The "Beat" generation was the brainchild of Jack Kerouac who despised the word "beatnik" and the distortion of his ideas. Kerouac was respecting of and devoted to the Catholic religion:
"It is because I am Beat, that is, I believe in beatitude and that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to it... Who knows, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty?"
"I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood and had a vision of what I must have really meant with "Beat"... the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific... People began to call themselves beatniks, beats, jazzniks, bopniks, bugniks and finally I was called the "avatar" of all this."
--Kerouac article: "The Origins of the Beat Generation" (Playboy, June 1959).
Interesting, oroboros. I wasn't aware of Kerouac's devotion to Catholicism (not that I'm well-read on this subject).
The "Beat" generation was the brainchild of Jack Kerouac who despised the word "beatnik" and the distortion of his ideas. Kerouac was respecting of and devoted to the Catholic religion:
"It is because I am Beat, that is, I believe in beatitude and that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to it... Who knows, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty?"
"I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood and had a vision of what I must have really meant with "Beat"... the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific... People began to call themselves beatniks, beats, jazzniks, bopniks, bugniks and finally I was called the "avatar" of all this."
--Kerouac article: "The Origins of the Beat Generation" (Playboy, June 1959).