Word: sin
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...rather like Americans, and that we want to be more so. Dead wrong. No idealism attended the birth of Anglo-Australia. White colonization in America began as a religious venture; the Puritans thought they were, literally, creating God's country. Australia, by contrast, began as the continent of sin, the dump for English criminals. Australians, unlike Americans, have never felt they had a mission or a message for a fallen world. There is no doctrine of Australian exceptionalism. If this deprived us of the heights of American moral expectation, it spared us from the anguish of American disappointment...
Heaven and hell and sin and redemption are just philosophy to me, a system to make sense out of life. But here in Angola, heaven and hell and sin and redemption aren't philosophy. They are the answers to why you're here and who you are and where you are going...
...theirs," he says. "It all worked out in the end." And wrong as that sounds, in Angola that's how it is, and there's no hiding from it, and I feel so lucky to go back to a place where heaven and hell and sin and redemption are just philosophy...
...Spirits, the teenage Horace Cross attempts to transform himself into a bird to escape the ostracism he will face if his homosexuality is exposed in his religious community. Instead he unleashes an army of demons that haunt him as he is haunted by what he sees as his sin. It is with Horace that Kenan claims the most affinity, and his plight seems a supernatural rendering of Kenan's experience of coming to terms with his own homosexuality in a culture where it was "never talked about but always a shadow...
...river, but it is the bend itself that determines the country's worth. Somewhere in that curve is the capacity to start over and do it right. Somewhere too is Lethe, the river of forgetfulness in which no lesson takes hold. The river carries the country into its sin and grandeur and magnificent contradictions. Deciding to free Jim and himself, Huck says, "All right, then, I'll go to hell," referring to salvation...