Word of the day: sacralize

The word of the day is sacralize:

1. to make sacred; imbue with sacred character, especially through ritualized devotion: a society that sacralized science.

(http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sacralize)

"In his weaker writing, there creeps into the verse a slightly reflexive, choric fatalism, a sacralizing of the land’s conflicts, in which Israel is evoked as a place haplessly soaked in thousands of years of religious strife: “In my land, called holy, / they won’t let eternity be: / they’ve divided it into little religions, / zoned it for God-zones.” But who, in these words, is “they”? “Jewish history and world history / grind me between them,” he writes, as if the soldier-poet, who helped found his nation, lacked all political agency."

 - James Wood, "Like a prayer: the poetry of Yehuda Amichai", 4 January 2016 The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/04/like-a-prayer)

Word of the day: choric

The word of the day is choric:

—adjective

1. of, pertaining to, or written for a chorus.

(http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/choric)

"In his weaker writing, there creeps into the verse a slightly reflexive, choric fatalism, a sacralizing of the land’s conflicts, in which Israel is evoked as a place haplessly soaked in thousands of years of religious strife: “In my land, called holy, / they won’t let eternity be: / they’ve divided it into little religions, / zoned it for God-zones.” But who, in these words, is “they”? “Jewish history and world history / grind me between them,” he writes, as if the soldier-poet, who helped found his nation, lacked all political agency."

 - James Wood, "Like a prayer: the poetry of Yehuda Amichai", 4 January 2016 The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/04/like-a-prayer)

Word of the day: kenosis

The word of the day is kenosis:

Etymology:  < Greek κένωσις an emptying, < κενοῦν to empty, with ref. to Phil. ii. 7 ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσε ‘emptied himself’.
Theol.

The self-renunciation of the divine nature, at least in part, by Christ in the incarnation. (OED)

"Both Christianity and Islam harshly challenge the self with an insistence on submission, sacrifice, and kenosis—an emptying out of the self, an exchange of the wrong kind of fullness for the right kind of humility—and Buddhism seeks to undermine the very idea of the sovereign, unified self."

 - James Wood, "Is that all there is?  Secularism and its discontents", 15 & 22 August 2011 The New Yorker