Jonathan Edwards: A Life

This biography of an America religious figure draws on newly available sources to reveal how he was shaped by the cultural and religious battles of his time. Winner of the Bancroft Prize • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography • Finalist for the American Society of Church History’s Philip Schaff Prize “The finest biography of this towering figure. . . . Marsden guides readers through Edwards’s profoundly alien world with authority and fluidity.”—Benjamin Schwarz, Atlantic Monthly A controversial theologian and the author of the famous sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) ignited the momentous Great Awakening of the eighteenth century. In this definitive and long-awaited biography, Jonathan Edwards emerges as both a great American and a brilliant Christian. George Marsden evokes the world of colonial New England in which Edwards was reared—a frontier civilization at the center of a conflict between Native Americans, French Catholics, and English Protestants. Drawing on newly available sources, Marsden demonstrates how these cultural and religious battles shaped Edwards’s life and thought. Marsden reveals Edwards as a complex thinker and human being who struggled to reconcile his Puritan heritage with the secular, modern world emerging out of the Enlightenment. In this, Edwards’s life anticipated the deep contradictions of our American culture. Meticulously researched and beautifully composed, this biography offers a compelling portrait of an eminent American.