Word: pious
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Negative Penalty. Medieval scholastics gradually construed a more humane destiny for unbaptized infants and for pious adults who died before Christ. In the 13th century, Albert the Great named this resting place limbo. Albert's disciple, Thomas Aquinas, argued that since unbaptized children were not guilty of actual, committed sins but only of original sin, their penalty would be a negative one-the loss of the vision of God that is heaven's supreme happiness. Moreover, Thomas suggested, the children would placidly exist through eternity unaware of the reward that was beyond their reach...
There was plenty of evidence to prove that pious Soviet denials of anti-Jewish activity are hollow. The most topical was a book called Judaism Without Embellishment, published last year by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. One cartoon from this "history" of Judaism showed a man with an exaggeratedly hooked nose described as a Zionist leader serving the "Hitlerite" invaders of the Ukraine...
...Pious Gloss. Moslem and Hindu fugitives all tell strikingly similar tales of persecution. Alike, they say that border police systematically relieve them of whatever money and jewels they have left. On both sides, fugitives protest that the only safe way across the frontier is by greasing the palms of unscrupulous fixers. Yet their governments piously gloss over the fact that the exodus is in both directions. India talks only of Hindus fleeing Pakistani atrocities, Pakistan of Moslems fleeing Indian hordes...
Last week, one by one, Sonny's chums and associates paraded before the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly in Washington. There was Sam Margolis, a pudgy, pious Philadelphian, who freely admitted his friendship with Blinky Palermo, who, as everyone knows, is a friend of Frankie Carbo, who in turn is nothing less than elite-at least in his line of work...
...native costume (Ivy League in this case). Cheever has infiltrated the permissive, prosperous characters who people High Suburbia and is apt to show up on the cocktail terrace or dining room to disconcert his agnostic friends with a pulpit message and scandalize the merely pious by preaching it on a text from Ovid involving the couplings of goddesses and beasts...