George M. Marsden

Presents a biography of the clergyman who played a major role in eighteenth-century American religious life and served as president of the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University.

A Life

Jonathan Edwards

A short life of Jonathan Edwards

Justin Taylor

Dane C. Ortlund

Stephen J. Nichols

Alive to the Beauty of God

Edwards on the Christian Life

Mark A. Noll

Nathan O. Hatch

Through careful historical and contemporary analysis, the authors address such issues as how much Christian action is required to make a whole society Christian; incorrect views of America's history for effective Christian involvement in critical public issues; and more. (Christian)

The Search for Christian America

A full history of the origins and direction of fundamentalism in America traces the important influence of this religious movement and their conservative Christian views on American culture, social institutions, politics, education, and more. Simultaneous.

Fundamentalism and American Culture

Francis a McAnaney Professor of History George M Marsden

In The Soul of the American University, George Marsden explores how, and why, these dramatic changes occurred.

From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief

The Soul of the American University

Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis's eloquent and winsome defense of the Christian faith, originated as a series of BBC radio talks broadcast during the dark days of World War Two. Here is the story of the extraordinary life and afterlife of this influential and much-beloved book. George Marsden describes how Lewis gradually went from being an atheist to a committed Anglican—famously converting to Christianity in 1931 after conversing into the night with his friends J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugh Dyson—and how Lewis delivered his wartime talks to a traumatized British nation in the midst of an all-out war for survival. Marsden recounts how versions of those talks were collected together in 1952 under the title Mere Christianity, and how the book went on to become one of the most widely read presentations of essential Christianity ever published, particularly among American evangelicals. He examines its role in the conversion experiences of such figures as Charles Colson, who read the book while facing arrest for his role in the Watergate scandal. Marsden explores its relationship with Lewis's Narnia books and other writings, and explains why Lewis's plainspoken case for Christianity continues to have its critics and ardent admirers to this day. With uncommon clarity and grace, Marsden provides invaluable new insights into this modern spiritual classic.

A Biography

C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity

Jonathan Edwards is one of the most extraordinary figures in American history. Arguably the most brilliant theologian ever born on American soil, Edwards (1703–1758) was also a pastor, a renowned preacher, a missionary to the Native Americans, a biographer, a college president, a philosopher, a loving husband, and the father of eleven children. George M. Marsden -- widely acclaimed for his magisterial large study of Edwards -- has now written a new, shorter biography of this many-sided, remarkable man. A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards is not an abridgment of Marsden's earlier award-winning study but is instead a completely new narrative based on his extensive research. The result is a concise, fresh retelling of the Edwards story, rich in scholarship yet compelling and readable for a much wider audience, including students. Known best for his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Jonathan Edwards is often viewed as a proponent of fire, brimstone, and the wrath of God. As Marsden shows, however, the focus of Edwards's preaching was not God's wrath but rather his overwhelming and all-encompassing love. Marsden also rescues Edwards from the high realms of intellectual history, revealing him more comprehensively through the lens of his everyday life and interactions. Further, Marsden shows how Edwards provides a window on the fascinating and often dangerous world of the American colonies in the decades before the American Revolution. Marsden here gives us an Edwards who illumines both American history and Christian theology, an Edwards that will appeal to readers with little or no training in either field. This short life will contribute significantly to the widespread and growing interest in Jonathan Edwards.

A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards

First published in 1997, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship is a landmark work that offered a bold call to re-establish Christian perspectives in academia. For this second edition, George M. Marsden has added a new preface as well as an entirely new chapter reflecting on the changing landscape of academia in the quarter century since the book first appeared.

The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship

Many American's today are taking note of the surprisingly strong political force that is the religious right. Controversial decisions by the government are met with hundreds of lobbyists, millions of dollars of advertising spending, and a powerful grassroots response. How has the fundamentalist movement managed to resist the pressures of the scientific community and the draw of modern popular culture to hold on to their ultra-conservative Christian views? Understanding the movement's history is key to answering this question. Fundamentalism and American Culture has long been considered a classic in religious history, and to this day remains unsurpassed. Now available in a new edition, this highly regarded analysis takes us through the full history of the origin and direction of one of America's most influential religious movements. For Marsden, fundamentalists are not just religious conservatives; they are conservatives who are willing to take a stand and to fight. In Marsden's words (borrowed by Jerry Falwell), "a fundamentalist is an evangelical who is angry about something." In the late nineteenth century American Protestantism was gradually dividing between liberals who were accepting new scientific and higher critical views that contradicted the Bible and defenders of the more traditional evangelicalism. By the 1920s a full-fledged "fundamentalist" movement had developed in protest against theological changes in the churches and changing mores in the culture. Building on networks of evangelists, Bible conferences, Bible institutes, and missions agencies, fundamentalists coalesced into a major protest movement that proved to have remarkable staying power. For this new edition, a major new chapter compares fundamentalism since the 1970s to the fundamentalism of the 1920s, looking particularly at the extraordinary growth in political emphasis and power of the more recent movement. Never has it been more important to understand the history of fundamentalism in our rapidly polarizing nation. Marsen's carefully researched and engrossing work remains the best way to do just that.

