Word: fervors
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Americans have always wanted it both ways. From the first tentative settlements in the New World, a tension has existed between the pursuit of individual liberty and the quest for Puritan righteousness, between Benjamin Franklin's open road of individualism and Jonathan Edwards' Great Awakening of moral fervor. The temper of the times shifts from one pole to the other, and along with it the role of the state. Government intrudes; government retreats; the state meddles with morality, then washes its hands and withdraws. The Gilded Age gave way to the muscular governmental incursions of the Age of Reform...
...evenings are evidence of Scalia's engaging sociability, but it is his combination of affability and acumen, of energetic fervor and astringent intellect, that makes him potentially one of the most influential of Justices. The Reagan Administration could hardly have invented a jurist whose views are more perfectly consistent with its own philosophy--or a sharper advocate of that philosophy...
Moreover, the competitive fervor that has made the U.S. computer industry the envy of the world has now become an impediment to the networking of the nation. Rather than agreeing on standards that would enable one computer network to share data with another, American firms are promoting their own proprietary communications systems, creating what has become a veritable skyscraper of Babel. The potential bugs involved in tying together incompatible systems, says Matthew Balkovic, director of AT&T Information System's Computer Networking Laboratory, are "enough to populate a swamp...
...determined to rescue his wartime buddies from a Vietnamese prison camp. In each case, these heroic passions were sufficient to disarm--at least for the length of the film--the audience's humanistic objections to the means used to gain the desired ends. In other words, their moral fervor canceled out our moral qualms...
...common threads run through Rifkin's peripatetic career, they are energy and anti-Establishment fervor. As an economics major at the University of Pennsylvania, he was an outspoken critic of the Viet Nam War. In the 1970s he founded and led the Peoples Bicentennial Commission in efforts to finance "revolutionary alternatives" to the 1976 Bicentennial celebration, which he considered to be too commercialized. By 1977 Rifkin had become embroiled in the growing controversy over the new recombinant-DNA technology and was ready to hit full stride. In his book Who Should Play God, published that year, he naively expressed concern...