Word: puritanly
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...only thing that separates the worthy from the unwashed is wealth. Miamians will go to great lengths to show off their wealth: It is a city of huge diamonds, Cadillacs and 80-foot yachts. California may be the birthplace of the "me generation" and Boston may have its Puritan ethic, but Miami's code demands conspicuous consumption...
...festive spirit of Commencement has a longstanding heritage. Morison describes the development of Commencement from "a purely literary occasion" to a "sort of puritan midsummer's holiday." In 1681, when President Oakes perished shortly before Commencement, the authorities seeking a sober ceremony felt compelled to restrict students to a provision of one gallon of wine per man. Despite that one prohibitive graduation, the tradition of imbibement was propagated, climaxing in the "Plum cake scandal" of 1693, when kill-joy President Mather outlawed the tainted pastries, deeming the custom "dishonourable to the Colledge." Needless to say, in spite of various fines...
...solider he has learned to cope with it. Before he embarks on any public event, Bok steels himself for the evening, and a noticeable change comes over him. He is disciplined and systematic and has learned to look interested no matter what the topic of discussion. Bok's almost Puritan sense of propriety, friends say, has molded his public behavior until it fits his image of how the president of Harvard should act. "The appearance," Dean Rosovsky says, "very much belies the person...
Those teachings soon overshadowed their God-struck author. John Knox carried Calvinism to Scotland, converting the rambunctious Catholic country with messages of doom. Puritan Jonathan Edwards shook the New World when he called the colonials "sinners in the hands of an angry God." Early in the 20th century, German Sociologist Max Weber found in Calvinism the seedbed of capitalism, a "Protestant ethic" that drove men to accumulate wealth as evidence of divine approval...
...wafted around. It is not that the U.S. is broke or now bereft of such resources as its grain, its amazing capacity to nourish life. But Americans have always needed to know the point of it all; that has been part of their peculiar national "innocence" and residual Puritan sense of themselves as the new elect of God. Without such grace or rationale, without the comfort of their demonstrable virtue and uniqueness, Americans feel themselves sliding toward triviality, and beyond that, toward an abyss that might swal low the whole experiment like a black hole. "Either America is the hope...