Word: urs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...that slippery patch of the life cycle once known as "the dangerous age." This is the generation of American women that reinvented feminism, wrote Our Bodies, Ourselves, and learned to examine their cervices with mirrors. But can they prevail over menopause -- the hormonal bog that ate up Ur-feminist Simone de Beauvoir and that reportedly reduces sleek Hollywood women to palpitations and tears...
...raised by a Mohican family, has at last a context worthy of his importance as a mythic figure. This character, blending the Old World tradition of gallantry with the New World's belief in the moral supremacy of those who live in close harmony with nature, is our Ur- frontiersman, the archetype on whom everyone from William S. Hart to Clint Eastwood has fashioned his variations...
...less mealymouthed defense of the American character would begin by acknowledging its historical roots in the behavior of the Anglo settlers of 200 and 300 years ago -- what are known today as Wasps. The Ur-Wasps brought with them a load of cultural baggage, which they unpacked when they arrived. Their load included a politics of natural right, derived from English Whigs; Protestant churches, mostly Bible reading and "low" in ritual and theology; and a near religious belief in the virtues of working hard and getting rich. These traits reinforced one another: pulpits proliferated under nonauthoritarian government, and the work...
Before the Hellenic era, this relationship was one of imitation: The temples of Teotihuacan and the ziggurats of Ur are manmade surrogates for the natural "sacred mountain," the center of a spiritually charged vision of the natural world...
...gaudier miracles are entertaining. A few of them may be authentic by Vatican standards. But a miracle without purpose is mostly a trick. Far from tourist trap and snake farm, there is the Ur-miracle from which all miracles derive. It is useful, simple, transforming and persuasive. It cannot be faked. It is love...