History and the Christian Historian

History and the Christian Historian PDF Author: Ronald Wells
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 9780802845368
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
What is the relation of faith to history? What difference should Christian commitment make to historical investigation? In this volume thirteen widely respected scholars consider such important questions and demonstrate the implications of a Christian perspective for the study of history and historiography.

History and the Christian Historian

History and the Christian Historian PDF Author: Ronald Wells
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 9780802845368
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
What is the relation of faith to history? What difference should Christian commitment make to historical investigation? In this volume thirteen widely respected scholars consider such important questions and demonstrate the implications of a Christian perspective for the study of history and historiography.

Sinful Self, Saintly Self

Sinful Self, Saintly Self PDF Author: Jeffrey Hammond
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780820315003
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Sinful Self, Saintly Self is a comprehensive study of early New England verse in light of Puritan notions regarding the nature and uses of poetry. Through a new historical reading of three major Puritan poets - Michael Wigglesworth, Anne Bradstreet, and Edward Taylor - Jeffrey Hammond reconstructs this aesthetic framework using Puritan theology, artistic and exegetical traditions deriving from the Bible, and Puritan assumptions about the psychology of the saved soul. Despite the current resurgence of interest in early American literature, Puritan poetry remains only dimly understood and appreciated. With the exception of Edward Taylor's Preparatory Meditations and Anne Bradstreet's personal lyrics, it is often viewed as a poetry of gloom and doctrine rather than of affirmation and inspiration. In reconstructing the Puritan experience of poetry, Hammond argues that this widespread view reflects a persistent tendency to approach these poems from a modern perspective

The Tayloring Shop

The Tayloring Shop PDF Author: Edward Taylor
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874136234
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
The bodies of tradition discussed here range from the Puritan concept of nature to Puritan casuistry. Three of the traditions presented - nature, casuistical, and elegiac - are analyzed for the way in which they help us understand the basic ideas in and the development of Taylor's poetry.

Inventing Eden

Inventing Eden PDF Author: Zachary McLeod Hutchins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199998159
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Previous scholars have noted the Puritans' edenic descriptions of New World landscapes, but Inventing Eden is the first study to fully uncover the integral relationship between the New England interest in paradise and the numerous iconic intellectual artifacts and social movements of colonial North America. Harvard Yard, the Bay Psalm Book, and the Quaker use of antiquated pronouns like thee and thou: these are products of a seventeenth-century desire for Eden. So, too, are the evangelical emphasis of the Great Awakening, the doctrine of natural law popularized by the Declaration of Independence, and the first United States judicial decision abolishing slavery. Be it public nudity or Freemasonry, Zachary Hutchins convincingly shows how a shared wish to bring paradise into the pragmatic details of colonial living had a profound effect on early New England life and its substantial culture of letters. Spanning two centuries and surveying the works of major British and American thinkers from James Harrington and John Milton to Anne Hutchinson and Benjamin Franklin, Inventing Eden is the history of an idea that irrevocably altered the theology, literature, and culture of colonial New England -- and, eventually, the new republic.

Theologies of Pain

Theologies of Pain PDF Author: Lucas Hardy
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350400386
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
With the arrival of Puritan settlers in New England in the middle decades of the 17th-century, accounts of sickness, colonial violence, and painful religious transformation quickly emerged, enabling new forms of testimonial writing in prose and poetry. Investigating a broad transatlantic archive of religious literature, historical medical science, and philosophies of sensation, this book explores how Puritan America contemplated pain and ascribed meaning to it in writing. By weaving the experience of pained bodies into popular public discourse, Hardy shows how Puritans imagined the pained Christian body, whilst simultaneously marginalizing and vilifying those who expressed suffering by different measures, including Indigenous Americans and unorthodox colonists. Focusing on pain as it emerged from spaces of inchoate settlement and colonial violence, he provides new understandings of early American nationalism and connected racial tropes which persist today.

John Eliot's Puritan Ministry to New England "Indians"

John Eliot's Puritan Ministry to New England Author: Do Hoon Kim
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1666709816
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
John Eliot (1604–90) has been called “the apostle to the Indians.” This book looks at Eliot not from the perspective of modern Protestant “mission” studies (the approach mainly adopted by previous research) but in the historical and theological context of seventeenth-century puritanism. Drawing on recent research on migration to New England, the book argues that Eliot, like many other migrants, went to New England primarily in search of a safe haven to practice pure reformed Christianity, not to convert Indians. Eliot’s Indian ministry started from a fundamental concern for the conversion of the unconverted, which he derived from his experience of the puritan movement in England. Consequently, for Eliot, the notion of New England Indian “mission” was essentially conversion-oriented, Word-centered, and pastorally focused, and (in common with the broader aims of New England churches) pursued a pure reformed Christianity. Eliot hoped to achieve this through the establishment of Praying Towns organized on a biblical model—where preaching, pastoral care, and the practice of piety could lead to conversion—leading to the formation of Indian churches composed of “sincere converts.”

