Word: calvinistic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...year-old boys is a question settled beyond doubt by this readable and authoritative biography: he was also, at the very least, the jaunty and flamboyant hero of an extraordinary life story. Frank McLynn's Robert Louis Stevenson (Random House; 567 pages; $30) describes a hardworking idler, a Scottish Calvinist who remade himself as a romantic and (four days out of any seven) a convincing bohemian, a smothered son who remained boyish all his short life, and an invalid who lived a life of arduous travel and physical adventure. (Another frail, literary, boyish adventurer of the time comes to mind...
Clinton's covenant talk mines a long American tradition, running right back to the Puritans. "It is of the nature and essence of every society," said John Winthrop, "to be knit together by some covenant." But what kind of covenant? Winthrop's was based on obedience to a Calvinist God, which is not something Clinton is likely to call on. This is where familiarity comes in, to provide the needed emotional glue...
...cannot yet claim such a quixotic position, though, because I have not worked very hard here, and I have engaged in soft living for which the Calvinist founders of Harvard would undoubtedly have had a remedy. Unlike some of my classmates, I still do not have the self-confidence to laugh at our school's old Puritan roots. In many ways, those roots reflect my own values...