Word: mysticism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...have seen them at your local sandwich shop or supermarket: exotic-looking, oversize bottles and sleek cans with names like SoBe Wisdom, Fresh Samantha's Super Juice and Mystic Potions. Their labels are meant to suggest either New Age healing powers or the latest in scientific nutrition, and they carry prices to match: about $2 for 14 ounces of SoBe's latest line...
...efforts to unblock other coronary tunnels by angioplasty failed painfully), and a supporting cast of ACE inhibitors, beta blockers, cholesterol thwarters, diuretics, aspirin to make the platelets slippery, nitroglycerine, blood-pressure suppressants, vitamin E, folic acid, a rowing machine, a stoic personality and the diet of a desert mystic. It goes without saying that a heart attack is also a good way to quit smoking. I was instantly cured of nicotine addiction that night in Kansas City...
...More remarkable than what he said is the fact that the pontiff chose to engage with the prevailing secular intellectual currents. "This pope cares about ideas," says TIME religion correspondent David Van Biema. "He is an intellecutal along with being a mystic, and since postmodernism challenges the harmony between faith and reason, he feels compelled to engage with it." Don't expect him to bump any French metatheorists off Comp Lit reading lists, but rare is the pontiff who displays an awareness of the prevailing wisdom in college-coffee-bar philosophy...
...first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln spoke to a nation darkened by the breaking storm of the Civil War. He closed, "The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature." In those days, long before the advent of mass education, Lincoln had no doubt that Americans maintained a communal memory of their history...
...years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation." King too relied upon America's shared memory, using Americans' knowledge of their nation's ideals to shame them into action. What happens to a nation, though, when neglect and apathy have severed those "mystic chords...