Christians need to pause once in a while to get their bearings. For perspective on our own times and how we got here, it helps to listen to wise guides from other eras. In An Infinite Fountain of Light, the renowned American historian George Marsden illuminates the landscape with wisdom from one such mentor: Jonathan Edwards. Drawing on his deep expertise on Edwards and American culture, Marsden explains where Edwards stood within his historical context and sets forth key points of his complex thought. By also considering Benjamin Franklin and George Whitefield, two of Edwards's most influential contemporaries, Marsden unpacks the competing cultural and religious impulses that have shaped our times. In contrast, Edwards offered us an exhilarating view of the centrality of God's beauty and love. Christians' love for God, he taught, can be the guiding love of our lives, opening us to transformative joy and orienting all our lesser loves. "There is an infinite fullness of all possible good in God, a fullness of every perfection, of all excellency and beauty, and of infinite happiness," wrote Edwards. "This infinite fountain of light should, diffusing its excellent fullness, pour forth light all around." With Marsden's guidance, readers will discover how Edwards's insights can renew our own vision of the divine, of creation, and of ourselves.

Jonathan Edwards for the Twenty-First Century

An Infinite Fountain of Light

At the end of his 1994 book, The Soul of the American University, George Marsden advanced a modest proposal for an enhanced role for religious faith in today's scholarship. This "unscientific postscript" helped spark a heated debate that spilled out of the pages of academic journals and The Chronicle of Higher Education into mainstream media such as The New York Times, and marked Marsden as one of the leading participants in the debates concerning religion and public life. Marsden now gives his proposal a fuller treatment in The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, a thoughtful and thought-provoking book on the relationship of religious faith and intellectual scholarship. More than a response to Marsden's critics, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship takes the next step towards demonstrating what the ancient relationship of faith and learning might mean for the academy today. Marsden argues forcefully that mainstream American higher education needs to be more open to explicit expressions of faith and to accept what faith means in an intellectual context. While other defining elements of a scholar's identity, such as race or gender, are routinely taken into consideration and welcomed as providing new perspectives, Marsden points out, the perspective of the believing Christian is dismissed as irrelevant or, worse, antithetical to the scholarly enterprise. Marsden begins by examining why Christian perspectives are not welcome in the academy. He rebuts the various arguments commonly given for excluding religious viewpoints, such as the argument that faith is insufficiently empirical for scholarly pursuits (although the idea of complete scientific objectivity is consider naive in most fields today), the fear that traditional Christianity will reassert its historical role as oppressor of divergent views, and the received dogma of the separation of church and state, which stretches far beyond the actual law in the popular imagination. Marsden insists that scholars have both a religious and an intellectual obligation not to leave their deeply held religious beliefs at the gate of the academy. Such beliefs, he contends, can make a significant difference in scholarship, in campus life, and in countless other ways. Perhaps most importantly, Christian scholars have both the responsibility and the intellectual ammunition to argue against some of the prevailing ideologies held uncritically by many in the academy, such as naturalistic reductionism or unthinking moral relativism. Contemporary university culture is hollow at its core, Marsden writes. Not only does it lack a spiritual center, but it is without any real alternative. He argues that a religiously diverse culture will be an intellectually richer one, and it is time that scholars and institutions who take the intellectual dimensions of their faith seriously become active participants in the highest level of academic discourse. Whether the reader agrees or disagrees with this conclusion, Marsden's thoughtful, well-argued book is necessary reading for all sides of the debate on religion's role in education and culture.

RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE focuses on the relationship of religion to the social and cultural dynamics of American history. Because most survey texts provide only brief coverage of this topic, Marsden's narrative is designed to explore the role of religion in American culture.

Religion and American Culture

A sequel and companion to the author's widely aclaimed Fundamentalism and American Culture, this book uses the history of Fuller Theological Seminary as a lens through which to focus an examination of the broader story of evangelicalism and fundamentalism since the 1940s.

Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism

Reforming Fundamentalism

This biography reveals Jonathan Edwards as a complex thinker & human being who struggled to reconcile his Puritan heritage with the secular, modern world emerging out of the Enlightenment.

"Superb and engrossing" ("The Washington Post Book World"), the definitive biography of Jonathan Edwards, America's most important religious figure, draws on newly available sources to reveal how he was shaped by the cultural and religious battles of his time. 30 illustrations.

