Overview

The important role of the parish in the lives of early Virginians; In this book, John Nelson reconstructs everyday Anglican religious practice and experience in Virginia from the end of the seventeenth century to the start of the American Revolution. Challenging previous characterizations of the colonial Anglican establishment as weak, he reveals the fundamental role the church played in the political, social, and economic as well as the spiritual lives of its parishioners. Drawing on extensive research in parish and county records and other primary sources, Nelson describes Anglican Virginia's parish system, its parsons, its rituals of worship and rites of passage, and its parishioners' varied relationships to the church. All colonial Virginians - men and women, rich and poor, young and old, planters and merchants, servants and slaves, dissenters and free-thinkers - belonged to a parish. As such, they were subject to its levies, its authority over marriage, and other social and economic dictates. In addition to its religious functions, the parish provided essential care for the poor, collaborated with the courts to handle civil disputes, and exerted its influence over many other aspects of community life. A Blessed Company demonstrates that, by creatively adapting Anglican parish organization and the language, forms, and modes of Anglican spirituality to the Chesapeake's distinctive environmental and human conditions, colonial Virginians sustained a remarkably effective and faithful Anglican church in the Old Dominion.

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9780807826638

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This magisterial book reveals the Anglican Church in Virginia as institutional, professional, spiritual, and communal. (Robert M. Calhoon, author of Dominion and Liberty: Ideology in the Anglo-American World, 1660-1801 ) In this impressively researched study, John Nelson explains more thoroughly than any previous work has done the process by which the established church in early Virginia adapted to circumstances in the colony and thereby developed an institutional structure for the Anglican Church that differed in important respects from that in England. (Thad W. Tate, coauthor of Colonial Virginia: A History )

In this impressively researched study, John Nelson explains more thoroughly than any previous work has done the process by which the established church in early Virginia adapted to circumstances in the colony and thereby developed an institutional structure for the Anglican Church that differed in important respects from that in England. (Thad W. Tate, coauthor of ""Colonial Virginia: A History"") This magisterial book reveals the Anglican Church in Virginia as institutional, professional, spiritual, and communal. (Robert M. Calhoon, author of ""Dominion and Liberty: Ideology in the Anglo-American World, 1660-1801"")

In this impressively researched study, John Nelson explains more thoroughly than any previous work has done the process by which the established church in early Virginia adapted to circumstances in the colony and thereby developed an institutional structure for the Anglican Church that differed in important respects from that in England. (Thad W. Tate, coauthor of Colonial Virginia: A History )

Author Information

John Nelson, RN, MS, PhDc, University of Minnesota, is President for Healthcare Environment, Inc., an international data management/ consultation company. His experience includes 14 years of clinical (med/surg and coronary care, Abbott-Northwestern Hospital) and 10 years of data management and consultation for healthcare organizations. He has published in Watson's Assessing and Measuring Caring in Nursing and Health Sciences (Springer), in peer reviewed nursing journals and presented at 20+ conferences nationwide He is a member of Sigma Theta Tau, AONE, and American College of Health Executives.

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