John Updike's corpus is punctuated forcefully by his own magnum opus, the Rabbit series, a tetralogy that is simultaneously literature, cultural critique, and theology.

“The character of the place on which one Stands is the fundamental symbolic and social question,” Claims historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith. From this sense of place, there follows a “whole language of Symbols and social structures.” Studies of Methodist history have also considered sensitivity to Methodism's distinctive sense of place essential to their subject. It is now commonplace to observe that Methodism shattered the geographic bounds of church and parish in order to situate religion for activity across an open, unbounded terrain. This proved one of the most offending characteristics of its ministers, whose itineracy commonly violated civil laws intended to locate spatially religion. Within some traditions, the receipt of a “location” meant a minister received a church and thereby became a minister. Within Methodist discourse, granting a “location” has held quite the opposite meaning: it has meant a departure from the ministry.

In looking at the politics of the opening decades of the nineteenth Century, scholarly attention has been drawn to the self-destruction of the Federalists, the ascendancy of the Jeffersonian Republicans, or the emergence of the Jacksonian Democrats. What gets lost in the way scholars view this political drama is the coalescence of an American Whig identity, forged in the decade of the 1820's. At least part of this inattention can be explained by scholarly appraisals of the Whig party as intellectually incoherent, politically cynical, and, ultimately, unsuccessful.

The Whig position was, indeed, a curious one: the Whigs heralded the growth of the modern capitalist market that would unleash the forces of entrepreneurial individualism, yet they decried the loss of the precommercial values of deference, virtue, and hierarchical Community; they embraced the prosperity brought about by commerce, yet they feared the corruption of virtue that resulted from the pursuit of interest; and they looked forward to a capitalist economy while glancing back at an antidemocratic Federalism and Puritan moralism.

In 1933, a twenty-five-year-old writer named Richard Sullivan articulated for himself the qualities a novel should have. In a “Record of Work Begun and Ideas for Stories,” 1932-1933, he wrote:

When he wrote these words, Sullivan had not yet published a novel; the publication of his first short story in a national magazine was still three years away. He eventually published six of his novels and dozens of short stories while teaching English at the University of Notre Dame from 1936 to 1974. Few people have heard of him or his work, and, at first glance, his life looks commonplace, even prosaic—he never lived farther than one hundred miles from his birthplace and seldom traveled; he taught at the same place, largely the same courses, for thirty-eight years; he wrote and published for almost forty years, coming tantalizingly close to major success, which nonetheless always eluded him.

The story is a familiar one, found in nearly every narrative text of American religious history In the summer of 1806, five Williams College students met in a grove of trees to pray for divine guidance and to discuss their religious faith and calling. While seeking refuge from a summer rainstorm under a haystack, Samuel J. Mills, Jr., and the other four students consecrated their lives to overseas missions. This incident, later publicized as the Haystack Prayer Meeting, became the pivotal event in the launching of American Protestantism's foreign missionary movement. Mills and several comrades carried their vision from Williams to Andover Theological Seminary, where they created a more formal organization that eventually led to the establishment of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in 1810. In the hagiography of missions, Mills is revered as the “father” of American foreign missions and Williams as the birthplace. Subsequently, Mills's “sons”—the alumni of Williams—followed precedent: from 1810 to 1840, Williams provided more missionaries to the ABCFM than any other American College.

Considering the national and international furor provoked by the sensational early 1950's “atom spy” trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, one may be surprised that these dramatic and traumatic events have not inspired more literary artistry than they have. But a prominent playwright, Arthur Miller, did write The Crucible (produced in 1953) in part as a response to the rabid McCarthyism of that era, and two highly regarded novelists in a later decade composed ambitious novels drawing directly on the Rosenberg affair: E. L. Doctorow in The Book of Daniel (1971) and Robert Coover in The Public Burning (1977). In 1987, Sidney Lumet produced the little noticed film Daniel, based on Doctorow's novel, and still more recently Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Angels in America, with Ethel Rosenberg as one of the characters, has been playing on Broadway.

Philo-Semitism is America's enduring contribution to the long, troubled, often murderous dealings of Christians with Jews. Its origins are English, and it drew continuously on two centuries of British research into biblical prophecy from the seventeenth Century onward. Philo-Semitism was, however, soon “domesticated” and adapted to the political and theological climate of America after independence. As a result, it changed as America changed. In the early national period, religious literature abounded that foresaw the conversion of the Jews and the restoration of Israel as the ordained task of the millennial nation—the United States. This scenario was, allowing for exceptions, socially and theologically optimistic and politically liberal, as befit the ethos of a revolutionary era. By the eve of Civil War, however, countless evangelicals cleaved to a darker vision of Christ's return in blood and upheaval. They disparaged liberal social views and remained loyal to an Augustinian theology that others modified or abandoned.

This article investigates the contribution of several twentieth-century women writers to the legacy of women's writing about child death and scriptural consolation. The suffering and death of children constitutes the most intractable of religious problems, and recent studies of parental grieving support women's literary treatment of child death. Thus, just as child death creates a unique religious space, it may also demand its own literary category and aesthetic. By considering the unique dimensions of parental grieving, and by looking at how Perri Klass, Toni Morrison, and Harriette Arnow handle this subject, it is possible to gain fresh literary perspective on the fiction of nineteenth-century American women, many of whom also addressed the problem of child death and scriptural consolation. Women writers create children who are more than literary or symbolic commodities, and, in so doing, these writers challenge us to reevaluate scriptural and social perspectives on child death.