The closing litany, beautifully delivered by Mullen, marks continuity from the gods of the ancient world to us, but also asserts the human need to be free of them.
Pregnant Franny, whose child can assert the human race's survival; the forgiving and ailing Glen; deaf-mute Nick; mentally challenged Tom Cullen, who will save Stu Redman Larry Underwoodd, who starts the novel dreaming of Flagg, and is filled with darkness, but somehow finds the light.
In the 1840s, Lincoln subscribed to the Doctrine of Necessity, a belief that asserted the human mind was controlled by some higher power.
The grammar of most statements asserting the identity of human nature and principle support this understanding: they leave little room for doubt that orthodox Cheng-Zhu thinkers were saying that all people have the same human nature, and that that human nature is principle.
Barash then asserts the "uniquely human potential to resist our own genes," and makes the further claim that it's exactly this ability that constitutes our humanity, thus making "rebellion" practically a duty.
And no doubt the diary represented, whether consciously or not, an almost moral act of defiance and liberation, allowing him to assert the simple human truth of who he was -- to God, to himself and to anyone else who cared to pry.
"In ending terrorism in 2009, we asserted the greatest human right: the right to live".
"I believe the responsibility or onus of the poet," he once wrote, "is to assert and affirm the human principle of perversity..
Why don't you use my house in Virginia for a weekend?" It was her way of asserting the permanent Washington in which human relations mattered more than the controversies of the day and in which the political battles were a prelude to a new elaboration of national purpose.
Associates gave supplementary "Mind Lectures" on biblical passages as interpreted by Mr. Park, who asserts that the human heart is lodged with "filth and evil".
