Word: religion
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
William R. Hutchison, co-master of Winthrop House and professor of the History of Religion in America, said yesterday the Masters suggested various ways to increase the dialogue on the issue, including discussions in the Houses and in courses...
...outside the vicinity of Landsdowne St. Summer in Boston is, after all, not much more than a humid, sweaty fantasy, two months of radiant heat and soaking t-shirts designed simply to occupy the space between semesters. And to watch baseball, which is far more of an opiate than religion, at least as far as Bostonians are concerned...
...seems so blithely "normal." For Jones was half-Indian, and in the midwest in the '50s you were not allowed to forget that very long--you were an outsider. At age 18, Jones became a Maoist and made the intellectual synthesis on which he would build his church: that religion is indeed the opium of the people, yet the people cannot live without opium--so what is needed, he concludes, is a religion that is Marxist, with Christ as the revolutionary hero...
...shotgun marriage of Marxist philosophy and Christian commitment could only be seriously entertained in America, and it reflects an instinctive, shrewd understanding of the American mind on Jones's part. The religious impulse in America is strong, much stronger, as De Toqueville points out, than in Europe, where religion is allied with politics and the social convention. Here, it suppresses godless ideologies. Yet another side of American nature is pragmatic and utilitarian, desiring rational justification for any act. Jones's philosophy embodied this conflict and, in a sense, mastered it. He could invest himself with religious charisma by using...
...Religion and insanity occupy adjacent territories in the mind; historically, cults have kept up a traffic between the two. The medieval Brethren of the Free Spirit, the heretical Beghards and Beguines who practiced in Cologne and other Northern European cities, became nihilistic megalomaniacs. They began in rags but then, in the conviction of their spiritual superiority, which they eventually believed to surpass God's, adopted the idea that the general run of mankind existed merely to be exploited, through robbery, violence and treachery. In 1420 a cult of Bohemians called the Adamites came to regard themselves, like the Manson...