Word: trenchant
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...artist's duty is to reveal and criticize the attitudes by which art is made. In fact, painting and sculpture have always done this; every authentic creation is also a criticism, but criticism is not its sole subject. Instead, as Art Critic Max Kozloff pointed out in a trenchant essay on art-as-idea, we get "deliberately undigested accretions of data, documentations without comment, the purveying of information for its own sake, and the measuring of meaningless quantities...
This is a trenchant collection of essays by one of the country's brightest and most thoughtful Roman Catholics about his beleaguered church. Unlike many intellectuals, Wills has not left the church during the current wave of disaffection, nor has he made any accommodation or adaptation to the Jesus movement. "Doubt is the test," he says. "Faith is rooted in it. The great enemy of believing is pretending to believe...
...drawingroom setting borrowed from Chekhov, Shaw's delightful but useless creatures engage in some of the master's most lively and trenchant prose. Not hampered by the limited arena of action, they spend quite an action-packed three hours on the stage. Yet their witty opinions sometimes seem a substitute for more complete characterization, and the constant action sometimes seems effected by too improbably contrivances. Though the atmosphere is consistent, the politics of the play are occasionally confused. It is perhaps this mixture of virtue and vices that have caused critics to make diametrically different judgments upon Heartbreak House. While...
...price freeze was slapped together, he recalls, "I felt a sense of exhilaration. I left all sorts of conventional notions behind." Working almost straight through from 7 p.m. Friday to noon Saturday, he drafted position papers on the options facing President Nixon; on Saturday night he wrote summaries so trenchant that, with only slight editing, they were handed out to the press as background material on Sunday. Last week Herb Stein's flexibility was rewarded. In a change not so much of policies as of personalities, Nixon named pragmatic Herb Stein, 55, to succeed professorial Paul Mc-Cracken...
...Berger, 42, perhaps America's leading religious sociologist, first won attention with The Noise of Solemn Assemblies, a trenchant attack on the smug, conventional Protestant churches of the 1950s. Back then, Berger reminded the ecumenical leaders last week, he and other critics seemed to be "banging against the locked gates of majestically self-confident institutional edifices." The situation could not be more different today. In the years since, said Berger, Protestants have suffered a failure of nerve and are wallowing in "masochistic self-laceration" or "hysterical defensiveness." He bluntly told the ecumenists that their efforts to regroup...