Download or read book Inventing George Whitefield written by Jessica M. Parr and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2015-03-18 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evangelicals and scholars of religious history have long recognized George Whitefield (1714-1770) as a founding father of American evangelicalism. But Jessica M. Parr argues he was much more than that. He was an enormously influential figure in Anglo-American religious culture, and his expansive missionary career can be understood in multiple ways. Whitefield began as an Anglican clergyman. Many in the Church of England perceived him as a radical. In the American South, Whitefield struggled to reconcile his disdain for the planter class with his belief that slavery was an economic necessity. Whitefield was drawn to an idealized Puritan past that was all but gone by the time of his first visit to New England in 1740. Parr draws from Whitefield's writing and sermons and from newspapers, pamphlets, and other sources to understand Whitefield's career and times. She offers new insights into revivalism, print culture, transatlantic cultural influences, and the relationship between religious thought and slavery. Whitefield became a religious icon shaped in the complexities of revivalism, the contest over religious toleration, and the conflicting role of Christianity for enslaved people. Proslavery Christians used Christianity as a form of social control for slaves, whereas evangelical Christianity's emphasis on "freedom in the eyes of God" suggested a path to political freedom. Parr reveals how Whitefield's death marked the start of a complex legacy that in many ways rendered him more powerful and influential after his death than during his long career.

Download or read book George Whitefield written by Nigel D Scotland and published by Lion Books. This book was released on 2019-06-21 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Whitefield proclaimed the Christian message to more people in history than anyone else, before or since, who spoke with an unaided voice. A preacher of revival almost from his childhood, when he prophesied his own destiny, he had a profound impact on the social, religious and political life of both Britain and America. He crossed the Atlantic thirteen times, and merged as a celebrity figure, whose message captivated both rich and poor alike. Whitefield heralded a new kind of revival that was both spiritually powerful and entertaining at the same time. He was also a man of contradictions. He loved the Anglican liturgy but would happily break canon law. He was a devoted Puritan yet he was also able to befriend those with more liberal morals, Above all, Whitefield was a driven man, and his overwhelming passion was to preach New Birth in Christ - the theme he was to speak on over a thousand times. He valued education, opposed slavery, cared for orphan children and changed the course of both British and American history.

Download or read book The Significance of the Printed Word in Early America written by Julie K. Williams and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1999-04-30 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American press played a significant role in the transference of European civilization to America and in the shaping of American society. Settlement entrepreneurs used the press to persuade Europeans to come to America. Immigrants brought religious tracts with them to spread Puritanism and other doctrines to Native Americans and the white population. The colonists used the press to openly debate issues, print advertisements for business, and as a source of entertainment. But what did the colonists actually think about the press? The author has gathered information from primary sources to explore this question. Diaries and journals reveal how the colonists valued local news, often preferring American news to European news. This concentrated focus upon colonial attitudes and thoughts toward the press covers the period of colonial settlement from the 1500s through 1765. This book will appeal to scholars and students of American history and communication history. Primary documents expressing the colonists' thoughts will also be of interest to scholars and students of American thought, American philosophy, and early American literature and writing.

Download or read book Proslavery and Sectional Thought in the Early South 1740 1829 written by Jeffrey Robert Young and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2020-09-23 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirteen treatises recall the history of slavery's defenders beginning in the colonial South In Proslavery and Sectional Thought in the Early South, 1740–1829, Jeffrey Robert Young has assembled thirteen texts that reveal the development of proslavery perspectives across the colonial and early national South, from Maryland to Georgia. The tracts, lectures, sermons, and petitions in this volume demonstrate that defenses of human bondage had a history in southern thought that long predated the later antebellum era traditionally associated with the genesis of such positive defenses of slavery. Previous anthologies, notably Drew Gilpin Faust's The Ideology of Slavery, have made the perspectives of antebellum slavery's defenders widely available to scholars and students, but earlier proslavery thinkers have remained largely inaccessible to modern readers. Young's anthology offers a corrective. In his introduction to the volume, Young explores the relationship between proslavery thought, Christianity, racism, and sectionalism. He emphasizes the ways in which justifications for slavery were introduced into the American South by reformers who hoped to integrate the region into a transatlantic religious community. These early proponents of slavery tended to minimize racial distinctions between master and slave, and they hoped to minimize the cultural distance between southern plantations and English society. Only in the early nineteenth century—with the rise of an increasingly influential abolition movement—did proslavery thinkers begin to justify their beliefs with approaches that underscored differences between North and South. Even then the theorists included in this anthology emphasized the extent to which southern slaveholders' claims to mastery were rooted in a Western moral tradition that reached back to antiquity.

