Word: preacher
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Rawson recounts dozens of fights, his tales of perseverance peopled with corrupt referees, dirty timekeepers and guys with names like "Patty Irish." Rattling off the records and weight classes of opponents the way a preacher might cite lines from scripture, he relives each bout for me, gesticulating with his thick fingers and dodging invisible punches...
Through the 1960s, Marshall Herff Applewhite, the man who would end his life with the musical name Do, had been relegated to secondary roles at the Houston Grand Opera. The son of a peripatetic Texas preacher, he had given up earlier plans for the ministry to pursue a career in music, supporting himself, his wife and two children with jobs that ranged from rehearsal conductor to part-time English teacher to occupational therapist at a tuberculosis sanatorium. But he was pushing 40, and his struggle against his homosexuality was unraveling both his marriage and his academic post in a religious...
...Emerson, is often regarded as a vanity plate to be custom-made. In the privileged town of Santa Barbara, California, where I sit, the hills are alive with the sound of mantra--from John-Roger, the Texan guru of Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, down the road; from the New Age preacher Marianne Williamson, closer to downtown; and even from the radio station on which I heard last week a minister speak rabidly of the Second Coming and Foxe's Book of Martyrs...
Jesus was hardly tentative about proclaiming the world to come. His first words as a preacher were, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." However, most of his famous metaphors for heaven (as the treasure hidden in a field or the pearl of great price) address humankind's ideal relationship to God's kingdom more than a specific paradise. Regarding heaven's actual "mysteries," he tells the Apostles that it is not given to most people to know them. An exception to this rule is his chilling parable of Lazarus and Dives: The rich master, consigned to hell...
Harrison's preacher father was kicked out of the house by her mother and grandparents when she was tiny, and she had almost no contact with him until she was 20. The household was grim. Grandmother would scream like a "scalded infant"; mother, who lived elsewhere most of the time, beat her daughter with a hairbrush. The child herself was unlikable. There is an unintentionally risible passage where she pries open the eyes of newborn kittens. The teenage years are marked by anorexia ("the dizzy rapture of starving") and bulimia ("I never taste what I eat. Sometimes...