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November 2023

November 01, 2023

How a Painting Illustrates the Nineteenth Century History Wars over American Christian Foundations

I am presently revising my textbook on the History of the United States, 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...

July 2021

July 05, 2021

Climate Disasters and the Making of Protestant Europe

I have argued that transformational eras of religious change are often rooted in climate-driven crises,...

November 2020

November 20, 2020

George Herbert, Little Gidding, and Virginia

Last time I wrote about George Herbert’s poem “The Church Militant” (published posthumously in 1633),...

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...

January 2020

January 15, 2020

Puritans Revisited

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

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...

April 24, 2019

Does Brooklyn need to check extravagance?

A New York Times report earlier this year on trends of stylish Brooklyn moms put...

July 2018

July 19, 2018

Narratives of Quaker Suffering

Despite their macabre subject matter, Quaker persecution narratives add color to histories of seventeenth-century New...

July 16, 2018

Children’s Advocates: New England Puritans

Children are very much with us in summer. If this summer's most disheartening images feature...

May 2018

May 10, 2018

Pilgrims and Puritans

"Pilgrim" just has a much nicer ring to most eyes than "puritan." On one level,...

December 2017

December 08, 2017

Infidels, Demons, Witches, and Quakers

I have an article out in the new issue of Fides et Historia, under the...

October 2017

October 20, 2017

Immanentists

I recently discovered a new word that will be really useful for me in writing...

July 2017

July 28, 2017

Five Rivers Flowing Out Of Paradise

Five rivers flowed out of Paradise, and we all know their names. That may sound...

June 2017

June 06, 2017

The Anxious Bench’s Favorite Historic Sites East of the Mississippi

Let The Anxious Bench help you plan your summer travels, as we share some of...

November 2016

November 11, 2016

Richard Davies and the Word of God

I posted about the autobiography of Quaker pioneer Richard Davies, arguing that this should be...

November 04, 2016

The Convincement of Richard Davies

I want to recommend a book that is a major source on Christian history. It...

March 2016

March 08, 2016

American Colonial History: Clashing Cultures and Faiths

My new Yale University Press book American Colonial History: Clashing Cultures and Faiths is 'in stock'...

December 2015

December 22, 2015

Christmas in 1776

From the Patheos archive: ‘Tis the season to argue about religion. Or more specifically, to...

December 13, 2013

A CATALOGUE OF SECTS

I recently posted about using visual materials to tell religious history. Some of the most...

October 2013

October 08, 2013

The Puritans as Masters of Reform

My history graduate students and I recently read David Hall's A Reforming People: Puritanism and the...

June 2013

June 13, 2013

A Model of Christian Charity

Nearly every semester, I have the occasion to ask at least one class of students...

April 2013

April 16, 2013

Understanding the Puritans

The scholarly study of the Puritans has been marked in recent years by attempts to...

February 2013

February 12, 2013

The Puritans: Neither Democratic nor American?

As I discussed in my post "Puritans: The Original Republicans?", few historians today remain interested...

August 2012

August 07, 2012

Puritans: The Original Republicans?

What political legacy did the Puritans leave to America? There was a time when historians...

July 2012

July 17, 2012

Best 5 Books on the Puritans

I recently reviewed Michael Winship's Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill,...