The New England Soul : Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England

The New England Soul : Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England PDF Author: Harry S. Stout John B. Madden Master of Berkeley College and Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Christianity Yale University
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198021011
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
Throughout the colonial era, New England's only real public spokesmen were the Congregational ministers. One result is that the ideological origins of the American Revolution are nowhere more clearly seen than in the sermons they preached. The New England Soul is the first comprehensive analysis of preaching in New England from the founding of the Puritan colonies to the outbreak of the Revolution. Using a multi-disciplinary approach--including analysis of rhetorical style and concept of identity and community--Stout examines more than two thousand sermons spanning five generations of ministers, including such giants of the pulpit as John Cotton, Thomas Shepard, Increase and Cotton Mather, George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, Jonathan Mayhew, and Charles Chauncy. Equally important, however, are the manuscript sermons of many lesser known ministers, which never appeared in print. By integrating the sermons of ordinary ministers with the printed sermons of their more illustrious contemporaries, Stout reconstructs the full import of the colonial sermon as a multi-faceted institution that served both religious and political purposes, and explicated history and society to the New England Puritans for one and a half centuries.

The New England Soul : Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England

The New England Soul : Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England PDF Author: Harry S. Stout John B. Madden Master of Berkeley College and Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Christianity Yale University
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198021011
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 414

Get Book Here

Book Description
Throughout the colonial era, New England's only real public spokesmen were the Congregational ministers. One result is that the ideological origins of the American Revolution are nowhere more clearly seen than in the sermons they preached. The New England Soul is the first comprehensive analysis of preaching in New England from the founding of the Puritan colonies to the outbreak of the Revolution. Using a multi-disciplinary approach--including analysis of rhetorical style and concept of identity and community--Stout examines more than two thousand sermons spanning five generations of ministers, including such giants of the pulpit as John Cotton, Thomas Shepard, Increase and Cotton Mather, George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, Jonathan Mayhew, and Charles Chauncy. Equally important, however, are the manuscript sermons of many lesser known ministers, which never appeared in print. By integrating the sermons of ordinary ministers with the printed sermons of their more illustrious contemporaries, Stout reconstructs the full import of the colonial sermon as a multi-faceted institution that served both religious and political purposes, and explicated history and society to the New England Puritans for one and a half centuries.

The New England Soul

The New England Soul PDF Author: Harry S. Stout
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199890978
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
Harry Stout's groundbreaking study of preaching in colonial New England changed the field when it first appeared in 1986. Here, twenty-five years later, is a reissue of Stout's book: a reconstruction of the full import of the colonial sermon as a multi-faceted institution that served both religious and political purposes and explained history and society to the New England Puritans for one and a half centuries.

The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England

The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England PDF Author: Sarah Rivett
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807838705
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
The Science of the Soul challenges long-standing notions of Puritan provincialism as antithetical to the Enlightenment. Sarah Rivett demonstrates that, instead, empiricism and natural philosophy combined with Puritanism to transform the scope of religious activity in colonial New England from the 1630s to the Great Awakening of the 1740s. In an unprecedented move, Puritan ministers from Thomas Shepard and John Eliot to Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards studied the human soul using the same systematic methods that philosophers applied to the study of nature. In particular, they considered the testimonies of tortured adolescent girls at the center of the Salem witch trials, Native American converts, and dying women as a source of material insight into the divine. Conversions and deathbed speeches were thus scrutinized for evidence of grace in a way that bridged the material and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible, the worldly and the divine. In this way, the "science of the soul" was as much a part of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy as it was part of post-Reformation theology. Rivett's account restores the unity of religion and science in the early modern world and highlights the role and importance of both to transatlantic circuits of knowledge formation.

Darkness Falls on the Land of Light

Darkness Falls on the Land of Light PDF Author: Douglas L. Winiarski
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469628279
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 632

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Book Description
This sweeping history of popular religion in eighteenth-century New England examines the experiences of ordinary people living through extraordinary times. Drawing on an unprecedented quantity of letters, diaries, and testimonies, Douglas Winiarski recovers the pervasive and vigorous lay piety of the early eighteenth century. George Whitefield's preaching tour of 1740 called into question the fundamental assumptions of this thriving religious culture. Incited by Whitefield and fascinated by miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit--visions, bodily fits, and sudden conversions--countless New Englanders broke ranks with family, neighbors, and ministers who dismissed their religious experiences as delusive enthusiasm. These new converts, the progenitors of today's evangelical movement, bitterly assaulted the Congregational establishment. The 1740s and 1750s were the dark night of the New England soul, as men and women groped toward a restructured religious order. Conflict transformed inclusive parishes into exclusive networks of combative spiritual seekers. Then as now, evangelicalism emboldened ordinary people to question traditional authorities. Their challenge shattered whole communities.

