Word: calvinist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...remote root of the conflict was idealism, the immediate cause, greed. Afrikaners-Dutch Calvinist settlers-had been in South Africa for 150 years when the British took over the Cape of Good Hope during the Napoleonic Wars. In the 1830s parliamentary idealists in London decreed an end to slavery in the Empire, and some of the Afrikaners, dependent on their slaves, trekked into the wilderness to the north. The leaders of these trekboers (wandering farmers) founded two independent republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. No one but the native blacks would have cared had not a rich diamond...
...rural New England, mothers used to threaten their recalcitrant children with midnight visits from the Pope if they didn't behave. Now these threats are coming true and descendants of these Calvinist matrons will vie with each other for places along Boston's own Via Papale. Two remarkable Bostonians should have lived to see this day. Antagonists in life, on this day they would have been as one: William Henry Cardinal O'Connell, Boston's ultramontane Cardinal Archbishop, and The Honorable James Michael Curley, Boston's irrepressible mayor and one-term governor of Massachusetts...
...swilled and swived his way through 18th century London and suffered, by Dr Ober's documented count, 19 acute attacks of urethritis. Just how the clap affected his writing is not readily apparent. More comprehensible are the roots of Boswell's reckless social life, specifically his Scots Calvinist origin with its severe strictures against wine and wenching. For Boswell, the embodiment of this authority was his father, the eighth Lord Auchinleck, a straitlaced, unaffectionate parent and a distinguished jurist who wore his courtroom robes around the house. The case history is not unfamiliar: son seeks the attention...
...dire warnings about the "Vacation Blues." These articles are invariably accurate. One does expect too much from vacations and winds up feeling disappointed and even inadequate, as if one had somehow not lived up to the occasion. One does toss through the supposedly sweet idleness with a lump of Calvinist guilt under the mattress; the jauntily go-get-'em "I need some work to do" does conceal, for all its Freudian banality, some sense of unworthiness: you don't deserve the pleasure of a good vacation...
...production notes for this film say that Paul Schrader was born in Grand Rapids, where Hardcore's modest, acutely observed opening sequences are set. They also tell us he was raised in the stern Calvinist tradition that sustains the heroic father figure (George C. Scott) as he searches for his runaway teen-age daughter. The girl has disappeared into the demimonde of pornographic film production in California, with its attendant agonies of drug addiction and prostitution. Schrader's feeling for the small-town society and values of his youth is respectful, never patronizing. There is an authenticity...