Herman Melville published his autobiographical novel Redburn in 1849. The work proved to be one of his best, and in many ways remains his most quintessentially American novel. Redburn lacks the exoticism that typified Typee and Omoo, both set in the South Pacific....
Miles Smith
“Men of all descriptions will, to a great degree, be transformed into business men”: Businessmen’s Preaching in the 19th United States
In 1857 James Waddel Alexander, prominent Presbyterian minister and former professor at what is now Rutgers University, and later at Princeton Seminary, spearheaded the publication of a short work called The Man of Business Considered in His Various Relations that...
Thomas Chalmers and the Expulsive Power of a State Church
Conversations among conservative Christians in the United States pertaining to questions of political theology tend to revolve around cultural or social politics and the retention of a Christian socio-moral order. The relationship of church and state to economics, in...
Hierarchy and Separation: Anglican Political Theology in the Early 20th Century
Historically-rooted works on Anglican political theology, particularly political theology of American Anglicans, remain in relatively short supply. Michael Bird and N.T. Wright have published their Jesus Among the Powers but its relatively contemporaneous and oriented...
A.A. Hodge on the Cultural and Social Benefits of Biblical Christianity
In a series of lectures begun at the end of the American Civil War, Hodge offered evidences for what he believed were incontrovertible proofs of Christianity’s social and cultural benefits to society. Hodge’s definition of Christian was ultimately somewhat sectarian,...
Post-constitutionalism and the Christian Right to Revolution in Anglican Political Theology, ca 1776
In the Spring of 1776, Anglican priest and academic Richard Watson—then Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and later the Anglican bishop of Llandaff from 1781 to 1816—wrote a short tract designed to address what was then a civil war between the British Empire...
R.L. Dabney on Politics and Christian Moderation, c. 1860
In November 1860 Robert Lewis Dabney addressed the young men of Hampden-Sydney College. The Governor of Virginia called a fast day for 1 November, a not infrequent occurrence in the Nineteenth Century. Governors appointed a day for the state to fast; this did not...
Charles Carroll and the Religious Republic
A new paperback edition of Brad Birzer’s American Cicero: The Life of Charles Carroll has recently been published by Regnery Gateway. It’s the best standard length biography of Charles Carroll of Carrollton I know of, and its spritely style and incisive commentary...
The Conservative Christian Alliance and the Liberal Revolutions of 1848
Timothy Mason Roberts’ Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism provides one of the best scholarly treatments of American intellectual, political, and religious interactions with the rash of liberal nationalist revolutions that rocked...
Liberalism, the Apocalypse, and Europe’s Doom: John Watson Adams’ “The Crisis,” 1848
Millennial impulses among American Congregationalists and Presbyterians defined Calvinist religiosity throughout the Nineteenth Century. Early Republic divines in North America tended to embrace a postmillennial eschatology. John Watson Adams, a prominent Presbyterian...