Word: puritanic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
THUS THE LOYALTY test assumes for Jones an almost ritual importance. It is a way of keeping absolutist beliefs absolute. It is not the first the time Americans have heard of loyalty tests: McCarthy once advocated them. In both men it is the old Puritan penchant for the absolute truth surviving deformed through history, breeding paranoia and, in Jonestown, total tragedy...
These are the legacy of the Puritan's Covenant psychology, and they are a great source of the old American demon, absolutism. The movements epitomize one half of the national psyche, the Puritan conscience, and contend with the other half, democratic license. They take up, once again, the Puritan's vision of an ideal community and a steadying of morals and manners. Their history is mostly a history of failures--the continent is littered with testimonies to American visions. And the People's Temple was really no different: it sought the ideal community, too. Like all its American predecessors...
Ours is still an age of status and symbolism. In today's America, we have lost many of the commonly unquestioned social values of the Puritan past. Surnames and father's occupation no longer define people as they once did; it is up to the individual to identify himself to the world. We now identify ourselves with words, clothes, and dinner conversations, cars--America's endless hierarchy of symbols...
Network. Speaking of impressionable innocents, a lot of them found this film a revelation. It was intended as a revelation, and by rights the book of Paddy ought to take its place beside those of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John--except that Paddy suggests a cross between Puritan windbag Jonathan Edwards and Jerry Lewis. His characters pontificate and huff and puff and the whole thing is so shrill, pretentious and heavy-handed (not to mention boring) that it won Paddy an Oscar for his writing and it's called Paddy's Network. Which is just as well, because Sidney Lumet...
...paranoid, shy, or easily offended by your classmates, you might stay that way. In a few years everyone else will, too, so why not get a head start? and get thoroughly lost at least twice, once on campus and once in Cambridge (which by some quirk of the Puritan Ethic lacks signs indicating the names of major streets,but has them for side streets, presumably working on the assumption that if you don;t know the name of the street you're on, you don't deserve to. Members of the elect know; everyone else has to guess. Thank...