Feeling Godly
248 pages, 6 x 9
Paperback
Release Date:30 Jul 2021
ISBN:9781625345905
Hardcover
Release Date:30 Jul 2021
ISBN:9781625345912
Feeling Godly
Religious Affections and Christian Contact in Early North America
Edited by Caroline Wigginton and Abram Van Engen
University of Massachusetts Press
In 1746, Jonathan Edwards described his philosophy on the process of Christian conversion in A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. For Edwards, a strict Congregationalist, true conversion is accompanied by a new heart and yields humility, forgiveness, and love—affections that work a change in the person's nature. But, how did other early American communities understand religious affections and come to recognize their manifestation?
Feeling Godly brings together well-known and highly regarded scholars of early American history and literature, Native American studies, African American history, and religious studies to investigate the shape, feel, look, theology, and influence of religious affections in early American sites of contact with and between Christians. While remaining focused on the question of religious affections, these essays span a wide range of early North American cultures, affiliations, practices, and devotions, and enable a comparative approach that draws together a history of emotions with a history of religion.
In addition to the volume editors, this collection includes essays from Joanna Brooks, Kathleen Donegan, Melissa Frost, Stephanie Kirk, Jon Sensbach, Scott Manning Stevens, and Mark Valeri, with an afterword by Barbara H. Rosenwein.
Feeling Godly brings together well-known and highly regarded scholars of early American history and literature, Native American studies, African American history, and religious studies to investigate the shape, feel, look, theology, and influence of religious affections in early American sites of contact with and between Christians. While remaining focused on the question of religious affections, these essays span a wide range of early North American cultures, affiliations, practices, and devotions, and enable a comparative approach that draws together a history of emotions with a history of religion.
In addition to the volume editors, this collection includes essays from Joanna Brooks, Kathleen Donegan, Melissa Frost, Stephanie Kirk, Jon Sensbach, Scott Manning Stevens, and Mark Valeri, with an afterword by Barbara H. Rosenwein.
'Feeling Godly succeeds very well in its arrangement of contributions. Set alongside each other, with the four brilliant responses and an insightful afterword, they call our attention to the wide spectrum of religious feeling, experience, and—yes—affections in early America.'—Laura M. Stevens, author of The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility'Feeling Godly is a timely and thought-provoking look at early American Christianity through the lens of the evolving 'history of emotion' approach . . . The essays and the model they form creatively (and justifiably 'messily') expand our consideration of the importance, both theoretically and structurally, of the ways that Christianity influenced early American intercultural experiences.'—H-Net Reviews
CAROLINE WIGGINTON is associate professor of English at the University of Mississippi and author of In the Neighborhood: Women's Publication in Early America. ABRAM VAN ENGEN is associate professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.
