Word: spirit
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...innocent simplicity of 1923 foretold. Before the quarter-century was done, TIME had tried to comprehend and convey the color, drama and meaning of such far-flung complexities as gangsterism, Franz Kafka, swing music, fancy funerals, Wallis Simpson, Marxism, aerial warfare, soap operas, Arnold Toynbee,* Barbara Hutton, the British spirit, Theodore Bilbo, Chen Li-fu, the Townsend Plan, Suzanne Lenglen, currency devaluation, Aldous Huxley, atomic fission, Jimmy Walker and the Supreme Court...
With prayer, with humility of spirit tempering his temerity of mind, man has always sought to define the nature of the most important fact in his experience: God. To this unending effort to know God, man is driven by the noblest of his intuitions-the sense of his mortal incompleteness-and by hard experience. For man's occasional lapses from God-seeking inevitably result in intolerable shallowness of thought combined with incalculable mischief in action...
...faith-in St. Paul's words: "The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." But Christian faith is a paradox which is the sum of paradoxes. Its passion mounts, like a surge of music, insubstantial and sustaining, between two great cries of the spirit-the paradoxic sadness of "Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief," and the paradoxic triumph of Tertullian's "Credo quia impossibile" (I believe because it is impossible...
...fact," says Dr. Niebuhr, "is that man is a child of nature, subject to its vicissitudes, compelled by its necessities, driven by its impulses, and confined within the brevity of the years which nature permits its varied organic forms. . . . The other less obvious fact is that man is a spirit who stands outside of nature, life, himself, his reason and the world." Man is, in fact, the creature who continually transcends nature and reason-and in this transcendence lies man's presentiment...
Juncture of Nature & Spirit. For man stands at the juncture of nature and spirit. Like the animals, he is involved in the necessities and contingencies of nature. Unlike the animals, "he sees this situation and anticipates its perils." As man tries to protect himself against the vicissitudes of nature, he falls into the sin of seeking security at the expense of other life. "The perils of nature are thereby transmuted into the more grievous perils of human history...