Word: virginal
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Churches in the Holy Land closed for two days last week to protest a decision by the Israeli government to allow the construction of a mosque beside the Basilica of the Annunciation, where Christians believe the Virgin Mary received word that she would bear the Son of God. The Vatican criticized the Israeli decision and in a strongly worded statement accused the "political authorities [of] fomenting division." The Israeli government reacted angrily, condemning the Vatican statement and saying it was only trying to "lower tensions" between Christians and Muslims. The controversy has strained relations between Israel and the Vatican...
...fashioned rationalistic unbeliever, I have no desire to defend religion or to attack real blasphemy. I leave it to others to argue about the appropriateness of covering a portrait of the Virgin Mary with manure. What horrifies me is the idea that, as Rabelais once put it, to "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law"--the concept that one's own desire is all that matters. I dislike this principle, not because I'm a law-and-order conservative but because it's a philosophy of vanity, and because vanity and happiness are incompatible...
...people; in the U.S. the rate was 34.4 per 100,000.) Worse, the cultural and legal attitudes toward rape are practically medieval. In Johannesburg, where the HIV-infection rate is reckoned to be 40% among men in the "rapist" age bracket (20 to 29), many believe raping a virgin will cure HIV. Earlier this month a prominent judge sentenced a 54-year-old man who had raped his 14-year-old daughter to just seven years in prison. Because the crime took place within the family, Judge John Foxcroft explained, little harm was done to the wider community. Furthermore...
...signal value? What image does it conjure up? "You can't just put out a doodad with a name slapped on it," insists Michael Stone, co-director of New York's Beanstalk Group, another large licensing agency. Missteps abound among those who have held that simplistic view. Take Virgin Clothes: British entrepreneur Richard Branson has successfully etched his Virgin trademark onto a host of products, from CDs to cola. But his apparel line is struggling, mainly because its initial styles were pricey and somewhat conservative, which went against the trendy and value-conscious image originally established by the airline Virgin...
...Mary hangs out, awaiting his fate. In her repressed way, she's as strung out as the medic, and perhaps not good news for him. But she's the only hopeful news in sight, and their tentative flirtation keeps getting interrupted--by cardiac arrests in nightclubs, by the allegedly virgin birth of twins, by the running violence of an often half-naked street person (well played by the singer Marc Anthony, who sports dreadlocks for the role...