Word: prelapsarian
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...author seeks, admirably, to dispel the myth of children's innocence by questioning our tendency to locate childhood in an Edenic state of prelapsarian innocence. To ascribe to them an imagined innocence is to do them and adults a grave disservice...
...attains) an authentically original tone. What it says, through the metaphor of these lives, is that the burden of history has grown too heavy to bear, that we can no longer hope to master it. Our best hope lies in shedding it and finding our way back to a prelapsarian state. At the end, ambiguously, Tom and Mary seem to be heading in that direction. It is the only imaginable conclusion to an ambitious and challenging film...
Lurking behind Sale's argument and that of many other vociferous critics is a prelapsarian myth: the world was once perfect and now it isn't, so someone or something must have ruined it. Many cultures possess a form of this myth; it is particularly strong in Western thought because of the Adam and Eve story in the Old Testament. In the 18th century, Jean Jacques Rousseau popularized a secular version of that Eden story with his writings about the Noble Savage. And part of his inspiration for this concept came from his knowledge of the New World. Even Sale...
...home, as abroad, Kennedy's performance was mixed. He was a fiscal conservative. The economy was robust during his thousand days. Economic growth averaged 5.6% annually. Unemployment came down by almost two percentage points from the nearly 8% level when he took office. Inflation held at a prelapsarian...
Primitives are the kittens of art; they stand for a kind of sweet, prelapsarian innocence that culture, which means complexity, tends to deny. Even so, Grandma Moses' popularity was unusual, and the show of 43 of her paintings at the National Gallery in Washington scarcely invites criticism. She was one of those infrequent artists whom everyone likes, and most people love...