Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / The objective of this dissertation is to re-create, as thoroughly as possible, the life of John Eliot, 1604-1690. To accomplish this end, the author has used an historical and descriptive method. The author began by gathering all the available material he could find which had direct bearing on the preacher's life. These materials were then critically evaluated in the light of scholarly knowledge of New England Puritanism. The result is an essay designed to reveal in an original manner the life of the "Apostle to the Indians," and the "Saint of the New England Way," within his historic, political, and social setting. EARLY LIFE: John Eliot was the son of Bennett Eliot and Lettese Agar. He was baptized on August 24, 1604, in Nazing, England. He grew up in the villages of East Anglia. English Puritanism was vibrant during this period, and Eliot was strongly influenced by Puritan thinking. In 1630, Eliot migrated to Massachusetts. THE THEOLOGICAL CLIMATE IN MASSACHUSETTS: The covenant or federalist theology was the dominating force in Puritan Massachusetts. This theology was so forceful that it intimately influenced the whole social, political, and ecclesiastical structure of the Bay Colony. The church polity of the covenant contained the leaven of democracy with its provision for voting and discussion amongst church members. Church and state were mutually supportive, but not in unity. ELIOT AS TEACHER AND PASTOR: In 1632, John Eliot was ordained a teacher in the First Church, Roxbury, "to teach Doctrine & therein to Administer a word of knowledge." The young Puritants vigorous ascetic tendencies adapted him well to his role. John Eliot helped guide the church during the dangerous times of the balky Roger Williams and the winsome Anne Hutchinson. He was one of the leaders at all of the early synods that helped to farm Congregational polity. At these synods, he was deeply involved in the Half-Way Covenant controversy. ELIOT'S EFFORTS FOR THE INDIANS: Eliot did his best to convert the Indians by making them conform to English patterns of life. He preached to them in their own tongue. He encouraged Indian publications, Indian towns, and Indian churches. The greatest single monument to Eliotts life was the translation of the Bible into Algonquin. The Bible was dedicated and presented to Charles II in 1664. Eliot's sacred, dedicated mission was a failure. War, vice, drunkenness, and disease hastened the demise of the Massachusetts Indians. Why did he fail? Probably because he was more concerned for the Indians(1) sinful condition than he was interested in the Indians(1) culture. The integrative nature of his theology forced him to look at the Indian in terms of himself. He tried to offer the Indian a religion, ideal and experience that he believed he had achieved for himself. He was only able to see the savage Indian world in terms of the civilized Puritan Reality. ELIOTIS OTHER LABORS: Eliot labored in a wide range of early Massachusetts life. For nearly sixty years he served a growing parish. He was their sole clergyman from 1642-1650, and 1674-1689. He served as "overseer" at Harvard College from 1642-1685. He established fourteen Indian towns, the Roxbury Latin School, and the Eliot School, Jamaica Plain. He printed fifteen Indian translations, including two entire editions of the Bible. He was the first to request funds for a college in North America. He was an editor of the first book printed in North America, The Bay Psalm Book. ELIOT'S LAST YEARS: Eliot's old age was mostly spent alone. He had buried his supportive wife and his five exemplary sons, three of whom were devoted to religious work. Only a daughter survived him. He watched the decline of the churches and the Indian mission. He saw the tyranny of Andros descend upon the colony and then lift again after the victory of William of Orange. A moment before death, at the age of eighty-six, he is recorded to have said, "Welcome joy!" He was not afraid to die. But the Massachusetts Indians had lost a great champion. / 2031-01-01

Thesis (Th. M.)--Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, 1990. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 121-126).

