Abstract
Ultimately her book is a plea for the cultivation of memory as a vital activity of all human beings, and as a particularly essential, but widely neglected, element in the fullness of the Christian life. The work of remembrance becomes in her hands one of the distinctive features of a Christian's way of being in the world, just as much as the work of intercessory prayer or acts of charity and mercy. The simple act of Sabbath-keeping amounts to a radical refusal of the imperium of secular time and an insistence upon a "separate rhythm of darkness and light, joy and repentance," a vertical escape from the tyranny of the horizontal into the more fluid and unpredictable time of spiritual reality, in which (in Charles Taylor's words) "this year's Good Friday can be closer to the Crucifixion" than it is to the previous week's flow of ephemera. In her capacity as director for the Congregational Library in Boston, Bendroth gives talks at the anniversaries of particular churches reminding the remaining members of this influential but diminishing denomination of the larger story of which they are part, a story that began with New England Puritanism and thus has historical roots even deeper than those of the United States itself.