Tag Archives: Daniel Defoe

Church Attendance in Plague Times

By Robin Bates | Published: April 18, 2020

Defoe in “Journal of the Plague Year” captures people’s need for church in plague times.

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Journal of a Plague Year

By Robin Bates | Published: March 18, 2020

Defoe’s “Journal of the Plague Year” has many unsettling parallels with our current situation.

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Using Novels for Sexual Assualt

By Robin Bates | Published: February 27, 2020

In Sanditon the novel, unlike the television series, the villainous Sir Edward Denham reads novels. He learns the wrong lessons from Samuel Richardson, however.

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Robinson Crusoe Has ALL the Answers

By Robin Bates | Published: January 9, 2020

In Wilkie Collins’s “Moonstone,” the wonderfully realized house steward resorts to “Robinson Crusoe” to face all difficulties.

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The Origins of Crazy U.S. Work Ethic

By Robin Bates | Published: March 29, 2018

New interpretation of “Robinson Crusoe” suggests that maybe Puritans not quite so much to blame for America’s insane work ethic as once thought.

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Trump’s Crusoe Wall Goes Up in Airports

By Robin Bates | Published: January 29, 2017

This past weekend so a flurry of illegal and unconstitutional executive orders that created chaos in airports and elsewhere as travelers from certain countries found themselves in detention. Defoe captures versions of such dramas in “Robinson Crusoe.”

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When Christianity Becomes a Money Cult

By Robin Bates | Published: August 27, 2016

A new book, “The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream,” brings to mind Howard Nemerov’s poem “Boom!” The book’s author argues that prosperity theology is not an aberration but was present from the beginning of American Puritanism.

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On Walls: A Letter to the Incoming Class

By Robin Bates | Published: August 14, 2016

Talk about walls and keep people out of America is beginning to seep down to high schools and colleges. It is therefore important that students understand how walls operate. Daniel Defoe and Lucille Clifton has some useful insights into how walls both make us safe and entrap us.

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On the Pope, Walls, and Robinson Crusoe

By Robin Bates | Published: March 6, 2016

Pope Francis recently labeled as “not Christian” those who build walls but not bridges. By this standard, the walls, both literal and metaphorical, being advocated by Donald Trump and Ted Cruz bring their own Christianity in doubt. An examination of the walls build by Robinson Crusoe, however, shows how Christians have rationalized walls.

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