/pdf/protestant-experience-and-continuity-of-political-thought-in-3l9okp0uj2.pdf

Protestant Experience and Continuity of Political Thought in Early America, 1630-1789

This essay revisits the importance of “conversion narratives” in New England puritanism, arguing that they were not widely used for admission to membership; instead, their primary function was to enable lay men and women to share their religious experiences to help others to salvation and cement the bonds of church fellowship.

“To Tell What God Hath Done for Thy Soul”: Puritan Spiritual Testimonies as Admission Tests and Means of Edification

It will be best to begin by saying as precisely as possible what I do not intend to do in this article in hopes that I can avoid being criticized for not doing things I didn't mean to do. First, this is not a survey of all English and American utopias because I stop around the beginning of the twentieth century. Also, I insist on a definition of utopia that rejects many works some readers would want to include?utopia is a species of prose fiction that describes a nonexistent society located in space and time in a variety of aspects and in some detail.1 Second, this is not an historical or sociological analysis of the place of utopia in either society; I am working on that but it is not yet finished. What I intend to do is simply to search for a pattern or a set of patterns in the utopias (eutopias or positive utopias) I happen to have been able to get my hands on. I expect that I shall be forced to modify many of my conclusions as I add further examples, and I hope that others can point out where I am wrong, where other patterns exist, and even provide further evidence for where I'm right. The task is of course somewhat awe inspiring and therefore one must attempt to develop a systematic approach that allows one to group like things with like or certain set topics. I have grouped my examples as follows: English vs. American (that, of course, is the whole point of the exercise), the English into pre-1800s and the nineteenth century preand post-Bellamy, and the American into pre and post-Bellamy.2 Then I have analyzed them on the basis of 23 topics.3 Obviously very few works cover all topics and some periods deal with certain questions only in a fairly limited way, but some such list (I would welcome improvements) is essential. In the analysis I have simply ignored items that are not important to the authors.

English and american utopias: similarities and differences

Two scholars debate whether John Davenport, pastor of the New Haven church (1638–67), required that a prospective church member offer a personal account of the workings of God's saving grace in him/her to be granted church membership, a matter that, in its broader implications, has significant importance for puritan studies.

Did John Davenport's Church Require Conversion Narratives for Church Admission?: A Challenge

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5309/willmaryquar.74.2.0344

Church, State, and Commonwealth: The Transatlantic Puritan Movement in England and America

T O determine the authorship of a Puritan writing and the circumstances of its composition is, in some instances, to perform a merely antiquarian task. In other cases, however, the findings can give important added meaning to what, at first reading, may appear to be mere conventional statement. New findings can, for example, illuminate with an unexpected particularity tensions within an evolving Puritan order such as are recorded in A Discourse about Civil Government in a New Plantation Whose Design Is Religion. "Written many years since," according to its title page, the pamphlet-length Discourse issued from the press at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1663. By that time its reasoning was as archaic as the abortive project it was intended to guide: a full-blown Puritan theocracy, to be formed within the territory of New Netherlands by men from New Haven colony disgruntled at their chartered absorption by Connecticut.1 But at the date of the Discourse's composition-fixed at 1638 or 1639 in this account-the position expounded in it was publicly championed by a majority of Puritans, as evidenced by laws of a numerically dominant Massachusetts. The author of the Discourse, concerned that church and commonwealth not be confounded, insisted, nevertheless, on their close coordination in the New England setting. "Free burgesses"-the sharers of civil authority, whether in a town or a colony-atlarge-must be drawn exclusively from the ranks of church members. This thesis the author advanced in elaborate fashion within the traditional forms: separation of the question from

Dissension at Quinnipiac: The Authorship and Setting of a Discourse about Civil Government in a New Plantation Whose Design Is Religion

Demographic Studies@@@A New England Town, the First Hundred Years: Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636-1736@@@A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony@@@Demography in Early America: Beginnings of the Statistical Mind, 1600-1800

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Dissension at Quinnipiac: The Authorship and Setting of a Discourse about Civil Government in a New Plantation Whose Design Is Religion

Demographic Studies@@@A New England Town, the First Hundred Years: Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636-1736@@@A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony@@@Demography in Early America: Beginnings of the Statistical Mind, 1600-1800