casuistry

This casuistry didn’t save him from a painful trial before a “denazification” court after the war.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 13, 2026

His decision for the court, handed down on Wednesday, is an incoherent mess of contradiction and casuistry, a travesty of legal writing that injects immense, gratuitous confusion into the law of equal protection.

From Slate ● Jun. 18, 2025

Hill's casuistry is all too common in memoirs written by or for statesmen seeking to sanitize their own blunders and lies.

From Salon ● May 8, 2021

With his casuistry, Whitman seems intent on convincing himself, more than anyone, that this health regimen will work.

From The New Yorker ● Mar. 21, 2017

But again his conscience told him next moment that such casuistry was dishonest and unworthy; he had found the thing, and, come what might, he ought to abide by the awful consequences.

From The Beckoning Hand and Other Stories by Grant Allen

It happened in Solnechnogorsk, 35 miles from Moscow and a world away from the casuistries of capitalism.

From Time Magazine Archive

Nay, the nicer casuistries of this principle had been latterly discussed.

From Theological Essays and Other Papers — Volume 1 by Thomas De Quincey

They 'knew' when He did not seem to be trenching on their prerogatives, or driving His Ithuriel-spear through their traditional professions of orthodoxy and punctilious casuistries.

From Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John Chapters I to XIV by Alexander Maclaren

The world has passed it by, and left all its subtle casuistries and painfully microscopic studies of the letter of Scripture—with utter oblivion of its spirit—left them all severely and wisely alone.

From Expositions of Holy Scripture St. Mark by Alexander Maclaren

Under the instruction of the Countess's director the boy's conscience was enervated by the casuistries of Liguorianism and his devotion dulled by the imposition of interminable "pious practices."

From The Valley of Decision by Edith Wharton