Word: pious
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Naughty Knickers and Pious Pilgrims. While they controlled the streets of Kadhamiya, the Mahdi Army had imposed a harshly puritanical interpretation of Islam on the residents. Women were required to wear the form-obscuring black cloaks known as abayas. Today, in a sign of the freedom felt in the neighborhood, a storefront displays sexy women's underwear in its windows, just a stone's throw from the great shrine of Imam Kadhim. Its owner told me business was good...
...protest in Harvard Square—six near naked protesters on a giant mattress, protesting fur—the Harvard Salient expressed predictable outrage. And when secular philosophers cite Darwin’s findings on human-animal similarities as a basis for more equal rights between species, pious conservatives cringe...
...most of Western history, political issues, while central and fiercely debated and disputed even on the field of battle, ranked second in dignity and priority to higher concerns. To a pious Christian, politics cannot provide a final solution because it only is concerned with this world, which is always passing away. But to American youth, immersed in a self-consciously and radically secular culture, especially at a place like Harvard, the precepts and promises of religion have diminished appeal. Limiting their perspectives to this world, youth understandably can see politics—once shorn of the ostensible cynicism...
...full understanding that they are swimming against the cultural, if not the academic, stream the folks at the new Institute pulled out Rushdie, who, although he is not one of their faculty members, writes fiction that acknowledges the centrality of faith to culture without the author's pious participation. From his astounding breakthrough work, Midnight's Children, through his current The Enchantress of Florence, he has been obsessed with both formal and informal belief, but from the point of view of a highly-educated Muslim-born sceptic. This potentially flammable combination combusted in 1989 when Iran's then supreme leader...
...Forster’s distinction between flat and rounded characters, Wood said that both readers and writers should be concerned with the human vividness and mystery of fictional characters, rather than understanding the intimate details of their lives. “I think we’re too pious about this business of creating character,” Wood said. According to Wood, there are only a few authors, such at Tolstoy or Shakespeare, who “have something freakish about their ability to create galleries of characters not like themselves.” But, Wood added, though other...