You’re So Right You Don’t Know What You’re Sayin’
A few weeks ago we were studying the Great Awakening in American Studies.  I have been a fan of Edwards’s tremendous sermon, (popularly known as) “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” since the day I first read it to teach to my students over twenty years ago. I have always wanted to stand for a chapel talk and deliver that sermon in Boyd Chapel.  I can’t imagine the consternation on the faces of the students as those cadences of Edwards’s sermon would begin to build and swell and then flood into the chapel pews. The sermon’s imagery is as powerful as any in American literature: “it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angr

What Would Winthrop Do?
I was walking the halls tonight, and I came across one of my American Studies students working on Biology with a  Sixth Form classmate. This Am Stud Scholar was helping a classmate who has been sick for the last week. My comment was to ask her why she wasn’t reading her Sarah Vowell assignment, but she reminded me that she was channeling the Puritan spirit as delivered by John Winthrop, in his 1630 sermon titled “A Modell of Christian Charity,” to his fellow colonists traveling to the New Land in order to settle near present-day Boston. Winthrop exhorts those with him to “make others Condicions our own.” (All spellings and punctuation are as published by th