The Last Puritan

The Last Puritan
Author: George Santayana
Publisher: Macmillan Reference USA
Total Pages: 602
Release: 1981-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780684168333

Published in 1935, George Santayana's The Last Puritan was the American philosopher's only novel and it became an instant best- seller, immediately linked in its painful voyage of self-discovery to The Education of Henry Adams. It is essentially a novel of ideas expressed in the birth, life, and early death of Oliver Alden. In Oliver's case the puritanical self-destruction that prevented him from realizing his own spirituality is transcended by his attainment of the type of self-knowledge that Santayana recommends throughout his moral philosophy. The Last Puritan is volume four in a new critical edition of George Santayana's wroks that restores Santayana's original text and provides important new scholarly information. Books in this series - the first complete publication of Santayana's works - include an editorial apparatus with notes to the text (identifying persons, places, and ideas), textual commentary (including a description of the composition and publication history, along with a discussion of editorial methods and decisions), lists of variants and emendations, and line-end hyphenations.

The Last Puritans

The Last Puritans
Author: Margaret Bendroth
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2015-08-12
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 146962401X

Congregationalists, the oldest group of American Protestants, are the heirs of New England's first founders. While they were key characters in the story of early American history, from Plymouth Rock and the founding of Harvard and Yale to the Revolutionary War, their luster and numbers have faded. But Margaret Bendroth's critical history of Congregationalism over the past two centuries reveals how the denomination is essential for understanding mainline Protestantism in the making. Bendroth chronicles how the New England Puritans, known for their moral and doctrinal rigor, came to be the antecedents of the United Church of Christ, one of the most liberal of all Protestant denominations today. The demands of competition in the American religious marketplace spurred Congregationalists, Bendroth argues, to face their distinctive history. By engaging deeply with their denomination's storied past, they recast their modern identity. The soul-searching took diverse forms--from letter writing and eloquent sermonizing to Pilgrim-celebrating Thanksgiving pageants--as Congregationalists renegotiated old obligations to their seventeenth-century spiritual ancestors. The result was a modern piety that stood a respectful but ironic distance from the past and made a crucial contribution to the American ethos of religious tolerance.

The Last American Puritan

The Last American Puritan
Author: Michael G. Hall
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0819572543

Powerful preacher, political negotiator for New England in the halls of Parliament, president of Harvard, father of Cotton Mather, Increase Mather was the epitome of the American Puritan. He was the most important spokesman of his generation for Congregationalism and became the last American Puritan of consequence as the seventeenth century ended. The story begins in 1639 when Mather was born in the Massachusetts village of Dorchester. He left home for Harvard College when he was twelve and at twenty-two began to stir the city of Boston from the pulpit of North Church. He had written four books by the time he was thirty-two. Certain he was God's chosen instrument and New England God's chosen people, he disciplined mind and spirit in service to them both. Tempted to "Atheisme" and unbelief, afflicted early by nightmares and melancholy, then by hope and joy, he was a pioneer in recognizing the excitement of the new sciences and sought to reconcile them to theology. This well-wrought biography, the first of Increase Mather in forty years, draws on the extensive Mather diaries, which were transcribed by Michael Hall.

A Quest for Godliness

A Quest for Godliness
Author: James Innell Packer
Publisher: Crossway
Total Pages: 372
Release: 1994
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780891078197

Surveys the teachings and beliefs of the Puritans, and calls today's Christians to follow their example of spiritual maturity.

Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination

Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination
Author: Kenyon Gradert
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2020-04-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 022669402X

The Puritans of popular memory are dour figures, characterized by humorless toil at best and witch trials at worst. “Puritan” is an insult reserved for prudes, prigs, or oppressors. Antebellum American abolitionists, however, would be shocked to hear this. They fervently embraced the idea that Puritans were in fact pioneers of revolutionary dissent and invoked their name and ideas as part of their antislavery crusade. Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination reveals how the leaders of the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement—from landmark figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson to scores of lesser-known writers and orators—drew upon the Puritan tradition to shape their politics and personae. In a striking instance of selective memory, reimagined aspects of Puritan history proved to be potent catalysts for abolitionist minds. Black writers lauded slave rebels as new Puritan soldiers, female antislavery militias in Kansas were cast as modern Pilgrims, and a direct lineage of radical democracy was traced from these early New Englanders through the American and French Revolutions to the abolitionist movement, deemed a “Second Reformation” by some. Kenyon Gradert recovers a striking influence on abolitionism and recasts our understanding of puritanism, often seen as a strictly conservative ideology, averse to the worldly rebellion demanded by abolitionists.

The Puritans

The Puritans
Author: David D. Hall
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 526
Release: 2021-04-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691203377

"Shedding critical new light on the diverse forms of Puritan belief and practice in England, Scotland, and New England, Hall provides a multifaceted account of a cultural movement that judged the Protestant reforms of Elizabeth's reign to be unfinished"--Provided by publisher.

The Puritan Tradition in America, 1620-1730

The Puritan Tradition in America, 1620-1730
Author: Alden T. Vaughan
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 388
Release: 1972
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780874518528

A classic documentary collection on New England's Puritan roots is once again available, with new material.

American Literature and the New Puritan Studies

American Literature and the New Puritan Studies
Author: Bryce Traister
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2017-09-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108509010

This book contains thirteen original essays about Puritan culture in colonial New England. Prompted by the growing interest in secular studies, as well as postnational, transnational, and postcolonial critique in the humanities, American Literature and the New Puritan Studies seeks to represent and advance contemporary interest in a field long recognized, however problematically, as foundational to the study of American literature. It invites readers of American literature and culture to reconsider the role of seventeenth-century Puritanism in the creation of the United States of America and its consequent cultural and literary histories. It also records the significant transformation in the field of Puritan studies that has taken place in the last quarter century. In addition to re-reading well known texts of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, the volume contains essays focused on unknown or lesser studied events and texts, as well as new scholarship on post-Puritan archives, monuments, and historiography.

The Puritans

The Puritans
Author: David Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Publisher: Banner of Truth
Total Pages: 448
Release: 1987
Genre: Religion
ISBN:

This volume brings together, for the first time, the addresses given by Dr Lloyd-Jones at the Puritan Studies and Westminster Conferences between 1959 and 1978.