John Eliot (1604-1690) has been called ‘the apostle to the Indians’. This thesis looks at Eliot not from the perspective of modern Protestant ‘mission’ studies (the approach mainly adopted by previous research) but in the historical and theological context of 17th century puritanism. Drawing on recent research on migration to New England, the thesis argues that Eliot, like many other migrants, went to New England primarily in search of a safe haven to practise pure reformed Christianity, not to convert Indians. Eliot’s Indian ministry started from a fundamental concern for the conversion of the unconverted, which he derived from his experience of the puritan movement in England. Consequently, for Eliot, the notion of New England Indian ‘mission’ was essentially conversion-oriented, Wordcentred, and pastorally focussed, and (in common with the broader aims of New England churches) pursued a pure reformed Christianity. Eliot hoped to achieve this through the establishment of Praying Towns organised on a biblical model – where preaching, pastoral care and the practice of piety could lead to conversion – leading to the formation of Indian churches composed of ‘sincere converts’. The thesis starts with a critical historiographical reflection on how missiologists deploy the term ‘mission’, and proposes a perspectival shift for a better understanding of Eliot (Chapter 1). The groundwork for this new perspective is laid by looking at key themes in recent scholarship on puritanism, focusing on motives for the Great Migration, millenarian beliefs, and the desire for Indian conversion (Chapter 2). This chapter concludes that Indian conversion and millenarianism were not the main motives for Eliot’s migration to the New World, nor were his thoughts on the millennium an initial or lasting motive for Indian ministry. Next, the thesis investigates Eliot’s historical and theological context as a minister, through the ideas of puritan contemporaries in Old and New England, and presents a new perspective on Eliot by suggesting that conversion theology and pastoral theology were the most fundamental and lasting motives for his Indian ministry (Chapter 3). After the first three chapters, which relocate Eliot in his historical context, the last three chapters consider Eliot’s pastoral activities with the Indians. These have usually been understood as ‘mission’, without sufficient understanding of Eliot’s historical and theological context in the puritan movement and how he applied its ideas to Indian ministry. The thesis examines Eliot’s views on ‘Praying Towns’ as settlements for promoting civility and religion, and ‘Indian churches’ as congregations of true believers formed by covenant (Chapter 4). It investigates Eliot’s activities in the Indian communities, to apply puritan theology and ministerial practice to the Indians as his new parishioners (Chapter 5). Finally, the thesis offers a comparison of puritan and Indian conversion narratives, to try to recover Praying Indians’ own voices about conversion and faith (Chapter 6). This analysis finds both similarities and differences. The extent of the similarities does not necessarily mean (as some have alleged) that puritanism was unilaterally imposed on the Indians. The evidence equally well suggests a nuanced picture of Eliot’s engagement with the Indians from the perspective of 17th century puritanism and its conversion-oriented parish ministry.

The “Unreal City” of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land looms large over the landscape of critical inquiry into the metropolitan character of Anglo-American modernism. Characterized by the disorienting speed and chaos of modern life, the shock of harsh new environments and bewildering technologies, and the isolating and alienating effects of the inhuman urban mob, the city emerges here, so the story goes, as a site of extreme social disintegration and devastating psychic trauma; as a site that generates a textuality of overwhelming dynamism, phantasmagoric distortion, and subjective retreat. This dissertation complicates such conventional understandings of the city in modernism, proposing in place of the “Unreal City” a habitable one—an urban space and literature marked by the salutary everyday practices of city dwellers, the familiar environs of the metropolitan neighborhood, and the variety of literary modes that register such productive and adaptive dwelling processes. Taking seriously Rita Felski’s consideration of the “multiple worlds” of modernity, and thus diverging from the canonical formulations of modern urban experience put forth by the likes of Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, my work explores the richly ambivalent and ambiguous modernist response to the spatial complexities of the metropolis, drawing on the work of Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol in the two volumes of The Practice of Everyday Life to attend to the quotidian valences that signal a healthful engagement with the city. I uncover this metropoetics of habitability in the vexed response to the city’s network of interconnected spaces in T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations and The Waste Land; in the attention to the viable dwelling practices of individual urbanites—in contrast to city itself as dominant and dominating character—in John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer; in the routine daily operations on display in James Joyce’s Ulysses—breakfast, for instance, or running an errand; in the ordinary series of moments that constitute the work of everyday life in the familiar cityscape of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway; and finally in the broad-ranging depictions of urban life in Jean Rhys’s The Left Bank and Other Stories and Quartet.