Cast Down

Cast Down PDF Author: Mark J. Miller
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812292642
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Derived from the Latin abiectus, literally meaning "thrown or cast down," "abjection" names the condition of being servile, wretched, or contemptible. In Western religious tradition, to be abject is to submit to bodily suffering or psychological mortification for the good of the soul. In Cast Down: Abjection in America, 1700-1850, Mark J. Miller argues that transatlantic Protestant discourses of abjection engaged with, and furthered the development of, concepts of race and sexuality in the creation of public subjects and public spheres. Miller traces the connection between sentiment, suffering, and publication and the role it played in the movement away from church-based social reform and toward nonsectarian radical rhetoric in the public sphere. He focuses on two periods of rapid transformation: first, the 1730s and 1740s, when new models of publication and transportation enabled transatlantic Protestant religious populism, and, second, the 1830s and 1840s, when liberal reform movements emerged from nonsectarian religious organizations. Analyzing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conversion narratives, personal narratives, sectarian magazines, poems, and novels, Miller shows how church and social reformers used sensational accounts of abjection in their attempts to make the public sphere sacred as a vehicle for political change, especially the abolition of slavery.

Doctrine and Difference

Doctrine and Difference PDF Author: Michael J. Colacurcio
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317795857
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
The enduring power of many antebellum American texts trace their inspiration to Puritanism. From Melville's preposterous but irresponsible quarrels with God to Hawthorne's instructed yet edgy evocations of earlier New England, to Dickinson's finely turned little blasphemies. Can one imagine that such texts were written anywhere but in the latter days of Puritanism? Doctrine and Difference shows how the spirit and forms of liberalism are a necessary but by no means sufficient explanation for the flowering of literature in this period. The colonialist writers were attempting to have things their own provincial way amidst an air of rejection by the cosmopolitan literary establishment. Capturing the violence of repression, the energy required to meet its moral argument head on, and the disease of embattled survival, this book shows how these works are in many ways the literary remnants of Puritanism.

The Word Made Flesh Made Word

The Word Made Flesh Made Word PDF Author: David G. Miller
Publisher: Susquehanna University Press
ISBN: 9780945636854
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
Edward Taylor's dilemma as Puritan, preacher, and poet was to discover a way in human language to express the ineffable Divine. This first book-length study of Edward Taylor's prose suggests that Taylor's use of language illustrates the very theological truths he struggled with as a minister and a writer. Taylor's poetic metaphors have long been noted for their vitality and linguistic absurdity. This penetrating study of Taylor's Christographia sermons concludes that Taylor intentionally forces his types and metaphors into failure to illustrate how necessary it is for the incarnate Christ to redeem both the medium and the messenger. The author places Taylor in historical, theological, and stylistic contexts and then looks at how both types and metaphors used by Taylor tend to follow the pattern of establishment, failure, and redemption. By focusing on the typological images of Moses, David, and the Jewish religious ceremonies, for example, Taylor shows how such images both point toward Christ and obscure the truth of Christ. By using metaphorical images of light, plants, and "living buildings," Taylor attempts to paint a portrait of Christ for his congregation, all the while insisting that human language can never illustrate the Divine.

Economies of Praise

Economies of Praise PDF Author: Ryan Netzley
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810146711
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Reevaluates early modern poems of praise as, paradoxically, challenging an artistic economy that values exchange and productivity Early modern poems of praise typically insist that they do not have a purpose or enact real labor beyond their effortless listing of laudable qualities. And yet the poets discussed in this study, including Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, Anne Bradstreet, Lucy Hutchinson, and John Milton, hint at an alternative aesthetic economy at work in their verse. Poetic praise, it turns out, might show us a social world outside the organizing principle of exchange. In Economies of Praise: Value, Labor, and Form in Seventeenth‐Century English Poetry, Ryan Netzley explores how poems of praise imagine alternatives to market and gift economies and point instead to a self-contained aesthetic economy that works against a more expansive and productivist understanding of literary art. By depicting exchange as inconsequential, unproductive, and redundant rather than a necessary constituent of social order, these poems model for modern readers a world without the imperative to create, appraise, and repeatedly demonstrate one’s own value.