As I wait for the translation of Luigi Giussani's study on American Protestantism, I'm doing what I can to better understand my religious heritage as an American. To that end, I'm looking at books which can introduce me and others to the main themes and historical schema of the distinctly American and yet authentically Christian experience.
One resource that I've recently become aware of is the Library of Religious Biography from Eerdmans Publishing edited by Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, Allen C. Guelzo. Although there are a few Europeans in the lot, the series has done well to focus on American figures, Protestant and Catholic.
Right now, I'm most interested in A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards by George Marsden (who previously wrote a full biography of Edwards) and Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America by Barry Hankins.
Here's the editorial statement and list of titles in the series:
The Library of Religious Biography is a series of original biographies on important religious figures throughout American and British history.
The authors are well-known historians, each a recognized authority in the period of religious history in which his or her subject lived and worked. Grounded in solid research of both published and archival sources, these volumes link the lives of their subjects — not always thought of as “religious” persons — to the broader cultural contexts and religious issues that surrounded them. Each volume includes a bibliographical essay and an index to serve the needs of students, teachers, and researchers.
Marked by careful scholarship yet free of footnotes and academic jargon, the books in this series are well-written narratives meant to be read and enjoyed as well as studied.
Titles in this Series:
Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President
Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody's Sister
Assist Me to Proclaim: The Life and Hymns of Charles Wesley
Billy Sunday and the Redemption of Urban America
Blaise Pascal: Reasons of the Heart
Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism
The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism
Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief
Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America
God's Strange Work: William Miller and the End of the World
Her Heart Can See: The Life and Hymns of Fanny J. Crosby
Occupy until I Come: A. T. Pierson and the Evangelization of the World
Orestes A. Brownson: American Religious Weathervane
Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White
The Puritan as Yankee: A Life of Horace Bushnell
A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards
Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Merton and the Monastic Vision
William Ewart Gladstone: Faith and Politics in Victorian Britain
2 comments:
One thought: in order to understand the american heritage one has to deeply understand the british religious history. And that is one long series of irrational events (same for the political history of France, or the philosophical history of Russia, or the economic history of China).
First of all, history is reasonable. Just because I can't wrap my head around something doesn't make it irrational.
And second, yes, English religious history is critical in understanding American religion. England was unusual in that it was a political Protestantism more than a doctrinal Protestantism and therefore included everyone from high church Anglicans to levelers.
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