Word: puritanic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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THEY FLED FROM BABYLON, from an England corrupt and doomed, to the beneficent shores of the Promised Land, where they would found their "city upon a hill." Guilty about deserting the cause, the Puritans aboard the Arbella self-righteously sought their justification in the hopeless depravity of their English brethren. If the short-lived blossoming of Babylon--the successful Puritan Revolution--undercut that justification, the dread finality of the Restoration left the New England Congregationalists even more anxious and alone, involving them in a desperate search for a meaning to their "errand into the wilderness...
According to Sacvan Bercovitch in The Puritan Origins of the American Self, they found that meaning in their stubborn and persistent identification of America as the New Jerusalem--a land of the elect that was itself elect, whose history was sacred history, and whose (inevitably successful) struggle for redemption would usher in the Millenium. For Bercovitch's Puritans, New England history and the individual's striving for grace are closely intertwined. Since public and private salvation are symbolically inseparable, history assumes the character of individual sanctification and the would-be saint in turn relies on the redemptive quality of first...
...first issue, porn's impact on the user, students divide. To many, porn is innocent escapism, a healthy device for fantasizing, a safety valve for dangerous impulses, a useful antidote to Puritan attitudes. Alan Dundes, professor of folklore at Berkeley, argues that it is an informal part of the nation's sex-education program, "the way American culture prepares people for sexuality." To Social Psychologist Douglas Wallace of the University of California Medical Center, porn is needed to bring sexual pleasure to the losers in the sexual game?the shy, the unattractive, the crippled. "Are you," he asks, "to deny...
...Cornell, making art was the most private activity imaginable. It set him free, but the freedom was that of the puritan aristocrat, not the anticlerical rebel. He was the exquisite ruler of little boxes, an incomparably more gifted Ludwig II who constructed his Neuschwanstein-swans, grottoes, secret chambers, opera house and permanent twilight-in the space of half a cubic foot...
...Around here your spirit gets hungry, lonely," she says in a hushed voice. "Sometimes I just want to be quiet, to have beauty and reverence." But then, Hagee turns on this feeling with a Puritan self-criticism that many Mormons seem to lapse into. "This urge," she says, is "probably a weakness." Instead of counting on church services for instilling her with piety, she reprimands herself. I should follow the lesson of Mormon friends, she tells herself, who find time each day to "commune or nourish themselves spiritually." But, she adds, "I need help to do that...