New World metaphysics : readings on the religious meaning of the American experience / edited by Giles Gunn.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Gunn, Giles B.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Religious thought--United States.

Religious thought.

United States.

Religious thought--Modern period, 1500-.

Religious thought--Modern period.

United States--Civilization.

Civilization.

Physical Description:

xxi, 464 pages ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Oxford University Press, 1981.

Summary:

From the days of discovery, when America was for Europeans more dream than reality, to our own days of disillusionment and faltering hope, poets, philosophers, historians, novelists, and theologians have drawn on religious themes and images to express the meaning of their encounter with America. Here, in more than one hundred selections, is the record of their quest for a New World metaphysics -- a spiritual vision or ultimate idea of order expressive of the American experience.

Comprehensive in scope, New World Metaphysics draws on a diverse body of material, ranging from travel narratives and personal diaries to lyric poetry and theological treatises, by such writers as Shakespeare, Anne Bradstreet, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, H. L. Mencken, John Dewey, Rheinhold Niebuhr, Malcolm X, and Norman Mailer. Introductions by the editor highlight the principal themes.

Contents:

I Presentiments (1492-1607) 1

/ Anonymous 5

from Saga of Eric the Red (ca. 1000) 5

/ Christopher Columbus (1451?-1506) 6

from Letter of Lord Raphael Sanchez, Treasurer to Ferdinand and Isabella, King and Queen of Spain, on his First Voyage (1492) 6

/ Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512) 9

from Mundus Novus (Letter on His Third Voyage to Lorenzo Pietro Francesco de' Medici, 1503) 9

/ Peter Martyr (1455-1526) 12

from De Orbe Novo (1511) 12

/ Francois Rabelais (1495?-1533) 13

from Gargantua and Pantagruel (1534) 13

/ Thomas More (1478-1535) 15

from Utopia (1551) 16

/ Richard Eden (1521-1576) 18

from The Decades of the New World or West India by Peter Martyr (1555) 19

/ Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) 20

from "Of Cannibals" (1580) 20

/ Thomas Hariot (1560-1621) 25

from Brief and True Report of the New-found Land of Virginia (1588) 25

/ Sir Walter Raleigh (1544-1618) 27

from The Discovery of Guiana (1595) 28

/ Michael Drayton (1563-1631) 30

"To the Virginian Voyage" (1606) 30

/ William Shakespeare (1564-1616) 31

from The Tempest (1611) 32

/ Francis Bacon (1561-1626) 33

from The New Atlantis (1627) 33

/ George Herbert (1593-1633) 36

from The Church Militant (1633) 36

II Preparations (1607-1740) 39

/ Alexander Whitaker (1585-1616?) 43

from Good Newes from Virginia (1613) 43

/ John Smith (1580-1631) 45

from A Description of New England (1616) 45

/ Mayflower Compact (1620) 47

from A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth (sometimes called Mourt's Relation, 1622) 48

/ John Cotton (1584-1652) 48

from "Gods Promise to His Plantations" (1630) 49

/ John Winthrop (1587-1649) 50

from "A Modell of Christian Charity" (1630) 50

/ Thomas Morton (1590?-1647) 54

from New English Canaan (1637) 54

/ Roger Williams (1613-1683) 55

from The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (1644) 55

from The Hireling Ministry None of Christs (1652) 56

/ William Bradford (1590-1657) 58

from of Plymouth Plantation (1630-1651) 58

/ Anne Bradstreet (1612?-1672) 63

"To My Dear Children" (1672) 64

"A Letter to Her Husband, Absent Upon Public Employment" (1678) 67

"To My Dear and Loving Husband" (1678) 68

"Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666" (1678) 68

/ Edward Taylor (1644?-1729) 69

"Huswifery" 70

"Meditation One" (1682) 70

/ Mary Rowlandson (1635?-1678?) 71

from Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) 71

/ William Penn (1644-1718) 77

"Preface to the [Pennsylvania] Frame of Government" (1682) 78

from Primitive Christianity Revived (1696) 80

/ Germantown Quakers 81

Quaker Resolution Against Slavery (1688) 82

/ Cotton Mather (1633-1728) 83

from Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) 83

III Loomings (1740-1830) 87

/ Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) 91

from A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Word of God (1737) 91

from Personal Narrative (1740) 97

from A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746) 104

from Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World (1765) 112

/ Jonathan Mayhew (1720-1766) 114

from A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers (1750) 115

/ John Woolman (1720-1772) 117

from "Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes" (1754) 117

/ Thomas Jefferson (1734-1826) 123

from Autobiography (The Framing of the Declaration of Independence, 1776) 124

from Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) 129

"An Act for Establishing Religious Freedom" (1786) 131

/ J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur (1735-1818) 132

from Letters from an American Farmer (1782) 133

/ Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) 139

from The Autobiography (1784, 1788) 139

/ James O'Kelly (1735?-1826) 146

from Essay on Negro-Slavery (1789) 146

/ Thomas Paine (1737-1809) 148

from "Of the Religion of Deism Compared with the Christian Religion, and the Superiority of the Former over the Latter" (1804) 149

