Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Environmental Aesthetics And Environmental Justice In Jonathan Edwards’S Personal Narrative And John Woolman’S Journal, Jay David Miller

Faculty Publications - Department of English

This essay examines the relationship between Christian theology, environmental aesthetics, and environmental justice in colonial America. As opposed to the work of secular writers from the early republic like J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and Thomas Jefferson, the Christian environmental aesthetics of Jonathan Edwards and John Woolman have potential to address questions of environmental justice in American literary history, such as tenant exploitation, African enslavement, and Indigenous displacement. Edwards, however, worked in a pastoral literary tradition, which limited his ability to imagine environmental justice due to his commitment to the doctrine of election. Woolman, on the other hand, worked …

Edgar Allan Poe: Addressing The Haunting Legacy Of American Exceptionalism, Kaitlyn Quinn

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

The term “American exceptionalism” is synonymous with the American identity, yet it can prove to be a dangerous association. Donald E. Pease in “American Exceptionalism” states, “Despite [John] Winthrop’s ‘A Model of Christian Charity’ (1630) fostering a tendency to view America in religious terms…American exceptionalism was more decisively shaped by the ideals of the European Enlightenment” (Pease). Puritan leader John Winthrop first introduced “American exceptionalism” in his sermon “A Model of Christian Charity.” Winthrop proclaimed, “For wee must consider that wee shall be as a city upon a hill” (Winthrop 2). Certainly, Winthrop’s words resonated with the Puritans as they …

Protestant Experience And Continuity Of Political Thought In Early America, 1630-1789, Stephen Michael Wolfe

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The debate on the continuity of American political thought from the 17^th century Puritan settlements to the 18^th century American founding assumes a bipolar spectrum, ranging from strong continuity to strong discontinuity. The degree that scholars recognize distinctively Christian, theological, or Protestant ideas operating in the founding era determines where they are placed on the spectrum. The most popular view today is the “amalgam” thesis, which is a moderate view, resulting from decades of debate. Amalgam theorists argue that the founders' political theory relied on a variety of sources, from classical to Protestant. The current debate centers on …

Moral Rivals: The Intersection Between Puritanism And Piracy In The 17th And 18th Centuries, Amy Stewart

Masters Theses

This thesis seeks to explore the relationship between American colonial Puritans and Atlantic pirates in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Due to their conflicting views on morality and faith, Christianity and piracy consistently tested the other’s resilience for what they believed. Their contrasting moralities intersected in countless ways throughout the colonies, evident through an increasing pattern and shift towards piracy and seafaring in the subject matter of Christian sermons, as well as the introduction of execution sermons that presented an opportunity for preachers to minister to pirates, giving them a final chance at redemption before they were sentenced …

Recycling A Colonial Puritan Sermon: A Case Study, David M. Powers

Sermon Studies

Notes which the teenager John Pynchon took in the 1640s as he listened to the Rev. George Moxon’s sermons in frontier Springfield, MA, have become the inspiration and the ingredients for sermon performances in 21st century New England. The project began with a word-for-word transcription of a symbol-for-symbol manuscript based on a code invented by Pynchon. Then a very few words which the notetaker skipped, in his rush to record just what he heard, were added to provide essential clarification. So, too, was introductory material to frame the experience by encouraging the listening congregation to “stretch” a bit to appreciate …

The Hermetic Enigma Of A Protean Poet: Gnosis And The Puritanical Error In Shakespeare's Venus And Adonis, Luke Jennings

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis offers a study of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (and by extension Lucrece) that builds on Ted Hughes’s claim that they function as two halves of a binary whole.[1] Tracing a contrapuntal surface symmetry between the poems, Hughes argues that Venus and Adonis encodes the founding myth of Catholicism and Lucrece that of Puritanism; the poems together convey the great metaphysical war between these two oppositional forces that so haunted Elizabethan England.[2] Critics have dismissed Shakespeare’s mythological references as mere “poet’s argot,” yet I shall build on Hughes’s reading of this ‘argot’ as “a sacred symbolic …

Bryan Ball As Historian, Daniel Reynaud

Daniel Reynaud

This chapter evaluates Seventh-day Adventist theologian Bryan Ball’s contribution to studies of Puritanism in Elizabethan and Stuart England. Ball locates the origins of many distinctive Seventh-day Adventist beliefs in various thinkers during the period, on a continuum from the main stream to the marginal. His work is innovative among SDA scholars in plumbing the origins of SDA thought long before the movement actually began.

