Joseph A. Conforti

Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity: Theology, Ethics, and Social Reform in Mid-Eighteenth-Century New England

HE intellectual stress of the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century was simultaneously divisive and creative. It split New England theologians into contending camps, one of which grew from the teachings of Jonathan Edwards and represented the first indigenously American school of Calvinism. Proponents of the New Divinity, as the doctrines of this Edwardsian party came to be called, attempted to build a complete, consistent system of evangelical Calvinism around such critical issues of the Awakening as the nature of and need for spiritual rebirth, the authenticity of mass conversions, the role of means (prayer, Bible reading, and church attendance) in regeneration, and the coming of the millennium. In the years after the Awakening, and particularly during his Stockbridge exile (075I-I757), Edwards assumed the task of refining and systematizing the revivals theological implications. His untimely death at the height of his creative power in I758 left his ambitious project uncompleted. But in the years since the revival Edwards had attracted clerical followers who aided him in his efforts and continued his work. Edwardss closest friend and disciple was Samuel Hopkins. Born in Waterbury, Connecticut, in I72i, Hopkins graduated from Yale in I74I, studied for the ministry in Edwardss Northampton parsonage, and was ordained at Housatonic (renamed Great Barrington in I76i), Massachusetts, in I743.1 Eight years later, when Edwards settled in Stockbridge, Hopkins renewed their friendship and frequently made the thirty-minute horseback ride from Housatonic to the Indian mission. Upon Edwardss death, all of his unpublished papers were placed under Hopkinss care. From I770 to I803

Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture.

As the charismatic leader of the wave of religious revivals known as the Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) is one of the most important figures in American religious history. However, by the end of the eighteenth century, his writings were generally dismissed as remnants of a moribund Puritan tradition. Focusing on the publishing history and appropriation of Edwardss works by succeeding generations, Joseph Conforti explores the construction and manipulation of the Edwards legacy and demonstrates its central place in American cultural and religious history. Most of Edwardss writings were not regularly republished or widely read until the early nineteenth century, when he emerged as a prominent thinker both in academic circles and in the new popular religious culture of the Second Great Awakening. Even after the Civil War, Edwards remained a popular figure from the Puritan past for colonial revivalists. But by the early twentieth century, scholars had again reinvented Edwards, this time deemphasizing his influence. These contrasting constructions of the one man, Conforti says, reveal the dynamic process of cultural change.

Jonathan Edwards and American Studies@@@Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience@@@Wilderness Lost: The Religious Origins of the American Mind

This book establishes that there is a consistent tradition of wilderness imagery in American literature, A psychological reading of theology is applied to the writings of such authors as Thomas Hooker, Jonathan Edwards, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickinson.