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Conventional wisdom holds that tradition and history meant little to nineteenth-century American Protestants, who relied on common sense and "the Bible alone." The Old Faith in a New Nation challenges this portrayal by recovering evangelical engagement with the Christian past. Even when they appeared to be most scornful toward tradition, most optimistic and forward-looking, and most confident in their grasp of the Bible, evangelicals found themselves returning, time and again, to Christian history. They studied religious historiography, reinterpreted the history of the church, and argued over its implications for the present. Between the Revolution and the Civil War, American Protestants wer...
Analyzing writings ranging from the Puritans to the present day, Loving God's Wildness traces the effects of Christian theology on America's ecological imagination, revealing the often conflicted ways in which Americans relate to and perceive the natural world.
Among those banished was Roger Williams, the advocate of religious liberty who also founded the colony of Rhode Island and established the first Baptist church in America. Williams opposed the Puritans' use of the Bible to persecute radicals who rejected the state's established religion. In retaliation against the use of scripture for violent purposes, Williams argued that religious liberty was a biblical concept that offered the only means of eliminating the religious wars and persecutions that plagued the seventeenth century.
To Live Ancient Lives signals a sharp redirection of Puritan studies. It provides the first comprehensive study of Puritan primitivism, defined as the drive to recover and return to church and society the ordinances of biblical times. This work traces a campaign to purify English Christianity of postapostolic accretions from the Henrician Reformation to the Great Migration of 1630 and through the first five decades in New England. Taking their bearings from a special past, Puritans were not concerned with the future in a modern sense. The Great Migration was not intended as an errand to reform the world or inaugurate the millennium, but as a flight to a free world in which long-lost biblical...
This collection of essays explores the significance of practice in understanding American Protestant life. The authors are historians of American religion, practical theologians, and pastors and were the twelve principal researchers in a three-year collaborative project sponsored by the Lilly Endowment. Profiling practices that range from Puritan devotional writing to twentieth-century prayer, from missionary tactics to African American ritual performance, these essays provide a unique historical perspective on how Protestants have lived their faith within and outside of the church and how practice has formed their identities and beliefs. Each chapter focuses on a different practice within a...
John Stull was probably born in Germany between 1680-1700. He immigrated to America before 1725. He and his wife, Martha, had ten children. The first four were probably born in Pennsylvania, the others in Prince George's County, Maryland. He was the first permanent German settler west of Frederick County, Maryland. Descendants lived in Maryland, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Texas, Arkansas and elsewhere.
The 1810 census of the Illinois Territory does not exist in its entirety, but what has survived is given here in full. It lists 1,310 heads of families, and, by age groups, the number of free white males and females in each household as well as the number of other free inhabitants and slaves owned. The total represented is over 7,000 persons. The 1818 census, which is arranged by counties, makes up the bulk of this work. It lists over 4,000 heads of families and, for each household, shows the number of free white males over twenty-one, all other white inhabitants, free persons of color, and servants or slaves. This represents an estimated 20,000 persons. In addition, there are notations indicating which heads of households can be found in the federal and state censuses of Illinois for 1820.
A dramatic tension confronts every Christian believer and interpreter of Scripture: on the one hand, we encounter images of God commanding and engaging in horrendous violence: one the other hand, we encounter the non-violent teachings and example of Jesus, whose loving, self-sacrificial death and resurrection is held up as the supreme revelation of God’s character in the New Testament. How do we reconcile the tension between these seemingly disparate depictions? Are they even capable of reconciliation? Throughout Christian history, many different answers have been proposed, ranging from the long-rejected explanation that these contrasting depictions are of two entirely different ‘gods’...
Puritan Family and Community in the English Atlantic World examines the dynamics of marriage, family and community life during the "Great Migration" through the microhistorical study of one puritan family in 1638 Rhode Island. Through studying the Verin family, a group of English non-conformists who took part in the "Great Migration", this book examines differing approaches within puritanism towards critical issues of the age, including liberty of conscience, marriage, family, female agency, domestic violence, and the role of civil government in responding to these developments. Like other nonconformists who challenged the established Church of England, the Verins faced important personal di...