This is a really interesting conversation between historians Francis Bremer, Jeff Cooper, Richard Boles, and Doug Winiarski. The Congregational Library and the New England Hidden History program sponsored this discussion. Watch:...
Douglas Winiarski
A History of the Jerks
No, this is not a political post. Over at The Panorama, University of Richmond religion professor Douglas Winiarski writes about the jerks, a “fascinating spirit possession phenomenon” often associated with certain forms of evangelical Christianity. It looks like this short...
Doug Winiarski on Teaching the Jerks
Doug Winiarski, the Bancroft Prize-winning historian and author of Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England, teaches the jerks. He explains at the Uncommon Sense: The Blog: Most of these texts eventually found their way into...
Bancroft Prize-Winner Douglas Wisnarski Talks About His Latest Project
Douglas Winiarski won the prestigious Bancroft Prize for his masterful interpretation of evangelical religion in New England titled Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England. (See our interview with Winiarski here). His latest...
Should Evangelicals Be Defined By Their Spiritual Commitments or Something Else?
(This is the second post in a series on the word “evangelical” in the eighteenth-century and today). In my first post in this three-post series, I made the case that there was a religious movement in the eighteenth-century that can...
Yes, There Was an “Evangelical” Movement in the Eighteenth Century and it Should Be Defined Theologically
(This is the first post in a series on the word “evangelical” in the eighteenth-century and today). If the Jonathan Merritt dust-up had a positive result, it was that it got historians thinking again about the meaning of the word...