod sought to build a cooperative community of dedicated Christians who would unite work, study and prayer-a modern Protestant counterpart of the ancient monastic ideal...