Word: pious
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...spirit of the earliest Commencement days, as of the early College, was largely chaperoned by theology--the presence of a formidable portion of the local clergy caused those first occasions to be rather pious and somber. But the joyous aspects of graduation increased steadily and by the end of the seventeenth century, commencement had become the main spectacle of New England...
...means of travel. Usually ancient pickup trucks fitted out with wooden roofs and benches, they hide their precarious mechanical condition under garishly painted hoods. Their cabs often bear a motto full of hope ("God Never Sleeps"), African fatalism ("No Condition Is Permanent"), challenge ("Let Me Try Again"), or simple pious appeal ("Amen...
Soyinka, a contemporary Nigerian playwright, novelist and poet takes as his plot the attempts of a fraudulent religious prophet to win people to his Christian teachings by promising them worldly benefits: to one, a prime-ministership, to another, the position of head clerk. Each character is pious on the surface but greedy, lusty and ambitious on the inside, and the most humorous moments come when these inner feelings are most bluntly and frankly expressed as when the phony prophet's disciple, Chume, whose principal desire in life is to beat his wife, pleads with his mentor, "Just once! Just once...
...apocryphal Judith was a pious and beautiful Jewish widow who got the Assyrian commander Holofernes drunk in his tent, cut off his head and saved the people of Israel. Giraudoux's Judith, enchantingly played by Rosemary Harris, is a rich, pampered, articulate minx who means to sacrifice her virginity as an act of personal grandeur. The total modernity of heroine and play is that Judith is as brimful of self-consciousness as she is barren of faith. In a moment of mortal peril among enemy underlings, she calls on Holofernes, not Jehovah, to save...
...Tartuffe is Orgon (Larry Gates), a complacently typical bourgeois. Orgon courts innocence by association, and his mind's eye is so weak that it persistently mistakes the appearance of sanctity for the assurance of goodness. Tartuffe (Michael O'Sullivan), his chosen saint-in-residence, is a pious fraud and an unparalleled hypocrite...