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The story of Princeton Theological Seminary, the Presbyterian Church's first seminary in America, begins in 1812, shortly after the United States had entered into its second war against Great Britain. Princeton went on to become a model of American theological education, setting the standard for subsequent seminaries and other religious higher education institutions. Princeton's story is uniquely intertwined with American religious and cultural history, the history of theological education, the Presbyterian church, and conceptions of ministry in general. Thus, this volume will interest not only those with links to Princeton but also historians of religion, Presbyterians, leaders within seminaries and Christian colleges, and all who are interested in the history of Christian thought in America.
In the nineteenth century, many American Protestants expected almost limitless, orderly progress as Christianity and democracy spread and as technology and prosperity increased. Yet they also believed that, many centuries hence, after progress had run its course, the Second Coming of Jesus and a supernatural End to the world would occur. If these Protestants had one foot in the world of steamships and the telegraph, the other remained firmly planted in the cosmos of the Apocalype--a universe where angels poured out vials of wrath, where the dead would rise again, and where the wicked would be cast forever into a lake of burning fire.
Especially in times of war Americans have claimed for their nation a unique world mission, often defining it in religious terms. James Moorhead analyzes a crucial episode of this patriotic piety through the behavior of four major Northern Protestant denominations in the 1860s. After examining the antebellum origins of the concept of America as a redeemer nation, he investigates the churches' use of familiar dogmas -- principally that of millennialism -- to interpret the experience of Civil War and Reconstruction.
Sharpening the debate over the values that formed America's founding political philosophy, Barry Alan Shain challenges us to reconsider what early Americans meant when they used such basic political concepts as the public good, liberty, and slavery. We have too readily assumed, he argues, that eighteenth-century Americans understood these and other terms in an individualistic manner. However, by exploring how these core elements of their political thought were employed in Revolutionary-era sermons, public documents, newspaper editorials, and political pamphlets, Shain reveals a very different understanding--one based on a reformed Protestant communalism. In this context, individual liberty w...
A provocative reassessment of religion and culture in the early days of the American republic "The so-called Second Great Awakening was the shaping epoch of American Protestantism, and this book is the most important study of it ever published."—James Turner, Journal of Interdisciplinary History Winner of the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic book prize, and the Albert C. Outler Prize In this provocative reassessment of religion and culture in the early days of the American republic, Nathan O. Hatch argues that during this period American Christianity was democratized and common people became powerful actors on the religious scene. Hatch examines five distinct traditions or mass movements that emerged early in the nineteenth century—the Christian movement, Methodism, the Baptist movement, the black churches, and the Mormons—showing how all offered compelling visions of individual potential and collective aspiration to the unschooled and unsophisticated.
Eli Washington Caruthers’s unpublished manuscript, American Slavery and the Immediate Duty of Southern Slaveholders, is the arresting and authentic alternative to the nineteenth-century hermeneutics that supported slavery. On the basis of Exodus 10.3—“Let my people go that they may serve me”—Caruthers argued that God was acting in history against all slavery. Unlike arguments guided largely by the New Testament, Caruthers believed that the Exodus text was a privileged passage to which all thinking on slavery must conform. As the most extensive development of the Exodus text within the field of antislavery literature, Caruthers’s manuscript is an invaluable primary source. It is especially relevant to historians’ current appraisal of the biblical sanction for slavery in nineteenth-century America because it does not correspond to characterizations of antislavery literature as biblically weak. To the contrary, an analysis of Caruthers’s manuscript reveals a thoroughly reasoned biblical argument unlike any other produced during the nineteenth century against the hermeneutics supporting slavery.
Both the North and the South viewed the Civil War in Christian terms. Each side believed that its fight was just, that God favored its cause. Rebuilding Zion is the first study to explore simultaneously the reaction of southern white evangelicals, northern white evangelicals, and Christian freedpeople to Confederate defeat. As white southerners struggled to assure themselves that the collapse of the Confederacy was not an indication of God's stern judgment, white northerners and freedpeople were certain that it was. Author Daniel W. Stowell tells the story of the religious reconstruction of the South following the war, a bitter contest between southern and northern evangelicals, at the heart...
Covering the period from roughly the Civil War to World War I, a collection of scholars explores how minority faiths in the United States met the challenges posed to them by the American Protestant mainstream. Contributors focus on Judaism, Catholicism, Mormonism, Protestant immigrant faiths, African American churches, and Native American religions.
Named one of the top religion books of 2002 by USA Today, Philip Jenkins's phenomenally successful The Next Christendom permanently changed the way people think about the future of Christianity. In that volume, Jenkins called the world's attention to the little noticed fact that Christianity's center of gravity was moving inexorably southward, to the point that Africa may soon be home to the world's largest Christian populations. Now, in this brilliant sequel, Jenkins takes a much closer look at Christianity in the global South, revealing what it is like, and what it means for the future. The faith of the South, Jenkins finds, is first and foremost a biblical faith. Indeed, in the global Sou...