Word: puritans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...earliest rules were severe in the Puritan sense, and intended to awe students by using religious menaces or ordinary flogging. The latter was quite popular. In 1674, for example, a student guilty of speaking blasphemous words was brought before his classmates, the officers, and Overseers of the College, where his sentence was read. He knelt down, the President prayed, he was flogged (law permitted no more than ten swipes), and the President ended the ceremony with another prayer...
...novelist, Santayana did not succeed. The Last Puritan was a very starchy, sententious book. He was unable to see people except in relation to himself or his ideas. In his volumes of autobiography, Persons and Places, on the other hand, which describe the spiritual history of his wandering, split-up family, the life in Avila at the turn of the century where sorrow, rigid custom and a melancholy religion absolutely ruled the population, and the strange contrasts offered by the earnest Boston of William James and the raffish England of Lord John Russell-in things like these Santayana...
Died. George Santayana, 88, Spanish-born poet, novelist (The Last Puritan), philosopher (The Sense of Beauty) and onetime (1907-12) Harvard professor who resigned to live in Europe in "the detachment of contemplation"; in Rome...
Speaking of his days at Harvard, Santayana confessed that he hated President Eliot, and loved President Lowell--"a gentleman, a man of deep understanding." But Eliot was, for Santayana, the symbol of everything he loathed; he was "The Last Puritan," the figure of stubborn, stupid morality...
...Reformation which modern Protestantism tends to neglect is the overarching sense of vocation, the Calvinist and Lutheran drive to participate in the whole of this actual world and to bring all of it under the judgment of God...What we imagine to be the Protestant tradition, the Puritan would disown as a flight from responsible exercise of power or influence...