Word: precept
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...year was 1641. Harvard College, a cash-poor five-year-old institution of higher learning, sent three Cambridge, Mass., preachers to England on a “begging mission.”When the pioneering preachers arrived, they realized what is now a precept of fundraising: they needed some literature. The trio sent word of its epiphany back across the Atlantic, and so in London in 1643 there appeared “New England’s First Fruits”—“the first of countless public relations pamphlets and brochures,” according...
...operation--and particularly Bush's decision to bypass the generally amenable Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for authorization--has drawn fire not only from liberal Democrats but also from some of the most conservative in Bush's party, in which government restraint is a fundamental precept. "There is a test of Republicans on this," says activist Grover Norquist, normally a White House ally. "The country will let you get away with this in the wake of 9/11, but that doesn't make it right." And even if Republicans are prepared to bless Bush's program, they know it theoretically would have...
...understanding, the new grading policy is supposed to set guidelines and goals for professors, not hard-line quotas that only 35 percent of each precept can receive A’s,” Joseph said. “We don’t have a problem not getting A’s we don’t deserve. But it is intensely frustrating to work hard all semester, for an A, only to get a B+ be all semester, for an A, only to get a B+ because some professors believe the guidelines to, in fact, be a quota...
...find it, but it was there, maybe in Leviticus somewhere, that forbade air conditioning." Thinking of religion may turn his mind to Father Emil, pastor of Lake Wobegon's Catholic congregation at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility Church, and his annual sermon on birth control, based on the precept "If you didn't want to go to Minneapolis, why did you get on the train...
Honor thy father and thy mother is a sound precept in life, but dubious advice for a writer. From James Joyce to Tennessee Williams, from Virginia Woolf to Mary Gordon, modern literature has thrived on an undercurrent of patricide and matricide. Monstrous parents, it seems, are what gifted children barely survive in order to write about them with inspired resentment. Loving memoirs tend to rank second only to corporate histories of tool-and-die companies as the kind of book any reader can put down. In the face of this, Wilfrid Sheed, a witty, acerbic critic and novelist (Office Politics...