Word: paganisms
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This probably seems like the height of modernity to a people who like to point out the island where Paris took Helen the first night after he stole her from Menelaus, and who still retain the purest links of Greece's pagan past. Old Maniots are convinced that Nereids haunt the local fountains, and mothers believe that the three Fates hover over an infant's cradle to write invisible destinies on the child's brow (moles are known as "writings of the Fates"). Seafarers claim that Gorgons grip their caiques in a storm and ask in ringing...
...further instance of empirical logic is indicated in the Levitical laws on taboo and hygiene. The speaker rejected the theory that the law prohibiting the eating of pork derived from pagan use of this animal in idol worship. He also doubted that one could ascribe theological-philosophical motives as discipline, development of group identity to the dietary laws at the time of their inception, though he acknowledged that they could be given a "theological-political treatment" in the post-Israelite period...
...disprove the Scriptures according to Fox, which make her a neophyte priestess of Chemosh, the child-devouring stone divinity. This gives Elana Eden, the dark-eyed Israeli actress who plays Ruth, a chance to show that she is prettily put together, since Hollywood's standard pagan-priestess gown is an off-the-shoulder number. The device also allows Writer Corwin to add a fairly effective sermon on prejudice to the Bible's skeletal story of filial devotion...
Rights & Privileges. Originally built by Constantine in 356, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was destroyed by the Persians in 616 and by the Egyptians in 1009. But more disastrous to the shrine than its pagan enemies have been its Christian friends. Today the church is occupied by six Christian sects-Syrian Orthodox (Jacobite), Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Coptic, Roman Catholic, Abyssinian- all of them so caught up in denominational jealousies that they cannot agree on repairs or on anything else. They hold their services in spaces as carefully marked as those in a parking lot, and about as large...
...pagan appetite in Author di Donato's book and no more sinful than salami. However, Mama does break up Papa's affair when Delia goes so far as to have a child by him. Mama's triumph is brief; short weeks later, Papa is pinned to death under a collapsing wall. As the keening women cluster about the open coffin, Paolino seems to hear in their voices a lament for his dead boyhood...