Word: religion
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...commonplace books are filled with all sorts of trivia picked up from travelers. Sometimes he merely recorded little but the subjects of his chats: 1786, Sept. 23: conversation with Dr. Benjamin Franklin about the plague in Turkey; 1791, Oct. 8: Mr. Stewart about the horrors of the Hindu religion and the manners of Laplanders...
That was how Eliot, a "revolutionary" poet, became without inconsistency the foremost literary champion of tradition. Everybody quoted him as saying that he was "classicist in literature, royalist in politics and Anglo-Catholic in religion." That would have sounded less smug if they had added, as Eliot did: "I am quite aware that the first term is completely vague, and easily lends itself to claptrap; I am aware that the second term is at present without definition, and easily lends itself to what is almost worse than claptrap, I mean temperate conservatism; the third term does not rest with...
...ancient islanders, who had no metal or even timber, manage to transport the statues over the steep rim of the crater and down the rugged mountain? Their hideous religion may have supplied the motive, but not the means...
Long-Legged Fish. Behind this round-robin anthropophagy, Dr. Wolff detects the outlines of a weird and dreadful religion. According to ancient legends, death and the fear of death ruled Easter Island. It was good to eat people, for into the eater then flowed the life of a "long-legged fish." Human sacrifices, piously (and frequently) performed on the tops of volcanoes, gave new life...
When he was 15, Knox began to take up religion seriously on his own. A friend came down with typhoid and, feeling that he must somehow help, Knox lived on bread & butter for six weeks. When the friend died, Knox prayed for him 15 minutes daily "with my hands held above the level of my head, which is not as easy as it sounds." At 17, he vowed himself to celibacy: "The uppermost thought in my mind was not that of virginity ... I must have 'power to attend to the Lord without impediment...