Pearlman's lyrics evoke a world that has strayed from divine truth into Babylon-like confusion.
In the decade that follows, an autocracy claiming legitimacy from divine ordination wrestles with demands for constitutional modernity.
But his main problem, surely, is mental.How else to explain a short game that has degenerated from divine to disastrous?
Stepping between the 40-foot pines surrounding his house, Mike Mussina is 15 minutes from Divine Providence.
And as a bright undergraduate who has read Plato's Euthyphro can tell you, it's not so easy to get moral mileage from divine commands.
He said portraying Lear, who goes from divine monarch to shivering naked animal in three acts, was too difficult and too exhausting.
"They are principles that can be known and honored by men and women of good will even apart from divine revelation," Rigali said.
A dozen petits fours are $28.95 to $31.95 from Divine Delights, Novato, Calif.; (800) 443-2836; Visa and MasterCard only; Dec. 18.
For him, the human status of sacredness draws from divine creation and directive, from man (and woman) having been created in God's image, and therefore has nothing to do with a human right.
His own oppositional modernism was as revolutionary as Eliot's, though it arose not from divine afflatus but, as the title of one of his poems has it, from "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things".
The institution of kingship comes not from divine revelation but from the request of the elders of Israel, and this request is treated by Samuel as rebellion against Yahweh.