Summer Sunlight And A Blackness Ten Times Black: Nathaniel Hawthorne's Problem Of Sin, Kaitlyn Lindgren

Religion: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

Nathaniel Hawthorne has typically been understood as an anti-Puritan. However, much of his work suggests that he was not rejecting Puritanism. Rather, Hawthorne was using narrative to deconstruct the doctrinal dichotomies of Puritanism and Unitarianism, which were prevalent during his lifetime.

Hartford Puritanism: Thomas Hooker, Samuel Stone, And Their Terrifying God, Baird L. Tipson

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

Statues of Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone grace downtown Hartford, Connecticut, but few residents are aware of the distinctive version of Puritanism that these founding ministers of Hartford's First Church carried into the Connecticut wilderness (or indeed that the city takes its name from Stone's English birthplace). Shaped by interpretations of the writings of Saint Augustine largely developed during the ministers' years at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Hartford's church order diverged in significant ways from its counterpart in the churches of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Hartford Puritanism argues for a new paradigm of New England Puritanism. Hartford's founding ministers, Baird Tipson …

Puritanism And American Exceptionalism: A Genealogy Of Their Impact On Native Americans 1620–1864, Jeremiah Jones

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This work traces the influence that a strand of Protestant Christianity had upon the idea of American Exceptionalism and its effect on the treatment of Native Americans. From Puritans to the Founding Fathers, to expansion into the west, this paper investigates instances where Indians have been forced to assimilate, removed from their homelands or exterminated outright in massacres. It specifically looks at the removal of the Cherokees, the Navajo Long Walk, the Pequot War, the Gnadenhutten Massacre, The Battle at Blue Water Creek and the Sand Creek Massacre

Religion And Geopolitics In The New World, Elizabeth Dillon

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon

No abstract provided.

Holy Experiments And Unholy Acts: Sex, Law, And Religion In Colonial Massachusetts, Rhode Island, And Pennsylvania, Anna L. Todd

Honors Theses

This thesis uses the law codes and court cases of sexual misconduct from the colonies of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania to determine the degree to which the colonies’ stated understandings of the relationship between church and state were practically applied to the governing of their societies as well as how that understanding affected the daily lives of colonial women. Thus, this analysis uses the lens of female sexual deviance to determine the degree to which church and state were integrated or separated within the three colonies.

Chapter 1 discuses the law as it was written. It examines the sexual …

The Scarlet Letter: A Façade For Subversion Of Patriarchy, Tessa Arnold

The Corinthian

This essay will work in two parts. First, it will examine The Scarlet Letter as representing a dystopian society created by political and religious leaders’ thirst for power and control above the needs and desires of the people whom they are supposed to protect. The second part of this essay will examine the effects of the dystopian Puritan society specifically as it relates to Hester Prynne.

Theologies Of Pain In American Puritanism : The Human Body And Spiritual Conversion From Anne Bradstreet To Jonathan Edwards, Lucas Hardy

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation studies the many ways in which physical pain produces instances of personal piety in poems, narratives, and theological tracts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Puritan New England. Specifically, the project revises the idea that spiritual regeneration happened only through Puritan contacts with established liturgical means and precast homiletics; it contends instead that conversion occurred because of bodily pain. Analyzing four canonical Puritan writers--Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards--Theologies of Pain demonstrates that texts of even the most historically mainstream Puritans contend with the disruptive force of pain. Anne Bradstreet sees pain as an …

John Cotton's Middle Way, Gary Albert Rowland

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Historians are divided concerning the ecclesiological thought of seventeenth-century minister John Cotton. Some argue that he supported a church structure based on suppression of lay rights in favor of the clergy, strengthening of synods above the authority of congregations, and increasingly narrow church membership requirements. By contrast, others arrive at virtually opposite conclusions. This thesis evaluates Cotton's correspondence and pamphlets through the lense of moderation to trace the evolution of Cotton's thought on these ecclesiological issues during his ministry in England and Massachusetts. Moderation is discussed in terms of compromise and the abatement of severity in the context of ecclesiastical …

Puritanism In America: Image Versus Reality, Kaitlin C. Gratton

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Puritanism in America is often misunderstood and misrepresented. Popular understanding of Puritan New England is filled with images of “Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving, of clustered villages and white steepled churches, of pious founders and stern fathers, of tormented souls... and witchcraft mania.” ‘ The modem masses, if they think of it at all, accept this imagery as representative of early colonial conditions and the sources of these stereotypes are rarely questioned outside of academia. While many of these representations have taken hold of the American imagination in the post-revolutionary era, there is one that owes its existence to the …

The Virtuoso And Puritanism In 1676, Harry Maddux

Languages, Literature & Philosophy Faculty Research

No abstract provided.

