Word: strife
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...main subject of Heaney's poetry is the religious strife in Northern Ireland. The poet resides in Dublin, usually spending one semester each year teaching at Harvard...
...this time last year, the council was reeling from a strife-torn spring in which its vice president was nearly impeached, and then censured and de-censured over three weeks; it was forced to invalidate a referendum it ran because of numerous administrative improprieties; it drew heavy criticism for not heeding a student petition and referendum calling for numerous structural reforms; and a council executive resigned amid impropriety charges after he tape-recorded a telephone conversation with a political rival...
...history tells us anything, it is that lowering the barrier between church and state will lead not to some harmonious utopia, but to open strife and the oppression of minority viewpoints. This is the history that the Founders knew, and we have seen these lessons from the Crusades to modern-day Yugoslavia...
...barbaric violence Chagnon documented is in some ways misleading. Though strife does pervade primitive societies, much of the striving is subtler than a club fight. Our ancestors, it seems, competed for mates with guile and hard work. They competed for social status with combative wordplay and social politicking. And this competition, however subtle, had Darwinian consequences. Anthropologists have shown, for example, that hunter-gatherer males successful in status competition have better luck in mating and thus getting genes into the next generation...
...domestic fury" so dreadful "that mothers shall but smile when they behold/Their infants quartered.../All pity chok'd with custom of fell deeds." Last week, it seemed, the pitilessness that has devoured so much of the former Yugoslavia since 1991 was at last choking itself toward extinction. Strife that has fed on vengeful mythologies and minor cultural differences was succumbing, among many southern Slavs, to a universality of victimhood. Around the western Balkans, sorry droves of refugees could almost have exchanged identities as they toted a few spare relics from their past lives into banishment...