Word: preacherly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...formidable challenge to the critics. At the beginning of the 20th century, liberal scholars were still trying to peel back layers of the miraculous and the mythical to find out what the historical Jesus really taught. The Jesus that some of the searchers found was a mild-mannered ethical preacher, definitely not God incarnate. But Missionary-Philosopher Albert Schweitzer suggested that the real Jesus would be an embarrassment, that he had been a misguided fanatic who proclaimed an imminent apocalypse and died to bring it about...
...mythology out of the music of the recent American past. He sings of grifters and gamblers, outlaws and farmers, offers reflections on taxes, infidelity, the lot of the poor man, and occasionally includes moral injunctions like the following, from an early 1930s tune called Denomination Blues by a singing preacher named Washington Phillips...
...does a preacher with murky credentials draw a crowd in jaded New York City? Simple. You field a corps of 2,000 tireless, polite young buttonholers who spend weeks offering people free tickets. Invest $300,000 on publicity for the one-night stand-far more than Billy Graham has ever spent for an eight-day crusade. Along with the radio and TV spots and full-page newspaper ads, plaster posters of the smiling preacher on all conceivable wall space...
...plot on which Shaw hangs his message is fairly simple. The Patient, a whining invalid stifled by her mother's overweening care, allows herself to be kidnapped by her sexy new "nurse" and a smooth-talking preacher-turned-burglar, named, respectively, Sweetie and Popsy. The three set out in quest of "real life" and a good time, taking up residence near a British imperial outpost in some unidentified desert land. The Patient's mother eventually catches up with them but fails to recognize her daughter now disguised as a native servant girl and glowing with health...
...speeches--they have not succeeded in laying bare Shaw's fundamental message. And perhaps it would be unfair to expect them to, because Shaw himself buried it in his final "stage direction," a postscript to "the reader" in which Shaw reveals that his own favorite character is not the preacher, who continues to preach despite his loss of faith, and who is the character most likely to be identified with Shaw, but rather the patient--"the woman of action...