How to Use heretical in a Sentence

heretical

adjective
  • This may sound heretical, but choose the crisp Brussels sprouts over the thin fries.
    Bill Addison, Los Angeles Times, 1 July 2021
  • Hell, even when those species are biting, trash fish make for a nice heretical change of pace and some good lowbrow fun.
    Will Brantley, Field & Stream, 2 Aug. 2019
  • Doak’s conclusion would have seemed heretical just a few years ago.
    Hillary Rosner, Discover Magazine, 30 July 2014
  • To Americans, who log 7 to 19% more time on the job than our European peers, that may sound heretical.
    Bryce Covert, Star Tribune, 21 July 2021
  • If you're porked out, try Frances's heretical but delicious choice — sliced turkey, hot off the pit.
    Frances Bailey, Country Living, 7 July 2014
  • But in 2020, Gastón started having the kind of heretical thoughts that would have made his ancestors blush.
    Matt Reynolds, WIRED, 2 Jan. 2024
  • As a young man, he had been expelled from the city’s Jewish community for his heretical views on God and the Bible.
    Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker, 5 Feb. 2024
  • In the British scientist’s own day, church leaders would have viewed many of his ideas on these subjects as heretical.
    Livia Gershon, Smithsonian Magazine, 8 Dec. 2020
  • If this is a heretical project, well, my subject is familiar with heresy.
    Talia Lavin, The New Republic, 13 Feb. 2020
  • But this heretical thought keeps intruding: Is there such a thing as too much Sondheim?
    Globe Staff, BostonGlobe.com, 20 July 2022
  • There’s more than a hint of the Ogdoad in these two, a sacramental yet heretical consciousness.
    Joy Williams, Harper’s Magazine , 14 Dec. 2022
  • Laurence, Jeff and Allyson had a shared goal: to feed their people until 1 a.m., heretical at the time for sleepy San Francisco.
    Rachel Levin, San Francisco Chronicle, 14 May 2021
  • Sight has become a heretical concept; even a TV critic could get his throat slit just for joking about it.
    Hank Stuever, Washington Post, 31 Oct. 2019
  • There’s also the heretical thought that even PSG may benefit from some time without its star.
    Jonathan Wilson, SI.com, 1 Mar. 2018
  • In the era of hustle culture, arguing for a standard work week of less than 40 hours a week feels almost heretical.
    Jenny Singer, Glamour, 27 Sep. 2021
  • The first stratagem of the racist is not to quote Adolph Hitler, or George Wallace, or bad science, or heretical religion.
    John Archibald | Jarchibald@al.com, al, 16 Jan. 2022
  • The Cedros Island sites add to a small but growing list that supports a once-heretical view of the peopling of the Americas.
    Lizzie Wade, Science | AAAS, 10 Aug. 2017
  • To speak of trees as social beings remains, in some quarters, heretical.
    Rebecca Giggs, The Atlantic, 17 June 2021
  • If the music were more somber, people would realize the images are disturbing and the song heretical. . . .
    Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker, 11 Mar. 2024
  • Ball was sympathetic to the Lollards, a Christian sect deemed heretical by Rome.
    Susan Wade, The Conversation, 5 June 2020
  • According to the Bible, astrology is also heretical, which makes the idea of reading into the meaning of the stars a bit suspect in the first place.
    Eric Betz, Discover Magazine, 19 Dec. 2020
  • Ryan knows as well as anyone why that is borderline heretical for coaches to believe.
    Andrew Beaton, WSJ, 22 Dec. 2020
  • The oral and dental medicine specialist belongs to the Shiite sect of Islam — viewed by many hard-line Sunni Muslims as heretical.
    Sarah Dadouch, Washington Post, 17 Aug. 2022
  • The village was in the crosshairs of the Inquisition, seeking to crush a Gnostic splinter group known as the Cathars, whose beliefs were branded heretical by the Vatican.
    Brian Murphy, Washington Post, 25 Nov. 2023
  • But a lot of the conspiracies about heretical cover-ups are fairly modern.
    National Geographic, 12 May 2016
  • The notion of watching horror movies on Christmas seems downright heretical.
    Drew MacKie, Peoplemag, 13 Nov. 2022
  • Such changes might sound heretical to those who grew up at a time when the theater was almost sacrosanct — a place to get lost in the latest cinematic adventure.
    Brian Raftery, EW.com, 31 Mar. 2022
  • In another heretical post, Lee deep fries a whole fresh black truffle after submerging it in an egg wash and breading it with Shake ‘N Bake.
    Adam Reiner, Bon Appétit, 6 Jan. 2024
  • In the years surrounding the Bakke case, Bell published two articles that were considered both brilliant and heretical.
    Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker, 13 Sep. 2021
  • What Osiander and others found heretical was the very notion of a heliocentric universe.
    Rob Reid, Ars Technica, 9 Mar. 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'heretical.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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