New England Election Sermons: A Model for a Public Pulpit

This article surveys the now largely foreign practice of election sermons delivered in colonial New England. The ultimate aim of the study is to provide a way forward for contemporary pastors: first, to challenge the modern bifurcation of the religious and the so-called secular in the public square; second, to chart a middle course between the extremes of blind partisanship and anemic passivity in commenting on public concerns. The content of election sermons also challenges prevailing evangelical notions of good government by presenting a more integrated sociopolitical life, emphasizing older priorities of the common good, justice, and prudence. KEYWORDS: Puritanism, New England, election sermons, preaching, public theology, church Iand state, politics, common good

Family Life

This chapter gives an overview of the family life of Jonathan Edwards. It seeks to establish Edwards’s success as a patriarch in colonial New England according to Puritan standards. Beginning with his relationships with his father, Timothy Edwards, and his maternal grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, both pastors, this chapter traces the relational and familial dynamics throughout Edwards’s life. From a young age, Edwards sought to establish himself as a mature and godly man capable of heading a family. After moving to Northampton, Edwards married Sarah Pierpont at the age of 23 and began a family of his own. Together, they had eleven children and ran their household successfully. Edwards’s discipline, kindness, and faithful presence helped him to become a model Puritan patriarch. While Jonathan and Sarah’s lives were both cut short, they left a legacy of love and domestic flourishing behind them when they passed.

Cartographic Intertextuality: Reading The Narrative of Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson with Geographic Information Systems

The Narrative of Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson from 1682 is not only famous – or infamous – for its brutal descriptions of the armed conflicts of King Philip’s War, it is also a colonial document that contains both religious as well as spatial representations of Native American territories. This article proposes to analyze this entanglement of space and text with a combination of digital text analysis tools and geographic information systems (GIS). Applying the potentials of such technologies and methods to the study of captivity narratives like Mary Rowlandson’s opens up new opportunities to better understand the interaction of writing and space in colonial New England.