Word: lessers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...refers to the difficult effort that is needed to put God's will into practice at every level--personal and social as well as political. A very important and much quoted tradition has Muhammad telling his companions as they go home after a battle, "We are returning from the lesser jihad [the battle] to the greater jihad," the far more urgent and momentous task of extirpating wrongdoing from one's own society and one's own heart...
There were rumors we would hear about, says Rylan M. Hamilton 02. And we would see lesser manifestations, like goosing or towel-slapping, which was weird, but not some sort of epidemic...
...Taliban - in many ways it has been mentor and tutor, too, and even, according to opposition groups, an active participant in its rise to power. In geopolitical terms, Pakistan needs to dominate Afghanistan to offset the discomfort of being wedged between hostile neighbors India and (to a lesser, but not insignificant extent) Iran - and the Taliban were to have been their vehicle. But the Bin Laden terror campaign has put Pakistan in a tight spot, where its all-important relations with the West are now dependent on standing against its Afghan progeny, a decision that raises considerable domestic difficulty...
...Father and Son' (Bloomsbury; September), giving it a starred review. The letters are a correspondence between the late poet Allen Ginsberg and his poet father, Louis. "Some of the most astonishing correspondence in American literature...In the end, for all their virtuosity, the Ginsbergs' literary talent emerges as the lesser gift in comparison to their honesty and mutual affection. Anyone interested in either Ginsberg, the Beats, American poetry or the '60s should not miss this ferociously tender and comical collection." Contemporary poets will shave to settle for a collection of their e-mail to mom, we suspect...
WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE U.S. The growing discontent over Europe's currency system could prove disastrous here, because many foreign investors holding euros would probably switch to dollar-denominated investments. That might help bonds and to a lesser degree stocks, but another consequence would be to thrust the greenback's value even higher, further debilitating manufacturing in the U.S., which has already lost 785,000 jobs in the past 12 months. The record U.S. trade deficit would spiral higher...