No provision for religious conversion, loss of faith, being overcome by an ecstatic vision, sudden manifestation of the ability to perform miracles, rolling on the floor and speaking in tongues, none of it mattered.
Donne will play games with broken structure, to make a serious point; he will pile up metaphors to talk to us of how faith, how conversion to faith or some other conviction, is a breaking, is like moving into a new state where everything is up for grabs.
Most of the claims about the purposes and achievements of higher education relate to the individual: it will change your life, through conversion or confirmation of faith, by improving your character, by giving you marketable abilities, by making you a better member of the community, or simply by being capable of operating more effectively in the contemporary world.
The character's 11th-hour conversion to faith and sentimentality, then, feels like a personality exorcism.
Those cottages that have not been torn down are remnants of an era in which camp meetings were popular in America and offered pastoral settings for fiery preaching, conversions and reaffirmations of faith.
"The main character's conversion as a man of faith seemed more about pleasing his new girlfriend," Ms. West said, "and I wanted that conversion to go deeper".
But it has Paul Haggis, the writer ("Million Dollar Baby") and director ("Crash"), as its example of conversion, faith, blind loyalty and, finally, apostasy.
After a civic ceremony in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, the delegations will return home, where a second set of religious ceremonies will be held, in a symbolic act of spreading St. Gregory's light -- the message of conversion and faith -- throughout the Armenian diaspora.
But the Alliance for Downtown New York argues that residential conversion would signal a lack of faith in downtown as a commercial district.
If we remember right, the silence of the spheres had a good deal to do with the conversion of Pascal: he discovered faith when he became conscious of silence.
