Word: puritans
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...some Puritan colony of the 17th century had to determine which of their number would find his name immortalized, I doubt anyone would have picked an obscure member of the clergy named John Harvard. After all, it is always the great leaders, the John Winthrops, who claim the headlines of their day. But John Harvard's name has gone onto greatness through its association with this University...
...visual arts. Even today Kienholz's detractors think he was practicing some kind of anti-Americanism (along with the rest of the godless liberal queer whiners favored by the National Endowment for the Arts, natch). Actually, he was at least as American as his critics--a compulsive Puritan who realized that the City on a Hill had been built in a mud-slide area. The very thought of this moved him to gusts of bitter laughter, and these still blow from his work. Did he exaggerate? Of course; that's what large-hearted moralists do. There are some truths that...
Cotton Mather's daughter Nanny fell into the fire and burned herself. Mather cried, "Alas, for my sins the just God throws my child into the fire!" The child was a moral adjunct mingling with the Puritan's internal devils. With equal unrealism, some American parents today envision their children as geniuses or angels. Wanda Kaczynski, of course, represented the style of an older generation of parents, but her child rearing bore traces of the obsessive. Later American parents sometimes have a tendency to practice a retro-projection that amounts to a search for their own lost, sweet, brilliant, childish...
...uses the word gambling) is creating jobs and "rejuvenating dying cities.'' And he adds, "We don't agree that Tom Grey and his supporters have the right to force their morality on others." Pulling a cue card from his pinstripe suit, Fahrenkopf reads H.L. Mencken's definition of a puritan: "'Someone who is afraid that, somewhere, someone else is having a good time.' The next time I see Tom, I'll say, 'Tom, you're a puritan...
...remorse. It establishes a behavioral pattern based on fear and the primitive aversion to pain rather than a rational understanding of the child's actions and its consequences, Supporters claim that, for whatever reason, corporal punishment works in halting negative behavior. While this utilitarian perspective may have a certain puritan appeal, it hardly seems like reason enough to teach children we don't have to work out problems with other people, especially if they are weaker than us. All we have to do is use our belts, rather than our heads...