Download or read book New Directions in American Religious History written by Harry S. Stout and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eighteen essays collected in this book originate from a conference of the same title, held at the Wingspread Conference Center in October of 1993. Leading scholars were invited to reflect on their specialties in American religious history in ways that summarized both where the field is and where it ought to move in the decades to come. The essays are organized according to four general themes: places and regions, universal themes, transformative events, and marginal groups and ethnocultural "outsiders." They address a wide range of specific topics including Puritanism, Protestantism and economic behavior, gender and sexuality in American Protestantism, and the twentieth-century de-Christianization of American public culture. Among the contributors are such distinguished scholars as David D. Hall, Donald G. Matthews, Allen C. Guelzo, Gordon S. Wood, Daniel Walker Howe, Robert Wuthnow, Jon Butler, David A. Hollinger, Harry S. Stout, and John Higham. Taken together, these essays reveal a rapidly expanding field of study that is breaking out of its traditional confines and spilling into all of American history. The book takes the measure of the changes of the last quarter-century and charts numerous challenges to future work.

Download or read book Babel Church written by Li Ma and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Assisted by a diverse mass media industry, American evangelicalism has been long plagued by consumerism, entrepreneurism, and social engineering. Churches and movements that carry the name of Christ have become projects of ambition and scandals in the public eye. Without fixing its dysfunctions, these ministry models have expanded to other parts of the world, reaping similar fruits of corruption, prejudice, and abuses. The alarm call of #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements since 2017 made it more urgent for the global body of Christ to inspect its pathological patterns. What kind of response does the #MeToo movement require of our public theology and leadership ethics? Sociologist Li Ma invites us to re-engage with biblical exegesis while being attentive to new mandates of God revealed from #MeToo. A creative Ellulian integration of sociological analysis and theology, Babel Church incisively reveals why American evangelicalism and its global projects have succumbed to the temptations of worldly power at the expense of vulnerable members in the body of Christ.

Download or read book The Financing of John Wesley s Methodism c 1740 1800 written by Clive Murray Norris and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-09 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dominant activities of the eighteenth century Wesleyan Methodist Connexion, in terms of expenditure, were the support of itinerant preaching, and the construction and maintenance of preaching houses. These were supported by a range of both regular and occasional flows of funds, primarily from members' contributions, gifts from supporters, various forms of debt finance, and profits from the Book Room. Three other areas of action also had significant financial implications for the movement: education, welfare, and missions. The Financing of John Wesley's Methodism c.1740-1800 describes what these activities cost, and how the money required was raised and managed. Though much of the discussion is informed by financial and other quantitative data, Clive Norris examines a myriad of human struggles, and the conflict experienced by many early Wesleyan Methodists between their desire to spread the Gospel and the limitations of their personal and collective resources. He describes the struggle between what Methodists saw as the promptings of Holy Spirit and their daily confrontation with reality, not least the financial constraints which they faced.

Download or read book Faith in Reading written by David Paul Nord and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-08-19 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the remarkable story of the unlikely origins of modern media culture. In the early 19th century, a few entrepreneurs decided the time was right to launch a true mass media in America. Though they were savvy businessmen, their publishing enterprises were not commercial businesses but nonprofit religious organizations.

