Dutch Calvinistic Pietism In The Middle Colonies

The word "pietism" usually conjures up a host of ambivalent im pressions. It has seemed to me increasingly clear that many of the strengths of pietism have been swept aside by reactions against the excesses of the movement. To properly assess the structures of pietism, it is important to comprehend its matrix and to understand its ex ponents. In preparing this study, therefore, I have sought to recapture something of the person of Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen as well as the gist of his thought; something of his environment as well as the institutions of his day. To achieve this I have traveled many by-paths and knocked on many doors. But the past has not always yielded its secrets; much is lost forever. Hagen in Westphalia, Frelinghuysen's birthplace, is now a modern city and only in a few isolated particulars is it reminiscent of Hagen in 1693. In the nearby village of Schwerte, however, the ancestral church of his forebears remains as it was nearly three hundred years ago. The gymnasium he attended in Hamm was destroyed in the bombings ofW orld War II, though the library he used during his study at Lingen is still largely intact. In the tiny East-Frisian village of Loegumer Voorwerk, Frelinghuysen's first parish, one can still stand in the pulpit where he first preached his awakening gospel. Yet oddly enough, in America, where his name is most remembered, most physical traces of his life have disappeared.

Traces the history of the Haring family: descendants of John Pietersen Haring (fl.17th c.) and Grietje Cosyns (b.1641) who were married in 1662 in the Out-ward of Manhattan. Their descendants lived in New York and New Jersey. John and Grietje were not immigrants, but were the children of immigrants from the Netherlands. The history is prim arily description of how and under what conditions the family would have lived; includes a great deal of sociological, cultural, religiou s, and other detailed information.

The Wilderness, the Nation, and the Electronic Era: American Christianity and Religious Communication 1620-2000: An Annotated Bibliography contains over 2,400 annotations of books, book chapters, essays, periodical articles, and selected dissertations dealing with the various means and technologies of Christian communication used by clergy, churches, denominations, benevolent associations, printers, booksellers, publishing houses, and individuals and movements in their efforts to disseminate news, knowledge, and information about religious beliefs and life in the United States from colonial times to the present. Providing access to the critical and interpretive literature about religious communication is significant and plays a central role in the recent trend in American historiography toward cultural history, particularly as it relates to numerous collateral disciplines: sociology, anthropology, education, speech, music, literary studies, art history, and technology. The book documents communication shifts, from oral history to print to electronic and visual media, and their adaptive uses in communication networks developed over the nation's history. This reference brings bibliographic control to a large and diverse literature not previously identified or indexed.

In the mid-eighteenth century, Americans experienced an outbreak of religious revivals that shook colonial society. This book provides a definitive view of these revivals, now known as the First Great Awakening, and their dramatic effects on American culture. Historian Thomas S. Kidd tells the absorbing story of early American evangelical Christianity through the lives of seminal figures like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield as well as many previously unknown preachers, prophets, and penitents.The Great Awakening helped create the evangelical movement, which heavily emphasized the individual’s experience of salvation and the Holy Spirit’s work in revivals. By giving many evangelicals radical notions of the spiritual equality of all people, the revivals helped breed the democratic style that would come to characterize the American republic. Kidd carefully separates the positions of moderate supporters of the revivals from those of radical supporters, and he delineates the objections of those who completely deplored the revivals and their wildly egalitarian consequences. The battles among these three camps, the author shows, transformed colonial America and ultimately defined the nature of the evangelical movement.

From its earliest days, the United States has provided fertile ground for reform movements to flourish. In this volume, twelve eminent historians assess religious and secular reform in America from the eighteenth century to the present day. The essays offer a mix of general overviews and specific case studies, addressing such topics as radical religion in New England, leisure in antebellum America, Sabbatarianism, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and Evangelicalism, social reform, and the U.S. welfare state. Suitable for students, the essays, each based on original research, will also be of interest to researchers and academics working in this area, as well as to all those with an interest in the history of religious and secular reform in America.

This collection of essays showcases the variety and complexity of early awakened Protestant biblical interpretation and practice while highlighting the many parallels, networks, and exchanges that connected the Pietist and evangelical traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. A yearning to obtain from the Word spiritual knowledge of God that was at once experiential and practical lay at the heart of the Pietist and evangelical quest for true religion, and it significantly shaped the courses and legacies of these movements. The myriad ways in which Pietists and evangelicals read, preached, translated, and practiced the Bible were inextricable from how they fashioned new forms of devotion, founded institutions, engaged the early Enlightenment, and made sense of their world. This volume provides breadth and texture to the role of Scripture in these related religious traditions. The contributors probe an assortment of primary source material from various confessional, linguistic, national, and regional traditions and feature well-known figures—including August Hermann Francke, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards—alongside lesser-known lay believers, women, people of color, and so-called radicals and separatists. Pioneering and collaborative, this volume contributes fresh insight into the history of the Bible and the entangled religious cultures of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Along with the editors, the contributors to this volume include Ruth Albrecht, Robert E. Brown, Crawford Gribben, Bruce Hindmarsh, Kenneth P. Minkema, Adriaan C. Neele, Benjamin M. Pietrenka, Isabel Rivers, Douglas H. Shantz, Peter Vogt, and Marilyn J. Westerkamp.