Word: willã
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While it seems unreasonable to attribute people’s being flattened in Wal-Mart parking lots to Increase Mather, Will??s indictment of Puritanism is hardly unique. In section and dining hall discussions, “Puritan” may be understood as shorthand for “obsolete, sexually repressed, joyless prude.” It is one of Harvard’s milder ironies that vilifying Puritans has become something of a pastime at the College that was once a cradle of the Puritan orthodoxy. In October, on this very page, for instance...
...Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England reveals, among other things, that John Winthrop twice tried suspected murderers by having them touch the corpses of their alleged victims to make them bleed—confirmed the injustice of Will??s attack on the Puritans...
...Will??s diatribe,” Hall wrote, “has a lot to do with ‘materialism’ and lots of other pejorative stuff.” Puritans of the 17th century, it turns out, were not the Scrooges Will portrayed; instead, they “were basically agricultural artisan, not proto-industrialists; no evidence that they stinted, etc. They liked rich food and strong colors, and danced at weddings (well, some hints of disapproval of this!). I.e., they weren’t hostile to the ‘material world?...
Hall wrote that the idea upon which Will??s criticism was founded—“the ‘repression’ idea,” which also posits that Puritans were “mean to kids, didn’t like sex, etc.,” wasn’t accurate either. Hall directed me to Edmund S. Morgan’s forthrightly-titled essay “Puritans and Sex,” in the December 1942 New England Quarterly. And it turns out that Puritans were by no means the prudes...
...lyrics, on the other hand, are outstandingly funny and clever; Mr. Bungee and his Mouseketeer-like companions sing a cheerful “Yes Song” about how you should always say “yes I can” or “yes I will?? except when asked to “lose your virginity” by “someone with whom you have no affinity.” The choreography, by Katharine F. O’Brien ’04, was uneven; Gordon and Roger had a dashing tango, and Bungee?...