Word: skepticism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Pakistan, was banned in Pakistan; now the last in his unofficial trilogy, about both India and England, has been banned in India and burned in England. As one who was born into the Islamic faith and studied "the Satanic verses" at Cambridge, he must surely have known that his skeptic's accounting of Islam was certain to offend; yet the very title of his book went out of its way to flaunt its hereticism...
...been somewhat obscured by the Goyaesque. Our idea of him has been so much shaped by the Romantic sensibility that pervaded Europe after his death that we still like to see him as a death-haunted, irrational loner, pitted by his - temperament against his times -- the first skeptic of art, the titanic ancestor of surrealism. "It is when Goya abandons himself to his capacity for fantasy that he is most admirable," wrote Theophile Gautier in 1842. "No one can equal him in making black clouds, filled with vampires and demons, rolling in the warm atmosphere of a stormy night...
...Even if I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would continue to plant my apple trees." That is the statement of faith traditionally attributed to Martin Luther. Some skeptic recently challenged the world of scholarship to demonstrate exactly where Luther had ever made such a declaration, and nobody could find an exact source. Perhaps, like so many such pieties, the idea really came from Goethe. Or perhaps Thoreau. It does not greatly matter, for the statement itself is one of abiding hope and abiding truth...
...friendly, unflappable manager at each turn. He also served as the editor of LIFE, a contributing writer for FORTUNE and the senior staff editor of all Time Inc. magazines. Along the way he took time to write two books, The Waist-High Culture (1959) and How True: A Skeptic's Guide to Believing the News...
Adin was bored at school and far more interested in the struggle to establish the state of Israel than in spiritual questions. "I am by nature a skeptic," he remarks. But the youth who looked upon believers with disdain was slowly and inexplicably drawn to faith. "I never climbed high mountains or shot lions. The way to religion was the beginning of an adventure, and a very big one," he says. "It came to the point that this world was not enough...