Class Recap 9/28

Old Burying Ground, Cambridge, Massachusetts---Thomas
Shepard is believed to be buried here among his congregants

Class began with a brief discussion on conference presentations, and Jessica was kind enough to share her experiences as a first time presenter at a recent conference.  This talk about professionalization was followed by Cody's informative lecture on Puritan theology and terminology.

Before turning to Thomas Shepard and John Bunyan, the class returned to Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation (1630-1650) and Thomas Morton's New English Canaan (1637).  When considering Shepard and his congregants, we took up issues such as the genesis of the private individual, selfhood and identity, self-determination and godly dependence, and Shepard as Puritan and Christian.  John Bunyan's Grace Abounding (1666) raised questions about literary publication and manuscript culture, the rise of personal writings and issues of genre, the use of language and metaphor, and the expression of sincerity (and thus emotion in general) through the written word.

It is worth remembering that the 1994 edition of God's Plot: Puritan Spirituality in Thomas Shepard's Cambridge reprints an abridged version of the Journal and a selection of the Confessions.  Those wishing to investigate these texts in full should turn to the 1972 edition of God's Plot (for the Journal) and the original 1981 and 1991 publications of the Confessions.