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acedia

NOUN
  1. apathy and inactivity in the practice of virtue (personified as one of the deadly sins)

How To Use acedia In A Sentence

  • I would, however, still be feeling something - melancholia or acedia, ennui, despair, nameless dread or another such psychic state historically lacking effective treatment.
  • Stephens's various descriptions of indigenous acedia do indeed suggest that the people of Central America and Yucatan inhabit a different sort of time: lazy, circular, and stagnant.
  • R. R. Reno's connection of an overblown fear of suffering with acedia or spiritual apathy in ‘Fighting the Noonday Devil’ (August / September) gave me an ‘aha!’
  • Simple boredom is the sort you suffer from during long Christmas dinners or political speeches; "existential" boredom is more complex and persistent, taking in many conditions, such as melancholia, depression, world weariness and what the psalmist called the "destruction that wasteth at noonday"—or spiritual despair, often referred to as acedia or accidie. Accidie? Ennui? Sigh . . .
  • People do feel helpless, but I believe that sense is itself a sign of something spiritually deadly: what the Fathers and Doctors of the Church called acedia or the deadly sin of "sloth. Archive 2005-10-01
  • If McKibben highlights pride and avarice, R. R. Reno contends that the most corrosive vice of our age is sloth, spiritual apathy, what the monks called ‘the noonday devil’ of acedia.
  • The Roman Catholic Church, which, like Nietzsche, knows something about conviction, has a name for this apathy: acedia, which is laziness of spirit, idleness of soul.
  • Raposa takes the possibility of voluntary consent to acedia seriously, but he is more particularly concerned with boredom as a significant but ambiguous fact of the spiritual life.
  • And as the subtitle promises the themes it will explore are the intersections of acedia with the writer's marriage -- especially with her husband's illness and death; with monks, who come in both because Norris first encountered the term acedia in the writings of the desert fathers and because she's a Benedictine oblate and thus has found that participating in the monastic life as a lay person has been for her a primary means of combating acedia; and the writing life, both Norris and her late husband are published poets. The Wine Dark Sea
  • I wrote my book because I suspected that although the word "acedia" is unfamiliar to most of us, its effects are widely known. Signs of the Times
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