Title: Spider in a tree
Description: In his famous sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," Jonathan Edwards compared a person dangling a spider over a hearth to God holding a sinner over the fires of hell. Here, spiders and insects preach back. No voice drowns out all others: Leah, a young West African woman enslaved in the Edwards household; Edwards's young cousins Joseph and Elisha, whose father kills himself in fear for his soul; and Sarah, Edwards's wife, who is visited by ecstasy. Ordinary grace, human failings, and extraordinary convictions combine in unexpected ways to animate this New England tale.--
Subjects: Fiction, Preaching, History, Fiction, biographical, Fiction, historical, Massachusetts, fiction, Clergy, fiction, Preachers, FICTION / Historical, FICTION / Literary, FICTION / Religious
Places: Northampton (Mass.), Massachusetts
People: Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)
Time periods: Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775