Word: sermons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who came to power two months after Khomeini's death. Rafsanjani has not actually called for a reversal of strict Islamic injunctions, but in oblique ways he is signaling that he favors a more relaxed approach, especially in the enforcement of hijab. In a much publicized sermon last November, for example, Rafsanjani chided fellow clerics who make a virtue of "austerity" and argued that "appreciating beauty and seeking embellishment are serious feelings. To fight them is not God's desire...
...remarks ignited a debate among the country's mullahs that is still blazing. Two weeks ago, Ayatullah Abdul Karim Mousavi Ardebili, a conservative religious figure and former chief justice, said in a televised sermon that he was ashamed by the way hijab was being flouted and that "the revolution was headed for destruction" if the people did not step forward. Within a few days the Revolutionary Guards, who sometimes act independently of government wishes, began rounding up young women in the street whose dress they found objectionable. On Vali Asr Avenue, the capital's main shopping boulevard, a guardsman tried...
...asking you to sit through a sermon. Nor am I asking you to be hypocritical, but when we give others a chance, many times we discover that our preconceived notions were wrong...
...sermon-like speeches that antagonized his enemies and mesmerized his followers, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide often described his movement as a lavalas, the Haitian term for a cleansing avalanche that will wash away tyranny and corruption. That image was particularly relevant last week, as a political lavalas carried the 37-year-old Roman Catholic priest to an overwhelming victory in Haiti's first truly democratic presidential elections...
...illness or murder, hovers over many of Spark's characters, but that does not make the author glum. Unlike Margaret, who is criticized by her husband for liking "art to have an exalted message whereas if there was anything he hated in art, as in life, it was a sermon," Spark seems to believe that the only sensible way to consider serious questions -- religion and guilt, insanity and illumination, free will and destiny -- is with lightly lethal humor...