Word: insularity
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Another aspect of Falwell's crusade has received less attention but is at least as important in its implications. He is mobilizing and altering the consciousness of that once insular component of American religion known as Fundamentalism. Before Falwell, Fundamentalist preachers denounced evil in "the world" in order to compel their flocks into strict isolation from it. Nowadays those same jeremiads are a stern call to social action. "When I was growing up," recalls Fundamentalist Pastor Keith Gephart of Alameda, Calif., "I always heard that churches should stay out of politics. Now it seems almost...
...only Hispanics, of course, who are tempted to hunker down in an insular subculture. "In the summer," says Emmanuel Pratsinakis, a Greek Orthodox priest in Briarwood, Queens, "the air is full of the sound of children shouting in Greek. This community gives a feeling of security." "Polish Greenpoint is comfortable, familiar," says Ponanta, the typesetter. "You stay as long as you need to, then move out to Queens, to Manhattan." Assimilation still seems inexorable. "We want to be part of American culture," says Richard Ou of Flushing. The Russian New Yorkers may keep eating piroshki forever, but, says Sima Blokh...
...course it would be wrong to focus so exclusively on the political tenor of what is now largely an apolitical campus. There are other aspects of insularity as well, and these have been well documented. Predecessors of mine have filled this page in years past with reams of statistics suggesting the narrow career-minded focus of most Harvard students, and they are largely correct. It's not so much that I object to my classmates' overwhelming decision to pursue law, business, or medicine--all worthwhile professions--as to the unthinking way in which many seem to hop on the assembly...
...exhibitions of this kind of insular opinion appear on campus more regularly than do labor strikes--in the arrogance that creeps imperecptibly into intellectual discussion in classrooms and dining halls around campus, automatically framing the terms of debate before there is any real give and take...
...PECULIAR and insular category of literature known as "Harvard novels," prepare to add another to the sub-group of books about Radcliffe. Superior Women is representative of the genre but somewhat better because Alice Adams '46 appears to have no pretensions about her aims. Early on, the 'Cliffies recognize their resemblance to the typical group of girls who inhabited certain novels of the 1940s. And certainly they're stereotypical enough--the problem is that, whether Adams intended it or not, they never quite manage to become more than that...