/ James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) 152

from The Prairie [The Death of Natty Bumppo] (1827) 153

/ William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) 159

from "Unitarian Christianity" (1830) 159

IV Realizations (1830-1915) 167

/ Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) 171

from Nature (1836) 171

/ Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) 192

from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) 192

/ Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) 195

"Young Goodman Brown" (1846) 195

/ Herman Melville (1819-1891) 205

from Moby-Dick (1851) 206

from Pierre (1852) 212

/ Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) 217

from Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) 217

/ Black American Folk Songs 220

Dere's No Hidin' Place Down Dere 221

Joshua Fit de Battle ob Jerico 221

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot 221

Go Down, Moses 222

I Know Moonrise 222

Run, Nigger, Run 222

Jump, Jim Crow 223

/ Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) 223

from Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) 224

/ Walt Whitman (1819-1892) 241

Preface from Leaves of Grass (1855) 241

from Song of the Open Road (1855) 243

"As Adam, Early in the Morning" (1860) 245

"Facing West from California's Shores" (1860) 245

"Pioneers! O Pioneers!" (1865) 245

"Years of the Modern" (1865) 248

"A Noiseless, Patient Spider" (1862-1863) 249

From Democratic Vistas (1871) 250

/ Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) 251

"There's a certain Slant of light" (ca. 1861) 252

"I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" (ca. 1861) 252

"I heard a Fly buzz

when I died

" (ca. 1862) 253

"It was not Death, for I stood up" (ca. 1862) 253

"My period had come for Prayer

"Presentiment

is that long Shadow

on the lawn

" (ca. 1863) 254

"Finding is the first Act" (ca. 1864) 254

"The Missing All

prevented Me" (ca. 1865) 254

"Tell all the Truth but tell it slant

" (ca. 1868) 254

/ Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) 255

"Letter to Horace Greeley" (1862) 255

"Meditation on the Divine Will" (1862) 256

"Gettysburg Address" (1863) 256

"Second Inaugural Address" (1865) 257

/ Henry James, Senior (1811-1882) 258

from The Secret of Swedenborg (1869) 259

Mr. Emerson (1884) 261

/ Horace Bushnell (1802-1876) 265

from Our Gospel a Gift to the Imagination (1869) 266

/ Francis Parkman (1823-1893) 271

from LaSalle and the Discovery of the Great West (1869) 272

North American Indian Oratory 277

Chief Powhatan (1609) 277

Chief Logan (1774) 278

Chief Pachgantschilias (1787) 278

Chief Tecumseh (1810) 279

Chief Sharitarish (1822) 280

Chief Cobb (1843) 281

Chief Seattle (1854) 283

Chief Joseph (1879) 284

/ W. E. B. DuBois (1868-1963) 288

from The Souls of Black Folk (1903) 288

/ Mark Twain (1835-1910) 294

"The War Prayer" (1904) 294

/ Henry Adams (1838-1918) 297

from The Education of Henry Adams (1907) 297

/ William James (1842-1910) 302

from "Is Life Worth Living?" (1895) 302

/ Charles William Eliot (1834-1926) 310

from The Religion of the Future (1909) 310

/ Josiah Royce (1855-1916) 311

from The Sources of Religious Insight (1912) 312

/ George Santayana (1863-1952) 318

from Winds of Doctrine (1913) 318

/ John Jay Chapman (1862-1933) 332

"Coatesville" (1915) 333

V Rejections and Revisions (1915-1950) 337

/ H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) 341

from "Puritanism as a Literary Force" (1917) 341

/ Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918) 345

from A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917) 346

/ Shailer Mathews (1863-1941) 348

from The Faith of Modernism (1924) 349

/ Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) 350

"Shine, Perishing Republic" (1924) 350

/ William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) 351

from In the American Grain (1925) 351

/ Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970) 358

from The Modern Temper (1929) 358

/ Hart Crane (1899-1932) 359

"Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge" (1930) 360

/ T. S.

Eliot (1888-1965) 361

"Marina" (1930) 361

/ Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) 362

"A Clean Well-Lighted Place" (1933) 363

/ John Dewey (1859-1952) 366

from A Common Faith (1934) 366

/ Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) 374

"The Idea of Order at Key West" (1935) 374

/ Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) 375

from Beyond Tragedy (1937) 376

/ James Agee (1909-1955) 385

from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1939) 386

/ Robert Frost (1874-1963) 387

"The Most of It" (1941) 387

/ Marianne Moore (1887-1972) 388

"What Are Years?" (1941) 388

William Faulkner (1897-1962) 389

"The Old People" (1942) 389

VI Recoveries (1950-1980) 403

/ Bernard Malamud (1914- ) 407

"The Loan" (1953) 407

/ Paul Tillich (1886-1965) 412

"Religion as a Dimension in Man's Spiritual Life" (1954) 412

/ Richard Wilbur (1921- ) 416

"Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" (1956) 416

/ B. Richard Niebuhr (1894-1962) 417

from Radical Monotheism and Western Culturt (1960) 418

/ James Wright (1927-1980) 428

"A Blessing" 429

/ James Baldwin (1924- ) 429

from The Fire Next Time (1964) 430

/ Malcolm X (1925-1965) 436

from The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1963) 437

/ Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) 440

"The Abyss" (1964) 440

/ Richard Rubenstein (1924- ) 442

from After Auschwitz (1966) 442

/ Schubert M. Ogden (1928- ) 447

from "How Does God Function in Human Life?" (1967) 447

/ Norman Mailer (1923- ) 452

from The Armies of the Night (1968) 452

/ Henry G. Bugbee (1915- ) 455

"Wilderness in America" (1974) 456

/ Robert Lowell (1917-1977) 464

"Thanks-Offering for Recovery" (1977) 464.

ISBN:

0195028732 :

OCLC:

6602276