Over at JSTOR Daily, Ed Simons offers an annotation of the famous 1741 sermon. A taste: Often remembered as the prototypical “fire and brimstone” sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” reflects the complicated religious background of eighteenth-century...
If you’ve been following my ongoing curation of the Asbury University revival going on right now, you will see that there are a lot of skeptics. Anyone who knows something about the history of revivalism in the United States is...
I first read historian Paul E. Johnson’s 1978 book A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 in 1989 while I was studying church history at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Johnson argued that evangelical religion in Rochester,...
Two years before Jonathan Edwards preached “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God” he suffered through what historian Philip Jenkins calls a “horrific period of extreme weather and glacial cold.” Here is Jenkins at History News Network: Scholars of...
I was going to include this in my MAGA evangelicals post this morning, but I decided to save it for a separate post. The Falkirk Center at Liberty University just tweeted a video of an Eric Metaxas speech: Almost everything...
Yesterday, Liberty University’s Falkirk Center, the culture war wing of the largest Christian university in the world, held a 1-day conference titled “Get Louder: Faith Summit 2020.” Evangelical Trump supporters were encouraged to yell and scream more, fight more, and...
George Whitefield was arguably the most popular man in colonial America. His preaching was the catalyst for the colonial-wide evangelical revival that historians call the “First Great Awakening.” Recently, the University of Pennsylvania decided to remove a Whitefield statue on...
Wendy Roberts is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Albany, SUNY. This interview is based on her new book, Awakening Verse: The Poetics of Early American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2020). JF: What led you to write Awakening Verse? WR: When...
(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...
(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...
Here is what Laurie recently told his congregation (as reported by the Christian Post) about his speech (and prayer) at the August 27 court evangelical celebration at the White House: Laurie reminded those in attendance for the dinner that the...
Peter Choi is Director of Academic Programs at Newbigin House of Studies. This interview is based on his recent book George Whitefield: Evangelist for God and Empire (Eerdmans, 2018). JF: What led you to write George Whitefield? PC: It was a seemingly...
No, it is not. I think John Turner is correct in his recent piece at The Anxious Bench blog. Here is a taste: John Fea, in what has become a must-read age-of-Trump blog about American religion, quotes from C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape...
Twenty-five years ago I was writing an M.A. thesis on separatist fundamentalism in twentieth-century America. One of the key figures in my research was a mid-century fundamentalist named Carl McIntire. (I actually published an article about him in 1994). As...
The 2017 Princeton Seminar on the “Colonial Era” wrapped-up yesterday. The day began with lectures on the “Enlightenment in America” and the “First Great Awakening.” The Enlightenment lecture focused largely on the lives of Philip Vickers Fithian and Benjamin Franklin. The...
Douglas Winiarski is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies at the University of Richmond. This interview is based on his new book Darkness Falls of the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England (University of North...
Last week James Dobson claimed that Donald Trump had recently had an evangelical or “born-again” conversion experience.” Since Dobson is a well-known leader within evangelicalism there are many Christians who believe his claim. Others are skeptical. I have no idea if...
In case you haven’t seen the First Round results in the 2016 Junto March Madness tournament, my article “The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian’s Rural Enlightenment (JAH 2003) lost to Jon Butler’s “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening...
In case you missed you missed it, Backstory with the American History Guys (Peter Onuf, Ed Ayers and Brian Balough), a syndicated public radio program, did an Easter espisode on religious renewal in American history. Guests on this episode were...
I have yet to read Thomas Kidd’s new biography of George Whitefield, but it is getting a lot of attention and some very good reviews. In this interview with Justin Taylor of the Gospel Coalition, Kidd gives us a nice...
