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Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) is widely regarded as North America's most influential theologian. Throughout the early decades of his ministry he engaged in a public and sustained debate with 'Arminian' theology, a crusade that contributed significantly to the events of the Great Awakening. This book investigates the contours and substance of this theological war. In establishing a clearer historical context for this polemic, McClenahan seeks to overturn the scholarly consensus that Edwards' own theology was a twisting of the Reformed tradition. By demonstrating that Edwards' interlocutor was the dead English Archbishop, John Tillotson, McClenahan provides the hermeneutical key for many of Edwards' most significant works. Justification by faith is one of the most contested doctrines in contemporary theology and Jonathan Edwards, referred to as America's Augustine, wrote extensively on this area. His is a voice that many people are keen to hear.
Much of the previous fifty years of scholarship on Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) has circumscribed his ethical thought either within narrow interpretations of Calvinist theology or the philosophy of the “moral sense.” The mutually exclusive nature of each perspective has distorted the importance Edwards granted human abilities in the salvation process and the demanding moral standards he thought were uniquely defining of Christians. Building on new interest in Protestant scholasticism, Puritan “precisionism,” and virtue ethics, Virtue Reformed recalibrates the scholarly stalemate with a comprehensive rereading of both major published treatises and lesser-known discourses. The result is a fresh portrait of a fascinating eighteenth-century figure’s struggle to be both a forwarder of the Reformation and a participant in the Enlightenment.
During the many years that they were separated by the perils of the American Revolution, John and Abigail Adams exchanged hundreds of letters. Writing to each other of public events and private feelings, loyalty and love, revolution and parenting, they wove a tapestry of correspondence that has become a cherished part of American history and literature. With Abigail and John Adams, historian G. J. Barker-Benfield mines those familiar letters to a new purpose: teasing out the ways in which they reflected—and helped transform—a language of sensibility, inherited from Britain but, amid the revolutionary fervor, becoming Americanized. Sensibility—a heightened moral consciousness of feeling...
English Puritans of the Stuart era were divided by a number of questions. The greatest of these asked what constitutes salvation and restoration from sin. All agreed that it was by grace through faith. But few could agree on how to define sin, grace, and faith. Richard Sibbes consciously followed Augustine, Martin Luther, and John Calvin in defining sin as self-love and grace as God's redemptive love in Christ. His theology centered on the love of God expressed through Christ and offered by the Spirit; and faith as a response to that love. This produced a winsome and transforming theology of union with Christ and communion with God. In this he was a counterweight to the spread of moralistic Puritan theologies in his day.
An enlightening look at a unique and remarkable Jewish community
The diaspora of Portuguese Jews and New Christians, known as Gente da Nação (People of the Nation), is considered the largest European diaspora of the early modern period. Portuguese Jews not only founded the first congregations and synagogues in Brazil (Recife and Olinda), but when they left Brazil they played an imperative role in establishing the first Jewish communities in Suriname, throughout the Caribbean, and in North America. Drawing on nearly twenty thousand digitized dossiers of the Portuguese Inquisition, this volume offers a comprehensive, critical overview informed by both relatively inaccessible secondary sources and a significant body of primary sources.
This compilation of reader response to Jonathan Edwards, spanning 276 years, includes a reprint of two earlier works ? Jonathan Edwards: A Reference Guide (1981) and Jonathan Edwards: An Annotated Bibliography (1994) ? and the publication of a third, a gathering of commentary from 1994 to 2005. Nearly 140 essays have been added to the first and second works, while the last new gathering ? which includes a celebration of the tercentenary of Edwards??'s birth ? adds another 700 to the whole. The text preserves the pattern of arranging items alphabetically within a given year and of recording cross-references. Essays in a collection are annotated serially rather than alphabetically. Each of the three sections is self-contained with an introduction and annotated bibliography of its own. Adding to the immense value of this work to Edwards scholars are the chronology of Edwards??'s works, listed by date and by short and long title, which precedes the entire work, and the three comprehensive indexes ? of authors and titles, of subjects, and additions to the previous volumes.
In Gendered Crime and Punishment, Stacey Schlau mines the Inquisitional archive of Spain and Latin America in order to uncover the words and actions of accused women as transcribed in the trial records of the Holy Office. Although these are mediated texts, filtered through the formulae and norms of the religious institution that recorded them, much can be learned about the prisoners’ individual aspirations and experiences, as well as about the rigidly hierarchical, yet highly multicultural societies in which they lived. Chapters on Judaizing, false visions, possession by the Devil, witchcraft, and sexuality utilize case studies to unpack hegemonic ideologies and technologies, as well as individual responses. Filling in a gap in our understanding of the dynamics of gender in the early modern/colonial period, as it relates to women and gender, the book contributes to the growing scholarship in Inquisition cultural studies.
Scholars and laypersons alike regard Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) as North America's greatest theologian. The Theology of Jonathan Edwards is the most comprehensive survey of his theology yet produced and the first study to make full use of the recently-completed seventy-three-volume online edition of the Works of Jonathan Edwards. The book's forty-five chapters examine all major aspects of Edwards's thought and include in-depth discussions of the extensive secondary literature on Edwards as well as Edwards's own writings. Its opening chapters set out Edwards's historical and personal theological contexts. The next thirty chapters connect Edwards's theological loci in the temporally-ordered wa...
A concise, original overview of the History of English, focusing on its early development and subsequent spread around the world.