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May 2026

May 12, 2026

White Whales and Early Republic Indian Rights Petitions

"Your Petitioners believe in the Republican doctrine that all men are born free and are...

January 2025

January 14, 2025

History and Ourselves: Story, The Past, and Responsibility

David Blight, the eminent Civil War historian, begins every class he teaches in the same...

October 2024

October 15, 2024

Indigenous Intellectuals and their Writings, Reconsidered

Preface I am currently in the third year of my PhD program in history, which...

July 2024

July 19, 2024

Pastors Complaining About Church Attendance: A Tradition

I’m old enough to remember going to Sunday evening services at my Baptist church growing...

September 2023

September 26, 2023

Why Did Jonathan Edwards Think That Slavery Was Morally Right?

John Piper, the Minnesota-based Baptist pastor who has popularized Jonathan Edwards’s Calvinist theology for a...

March 2023

March 03, 2023

New England Women and the Geographies of Power (Part One)

The First Peoples (Natives) viewed their geography as a space of spiritual interconnection between ecology...

September 2022

September 28, 2022

Recent Books on Women, Gender, and Sex in American Religious History, Part 2

This semester I am teaching one of my favorite courses: "Women, Gender, and Sex in...

April 2021

April 28, 2021

A Historian’s Spiritual Reading List

I have a cookie every night before bed. I'm not sure whether this is physically...

December 2020

December 05, 2020

Outward and Inward Baptism

John Robinson, pastor of the English separatist congregation in Leiden that partly transplanted itself to...

July 2020

July 13, 2020

Why Should Kids Go Back to School?

What is school for? To answer that question Massachusetts Bay colonists invoked the devil. The...

June 2020

June 04, 2020

The Quakers: New England’s First Sustained Non-Violent Movement

They were rude, their words were crude. Occasionally, a few went nude. The Quakers reached...

May 2020

May 21, 2020

Calvinism, Puritan New England, and the Death of Children

In the winter of 1676-1677, a “malignant” fever swept through New England communities. In the...

April 2020

April 09, 2020

Pilgrims and Pandemics

Spanish Flu. SARS, MERS. Bubonic plague, if one wants to reach for a more distant...

March 2020

March 12, 2020

City on a Hill: From John Winthrop to Donald Trump

I am excited to welcome Abram Van Engen to The Anxious Bench. Van Engen, Associate...

January 2020

January 15, 2020

Puritans Revisited

Nathaniel Hawthorne and Arthur Miller firmly tethered puritan to hypocrisy, self-righteousness, prudery, and the irrational...

December 2019

December 26, 2019

Coming Soon: 2020 Must-Reads in Christianity and Politics

The frenzied commentary around Mark Galli's Christianity Today editorial has not only revealed widely diverging opinions...

December 05, 2019

Dorothy Bradford Did Not Commit Suicide

In December of 1620, the Mayflower Pilgrims began to die. Eighteenth-century Boston minister Thomas Prince...

July 2019

July 04, 2019

Radical Parliamentarians

On the day Americans commemorate their separation from Great Britain, why not spend some time...

June 2019

June 20, 2019

The City-State of Boston

I am used to thinking of the New England colonies as commonwealths, as what Michael...

May 2019

May 23, 2019

The Myth of Puritan Intolerance (Part II)

A few weeks ago, I suggested that the "myth" of puritan intolerance is "not very...

April 2019

April 25, 2019

The Myth of Puritan Intolerance

Puritan New England's reputation for rigidity and intolerance goes back almost all the way to...

January 2019

January 28, 2019

It’s Cold Outside

But we expect it to be—don’t we? What is the big deal about winter if...

November 2018

November 21, 2018

Why Kids in Kentucky Didn’t Dress Up as Pilgrims after the Civil War

And how is it that my own children now celebrate Thanksgiving in their Jessamine County...

November 05, 2018

We Need A Little Puritanism

“A little Puritanism would help us all.” This striking recommendation comes from Commonweal magazine’s Paul...

October 2018

October 25, 2018

Rebecca Rawson: Part II

A blog post sometimes serves as a forum to try out an idea that is...

October 08, 2018

Puritans Were Right: Stop Checking Your Email

The Puritan logic of the Sabbath does much better than our current advice to guard...

September 2018

September 26, 2018

Sexual Misconduct in Seventeenth-Century New England

Partly because they took church discipline so seriously, New England Congregationalists tended to act mercifully...

September 12, 2018

The Sovereignty and Goodness of God

The most famous chain of events during what Americans came to call King Philip's War...

August 2018

August 16, 2018

Rebecca Rawson

UPDATE: Since writing this post, I learned of D. Brenton Simons's Witches, Rakes, and Rogues: True...

August 02, 2018

Puritan Cruelty and Quaker Suffering

In the fall of 1658, Massachusetts passed a law that threatened banished Quakers with death....