Word: pious
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...certainly striven to conduct myself as my mother would wish me to," said William Marshall Boyle to a Senate investigating committee. Many citizens mistakenly assumed that this statement by the chairman of the Democratic National Committee was a piece of pious patter. But Bill Boyle was in sober earnest. His mother is still honored in Kansas City as one of Boss Tom Pendergast's best precinct workers of the 1920s. Friends of the family, discussing Bill Boyle, say somewhat condescendingly that he is a nice, pleasant fellow; Clara, his mother, now retired, was "the politician of the family...
...fictionalized lives of Christ (The Nazarene), Saint Paul (The Apostle), and Mary, he stretched Gospel truth, stressed the ties of faith linking Jew and Christian, "in the hope that mutual understanding might bring about a better world." For his pains, pious Novelist Asch caught a crossfire of criticism from both camps-and scored bull's-eyes on the bestseller lists every time...
Read casually, The Holy Sinner seems merely an affectionate embroidery of a pious legend. But that would not be Thomas Mann. As usual, he has glazed the legend with elegant mockery; the notions of Freud creep in to jostle the miracles of faith. Here is a delightful story, Mann seems to say: thanks to God's mercy, an Oedipus with a happy ending. And Mann is too good a pessimist not to conceal his own derisive smile...
Bosch was a sad, pious man with a consuming interest in the sins and stupidities of his fellows, and alternated debunking caricatures, such as The Magician, with huge, opalescent nightmare pictures which foreshadowed surrealism. The neat realism that characterized Flemish painting was as foreign to him as it was to the early masters of the Italian Renaissance...
...work. The artists were bound to be influenced by the sugary religious chromos imported from Europe and tacked up in thousands of Haitian homes. Rodman kept insisting that they also incorporate Haitian scenes of the sort they generally paint. The result is an arresting but badly integrated mixture of "pious" and "native" art, made vital by rich colors and the intermittent lightning of individual inspiration...