Word: fervor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Formed in 1979 as Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini's personal militia, the IRGC acquired a reputation for suicidal human-wave attacks in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88. After Khomeini's death in 1989, the government of then President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani sought to channel the guards' fervor into reconstruction projects, allowing them to dip into the coffers of massive religious and charitable foundations known as bonyads; in time, the guards came to control the foundations themselves...
President Barack Obama's announcement on Sept. 17 that he was scrapping plans for a long-range-missile shield in Europe prompted a fervor normally reserved for theological discussion. Critics assailed his alternative--smaller, sea-based interceptors to counter the immediate threat from Iran--as a concession to Russia, which had seen the U.S. stronghold near its borders as directed at its own arsenal...
...When Abdurajak's younger brother Khadaffy Janjalani took complete control of the group sometime around 2002, Abu Sayyaf renewed its ideological fervor for independence and refocused its efforts on bombmaking. In 2004 the group took responsibility for the most deadly terrorist attack in the history of the Philippines: the 2004 bombing of a ferry in Manila Bay that killed 116 people. By mid-2005, the Philippine government says Jemaah Islamiyah, the Southeast Asian terrorist group responsible for the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people, had trained some 60 members of Abu Sayyaf to make bigger, better explosives. Two Jemaah...
...election heralded a turning point in America’s history, while for others the election of this 47-year-old man marked the ascendancy of Generation X. Looking back on that historic day, two things stand out: First, I have never seen so much passion and fervor surrounding an election. Second, despite this enthusiasm, voter turnout remained woefully low. In fact, only around a third of Americans actually voted Obama...
This past spring, however, after several decades as a nominal Southern Baptist, Gingrich converted to Catholicism. With the fervor of a convert, he has embraced the role of defending both his new faith and religious liberty. In his 2006 book Rediscovering God in America, Gingrich lambasted what he calls the "secular effort to reject any sense of a spiritual life as mattering." And days before he officially joined the Catholic Communion on March 29, he was among the first to criticize the University of Notre Dame for inviting Barack Obama to speak, Twittering (of course...