What is "authoritative"

Usage examples of "authoritative".

Coherence was achieved because the men who created the system all used the same, ever-growing body of textbooks, and they were all familiar with similar routines of lectures, debates and academic exercises and shared a belief that Christianity was capable of a systematic and authoritative presentation.

In your arguments you never yet have shown the least disposition to withhold a just verdict or be in anywise unfair, when authoritative history condemned your position, and therefore I have no hesitation in asking you to take the original blame from the Massachusetts ministers, in this matter, and transfer it to the South Carolina clergymen where it justly belongs.

One can only be explained from the apologetic tradition which in his time was already recognised as authoritative by Christian scholars, and moreover appeared justified and required by John I.

Still, the position towards asceticism yielded a hard problem, the solution of which was more and more found in distinguishing a higher and a lower though sufficient morality, yet repudiating the higher morality as soon as it claimed to be the alone authoritative one.

But unlike the authoritative and authorial discourse that Tolstoy directs toward this end, the penetrated word does not stand above or outside the discourse of the characters.

Since the three heroes are not conscious of one another, they can be made meaningful to one another only in the authorial, and authoritative, field of vision that encompasses them all.

Leon had called Moynihan late Sunday night, but the piping voice of the Benet body had not been authoritative enough to get any information out of that damned Irish hoodlum.

To the extent that the figures who carry around with them that older moral design as a sacred and unselfconscious trust are made to appear conventional, predictable, and bidimensional by contrast with the figures with whom they share the stage and who are restless in their roles, however strenuously they attempt to conform to them, that older moral design can no longer be authoritative.

As we saw in chapter 1, Christianity from the outset was a bookish religion that stressed certain texts as authoritative scripture.

It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships, and as well a thing placed upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby, that some whales have been captured far north in the Pacific, in whose bodies have been found the barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland seas.

The most detailed and authoritative periodic reports on the Iraqi economy are produced by the Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates in their semiannual Middle East Economic Outlook .

The weapon had a flat, gutty bark, much more authoritative than the snapping of the twenty-two.

I summoned my most authoritative voice, the one I always used when all hell broke out in homeroom the morning before Christmas vacation.

A stern, authoritative voice rang across the deck, cutting through the hubbub of the blood-crazed spectators.

If he knocks it is usually only to make his presence known to the slave, and the knock is commonly authoritative and rude, often startling her, even though she expects it, signaling her in no unclear or ambiguous fashion that she is to prepare herself, and well, to greet him, her master, which she does then in a position of docility and submission, usually kneeling and head down.