My Mother And Other New Englanders

My Mother and Other New Englanders is a story of faith measured out in ordinary lives. This volume is not only one family's history, but how faith in God gives perspective and depth to the million little incidents that make up every day. It is God who comes alongside, guiding each of us through good times, and carrying the weight of our disappointments, our suffering, and loss, even to the point of death. You may be a New Englander and recognize the backdrops that decorate many of the poems. But we all are pilgrims on the road of grace, recognizing the all-too-familiar struggles of this life and how they often mix with the poignant and sometimes humorous moments that follow us all the way home.

Beginning in 1924, Proceedings are incorporated into the Apr. number.

Reproduction of the original: The Mother's Dream and Other Poems by Hannah F. Gould

Revising dominant accounts of Puritanism and challenging the literary history of sentimentalism, Sympathetic Puritans argues that a Calvinist theology of sympathy shaped the politics, religion, rhetoric, and literature of early New England. Scholars have often understood and presented sentimentalism as a direct challenge to stern and stoic Puritan forebears; the standard history traces a cult of sensibility back to moral sense philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment, not Puritan New England. Abram C. Van Engen has unearthed pervasive evidence of sympathy in a large archive of Puritan sermons, treatises, tracts, poems, journals, histories, and captivity narratives. He demonstrates how two types of sympathy -- the active command to fellow-feel (a duty), as well as the passive sign that could indicate salvation (a discovery) -- permeated Puritan society and came to define the very boundaries of English culture, affecting conceptions of community, relations with Native Americans, and the development of American literature. Van Engen re-examines the Antinomian Controversy, conversion narratives, transatlantic relations, Puritan missions, Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative -- and Puritan culture more generally -- through the lens of sympathy. Demonstrating and explicating a Calvinist theology of sympathy in seventeenth-century New England, the book reveals the religious history of a concept that has previously been associated with more secular roots.