Brethren and Sisters in Christ: The Church, Religious Experience and Society in Connecticut, 1636-1776

FAIN: FR-10250-78

Gerald F. Moran
Regents of the University of Michigan (Dearborn, MI 48128-2406)

To explore the connections that exist between ideas or values, institutions, and experience. This central methodological concern of anthropologists, literary critics, political scientists, and sociologists has begun to inform recent historical studies of American Puritanism, but the relationship between early New England Culture, lay religious experience, and institutional and social developments is still unclear. This study will explore the possible connections between these seemingly separate spheres of the past by combining local records with literary documents in a study of Connecticut churches and society from the 1630s to the Great Awakening and beyond.