Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America

الغلاف الأمامي
Cornell University Press, 2004 - 257 من الصفحات

Native converts to Christianity, dubbed "praying Indians" by seventeenth-century English missionaries, have long been imagined as benign cultural intermediaries between English settlers and "savages." More recently, praying Indians have been dismissed as virtual inventions of the colonists: "good" Indians used to justify mistreatment of "bad" ones. In a new consideration of this religious encounter, Kristina Bross argues that colonists used depictions of praying Indians to create a vitally important role for themselves as messengers on an evangelical "errand into the wilderness" that promised divine significance not only for the colonists who had embarked on the errand, but also for their metropolitan sponsors in London.In Dry Bones and Indian Sermons, Bross traces the response to events such as the English civil wars and Restoration, New England's Antinomian Controversy, and "King Philip's" war. Whatever the figure's significance to English settlers, praying Indians such as Waban and Samuel Ponampam used their Christian identity to push for status and meaning in the colonial order. Through her focused attention to early evangelical literature and to that literature's historical and cultural contexts, Bross demonstrates how the people who inhabited, manipulated, and consumed the praying Indian identity found ways to use it for their own, disparate purposes.

 

المحتوى

Indian Resurrection
28
Translating
52
Spiritual Questions
84
Indian Dialogues
112
Satans Captives Preying Indians and Mary
146
Dying Indian Speeches
186
Notes
207
Index
249
حقوق النشر

طبعات أخرى - عرض جميع المقتطفات

عبارات ومصطلحات مألوفة

نبذة عن المؤلف (2004)

Kristina Bross is Associate Professor of English at Purdue University.

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