Download or read book African American Religion written by David Musa and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2015-07-06 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature on North American slavery is almost inexhaustible but negligent of the religious culture of the slaves, most especially African-American Christianity. As noted in Robert Handys insightful article, for several decades AfricanAmerican Christianity appeared only as incidentals in the general historiography of American Church history. Considering the immeasurably positive role of the Church in the lives of African-Americans, this oversight is almost inexcusable. Even where studies in slave Christianity have been attempted one would search in vain for any substantial discussion of the mutual effects of the slaves original African religion and Christianity. Thus this study is a contribution to recent explorations into that vital aspect of the history of African slaves in North America their Christianization. The study focuses on the question of why the African slaves were apparently more responsive to Christianity in the Great Awakenings than during the previous evangelization efforts by the Anglican missionaries. I propose that the continuities as well as discontinuities between Christianity and African Traditional Religion were key among determinant factors in the slaves response to Christianity. Basically, the slaves responded to the type of Christianity in which these factors were more prominent, the Great Awakenings vis--vis the Anglican version. The first chapter of this study highlights the problem of past inattention to slave Christianity, especially as it relates to African Traditional Religion. In Chapter two, I argue for both West Africa as the original home of the slaves and African Traditional Religion as the predominant religious culture of that region. The third chapter describes the process, personnel, and problems encountered in slave Christianization. Chapters four and five analyze and evaluate the impact of Christianizing efforts by the Anglican missionaries and revival evangelists respectively. Chapter six summarizes and discusses the value of my findings for the African-American Church and Christianity in general. The study contains suggestions for further research.

Download or read book Religion and the Marketplace in the United States written by Jan Stievermann and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays focuses on the diverse interactions between religious and commercial practices in U.S. history. Studying religion and the marketplace from various angles, each chapter offers insights into a long and intimate relationship between two aspects of American culture.

Download or read book Governing the Tongue written by Jane Kamensky and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1999-02-18 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Governing the Tongue explains why the spoken word assumed such importance in the culture of early New England. In a work that is at once historical, socio-cultural, and linguistic, Jane Kamensky explores the little-known words of unsung individuals, and reconsiders such famous Puritan events as the banishment of Anne Hutchinson and the Salem witch trials, to expose the ever-present fear of what the Puritans called "sins of the tongue." But even while dangerous or deviant speech was restricted, as Kamensky illustrates here, godly speech was continuously praised and promoted. Congregations were told that one should lift one's voice "like a trumpet" to God and "cry out and cease not." By placing speech at the heart of New England's early history, Kamensky develops new ideas about the complex relationship between speech and power in both Puritan New England and, by extension, our world today.

Download or read book Slavery Propaganda and the American Revolution written by Patricia Bradley and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2010-04-08 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under the leadership of Samuel Adams, patriot propagandists deliberately and conscientiously kept the issue of slavery off the agenda as goals for freedom were set for the American Revolution. By comparing coverage in the publications of the patriot press with those of the moderate colonial press, this book finds that the patriots avoided, misinterpreted, or distorted news reports on blacks and slaves, even in the face of a vigorous antislavery movement. The Boston Gazette, the most important newspaper of the Revolution, was chief among the periodicals that dodged or excluded abolition. The author of this study shows that The Gazette misled its readers about the notable Somerset decision that led to abolition in Great Britain. She notes also that The Gazette excluded anti-slavery essays, even from patriots who supported abolition. No petitions written by Boston slaves were published, nor were any writings by the black poet Phillis Wheatley. The Gazette also manipulated the racial identity of Crispus Attucks, the first casualty in the Revolution. When using the word slavery, The Gazette took care to focus it not upon abolition but upon Great Britain's enslavement of its American colonies. Since propaganda on behalf of the Revolution reached a high level of sophistication, and since Boston can be considered the foundry of Revolutionary propaganda, the author writes that the omission of abolition from its agenda cannot be considered as accidental but as intentional. By the time the Revolution began, white attitudes toward blacks were firmly fixed, and these persisted long after American independence had been achieved. In Boston, notions of virtue and vigilance were shown to be negatively embodied in black colonists. These devil's imps were long represented in blackface in Boston's annual Pope Day parade. Although the leaders of the Revolution did not articulate a national vision on abolition, the colonial anti-slavery movement was able to achieve a degree of success, but only in drives through the individual colonies.

