Jonathan Edwards's Writings

This collection of essays presents groundbreaking contemporary scholarship on the writings of the eighteenth-century American philosopher and theologian Jonathan Edwards. These essays range widely across the Edwardsian canon, including his most prominent and important published texts - Religious Affections and The Nature of True Virtue - as well as unfamiliar and unpublished treatises and sermons. They measure Edwards against significant Western religious and philosophical figures including Solomon Stoddard, Thomas Shepard, George Berkeley, and William James. The current debate concerning the nineteenth-century Edwardsian tradition is also featured in essays which show prominent American evangelicals, such as Nathaniel William Taylor, Charles Grandison Finney, and Edwards Amasa Park, competing for the mantle of Edwards. A compact survey of current Edwards scholarship, this book engages the full range of Edwards's writings and shows their central importance for the history of American religion and culture.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.