Word: pitirim
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Even in the unpredictable Soviet Union, television viewers must be astonished by a new program on one of the two state-run channels. Last week, in a Sunday time slot following the evening news, Metropolitan Pitirim, head of the publishing department of the Russian Orthodox Church, appeared on the screen garbed in clerical robes and holding prayer beads. For ten minutes, Pitirim spoke soothingly about the need to set aside daily troubles in order to help others and contemplate the meaning of life. The priest also worked in discreet mentions of Jesus Christ and the Bible...
Metropolitan Pitirim was appearing on a new weekly show called Thoughts About the Eternal: Sunday Moral Sermon, which a layman had inaugurated the previous week. Pitirim's commentary, though as innocuous as a sermonette after an American late movie on television, was nonetheless historic: the first time in 72 years of Communist rule that a clergyman's sermon had been broadcast. Coming six weeks before President Mikhail Gorbachev's scheduled meeting with the Pope at the Vatican, the show underscored Soviet leaders' increasing tolerance of religious practice...
...mind told him to go back to Harvard nearly 50 years ago, he threw himself into the study of the piano and developed an enduring passion for Bach. For years afterward he would relax by playing the partitas. He found himself fascinated by such scholars as the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, a Russian emigre who saw ominous parallels between Nazism and Soviet Communism. Nitze shared that lesson with his mentor, Dillon, Read's president James Forrestal, who later became the nation's first -- and most obsessively anti- Communist -- Secretary of Defense. Forrestal brought Nitze to Washington to work for Franklin...