Sentences with phrase «utter pragmatist»
As a Virgo to the core and utter pragmatist, the idea of using flowers as a cure for my emotional and psychological issues seemed, to put it bluntly,...
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We do not miss the loyalty of David's mercenary troops (15: 19 - 21); the narrator's conviction of the mature quality of David's faith (15:25 f.; 16:12); the essential gentleness of David in these most wretched hours (16:5 - 14); the brilliant, carnal symbol of Absalom's irrevocable usurpation (16:20 - 22) and its portentous recall of the David - Nathan encounter (II 12:11 - 12); the arch Old Testament realist, the remarkable pragmatist Ahitophel (17: 1 - 23); Joab, who always acts like Joab (18:10 - 15; 19:1 - 7; 20A - 13); David's pathetic concern, implicit throughout, for the defiant son (18:1 - 5); the moving grief of a father's utter brokenness in the loss of his son (18:33); the reassertion in this critical time of the old and always fundamental north - south cleavage (19:11,41 - 43); David's profound and probably chronic annoyance with the crude, brash, «muscular» ways of Joab and his brothers, the sons of Zeruiah (16:10; 19:22; see also 3:34 b; 3:38 f.); and finally, in a kind of pausal summary before the last scene of David's reign in I Kings 1 - 2, the statement of David's very modest bureaucracy (20:23 - 26; cf. the extensive elaboration of this structure under Solomon, I Kings 4:1 ff.).
At several points he touches upon the paradoxes of modern urbanism and the tragic ironies of our cultural attitude toward cities: although we now have more individual freedom, technical ability, and, arguably, social equity, we do not live in places as hospitable to human beings as were our cities of the past; we are pragmatists who build shoddily; our current obsession with historic preservation is the flip side of our utter lack of confidence in our ability to build well; while cultures with shared ascetic ideals and transcendent orientation built great cities and produced great landscapes, modern culture's expressive ideals, dogmatic public secularism, and privatized religiosity produce for us, even with our vast wealth, only private luxury, a spoiled countryside, and a public realm that is both venal and incoherent; above all, we simultaneously idolize nature and ruin it.