Because of these difficulties and also the pressures, strains, and competing interests of modern existence, many persons rarely pray. (religion-online.org)
But while some critics have hailed the pic as a return to Kurosawa's earlier «straight» horror films, like «Pulse» or «Cure,» it in fact represents a conscious move away from past phantasmagoric stylizations to evoke the horrors of modern existence in plain sight and form. (variety.com)
(See Norman Cousins, Anatomy of an Illness [Bantam, 1981]; Vine Deloria, The Metaphysics of Modern Existence [Harper & Row, 1979]; Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health [Random House, 1976]; Thomas S. Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness [Harper & Row, 1974].) (religion-online.org)