Word: worship
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...need be, your worship, I can summon witnesses to defend my way of life, such as it is. In "Memories of West Street and Lepke," Robert Lowell lamented, "I was so out of things," to indicate he was praising the condition. Unhappily, one of the things he was out of was his mind. In a movie, Oscar Levant told Joan Crawford, "Don't blame me, lady. I didn't make the world. I barely live on it." Somerset Maugham dignified the dreaming-out-the-window business. "A state of reverie," he said, "does not avoid reality; it accedes to reality...
...each individual entering it. In the presence of teachers who exemplify the fighter-pilot mentality of success in the face of mortal danger, the idealism and even the humanity become imperiled. Too often, they are leached out in the long indoctrination. The best become like their teachers: they worship at the shrine of scientific objectivity, and they wrap themselves in a mantle of depersonalization that allows them to carry on despite the carnage around them--all in the name of victory over death...
Despite his faith, Ma has not been immune to one of the largest social problems facing China today: corruption. In the past year, raids on house churches--worship groups set up in homes--have increased from twice a month to once a week, according to human-rights groups in Hong Kong. As long as church members have the funds to grease the palms of the police, they can often escape arrest. Ma so far has paid $350, more than six months' salary, but he's worried that the authorities will soon return. "I pray they will not come back...
Contemporary writers on the American environment, Rick Bass, for example, worship in the church of Muir: "Must we break everything that is special to us, or sacred--unknown, and holy--into halves, and then fourths, and then eighths? What happens to us when all the sacred, all the whole, is gone--when there is no more whole?" Montana evokes for Thomas McGuane "a terrific evangelical silence." Faith is by definition irrational--it is, in fact, a little like fire...
...Ellen DeGeneres audience is no longer one that has come to see comedy. People have come just to see her and offer up worship. That's not to say her HBO special is rigidly unfunny. She has a free-form routine about meeting God, in whose living room she sees many pictures of Jesus, one in which he's wearing a T shirt that says, MY PARENTS CREATED THE UNIVERSE AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T SHIRT. She does a hilarious bit about why she thinks people videotape themselves making love (they think they're really...