Product Description
by Stephen J. Stein (Editor)
"This book will take its place in libraries next to the finest works abou;this creative thinker." --Religious Studies Review
". . . gives a fine sense of the present state and the future direction of Edwards studies . . . Recommended for upper-division undergraduate and graduate students." --Choice
" . . . this volume opens up new windows, not only on previously neglected texts of Jonathan Edwards, but on the larger cultural functions and effects of those texts." --Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
Here is a compact survey of current Edwards scholarship. These essays present groundbreaking contemporary scholarship focusing on the writings of the 18th-century American philosopher and theologian Jonathan Edwards. They range widely across the Edwardsian canon, including his most prominent and important published texts--Religious Affections and The Nature of True Virtue--as well as unfamiliar treatises and sermons.
Back Jacket
This collection of essays presents groundbreaking contemporary scholarship on the writings of the eighteenth-century American philosopher and theologian Jonathan Edwards. These essays range widely across the Edwardsian canon, including his most prominent and important published texts - Religious Affections and The Nature of True Virtue - as well as unfamiliar and unpublished treatises and sermons. They measure Edwards against significant Western religious and philosophical figures including Solomon Stoddard, Thomas Shepard, George Berkeley, and William James. The current debate concerning the nineteenth-century Edwardsian tradition is also featured in essays which show prominent American evangelicals, such as Nathaniel William Taylor, Charles Grandison Finney, and Edwards Amasa Park, competing for the mantle of Edwards. A compact survey of current Edwards scholarship, this book engages the full range of Edwards's writings and shows their central importance for the history of American religion and culture.
Author Biography
STEPHEN J. STEIN (1940-2022) was Chancellors' Professor of Religious Studies, Adjunct Professor of History, and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He was a member of the Editorial Board of The Works of Jonathan Edwards, editor of volume 5 in that edition (Apocalyptic Writings) and author of The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers, which was awarded the Philip Schaff Prize in 1994 by the American Society of Church History.
