His accusers put little store in his concern for conservation, his love of animals, his wish to protect Congo's forests, his earnest desire to help the pygmies of central Africa and his devotion to the Discovery television channel.
Ashura is central, understandably, to Bektashi devotions, and like the Albanian Declaration of Independence, the Ashura ceremony this year, in which I participated, revealed the nature of Albanian interreligious unity.
They share not only a genre and a central theme but the fanatical devotion of hordes of readers whose fervent attention to every detail of the fictional world hovers between longing and faith.
While the novel has its problems — the plotting is busy, the minor characters are both numerous and negligible — Leavitt's devotion to her central characters, and to a surprisingly pessimistic world view, gives the story a certain gravity.
The netsuke reflect husband and wife's central, if unacknowledged, conflict — her devotion to a precise and pristine aesthetic, to perfect views and masterly carvings, versus his compulsion to have annihilating sex with people whose lives have already carved them into various distressing shapes.
After the ensuing flap, the Smothers Brothers had Seeger back to sing the song again: I'm always struck by the starkness of the presentation, which isolates the lyrics and, in turn, their central message: that an unquestioning devotion to authority will get you killed.
The key word is devotion.
This underscores the central thesis of the commentary, that devotion to the Dao in terms of self-cultivation and compliance with its precepts would assure boundless blessing in this life and beyond.
There is no set form for devotions and meditations, though the devotional prayers written by the central figures of the Bahá'í Faith and collected in prayer books are held in high esteem.
And despite the subtle differences that arose in the various Protestant church bodies, devotion to this teaching has been central to Protestantism throughout its history.
