Word: religion
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...protest introduced the world to a mystical movement little known outside Asia. China, once devoted to Confucianism and then to Maoism, is experiencing a vacuum of faith and values. The creed most successful in filling it since "freedom of religion" was announced in 1979 has been Buddhism. But others, from illegal Christian "house churches" to witchery, have also flourished. Falun Gong is a variant of Qi Gong, a blend of mind and body work (it also includes Tai Chi) that strives to harness an energy called qi. Qi Gong does not always rise to the intensity of faith, but charismatic...
...regime. Li insists that "I want to teach people to be good, not to be involved in politics." Yet historically, secret societies and spiritual masters have challenged, and even toppled, Chinese dynasties, and President Jiang Zemin has stressed a need to "suppress cults and the use of religion to engage in illegal activities...
...prepares to enter the next world, Carmen looks back on her life: her masked desires for passion, her resistance to change, her assertions of power in a male-dominated religion and male-dominated world and her constant struggle to find beauty in a harsh and unforgiving terrain. The saints that Carmen addresses have given her solace and guidance through the years, from Saint Liberata, the patron saint of abused women represented as a crucified female martyr, to Saint Theresa of Lisieux, who teaches Carmen to find beauty in adversity...
...results of Mora's experiment with folk religion are, unfortunately, mixed. It is a fine line she must walk between the grandeur of religious language and the earthiness of folk traditions, and she often errs on one side or the other. As a result, her poetry can sound stilted at times. "Light enters you through every pore/dissolves you into itself," she writes in "Our Lady of the Annunciation." The imagery is too grand and abstract to touch the reader on a visceral level and too removed from the dirty realities of desert life to sound authentic...
...death, en paz may we rest," she writes in "Saint Isidore the Farmer." Such passages lose the transcendent quality that should mark them as religious poetry. They are too focused on this earth. More often than not, though, Mora manages to find the right balance between religion and reality, between the glory of the next life and the hardships of this one. When she does find this balance, Mora's words achieve a beauty that matches and often even surpasses that seen in the religious art on which she bases every poem. In "The Guardian Angels" she writes "In these...