Word: puritanize
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...strange phenomenon. In many traditional societies, youth's initiation into the mysteries of sex and life is the awesome duty of family or tribe. Yet in the West, and particularly in Puritan America, parents rarely perform a major conscious role in this respect-although their unconscious attitudes profoundly influence their children. Parents are apt to feel strained, embarrassed, inadequate to the task. Many psychiatrists agree that parents are too often beset by their own sexual problems or guilt feelings to make good sex teachers. They can hardly imagine their children as anything but innocent, while the children can hardly...
...chose not to wear his ancestry as a social decoration but to accept it as a present doom and to argue with the Pilgrim Fathers as if they were living men. His poems call the Puritan spirit of New England to sharp account and make his ancestral portraits step from their frames and answer to Lowell. Thus his dialogue becomes an argument about his own nature, in terms of the Calvinist obsessions with sin, damnation, God and Satan. Lowell does not possess his ancestors; they possess...
...apparently remains, haunted by totemistic objects. One is the mirror, symbol of self-knowledge, in which Lowell has seen himself as a newt and a turtle. The other is the razor, symbol of the knowledge of life that comes through the contemplation of death. The puritan-lapsed-Catholic may have arrived at the true existentialist position-confronting the possibility of suicide man learns the nature and possibilities of his life...
...waits a second, and then yawns a fine Ed Sullivan "Ho-o-okay. . ." A sudden thought-either his or a guest's-will launch him into an imitation of Jona than Winters imitating an old granny. He can spread his eyes wide open into a wow. Semi-emancipated puritan that he is (he was reared a Methodist), he can, when a guest goes off-color, freeze his face into a blank that shows nothing but eyes and innocence. He is performer and critic, rapping out a whole percussion section of effects to suit a funny line-a wince that...
...spectacular standout is David McClelland's "Great Game of Absolution and Redemption," a satire on, of all things, Calvinism-a highly successful satire which not so long ago would have gotten him dunked in every pond in Massachusetts. The Puritan game delights in the fact that wherever the player moves, he can't help but fall into sin, McClelland's apt use of the unexpected turns a good idea into a brilliantly funny piece...