A Seal Of Living Reality: The Role Of Personal Expression In Latter-Day Saint Discourse, C. Julianne Smith

Theses and Dissertations

A personal mode of discourse is central to Latter-day Saint culture. This mode is both pervasive throughout the culture and significant within it. Two specific genres-the personal experience narrative and the personal testimony-illustrate the importance of this discourse mode in LDS culture. Understanding the LDS personal mode of discourse is essential to properly understanding Mormonism. The personal orientation in LDS discourse mirrors a tendency towards personal expression which has become common throughout Western culture. This tendency has important roots in the Protestant religious movement. In particular, Puritanism represents a significant point of origin for American personal expression. Such expression has …

Review Essay: Sommerville, John C. The Discovery Of Childhood In Puritan England, Daniel W. O'Bryan

Quidditas

Sommerville, John C. The Discovery of Childhood in Puritan England. University of Georgia Press, Athens 1992. 211 pp. $35.00.

“Ice And Granite”: The New England Character, Joseph Conforti

Maine History

This article is a shortened and slightly revised version of the Eleanor Pickering Sprague presents to the Maine Historical Society, the Maine Chapter of the National Society of Colonial Dames and the Portland Chapter of the Maine Genealogical Society on November 10, 1987.

American Family Memorial Imagery, The Photograph, And The Search For Immortality, Daniel Gyger Snyder

Art & Art History ETDs

In this dissertation I trace the development of family (as opposed to public) memorial imagery and note the unique contribution of photography. I examine attitudes toward photography during its early years. These attitudes reveal that the medium was uniquely appropriate for the continuation and extension of the tradition of memorial imagery in America.

I suggest that America holds expectations for the Machine and for the power of Science that have at various times (the mid-nineteenth century and today) led some to assume that death is not inevitable and that physical Immortality is possible. From Puritan times, when death was accepted, …

Factors Of Influence In The Development Of Mukyokai, Rodger Grulke

Bachelor of Divinity

It is the intention of this paper to point out those factors of influence in the cultural and historical climate which helped to forge and shape Mukyokai, but also to reveal the importance of a great man who is responsible for its development and continuation. This does not intend to eradicate the importance of individuals and the church in the life of Uchimura Kanzo. However, a movement which maintains fifty thousand members including many prominent individuals in government, education, and theology is the living testimony of a man who deserves recognition as a great theologian and Scholar.

The Origin And Early Development Of Puritanism, V Ralph Weinhold

Bachelor of Divinity

Much has been written of the history of English Puritanism. This brief examination of the subject purposes no new contribution. It seeks merely to draw together the main events of that phase of English history and to discuss some of the issues involved.

The first problem is one of definition. One scholar has suggested that Puritanism has as many definitions as it has students, with a like distribution of trustworthiness. Therefore, before attempting to define it ourselves we do well to consider the definitions offered by recognized scholars of the movement.

A Christian Interpretation Of Sex, Richard Scheimann

Bachelor of Divinity

There is a sharp discrepancy between profession and practice in the sex life of the American people. It is commonly said that the philosophy of sexual conduct which has been traditionally held up to the public has been strongly determined by Puritanism. Neither Puritanism nor traditional morals are popular any more.. Especially the “Puritanism” and the morals connected with sexual behavior.

Magnalia Christi Americana, Cotton Mather, Thomas Parkhurst

Osher Map Library Rare Books

Full title: Magnalia Christi Americana: or, the Ecclesiastical history of New-England, from its first planting in the year 1620. unto the year of Our Lord, 1698. In seven books ... By the Reverend and learned Cotton Mather. London: Printed for Thomas Parkhurst, at the Bible and Three Crows in Cheapside. MDCCII.

Early New England history.

7 parts in 1 volume