Word: virginal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What Rush Limbaugh Was Doing over the Same Weekend: Sailing in the Virgin Islands with Bush Commerce Secretary and millionaire Robert Mosbacher and his wife Georgette...
...Crossan, Jesus' deification was akin to the worship of Augustus Caesar -- a mixture of myth, propaganda and social convention. It was simply a thing that was done in the ancient Mediterranean world. Christ's pedigree -- his virgin birth in Bethlehem of Judea, home of his reputed ancestor King David -- is retrospective mythmaking by writers who had "already decided on the transcendental importance of the adult Jesus," Crossan says. The journey to Bethlehem from Nazareth, he adds, is "pure fiction, a creation of Luke's own imagination." He speculates that Jesus may not even have been Mary's firstborn and that...
...their physical nature, angels were traditionally said to assume bodies only as needed to carry out a task. This meant that they had no gender, despite the sentimental Victorian image of the pale virgin with wings. Milton's angels, however, among the most vivid in literature, were robust figures who ate and drank freely. Raphael, in fact, "with a smile that glowed/ Celestial rosy red," blushingly explained to Adam and Eve how angels make love, "Easier than air with air, if spirits embrace, / Total they mix, union of pure with pure/ Desiring...
...color photos of it -- the emerging image clearly shows that contrary to a previous assumption that Christ's expression is one of anger, it instead betrays impatience, as though He were saying, "Silence! Now I will pronounce judgment!" Even more significant, no one in the fresco except the Virgin Mary seems to know his own fate, and thus everyone looks fearful. Says Fabrizio Mancinelli, the Vatican's curator of Renaissance art: "Michelangelo's way of interpreting this theme -- the uncertainty -- was not in line with the church at the time. The church wanted to project itself as the only certainty...
...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...