Download or read book Contested Boundaries written by Timothy D. Hall and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The First Great Awakening in eighteenth-century America challenged the institutional structures and raised the consciousness of colonial Americans. These revivals gave rise to the practice of itinerancy in which ministers and laypeople left their own communities to preach across the countryside. In Contested Boundaries, Timothy D. Hall argues that the Awakening was largely defined by the ensuing debate over itinerancy. Drawing on recent scholarship in cultural and social anthropology, cultural studies, and eighteenth-century religion, he reveals at the center of this debate the itinerant preacher as a catalyst for dramatic change in the religious practice and social order of the New World. This book expands our understanding of evangelical itinerancy in the 1740s by viewing it within the context of Britain's expanding commercial empire. As pro- and anti-revivalists tried to shape a burgeoning transatlantic consumer society, the itinerancy of the Great Awakening appears here as a forceful challenge to contemporary assumptions about the place of individuals within their social world and the role of educated leaders as regulators of communication, order, and change. The most celebrated of these itinerants was George Whitefield, an English minister who made unprecedented tours through the colonies. According to Hall, the activities of the itinerants, including Whitefield, encouraged in the colonists an openness beyond local boundaries to an expanding array of choices for belief and behavior in an increasingly mobile and pluralistic society. In the process, it forged a new model of the church and its social world. As a response to and a source of dynamic social change, itinerancy in Hall's powerful account provides a prism for viewing anew the worldly and otherworldly transformations of colonial society. Contested Boundaries will be of interest to students and scholars of colonial American history, religious studies, and cultural and social anthropology.

Download or read book The Printer and the Preacher written by Randy Petersen and published by HarperChristian + ORM. This book was released on 2015-06-09 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They were the most famous men in America. They came from separate countries, followed different philosophies, and led dissimilar lives. But they were fast friends. No two people did more to shape America in the mid-1700s. Benjamin Franklin was the American prototype: hard-working, inventive, practical, funny, with humble manners and lofty dreams. George Whitefield was the most popular preacher in an era of great piety, whose outdoor preaching across the colonies was heard by thousands, all of whom were told, “You must be born again.” People became excited about God. They began reading the Bible and supporting charities. When Whitefield died in 1770, on a preaching tour in New Hampshire, he had built a spiritual foundation for a new nation—just as his surviving friend, Ben Franklin, had built its social foundation. Together these two men helped establish a new nation founded on liberty. This is the story of their amazing friendship.

Download or read book From Mounds to Megachurches written by David Salter Williams and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-01-25 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This sweeping overview of the role religion, especially diverse denominations of Christianity, has played in Georgia's history, from pre-colonial days to the modern era, uses the stories of important figures to portray larger historical narratives and denominational battles.

Download or read book Telling the Story written by Andrew G. Walker and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2004-12-03 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a story, once widely known, that tells us who we are, where we came from, and where we are going. This story is told by Christians and it is called the gospel - the good news of the kingdom of God as revealed in the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Today the story has become one story among many. Andrew Walker argues for its recovery and a retelling appropriate for our postmodern culture so that it may again become a story to share, and a message of hope for the world.

Download or read book Jonathan Edwards s Apologetic for the Great Awakening written by Robert Davis Smart and published by Reformation Heritage Books. This book was released on 2011-06-06 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1740s Jonathan Edwards emerged as the New Light proponent of the claim that the Great Awakening was, in the main, a true work of the Spirit of God. Conversely, Charles Chauncy led the Old Lights in opposition by offering criticisms of the Awakening. In this book, Robert Davis Smart examines Edwards’s defense of the revival with particular attention to Chauncy’s criticisms, which have often been acknowledged but not previously subjected to thorough analysis. He sets forth historical and contextual factors that shaped Edwards and his generation, shows how Edwards emerged as a leader of the revival from its early days, and offers an updated survey of the modern attempts to interpret the Awakening theologically, sociologically, and historically. Here is a detailed treatment of the contrasting perspectives of Edwards and Chauncy, an extensive analysis of their major works regarding the revival, an able assessment of the essential issues raised by the debate, and an evaluation of the significant contributions of these men. Table of Contents: Introduction to Edwards’s Historical Context Chapter One: Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening Chapter Two: Interpretations of the Awakening Chapter Three: The Distinguishing Marks and Some Thoughts Chapter Four: Chauncy’s Seasonable Thoughts Chapter Five: Edwards’s Final Response to Chauncy Conclusion: The Debate and Its Legacy