Brimstone America
May 26, 2003 ·
Jean Bethke Elshtain, Magazine, Books and Arts
Hellfire Nation
Hellfire Nation
OF ALL THE BENIGHTED CUSTOMS of the past, none is viewed with more condescension in these enlightened days than the practice of purging offensive passages from literary classics. We get the word "bowdlerize" from the English physician Thomas Bowdler, whose 1818 edition of Shakespeare omitted "those…