Word: paradox
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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What can save a civilization from perishing? Does the Christian Gospel of Redemption apply to nations as well as individuals? Here Niebuhr wades into a cut & thrust theological controversy, armed with a two-edged blade of paradox. Human society, he concedes, is maintained by push-and-shove competition and balance of power; the very instruments of social justice tend automatically to become unjust. But, he says, such teachers as Martin Luther are in error, when they "exclude the possibility of redemption and a new life in man's social existence, and confine redemption to individual life." The structures...
...boils down to a paradox. To have better Councils we must have better Councils. The only suspicion of a break in this vicious circle is the prospect of intelligent and widespread campaigning...
...Dismayed. Empson's paradox is that he preaches Oriental passivity in the most dynamic sort of Western verse. This is symbolic of Empson's life in China, where he shared the hardships of the Japanese war with his students, trekking overland from Peiping to distant, mountainous Yunnan province, a distance of some 1,800 miles. Books were lost in the flight, so Empson gave a whole course in the English metaphysical poets from memory, reconstructing John Donne's songs and sonnets by substituting lines of his own for lines he had forgotten...
...main fault lies in the interpretation given its plot by this or, I believe, any non-Italian-speaking spectator. Some crucial situations in the film seemed incredible and several episodes were confusing to follow; when shown in its native country this would undoubtedly not be so. (There is a paradox in this--the half-a-dozen great Italian post-war films imported to America have had a larger audience here than in Italy. Since they have all dealt with the agonies of the present times, the Italians' preference for Miss Hayworth et al., is understandable...
...years ago, the Yale Record was a very funny magazine as I remember it, and the Lampoon was a very unfunny magazine. This paradox has been properly destroyed by the recent efforts of the two publications. The latest issue of the Lampoon contains some really topnotch cartoons and, more surprising, some amusing stories. The cartoon, "The New Overcoat," by Fred Gwynne, is timeless and rich enough to rate reprinting in the Lampoon in ten years or so, as will probably be the case...