Boston Catholics

Előszó

Introduction
Boston is a town where people have always taken their religion seriously. From the very be-ginnings of the so-called Bible Commonwealth in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the questions of the nature of God, the sinfulness of humán beings, and the prospects of eternal salvation were uppermost in the minds of all citizens. It would be impossible to write the history of colonial Boston without seriously examining the origins of Puri-tanism, the structure of the congregational system, and the impact of spiritual influences on the everyday lives of men, women, and children.
Throughout the eighteenth century, and well into the nineteenth, theological precepts and morál convictions helped shape the public character of the city and the personal lives of its people. The rise of Unitarianism in the early 1800s provided an optimistic response to old -time Calvinism, and the new religious movement was so closely identified with the Northeastern community that many persons re-ferred to it as "the Boston religion." It replaced the fierce God of judg-ment and punishment with a more beneficent God of love and protec-tion; it rejected the idea that all people were born sinful, in favor of a belief that all persons were born basically good and potentially perfectible; and it held out the prospect of salvation, not just for the "saints" and the "elect", but for all who lived their lives in a spirit of brotherhood under the fatherhood of God. Vissza