Tares in the Wheat: Puritan Violence and Puritan Families in the Nineteenth-Century Liberal Imagination
The New England tradition of violence is a curiously dual one. For more than a Century after their arrival in Boston, the Puritans of New England participated in the wave of genocidal violence that helped decimate Native communities throughout the Americas. To a lesser degree, they also turned their...
Published in: | Religion and American culture |
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Main Author: | |
Format: | Electronic Article |
Language: | English |
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Published: |
Cambridge University Press
1998
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In: |
Religion and American culture
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Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
Summary: | The New England tradition of violence is a curiously dual one. For more than a Century after their arrival in Boston, the Puritans of New England participated in the wave of genocidal violence that helped decimate Native communities throughout the Americas. To a lesser degree, they also turned their violent energies against members of their own Community by banishing, torturing, and killing those Puritans who embraced the Quaker doctrine of the inner light or who were accused by their neighbors of witchcraft. Yet, rarely has a community been so self-conscious about its own violence, so determined to find ultimate meaning in the midst of atrocity. What could it mean, New Englanders persistently asked, that their “city on a hill” was enmeshed in violence? For at least two of the theological traditions that took strongest hold in New England—Puritanism and liberalism—this question was an inescapable preoccupation. |
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ISSN: | 1533-8568 |
Contains: | Enthalten in: Religion and American culture
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Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1525/rac.1998.8.2.03a00030 |