Word: puritanize
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...they appear wildly eccentric against the puritan drabness of Khrushchev's Russia, few such poets can compete in nonconformity with Vladimir Mayakovsky, Stalin's poet laureate. Mayakovsky was a brilliant, brattish libertine who alternated between slavish drivel in praise of Communism and biting satires against it. Sickened by repression and criticism, he committed suicide in 1930. Stalin astounded Party hacks by decreeing that he was Russia's "best and most talented" poet, adding ominously: "Indifference to his work and memory is a crime." Independent-minded young Russians think none the better of Mayakovsky for Stalin...
Having studied in the U.S., I have personally experienced the puritan attitude that most Americans have toward the human body...
Hawkins was a prig and a puritan, horrified at Johnson's well-known frailties of flesh and soul. He knew Johnson when Bozzy was still a schoolboy. But Boswell says truthfully enough that "from the rigid formality of his manners, it is evident that [Hawkins and Johnson] never could have lived together with companionable ease and familiarity." When Hawkins resigned from Johnson's famous Literary Club after a short membership. Dr. Johnson wryly pronounced him "unclubbable," and the tag has stuck...
...worship of God that led to the worship of Mammon. It was rather that it was necessary to demonstrate that devotion to wealth was not necessarily an impediment to true piety-and the need to assert it was all the greater because so many of the Puritan fathers had so intensely feared the harmfulness of riches." When old-style "robber barons" wrote about their faith, they usually picked from a variety of philosophies "whatever contributed to the defense of their own conduct, riches and power...
...Invoking God. It is a mistake, says Samuelsson, to infer from Protestant and Puritan support for old-style capitalism that the religion helped forge the economy, or that capitalism would have developed differently in another spiritual climate: "In all religious faiths, the servants of God have invoked Him as a guarantee of the righteousness and prosperity of their own social class, their own nation, their own race-in short, their own interests. But we cannot assert that Christianity was therefore the cause of all the oppression of one social class by another that has been committed...