Word: purists
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...appealing prisoner of conscience. He is depicted--by friends--as a lightning-breathing terror with three bloodshot eyes, wreathed in the smoke of burning human flesh. In fact, however, as one of a pantheon of "protector deities," he exercises his wrath only in defense of a 350-year-old purist interpretation of the Dalai Lama's own Gelugpa branch of Tibetan Buddhism. For decades the High Lama himself included Shugden in his daily prayers. But in 1976 he began preaching against the god; in 1996 he discouraged Shugdenites' participation in a key initiation, and soon his exile government prohibited Shugden...
...Shakespearean purist--like our hypothetical unconscious friend--would have been disappointed in this Pericles, both for its irreverent reinterpretation and for the flaws in its dramatic presentation. But a less stuffy spectator, if slightly baffled by the storyline, would nonetheless find himself laughing for much of the play's two-and-a-half-hour duration. And the transformation of the structurally iffy Pericles into a worthwhile evening's entertainment is, after all, something of an accomplishment. If the play has been changed along the way from a series of adventures into a series of comedy sketches--well, maybe that...
...emotions of the audience. You could cut the white liberal guilt in the theater with a knife. Even though the real issue at hand is mostly a technical legal and political question, Spielberg some-how extrapolates it so that it becomes a question of slavery versus non-slavery, of purist evil against innocent victims...
...sure, history is hardly a pristine, purist endeavor. The historian can never completely recreate the past. But he can provide a snapshot or even a panorama of it. History is multi-directional--just as we influence history, so too does history influence us. This is not to deny a standard of historical veracity to which we should aspire. History is a "creative" field in that its purpose is to uncover creatively what occurred in the past, to the greatest degree of accuracy possible...
...were standing in Kabul's only hospital for women when the purist authorities of the Taliban decided they did not want any pictures taken. Screaming and shouting at us, they grabbed our TV cameras, all our tapes and even our briefcases. Several armed Taliban enforcers slapped a cameraman, while another rammed his rifle butt at visiting aid workers. One raised his hand toward Emma Bonino, the European Union Commissioner for Humanitarian Affairs, there to investigate the Taliban's treatment of women, and would have struck her but for an aide's intervention. The next thing we knew, a truckload...