The Genevan Reformation and the American Founding

The Genevan Reformation and the American Founding PDF Author: David W. Hall
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739155539
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 507

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Book Description
In this provocative study, David W. Hall argues that Calvinism had a greater influence on America's founders than contemporary scholars, and perhaps even the founders themselves, have understood. Calvinism's insistence that human rulers tend to err played a significant role in the founders' prescription of limited government and fed the distinctly American philosophy in which political freedom for citizens is held as the highest value. Hall's timely work countervails many scholars' doubt in the intellectual efficacy of religion by showing that religious teachings have led to such progressive ideals as American democracy and freedom.

Upon the Altar of the Nation

Upon the Altar of the Nation PDF Author: Harry S. Stout
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101126728
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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Book Description
A profound and timely examination of the moral underpinnings of the War Between the States The Civil War was not only a war of armies but also a war of ideas, in which Union and Confederacy alike identified itself as a moral nation with God on its side. In this watershed book, Harry S. Stout measures the gap between those claims and the war’s actual conduct. Ranging from the home front to the trenches and drawing on a wealth of contemporary documents, Stout explores the lethal mix of propaganda and ideology that came to justify slaughter on and off the battlefield. At a time when our country is once again at war, Upon the Altar of the Nation is a deeply necessary book.

The New England Society Orations

The New England Society Orations PDF Author: Cephas Brainerd
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : New England
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description


Reading the Gravestones of Old New England

Reading the Gravestones of Old New England PDF Author: John G.S. Hanson
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476685452
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
The graveyards of old New England hold an incredible range of poetic messages in the epitaphs etched into the gravestones, each a profound expression of emotion, culture, religion, and literature. These epitaphs are old, but their themes are timeless: mourning and faith, grief and hope, loss, and memory. This book tells the story of a years-long walk among gravestones and shares insights gained along the way. It identifies the source texts and authors chosen for these stones; interprets something of the tastes and beliefs of the people who did the choosing; offers some hypotheses on the various ways these texts were accessible to readers in remote towns and villages; gives a brief summary of the religious context of the times; and reflects on how the language and literature chosen for these epitaphs express these peoples' conflicted and evolving attitudes towards life, death, and eternity.

Studies in New England Puritanism

Studies in New England Puritanism PDF Author: Winfried Herget
Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : de
Pages : 258

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Book Description
New England Puritanism has had a pervasive influence on American life and culture. Instead of examining Puritan heritage in subsequent history, however, the essays collected in this volume confine their attention to the colonial period, primarily the seventeenth century. They deal with sermons, tracts, autobiographical writings, and poetry, as well as with subjects such as anti-Puritan literature, the Salem witchcraft persecutions, and Puritan theology and ideology. Writers analyzed in some detail include Cotton Mather, Thomas Lechford, Samuel Gorton, Thomas Hooker, Edward Johnson, Philip Pain, Michael Wigglesworth, Edward Taylor, Anne Bradstreet, Jonathan Edwards, Sarah Kemble Knight, and John Winthrop.

Early New England

Early New England PDF Author: David A. Weir
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 9780802813527
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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Book Description
The idea of covenant was at the heart of early New England society. In this singular book David Weir explores the origins and development of covenant thought in America by analyzing the town and church documents written and signed by seventeenth-century New Englanders. Unmatched in the breadth of its scope, this study takes into account all of the surviving covenants in all of the New England colonies. Weir's comprehensive survey of seventeenth-century covenants leads to a more complex picture of early New England than what emerges from looking at only a few famous civil covenants like the Mayflower Compact. His work shows covenant theology being transformed into a covenantal vision for society but also reveals the stress and strains on church-state relationships that eventually led to more secularized colonial governments in eighteenth-century New England. He concludes that New England colonial society was much more "English" and much less "American" than has often been thought, and that the New England colonies substantially mirrored religious and social change in Old England.