Explores the decline in religious influence in American universities, discussing why this transformation has occurred.

The Soul of the American University is a classic and much discussed account of the changing roles of Christianity in shaping American higher education, presented here in a newly revised edition to offer insights for a modern era. As late as the World War II era, it was not unusual even for state schools to offer chapel services or for leading universities to refer to themselves as �Christian� institutions. From the 1630s through the 1950s, when Protestantism provided an informal religious establishment, colleges were expected to offer religious and moral guidance. Following reactions in the 1960s against the WASP establishment and concerns for diversity, this specifically religious heritage quickly disappeared and various secular viewpoints predominated. In this updated edition of a landmark volume, George Marsden explores the history of the changing roles of Protestantism in relation to other cultural and intellectual factors shaping American higher education. Far from a lament for a lost golden age, Marsden offers a penetrating analysis of the changing ways in which Protestantism intersected with collegiate life, intellectual inquiry, and broader cultural developments. He tells the stories of many of the nation's pace-setting universities at defining moments in their histories. By the late nineteenth-century when modern universities emerged, debates over Darwinism and higher criticism of the Bible were reshaping conceptions of Protestantism; in the twentieth century important concerns regarding diversity and inclusion were leading toward ever-broader conceptions of Christianity; then followed attacks on the traditional WASP establishment which brought dramatic disestablishment of earlier religious privilege. By the late twentieth century, exclusive secular viewpoints had become the gold standard in higher education, while our current era is arguably �post-secular�. The Soul of the American University Revisited deftly examines American higher education as it exists in the twenty-first century.

From Protestant to Postsecular

The Soul of the American University Revisited

David W. Bebbington

The past, present, and future of a movement in crisis What exactly do we mean when we say “evangelical”? How should we understand this many-sided world religious phenomenon? How do recent American politics change that understanding? Three scholars have been vital to our understanding of evangelicalism for the last forty years: Mark Noll, whose Scandal of the Evangelical Mind identified an earlier crisis point for American evangelicals; David Bebbington, whose “Bebbington Quadrilateral” remains the standard characterization of evangelicals used worldwide; and George Marsden, author of the groundbreaking Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism. Now, in Evangelicals, they combine key earlier material concerning the history of evangelicalism with their own new contributions about present controversies and also with fresh insights from other scholars. The result begins as a survey of how evangelicalism has been evaluated, but then leads into a discussion of the movement’s perils and promise today. Evangelicals provides an illuminating look at who evangelicals are, how evangelicalism has changed over time, and how evangelicalism continues to develop in sometimes surprising ways. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: One Word but Three Crises Mark A. Noll Part I: The History of “Evangelical History” 1. The Evangelical Denomination George Marsden 2. The Nature of Evangelical Religion David Bebbington 3. The Essential Evangelicalism Dialectic: The Historiography of the Early Neo-Evangelical Movement and the Observer-ParticipantDilemma Douglas A. Sweeney 4. Evangelical Constituencies in North America and the World Mark Noll 5. The Evangelical Discovery of History David W. Bebbington 6. Roundtable: Re-examining David Bebbington’s “Quadrilateral Thesis” Charlie Phillips, Kelly Cross Elliott, Thomas S. Kidd, AmandaPorterfield, Darren Dochuk, Mark A. Noll, Molly Worthen, and David W. Bebbington 7. Evangelicals and Unevangelicals: The Contested History of a Word Linford D. Fisher Part II: The Current Crisis: Looking Back 8. A Strange Love? Or: How White Evangelicals Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Donald Michael S. Hamilton 9. Live by the Polls, Die by the Polls D. G. Hart 10. Donald Trump and Militant Evangelical Masculinity Kristin Kobes Du Mez 11. The “Weird” Fringe Is the Biggest Part of White Evangelicalism Fred Clark Part III: The Current Crisis: Assessment 12. Is the Term “Evangelical” Redeemable? Thomas S. Kidd 13. Can Evangelicalism Survive Donald Trump? Timothy Keller 14. How to Escape from Roy Moore’s Evangelicalism Molly Worthen 15. Are Black Christians Evangelicals? Jemar Tisby 16. To Be or Not to Be an Evangelical Brian C. Stiller Part IV: Historians Seeking Perspective 17. On Not Mistaking One Part for the Whole: The Future of American Evangelicalism in a Global PerspectiveGeorge Marsden 18. Evangelicals and Recent Politics in Britain David Bebbington 19. World Cup or World Series? Mark Noll

Who They Have Been, Are Now, and Could Be

Evangelicals

In this book, Marsden argues forcefully that mainstream American higher education needs to be more open to explicit expressions of faith and to accept what faith means in an intellectual context.

George M. Marsden

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