Word: prophetic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Concierges and shopkeepers asked their intellectual betters what Existentialism means (few can answer, but many try). In the overcrowded metro a working man has been heard to swear at a neighbor who shoved him: "Species of an existentialist!" At one of Prophet Sartre's recent lectures, an overflow mob of 2,000 was turned away, a small riot occurred, and women swooned...
Sartre's temperament is Gallicly gay. Once at a bibulous party the irrepressible prophet began boxing a dressmaker's dummy. Nearby, on an old-fashioned bed topped by a canopy, sat bravoing Authoress de Beauvoir. Suddenly Sartre landed a haymaker. The dummy hit the bed, shook loose the canopy on De Beauvoir's brunette head. Wags said that Sartre had crowned her Queen of Existentialism...
Actually, not Kierkegaard but German Philosopher Martin Heidegger (a Nazi from 1932-34), begot Existentialism. Heidegger's ultimately cynical subjectivism rather than the Danish prophet's Christian profundity determined Sartre's concept of man's responsibility: "Man is free to act, but he must act to be free. If he fails to choose a social or political line of action, he is not a Being; he is Nothingness." Should, by chance, Christian ethics permeate man's action, Sartre does not mind-not because it is Christian but because it is moral...
Saint or sinner, Joseph Smith Jr., founder and prophet of Mormonism, possessed a personality so powerful and fascinating that men, and women too, have sought down the years to "know his heart." One of these is Mormon-born (but Mormon no more) Fawn M. Brodie. What she has learned she tells with skill and scholarship and admirable detachment in No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith (Knopf...
What manner of man was this, who could convince people that his will was God's, even in the most mundane matters, even when it flew in the face of a frontier civilization's deep-dyed Puritan morality? Was he shameless fraud or true prophet? In Mrs. Brodie's well-documented version, he held something of both...