Over the last two decades a major revaluation has been taking place of the colonial Puritan imagination. With the growth of interest in early American literatur

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 prud

Does heaven exist? If so, what is it like? And how does one get in? Throughout history, painters, poets, philosophers, pastors, and many ordinary people have po

In this lively and provocative study, Geoff Ward puts forward the bold claim that the founding documents of American identity are essentially literary. America

Innumerable men and women in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were gripped by the anxiety, often conviction, that they were doomed to go to hell. Th