Word: parson
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Down in the harsh bottom land of Crooked Creek, N.C., the sharecropping Negroes grub and grovel in feudal hardship, sustained only by a Bible-quoting parson and their own passive resistance to death, famine and flood - the blind resilience peculiar to those with no hope to abandon except that of heaven. To borrow one of their own sayings, they are "blackgum against thunder," and that is something when a man knows that the blackgum tree is "so hard, when lightnin hit it, is a question of who win, the fire or the wood." The many ways in which the lightning...
...slashing at each other with shivs amid the crowds of shoppers in Soho's Frith Street−an event which indicated that, at the very least, things were not all quiet in the rackets. Because of the obliging perjury of a petty con man posing as an Anglican parson, both men beat the rap. But soon afterward Jack Spot was set upon once more and slashed in the face and hands; it took 60 stitches to put him together again...
Zvons, however, are not without use in the western world, Edmund M. Parson '58, manager of the new society, insists. When Mercury Recordings produced the 1812 Overture recently, the company employed Yale's Harkness Tower chimes to simulate Russian bells. The Lowell bell-ringers are writing a letter in protest to a statement by the record's narrator that Yale's carillon gave the nearest facimile to Russian bells available in the United States...
Despite all this interest in Parsons, hardly anyone seems to understand his work. This places a strange reserve upon most critics who, one section man says, "are never sure whether it's Parsons or themselves who are confused." Some claim sociology is not ready for Parson's broad generalizations, while others say his work could never be empirically tested anyway. And one bloc of hesistant support feels, "At this stage, any theory is better than no theory at all." But everyone seems impressed with the vastness of Parson's knowledge and his theoretical analyses of such specific subjects...
...simplest terms, Persons is striving for "a general theory of action" unifying both personal psychology and broad economic, cultural and social theories. The British Journal of Sociology and some professors actually compare Parson's theories to those of Sir Isaac Newton. While Parsons himself laughs at this analogy, his own explanations sound like a Natural Sciences 3 definition of the conceptual scheme...