Word: virgin
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...Starr Professor of Classical, Modern Jewish & Hebrew Literature James L. Kugel yesterday describing how the Hebrew words for "young woman" and "maid" were translated in biblical prose to the Greek term "virgin," in Literature & Arts C-37: The Bible & Its Interpreters...
...movement of stars was charted confidently by Egyptians and Druids, the appearance of a comet, an astronomical oddity, has long been an opportunity for panic. When Halley's comet returned in 1910, an Oklahoma religious sect, the Select Followers, had to be stopped by the police from sacrificing a virgin. In the case of Hale-Bopp, for months the theory that it might be a shield for an approaching ufo has roiled the excitable on talk radio and in Internet chat rooms like--what else?--alt.conspiracy...
Camped ostentatiously at the impact point of our age's need to believe and its need to know, and generating best sellers both for its fervent proponents and (lately) its detractors, the historical Jesus movement (Flash! Virgin birth a cover-up! Resurrection a fraud!) hardly wants for print. Yet in his Gospel Truth (Riverhead Books; 305 pages; $24.95), Russell Shorto provides a useful addition: an up-to-date survey and smart lay analysis of the theories that together constitute one of the stickiest challenges to traditional Christianity...
...dead. Medieval heaven, approached intellectually by the Scholastics or passionately by the mystical school of love, expanded St. Augustine's idea of the Beatific Vision, the saints' rapturous and direct communion with God. The Renaissance Catholic heaven more resembled an ongoing human-to-human celebration presided over by the Virgin Mary. But Protestant reformers of the 1500s reinstated a vision severely centered on Christ and his Last Judgment. This became the dominant understanding in America from its Puritan period through its first century, despite some founding fathers' attraction to the ideas of the Enlightenment...
...enough when Scottish researchers cloned a sheep named Dolly and commentators started writing about virgin births and Frankenstein. But then one week later, researchers at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center let it be known that they had cloned a pair of rhesus monkeys, named Neti (for nuclear embryo transfer infant) and Ditto, that squinted in the glare of the TV lights and clung to each other for dear life...