The recast takes the general and makes it more
specific, adding power and clarity that neither could achieve on its own.
Some recasts are elaborations, others definitions, still others transformations.
Note that most of them are stark attachments, a signal of the link between
the specific and the general.
In the past plagues were often marked by their
lack of discrimination, by the way in which they laid low vast
swaths of the population with little regard for station or wealth
or sex or religion.
The second by might send the reader
on the wrong track of thinking that a third by might be coming
to complete a series and that what follows the second by is
launching something different, not similar. By sentence's end, however,
it is obvious that the second by is a stark attachment, making
more concrete the abstract lack of discrimination.
Unbelief remains omnipresent in American life,
the position one takes by taking no position.
Part of it was sheer recklessness, a determination
to plunge ahead, regardless of cars and walls and stairs.
Collective religious identity is further weakened and
individual religious autonomy further strengthened by the separation
of religion and nationality in American culture—the fact that
an American may be of any religion or none and still be fully an American.
