Word: pelagianism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Thus the American ethos-part pragmatic, part Puritan, part Pelagian-has had the synergistic effect of masking the popular consciousness of evil. Traditionally, evil has been something distant, Wholly Other, rather than an enemy within. When Rap Brown complained that "violence is as American as cherry pie," most Americans dismissed the charge as the aberrant nastiness of a Black Power fanatic. When the Kerner Commission proposed that America was a racist nation, the U.S. public reacted with "Who, me?" protests of innocence. But there is a dark underside to American history: the despoliation of the Indian, the subjection...
Neither Judaism nor the New Testament has much to say about afterlife: it was during the Middle Ages, when life was nasty, brutish and short, that the church developed a full doctrine of immortality. Spiritually unsatisfied by the Pelagian tendencies-salvation by good works-of late medieval Catholicism, Martin Luther found fresh and momentous insight in an all but ignored phrase of Paul's: that man is justified by grace through faith...
Modern tragedy is guilty of another heresy as well-the Pelagian idea* of salvation as strictly a do-it-yourself project. This is evident in the modern tragic hero's tendency to rise above his fate, bloody but unbowed, whereas the traditional tragic hero was reduced at the close to "the very last point of human finitude and helplessness." Today's "attempts at tragedy have abandoned this finite image for a new Pelagian tactic, for a new type of third act, the third act of the power and the exclamation point." Society & Ritual. Similarly, too many people turn...