Word: social
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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There would also be social doings...
Departed: Hon. Michael Astor, little-noted 31-year-old son of much-quoted chatterbox Lady Astor; from the U.S. after a silent six-week visit. Mother lingered behind, possibly to paste in the family scrapbook a piquant social item from the Des Moines Register; "When [Lady Astor] finished speaking at the . . . tea, one of the guests thanked the speaker profusely. The English noblewoman responded with a sudden kick right on her admirer's posterior. The guest stiffened,then, with a gale of laughter, turned and kicked the Lady right back...
...things, achieved a singularly easy conscience and an almost hermetically smug optimism. The idea that man is sinful and needs redemption was subtly changed into the idea that man is by nature good and hence capable of indefinite perfectibility. This perfectibility is being achieved through technology, science, politics, social reform, education. Man is essentially good, says 20th Century liberalism, because he is rational, and his rationality is (if the speaker happens to be a liberal Protestant) divine, or (if he happens to be religiously unattached) at least benign. Thus the reason-defying paradoxes of Christian faith are happily bypassed...
This paradox is related to another. Sometimes man boasts: "I am essentially good, and all the evils of human life are due to social and historical causes (capitalism, communism, underprivilege, overprivilege)." But a closer look shows man that these things are consequences, not causes. They would not be there if man had not produced them...
...assumes that he can gradually transcend [his finiteness] until his mind becomes identical with universal mind. All his intellectual and cultural pursuits . . . become infected with the sin of pride.. . . The religious dimension of sin," says Dr. Niebuhr, "is man's rebellion against God. . . . The moral and social dimension of sin is injustice...