Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience


Book Description

Universally recognized as a seminal figure in American intellectual history, Jonathan Edwards has been the focus of considerable scholarly attention in a variety of academic disciplines, including religion, history, literature, and philosophy. Because these disciplines discuss him in relation to different intellectual traditions, Edwards scholarship remains segmented. This volume represents the first attempt to provide a synthetic vision of Edwards and his contributions to American culture. Its fifteen previously unpublished essays present the best contemporary literary, historical, theological, and philosophical thinking on Edwards, locating him in his full historical context and demonstrating the continuity of his influence. Together, they provide the fullest account to date of his role in the development of the American consciousness. This volume is the first attempt to provide a synthetic vision of Edwards and his contribution to the development of the American consciousness. Fifteen previously unpublished essays present the best contemporary literary, historical, theological, and philosophical thinking on Edwards, locating him in his full historical context and demonstrating the continuity of his influence.




The Experience That Counts


Book Description

What does it mean to be a Christian? What is conversion? These questions are not new, Jonathan Edwards, the great American theologian tackled these, and many other, against the background of the First Great Awakening. These questions, and the answers Edwards gives to them, are profoundly relevant to us today.




Encounters with God


Book Description

Among the topics considered are spiritual perception, metaphysics, spirituality, ethics, history, and apologetics."--BOOK JACKET.




Jonathan Edwards and the Ministry of the Word


Book Description

Jonathan Edwards has been recognized as the most influential evangelical theologian of all time. Before his death at the age of fifty-four, he had sparked a new movement of Reformed evangelicals who played a major role in fueling the rise of modern missions, preaching revivals far and wide, and wielding the cutting edge of American theology. He has never gone out of print, and Christians today continue to flock to seminars and conferences on him. In this biography of the great preacher and teacher, historian Douglas Sweeney locates for us the core and key to Edwards' enduring impact. Sweeney finds that Edwards' profound and meticulous study of the Bible securely anchored his powerful preaching, his lively theological passions and his discerning pastoral work. Beyond introducing you to Edwards' life and times, this book will provide you with a model of Christian faith, thought and ministry.




A God Entranced Vision of All Things


Book Description

Ten essays highlight different aspects of Jonathan Edwards's life and legacy and show how his teachings are just as relevant today as they were three centuries ago.




A Natural History of Pragmatism


Book Description

Joan Richardson provides a fascinating and compelling account of the emergence of the quintessential American philosophy: pragmatism. She demonstrates pragmatism's engagement with various branches of the natural sciences and traces the development of Jamesian pragmatism from the late nineteenth century through modernism, following its pointings into the present. Richardson combines strands from America's religious experience with scientific information to offer interpretations that break new ground in literary and cultural history. This book exemplifies the value of interdisciplinary approaches to producing literary criticism. In a series of highly original readings of Edwards, Emerson, William and Henry James, Stevens, and Stein, A Natural History of Pragmatism tracks the interplay of religious motive, scientific speculation, and literature in shaping an American aesthetic. Wide-ranging and bold, this groundbreaking book will be essential reading for all students and scholars of American literature.




The Essential Jonathan Edwards


Book Description

You've heard his name, you've probably heard your pastor quote him, but who is he really? 250 years later, Jonathan Edwards, America’s consummate pastor-theologian, continues to capture the attention of Christians around the world. Yet Edwards left us over 1,200 sermons and thousands of pages of other publications, not to mention the literal thousands of books that have been written about Edwards since he died. Where does one even begin? That’s why we created The Essential Jonathan Edwards. It serves as a perfect introduction to Edwards’s life and thought. It explores Edwards day-to-day life, and his views on beauty, true Christianity, heaven and hell, and the good life. Strachan and Sweeney strike the perfect balance between necessary background information and giving Edwards’s own works room to speak. Whether you’re an Edwards fan already or only know Edwards because of “that Angry God sermon,” this book will lead you to drink deeply of Scripture and gaze longingly at God.




A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards


Book Description




Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of History


Book Description

Avihu Zakai analyzes Jonathan Edwards's redemptive mode of historical thought in the context of the Enlightenment. As theologian and philosopher, Edwards has long been a towering figure in American intellectual history. Nevertheless, and despite Edwards's intense engagement with the nature of time and the meaning of history, there has been no serious attempt to explore his philosophy of history. Offering the first such exploration, Zakai considers Edwards's historical thought as a reaction, in part, to the varieties of Enlightenment historical narratives and their growing disregard for theistic considerations. Zakai analyzes the ideological origins of Edwards's insistence that the process of history depends solely on God's redemptive activity in time as manifested in a series of revivals throughout history, reading this doctrine as an answer to the threat posed to the Christian theological teleology of history by the early modern emergence of a secular conception of history and the modern legitimation of historical time. In response to the Enlightenment refashioning of secular, historical time and its growing emphasis on human agency, Edwards strove to re-establish God's preeminence within the order of time. Against the de-Christianization of history and removal of divine power from the historical process, he sought to re-enthrone God as the author and lord of history--and thus to re-enchant the historical world. Placing Edwards's historical thought in its broadest context, this book will be welcomed by those who study early modern history, American history, or religious culture and experience in America.




Jonathan Edwards


Book Description

Jonathan Edwards (1703?58) was preeminent as a theologian in the eighteenth century American colonies, deeply involved in the religious revival known as the Great Awakening. He was also the first American Puritan, or Calvinist, to recognize the challenges to traditional views of the world posed by figures like John Locke and Isaac Newton. Thus he is a pivotal figure as American thought evolved from heavily religious beginnings toward populism and a new rationalism in the young nation. His many books include Freedom of the Will, Religious Affections, and Original Sin, although he is probably best known for a legendary sermon he titled ?Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.? ø Perry Miller?s study of Jonathan Edwards as a writer and an artist is regarded as one of the great studies of ?the life of a mind.? He challenges readers to understand Edwards as an intellectual who, living in his own time and place, wrestled with issues relevant to the modern world. This Bison Books edition, with an introduction by John F. Wilson, will help to introduce Jonathan Edwards to a new generation of readers.