The Last Puritans
eBook - ePub

The Last Puritans

Mainline Protestants and the Power of the Past

  1. 258 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Last Puritans

Mainline Protestants and the Power of the Past

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access The Last Puritans by Margaret Bendroth in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Theology & Religion & North American History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover Page
  2. The Last Puritans
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Contents
  5. Illustrations
  6. Acknowledgments
  7. Introduction
  8. Chapter One: Protestant Saints
  9. Chapter Two: Sons of the Pilgrim Fathers
  10. Chapter Three: The Boston Council of 1865
  11. Chapter Four: The Pilgrim Jubilee and What Came of It
  12. Chapter Five: Scribes and Scholars
  13. Chapter Six: Coming to Terms with the Pilgrim Fathers
  14. Chapter Seven: The End of One Epoch and the Beginning of Another
  15. Chapter Eight: History and the Politics of Merger
  16. Chapter Nine: History and Mainline Protestants
  17. Notes
  18. Bibliography
  19. Index