Word: pagans
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...Catholic Church consigned Valentine to an eternity of sappiness when it canonized him 200 years after his demise, according to a recent article in The New York Times. (It was a slow news day, okay?) The church intended Valentine's Day to supplant a popular fertility rite of the pagan god Lupercus, who was associated with "joy, abundance and sexual freedom." Joy, abundance and sexual freedom sound a lot more entertaining to me than the current, more greeting-card-driven ritual, but then I'm not Roman Catholic and may be missing out on religious significance et cetera...
...singular combination of ferocity and decorum -- the torture of a saint by evisceration, a live man's guts being drawn out on a windlass, yet with the shock of the blood edited away or, rather, subliminally transferred to a cascade of red drapery below Erasmus' body. In his work, pagan antiquity and 17th century Catholicism eloquently support each other...
This vote of no confidence gave the bond market the aspect of a fierce pagan idol that can never be appeased. No sooner does the market receive one form of tribute than it finds fresh problems to worry about. Among other things, investors saw a new threat of inflation in promises by House Speakerin-waiting Newt Gingrich and other Republicans to cut taxes next year without any credible program for restoring lost revenues. "Tax cuts are not always good for the bond market,"said Joseph Carballeira, the head of U.S government- securities trading at Smith Barney. "Initially, there...
...poor health. But when he settles in with his nieces to recuperate, it gradually dawns on them that he was ejected from the mission because he had 'gone native.' He peppers his accounts of missionary work with graphic narratives of the blood sacrifices and propiatiations of pagan idols in which he eagerly participated. While his sisters encourage him to celebrate Mass, he flings himself into a tribal rain dance with gay abandon. The man whom the village heralded as the vanguard of godliness turns out to have been a gin-addled apostate...
...atmosphere, then, is properly ominous at Camp Shelter, where Delia, Catherine and sisters Lenny and Alma explore a wilderness that mirrors their own sexual stirrings and confusion. The woods are dark, deep and haunted by both Christian and pagan spirits. A character named Parson flits in and out of Phillips' story as a sort of Fundamentalist avenger. Nature comes guileless in the person of Buddy, a knowing child of the forest, and Nature comes sinister in the form of Buddy's father Carmody, a backwoods pervert who would not have been out of place in James Dickey's Deliverance...