Tares in the Wheat

Puritan Violence and Puritan Families in the Nineteenth-Century Liberal Imagination

Bibliographic Data

ID4517330
AuthorsDaniel P Buchanan (corresponding author)
Year1998
Volume8
Issue2
Pages205-236
Publication date1998-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueReligion and American Culture A Journal of Interpretation (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1052-1151 • E-ISSN: 1533-8568
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1525/rac.1998.8.2.03a00030
OpenAlexW4235487277
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited30

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

Criminology · Doctrine · Liberalism · New england · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Violent crime · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Mormonism, Religion, and History · Philosophy · Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment · Religious studies

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