Word: tenet
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...Cardinal likes to explain his faith through the story of one of his theology professors, a man who questioned the thinking behind the church's 1950 declaration that the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into Heaven was an infallible tenet. "He said, 'No, this is not possible -- we don't have a foundation in Scripture. It is impossible to give this as a dogma.' " This led the professor's Protestant friends to hope they had a potential convert. But the professor immediately reaffirmed his abiding Catholicism. "No, at this moment I will be convinced that the church is wiser than...
...focus of p.c. multiculturalism seems to be shifting from curriculum battles -- so many have already been won -- to the suppression of "hate speech," which is loosely defined as anything that any recognized minority or victim group chooses to find offensive. A chief tenet of political correctness is that minority groups must support each other, rather like union members refusing to cross a picket line. The very use of the term "of color" -- which embraces blacks, historically antagonistic Asian ethnicities, Native Americans and Hispanics, many of whom are ethnically white -- implies that these disparate groups are bonded simply by not being...
...first two beliefs can, except by those who hold them, easily be dismissed as superstitions. The third -- a tenet of the classic theory of psychoanalysis devised by Sigmund Freud -- has become this troubled century's dominant model for thinking and talking about human behavior. To a remarkable degree, Freud's ideas, conjectures, pronouncements have seeped well beyond the circle of his professional followers into the public mind and discourse. People who have never read a word of his work (a voluminous 24 volumes in the standard English translation) nonetheless "know" of things that can be traced, sometimes circuitously, back...
...evil empire was the enemy. That was the central tenet of American cold warriors. Liberals deplored such talk as crude Manichaeism. Now, after 20 years of deriding anticommunists for being blinded by the Soviet threat, they wistfully recall how the Soviet threat brilliantly illuminated the foreign policy landscape -- and lament how obscure it all is with the lodestar gone. Ah, the Golden Age when everything was easy and we all joined hands in the cold war battles of Vietnam and Nicaragua and the Euromissiles...
...minority. Whatever the reason, old soldiers like Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and columnist Nat Hentoff, both onetime A.C.L.U. board members, see a serious threat to single-minded support of individual liberty. Dershowitz asserts that "the A.C.L.U. is a very different organization today." To him, the key tenet of the A.C.L.U. faith is support for free-speech rights for "causes that you despise." Without that, "all you are is a political activist...