Word: skepticism
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Little Paws? Gide was far from being a religious skeptic: he scorned freethinkers, and was passionately devoted to the example of Christ. Some of his friends were won over by Claudel's appeals, and at times it seemed as if Gide too would become a convert. One issue that kept them apart was the relation of art to religion. For Claudel, art must bear witness to Christ; he described the whole tribe of modern literary introspectionists as "horrible little terriers who put their paws on one and make one feel the convulsive shivering which animates their wretched bodies...
...upbringing had forced upon Santayana the mind of the wandering student, it had also made him a solitary. As a boy he played no games, and in all his life he never used a typewriter, or drove an automobile, or danced. He never married. An esthete and a skeptic, a materialist and a poet, a hedonist but of few pleasures, Santayana's mind might have been paralyzed by its conflicts had he not built for himself a sort of monastery of beautiful prose, which was greatly admired by the literary if it was sometimes suspected by philosophers. Santayana...
...still uncompleted mosaic-the portrait of Jesus." Although a sizable portion of Christendom (including the Roman Catholic, Anglican and Orthodox communions) honors the saints as man's intercessors with God, historical distances have dimmed most saintly portraits even for the modern Christian, to say nothing of the skeptic who lives next door. To show the "timeliness" of the saints in 1952, Clare Luce has edited Saints for Now (Sheed & Ward; $3.50), 20 sketches of triumphant Christians of the past...
...writer (under the pseudonym Anthony Abbott), editor in chief (1931-42) of Liberty magazine, editorial, boss (1941) of all Macfadden Publications, and (since 1944) a senior editor of Reader's Digest; of a heart attack; in Manhattan. Once an agnostic, Oursler visited Palestine in 1935 and wrote A Skeptic in the Holy Land ("I started out being very skeptical, but in the last chapter I was nearly converted"). Eight years later he joined the Roman Catholic Church, from then on devoted most of his writing time to religious subjects...
...hero of this play let is the individual or the skeptic who is outside the pale. He cannot see the object of beauty and failing to see refuses to believe in it. As he taunts the mob, it closes in on him; he falls into convulsions and dies. If your sympathies are with the mob his demise is a victory for the true faith. Otherwise it is a triumph of the group over individuality...