Word: righteousness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Norman Mayer, there was method to his madness on the Mall. Always a loner, he singlehanded tried to halt the threat of one kind of annihilation with that of another and died as he had lived, alone, troubled, but strangely sympathetic. What began as a righteous cause for this polite and abstemious antinuclear advocate became an obsession and ultimately ended in a hollow if not insane act of protest. Yet before his bluff was called, Mayer, 66, a balding drifter, managed to frighten the city of Washington and stage a blatant and bizarre act of terrorism at the Washington Monument...
...traditional conditions for a morally justifiable war, which are generally accepted by non-Catholics as well as Catholics, are that it be declared by a legitimate authority, for a righteous cause, with good intention, as a last resort, and waged with limited means. The two criteria for conduct of a just war that are especially pertinent to today's nuclear debate are "discrimination" (no direct killing of innocent civilians) and "proportion" (a war's devastation must not exceed the evil it seeks to overcome). Nuclear pacifists argue that these two factors necessarily rule out atomic warfare...
...chemical weapons, but forbade these methods if they "entirely escape from the control of man" or cause the "annihilation of all human life within the radius of action." Pius, who denounced saturation bombing even before the inferno of Hiroshima, declared that wars of righteous aggression, in order to punish an offense or to recover territory, could no longer be justified because modern weaponry had become so devastating. Wars of national self-defense, however, were still permitted...
What the USIA is planning is not a mere documentary, or a symbolic show of support for Solidarity, but a program to be aired internationally, in a sort of cold war battle over the airwaves--the kind of show that portrays the evils of communism and the righteous causes of the good old USA. While the voices of campus groups ought never to be silenced or censored. Giamatti is right not to drag the name of a diverse liberal university into that particular realm of international politics...
...ordinary men endure the restless boredom of confinement. Five of them are given a week's pass to visit their families, and find that the same restrictions face them and their women on the outside. The country is a prison, every liberating impulse is indictable, and the more righteous villagers are all too willing to play judge and executioner. Adultery is punished by eight months of bread and water; indiscreet lovemaking demands instant and bloody death. In this remorseless landscape, where the subtlest smile on a stolid face can seem an act of anarchy, each prisoner must find fulfillment...