affirmingly

He said: "What struck me about this heartfelt and poetic work was that it appears that from one country to the next, from one generation to another, people's deepest desires and greatest fears are frighteningly and affirmingly alike.

Their endings (if they can be said to have endings) are therefore not so much anticlimactic as affirmingly preclimactic.

The way to avoid problematic appropriations of "Brandon Teena," Freccero suggests, is not in any attempt at definition but in "the creation of a future where categorical definitions so dependent on gender and desire might prove affirmingly impossible and unnecessary" (75).

But this imagination, the kind that is affirmingly receptive rather than strenuously constructive, is fed by remembered experience, be it worldly or fictive, and that means, in turn, that it is inevitably past-nurtured: Oakeshott, the most single-minded and most recent representative of this way of being, whose pairable predecessor is Burke, says:

One would tell a story, the other would listen attentively, nod approvingly, smile affirmingly, shake his head sadly.

Heads turned, mouths gaped, but then the heads nodded affirmingly. The diocese has far too many parishes.