Word: sin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...concept without meaning. Many mainstream Protestant and Roman Catholic theologians argue that millenarians like Walvoord and Dyer misuse scriptural prophecies about the final days. These are not detail-specific guides to beating some kind of celestial point spread but timeless alerts that humanity must be constantly vigilant against sin's allure. The temptation to seek clues to the Second Coming on CNN is easy to understand, since Saddam has proclaimed himself a successor to Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian King who enslaved the Israelites of old. That makes it deceptively easy for prophecy mongers to identify Iraq with Babylon. Somewhat awkwardly...
...Muriel Spark. Ten guests assemble for a fashionable London dinner party, with no idea of just how murderously interesting the affair will turn out to be. The author here approaches the sinister elegance of her The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). She introduces fundamental issues -- salvation and sin, inspiration and insanity, free will and destiny -- through the medium of light but lethal comedy...
...West German President and the wife of a first cousin of Poland's Catholic Primate. Nonetheless, in 1987 the German hierarchy forced the University of Essen to oust Ranke-Heinemann from her Catholic professorship and give her another teaching post that would not imply any church endorsement. Her sin: in defiance of Christian teaching, Ranke-Heinemann had concluded that Mary was not a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus...
...religious and intellectual circles, debates about the past are as vigorous as discussions about the future. At a conference last month, Dutch Reformed Church theologian Willie Jonker declared apartheid a sin and confessed his guilt as well as that of the church and "the Afrikaner people as a whole." Although his declaration caused an uproar, his statements echoed a historic resolution adopted two weeks earlier at a church synod. Former President P.W. Botha briefly emerged from seclusion to express his anger. "The Afrikaners, my people, were not oppressors," he insisted. But progressive Afrikaners are advocating that the government take...
Plagiarism at least proclaims that some written words are valuable enough to steal. If the language is magnificent, the sin is comprehensible: the plagiarist could not resist. But what if the borrowed stuff is a flat, lifeless mess -- the road kill of passing ideas? In that case there is less risk, but surely no joy at all. (Does the plagiarist ever feel joy?) Safer to steal the duller stones. None but the dreariest specialists will remember them or sift for them in the muck...