Word: paragons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Pelikan lovingly tracks successive Marian personae, such as Second Eve, Paragon of Chastity, Queen of Heaven and Blessed Mother, through to the present. He is fascinated with what the Victorian-era Cardinal and theologian John Henry Newman called the "development of doctrine"--the process, infuriating to traditional Protestants, whereby Catholic Popes and bishops continued promulgating articles of Christian faith long after the last biblical word was written. Mary is a prime example: her scant treatment in the Gospels left a vacuum that the church, often preceded and probably influenced by popular belief, has been gradually filling over the centuries...
...best-seller lists, someone else is, and he's not exactly a moral paragon. In the current best seller Absolute Power, the Leader of the Free World, the heir of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, almost kills a paramour during rough sex and then aids in the cover-up. In the summer's hot title Exclusive, the President of the United States murders the baby his girlfriend refused to abort. In the film Escape from L.A., the Chief Executive orders the assassination of his own daughter, while in the movie version of Primary Colors, John Travolta is slated to play...
...time when some of cinema's most respected actors--Robert De Niro, Al Pacino--have developed an unfortunate taste for self-parody, Neeson has made his mark in Hollywood as a paragon of restrained intensity. In Ethan Frome, the 1993 movie version of Edith Wharton's novel, Neeson manages to convey a lifetime of thwarted longing in one gaze. In a Schindler scene that has Neeson's debonair businessman surveying the destruction of the Cracow ghetto, we see in the actor's perplexed expression something quite remarkable: a man's humanity slowly surfacing...
When Johnson talks about his approach to business, he summons images of Teddy Roosevelt, the patrician paragon of "the strenuous life." As he explains it, in the languorous vowels of a Boston Brahmin, "This comes from a belief that making things happen is what was given to me through my genes. That's in the genes...
...From the moment he affectionately tells the audience that they remind him of a bed of pubic hair, to when he masturbates with a piece of Valencia orange stuck in his mouth, to the climactic moment when he orgasms to Handel's "Messiah," Miller is a paragon of eros, humor and theatricality packed into one vital, often naked body. Switching effortlessly from one performance mode to another, Miller at one moment works the audience better than any stand-up comedian, then dives into his own illusionary world the next, and performs equally well in both modes...