For the Puritans, the God-centered life meant making the quest for spiritual and moral holiness the great business of life.

My claim is simply that the literary approach is one necessary way to read and interpret the Bible, an approach that has been unjustifiably neglected. Despite that neglect, the literary approach builds at every turn on what biblical scholars have done to recover the original, intended meaning of the biblical text.

Puritanism was a youthful, vigorous movement.

The goal of Bible translation is: be transparent to the original text - to see as clearly as possible what the biblical authors actually wrote.

The Puritans were obsessed with the dangers of wealth.

Writers themselves benefit from all helpful information about their task and methods. Readers, in turn, can have both their understanding and appreciation of literature enhanced by information about the writer's work.

Literature incarnates its meanings as concretely as possible. The knowledge that literature gives of a subject is the kind of knowledge that is obtained by (vicariously) living through an experience.