The Relevance of Religious History for Today
Nearly every semester, I have the occasion to ask at least one class of students to read John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon, “Christian Charity, a Modell Hereof.” Most of my students have rather negative impressions of Puritanism, which in their minds probably equals religious intolerance and the execution of teenaged witches. I don’t assign them Winthrop [...]
The scholarly study of the Puritans has been marked in recent years by attempts to understand them in a fully transatlantic context. This follows a broader trend in early American history to focus on “Atlantic world” perspectives, rather than proto-national American ones. While others could view this de-emphasizing of the future United States as ideologically [...]
As I discussed in my post “Puritans: The Original Republicans?“, few historians today remain interested in Puritanism as the seedbed of American democracy. But as demonstrated by Michael Winship’s excellent book Godly Republicanism, the Puritans may well have been America’s first republicans (small ‘r’), with their loathing of political and ecclesiastical tyranny. It has been interesting [...]
How should we interpret Hurricane Sandy, blowing near Salem, Massachusetts, in the days before Halloween? Might it be read providentially, as it could have been read by the colonists who made the place famous by their treatment of witches? Or is it really an enhancement of Halloween, tempestuous winds to make the party spookier and [...]
I spent the last couple of days at Duke University where I gave a lecture at a really interesting conference on the Bible in the Public Square. The conference was sponsored by the Duke Department of Religion, the Duke Center for Jewish Studies, and Southern Methodist University. What I found particularly interesting about the conference [...]
What political legacy did the Puritans leave to America? There was a time when historians commonly portrayed the Puritans as America’s founding democrats. No one better articulated this view than Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote in Democracy in America that Puritanism was not merely a religious doctrine, but it corresponded in many points with the most absolute [...]
I recently reviewed Michael Winship’s Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill, and thought I would use the occasion to offer a list of 5 all-time great books on the Puritans in America. The Puritans have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, so there are lots of excellent books not included [...]
Follow Patheos on
Copyright 2008-2013, Patheos. All rights reserved. Terms of Service | Patheos Privacy Policy | Site developed by Avalon Consulting, LLC
Follow Patheos
Evangelical: