Word: chapter
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...confession of faith in Jesus, telling the participants that if this was their first time professing faith in Jesus, they had been saved that day. Not surprisingly, within days of the assembly, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, Atlanta chapter, joined together to assault the school's decision to bring direct Protestant dogma into the public school system. Editorials rang out for protection of the First Amendment on the pages of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. However, reports Doug Cumming in The New Republic, from one quarter a conspicuous silence greeted...
...chapter describes the intrusion by the men of Ruby, Oklahoma--"the one all-black town worth the pain"--into a nearby former mission-school known colloquially as the Convent. Five women, fugitives each from justice, abuse or a lover's caprice, are living in the Convent at the moment when the men invade one morning and shoot them...
That scheme was rejected by her publishers, and Paradise was released to the public with a mournful, creakily "mystical coda that is easily the least effective passage of the book. Even without that concluding misstep, though, the impact of the first chapter within the circular framework Morrison attempts is severely diluted by two factors...
...that we get too full an outline of the many characters' thoughts, so that later, when the same moment is revived in the novel's finale, there is little left to reveal. Of course, that broad surveying into Who Feels What lends the chapter very well to independent analysis, making Morrison's reading a strong, emotionally-rich teaser for readers who, unfortunately, are not likely to have their curiosity sated by the way Paradise plays...
...second problem with the opening chapter--as issue both related to and graver than the first problem--is that few of the men or women in Paradise are convincingly full-blooded, nor do the majority of them experience any true psychological or ideological change...