Hour of the Witch

by Chris Bohjalian

Never did they ask the question Why me? In truth, they never even asked the more reasonable question Why anyone?

How do we, even now, make sense of the horrors that unfold every day, from genocide to pandemics to packed ferries that sink and airplanes that augur into the ground? For the seventeenth-century Puritans, whose lives were often (yes) mean, nasty, brutish, and short, the answers were sometimes found in the devil and the humans he enticed here on earth. They worked to please their God and keep Satan at bay, and, invariably, they were going to fail. The truth is, I’ve been interested in Puritan theology since college and still have my books from the courses I took. How did a desire to build a city on a hill go so horribly wrong in so many ways? The answer exists as much in the universals of human nature as it does in the particulars of their religion.