Word: workaday
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...blacks who had made it to get out of the ghetto. This out-migration gutted the social structures of inner-city society, leaving neighborhoods bereft of a functioning middle class -- a middle class that once provided the neighborhood with shops and businesses and, more important, offered a model of workaday values that bound the society together...
...priest? Why, virtually everything Powers had written till then had been about Roman Catholic clergymen in out-of-the-way Midwestern parishes. He had established himself as an uncannily intimate chronicler of their workaday / lives away from the altar: their immersions in church politics and fund raising, their intramural feuds and poker-table cronyism, their struggles with vinegary housekeepers, booze and loneliness. Not that Powers by any means fell into the cozy category of "Catholic writer"; his vision, though compassionate, was too unsparing for that. Still, a Powers book without a priest would be like -- well, a John Cheever book...
...workaday Christian who does make the effort to delve into the findings of the critics will probably be frustrated. After more than a century of immense effort, surprisingly little has been settled concerning the Gospels. A riot of discord persists over which passages might be trustworthy and over the criteria for deciding so, not to mention over the fundamental issue of who Jesus was. One eminent theologian, Yale University's George Lindbeck, finds the specialists' theories "mutually unintelligible" and not particularly helpful. The theories are also unstable. Funk admits that the "data base" of sayings being developed by his Jesus...
Recently he has been playing with Nintendo, the video game that is the Hula-Hoop of the 1980s. Nintendo draws millions of children into the high- tech, button-pressing world that may be their workaday future. Sometimes John David plays alone, but when his five-year-old brother Christopher is home, the two of them compete against each other. The boys sit together in an armchair pushed close to the television set, their fingers moving expertly across the buttons on a palm-size control panel. They are mesmerized...
...that strikes you in the great still lifes and interiors of the 1940s and '50s, and it lends them the breadth and declamatory power of traditional fresco. Even when the form is inherently mysterious or logically inexplicable -- like the bird that flaps like a silent, benign apparition through the workaday clutter in his Studio paintings of 1949-56 -- you are aware of its density...