Word: sinning
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...anymore. "We are losing the notion of sin," Pope Benedict XVI warns, as attendance at confession plummets. The culture celebrates what once it sanctioned: parents encourage pride as essential to self-esteem; a group of self-rising French chefs has petitioned the Vatican that being a gourmand is no sin. Envy is the engine of tabloid culture. Lust is an advertising strategy; anger, the righteous province of the aggrieved. Most days I'd give anything for some sloth. It was the moral philosopher Mae West who observed that "to err is human, but it feels divine." (She also advised, "When...
...understand the impulse of the Vatican to stress a broader range of sins for the modern age. Gianfranco Girotti, the No. 2 Catholic official in charge of confessions and penitence, told the Vatican's newspaper, "You offend God not only by stealing, blaspheming or coveting your neighbor's wife" but also by polluting, cloning, taking drugs, promoting social injustice or becoming obscenely rich. Where the standard sins are individual failings, in a global culture sin is social. "Attention to sin is a more urgent task today," Girotti said, "precisely because its consequences are more abundant and more destructive...
...retribution, Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to Jerusalem, raiding Solomon's Temple and seizing 10,000 Jews to help build his city. This brutal history would later color the portrayal of Babylon in the Bible. "In Christian culture, Babylon was quite deliberately developed as a broad symbol of the city of sin," says Michael Seymour, a curator of the British Museum's Middle Eastern collection. Indeed, over the centuries, Judeo-Christian texts would consistently imbue Babylon with a sense of evil. A 14th century Flemish manuscript of Saint Augustine's "City of God" contrasts Babylon with God-fearing Jerusalem; the former...
...prime time for film noir, whose shadowy contours and sleek period architecture the Sachs movie mimes. Of late, noir has often been pretzeled into post-modernism: by Joel and Ethan Coen in The Man Who Wasn't There, by Todd Haynes in Far from Heaven, by Robert Rodriguez in Sin City. Each of these built on the viewer's familiarity with the form to play with and subvert it, to create a new, gnarled noir...
...That was bad luck for the Spanish renewable power company Acciona Energy, which had chosen that day to publicly inaugurate its new Nevada Solar One (NS1) thermal power plant, around 30 miles from Sin City. The sky was darkened and violent winds rattled a canvas tent that held dozens of Acciona executives, energy experts, journalists and even a few celebrities like the astronaut Sally Ride and the ubiquitous green actor Ed Begley, Jr. But while the unusual weather might not have put the Solar One complex in its best light (or often, any light at all), it didn't dampen...