Word: impious
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...midst of lecturing in the U.S., Sir John Tresidder Sheppard, former provost of King's College, Cambridge University, issued a blunt warning to U.S. literature teachers. "This custom you have of the quiz." said he, "is very dangerous. To read with a view of being examined is impious. It's wicked! It's impossible to read with happiness when you're looking out for what the old boy, or the old girl, is going...
...shall know the truth" is the pious text to which Real Truth magazine cynically subscribes in its impious operations, "and the truth shall make you free." The kind of truth that Real Truth publishes has made its publisher (Steve Cochran) free of financial worries. Once a nickel-and-dime pressagent for a string of strippers, he can now afford to have the Rolls brought round to a Park Avenue address. But then all at once circulation, and with it Cochran's elegant new world, begins to crumble. "What we need," he storms at his harried staff, "is a really...
Such other blunt moral precepts as "Don't get drunk" or "Keep your wits about you," added to several poems, suggest the testy future schoolmaster. But in one impious song of fraternal friction, there is a glimpse of the irreverence that shocked many a later-Victorian reader...
...ESCAPE OF SOCRATES, by Robert Pick (326 pp.; Knopf; $3.95). An arresting fictionalization, lightly laced with sex, of one of history's most famous trials. Unjustly condemned to drink the hemlock on the charge that he was impious and had corrupted the young, Socrates refuses to escape and save his skin, preferring to save his soul. Not nearly as perceptive an account as Plato's, of course, but full of lively local color (garlic-eating jurymen, the seductive street wiles of Athenian slave girls) and a sympathetic look at Socrates' much maligned wife, Xanthippe...
...Papacy, he also ripped into cherished new Protestant doctrines such as Calvin's predestination and Luther's "justification by faith alone." By the time Servetus was 22, the "Wanted" posters were up for him in both camps. Calvin denounced his writings as "a rhapsody composed of the impious ravings of all the ages." Added Luther's disciple, Melanchthon: "Astute and impious . . . blowing smoke perfidiously before his hearers." For the Catholics, Jerome Aleander, Luther's debating opponent at the Diet of Worms, commented: "I never saw or read anything more nauseating, though the man is very keen...