Word: sainthood
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...objects. The saints are distinguished by their virtue and piety, and it is remarkable how few practitioners of the arts there are among them. The only painter ever canonized was St. Luke, but he was one of the four Evangelists. No novelist or dramatist has ever been elevated to sainthood. Nobody, in the eyes of the church, ever tap-danced his or her way up the stairway to paradise. And the celestial city does not seem to have needed architects, since (one presumes) God designed...
...liberalism and was devoted to everything most penitential and reactionary in Spanish Catholicism. He was gloomy, short-fused, arrogant--the Christian virtue of humility was never his forte--and so misogynistic that he never married and probably died a virgin. Of course, such traits have never disqualified anyone from sainthood, and nobody would doubt that Gaudi was in a general way a more saintly character than, say, Frank Lloyd Wright or Philip Johnson. But there is a deeper problem: the absence of miracles, which the Vatican authorities need as "verification of godliness." Mere piety is not enough for sainthood...
...sudden decision to appear achieved the effect he so clearly enjoys, catching his rivals off balance and making them look foolish. This time, however, his about-face may have been inspired by more profound considerations. The day before the funeral, the one living Russian with any claims to sainthood, Dmitri Likhachev, 91, spoke on the phone with the President and urged him to attend. Yeltsin is reputed to be in awe of Likhachev, a specialist in early Russian literature and a survivor of one of the worst of the early Soviet political prisons, where in previous centuries the Orthodox Church...
...whom the gods would humble they first make the center of a global advertising campaign. Beyond Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela, few humans have recently come closer to sainthood-by-acclaim than the Dalai Lama. Revered as a Buddha of compassion by his followers, Tibet's political and religious leader garnered not only a 1989 Nobel Peace Prize for efforts on behalf of his Chinese-occupied homeland but also (as the Apple Computer ads strove to exploit) the vague undifferentiated goodwill of a cynical and overcaffeinated world still auditioning sources of truth, calm and peace...
...Cline's credit, the book isn't a hagiography. Her obsessive attention to detail and her effort to represent more than one side of a given story leaves us with a picture of Hall as a person who, in the final analysis, falls considerably short of sainthood. Hall's behavior toward each of her long-term partners when she fell in love with someone else was unpleasant, to say the least: it's tacky by any standards to start dating your lover's nurse while she's laid up in the hospital. Hall was also a possessive and controlling lover...