Check out the region in northwest Massachusetts and southwestern Vermont; my wife and I have traveled through it many times and both of us find it eerie and Lovecraftian. Get off the main highways and take the back roads (bring a good map). Glastonbury forest just north of Bennington has seen a good number of people disappear without a trace over the years. H.P. is known to have spent time in the area and used it for some of his work.

I can't think of anyone more perfect for New Orleans then Anne Rice, speaking of Lovecraft's use of race. What a strange thread for the youthful ex-pats to tells us their thoughts on the Puritans? Lovecraft wrote boys fictions; his club of friends, included the chap who would read a story about a certain Wisconsin serial murderer and turn it into Psycho; the same Wisconsin story produced another regional classic, of infamous sorts, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The guy who played Leatherface lives up my way.

I think I sense regional jealousy.

Fantastic piece, if missing the regional component.

Not true. Sam was an agnostic and a proud Southerner (raised Presbyterian) and there is no evidence for him "loving Puritans" in any of his writings.

The reaction to a heresy is sometimes worse than the heresy. In old age, the treatment of the cancer can be worse than living with it. One reason the Catholic Church is so hated is she is constantly restoring the world to order not always through her contemporary virtues but through her ancient practices and familairity with timeless truths. It is the same, only on a smaller scale for the Southern culture in the United States. The South is hated and despised because she is a medicine that has long been mistaken for a poison, yet she is always found bringing the Puritan actions and reactions back to the order of reality and laying down her life for her country. Look at how nervous the neo-cons are to capture the conservative instincts of the South with their little shallow idiots dressed in blue, possessing the good manners of an Elephant standing on one leg at a circus, while the little kids like Sean Hannity, Billy Kristol, and David Frum cheer for more federal govt., more war and more democracy abroad. I hear Sarah Palin's book will be out in November (for Holiday reading) and 1.5 million copies have been ordered to be sold to our unsuspecting public. Imagine living in a culture where more people will read about Ted Kennedy and Sarah Palin in one year, than most folks will read about Washington, Lee or Frost in a long lifetime. Heck, one doesn't have to imagine it, just look around.

Etienne Gervaise's comment on Puritans seems to be very astute. In addition to their turn to socialism, the ancestors of the Puritans invented many odd little cults- the Oneida Free-Love movement(where two future presidential assasins spent time), the Shakers, the Seven Day Adventists, the abolitionists, the feminists, the Barn Burners and the Mormons. No wonder that Anglo New England supports homosexual "marriage". And what oddity will Anglo New England come up with next?

Whether or not Dr Francis loved the puritans, I cannot say. But the truth is that there are not too many of them left in New England. It would seem that puritanism stripped of its Christian underpinnings becomes left-wing socialism.

The staunch crypto-Islamic rigidity and anti-mannerist morbidity of the true Calvinist always gives way to amoral antinomian hedonism. The Puritans are only the best historical and sociological example, but one can well witness it in individuals of our own time, as well."

Now we are getting somewhere. If Anglo-Saxon Puritanism is as pernicious as I assert, and you assert, then America is up the creek without a paddle, because when the Yankees won the War, Yankee WASPism, Anglo-Saxon culture in its unTrinitarian and secular form, became mandarin for the nation.

Francis loved the Puritans.