ANACHRONISM:

Notes From 2004 (PETER STEINFELS, 1/01/05, NY Times)

At the beginning of December, it was announced that George M. Marsden's "Jonathan Edwards: A Life," published in 2003 by Yale University Press, had won the 2005 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion. This award, given jointly by Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and the University of Louisville, bestows not only prestige but also a tidy $200,000 in cash.

Professor Marsden, who has written influential studies of fundamentalism and, more recently, the secularization of higher education, surely earned every penny. Edwards may have been one of the nation's great thinkers, but to most Americans he is known, if known at all, simply for the ominous title of one of his sermons: "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."

In fact, as Professor Marsden shows, this was a much more complex and nuanced man, born into what was still a frontier New England world and struggling to bridge an evangelical Puritan heritage and an emerging Enlightenment secularity - a "central cultural tension," said the awarding Louisville official, that still "surfaces today."

Professor Marsden, who teaches history at the University of Notre Dame, succeeds in bringing Edwards alive for contemporary readers precisely by setting him so firmly in his circumstances.

Not just a great book but vital to comprehending the Founding.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 5, 2005 1:12 PM