Jonathan Edwards (1703?58) was preeminent as a theologian in the eighteenth century American colonies, deeply involved in the religious revival known as the Great Awakening. He was also the first American Puritan, or Calvinist, to recognize the challenges to traditional views of the world posed by figures like John Locke and Isaac Newton. Thus he is a pivotal figure as American thought evolved from heavily religious beginnings toward populism and a new rationalism in the young nation. His many books include Freedom of the Will, Religious Affections, and Original Sin, although he is probably best known for a legendary sermon he titled ?Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.? ø Perry Miller?s study of Jonathan Edwards as a writer and an artist is regarded as one of the great studies of ?the life of a mind.? He challenges readers to understand Edwards as an intellectual who, living in his own time and place, wrestled with issues relevant to the modern world. This Bison Books edition, with an introduction by John F. Wilson, will help to introduce Jonathan Edwards to a new generation of readers.
The title of this book by Perry Miller, who is world-famous as an interpreter of the American past, comes close to posing the question it has been Mr. Miller's lifelong purpose to answer: What was the underlying aim of the first colonists in coming to America? In what light did they see themselves? As men and women undertaking a mission that was its own cause and justification? Or did they consider themselves errand boys for a higher power which might, as is frequently the habit of authority, change its mind about the importance of their job before they had completed it? These questions are by no means frivolous. They go to the roots of seventeenth-century thought and of the ever-widening and quickening flow of events since then. Disguised from twentieth-century readers first by the New Testament language and thought of the Puritans and later by the complacent transcendentalist belief in the oversoul, the related problems of purpose and reason-for-being have been central to the American experience from the very beginning. Mr. Miller makes this abundantly clear and real, and in doing so allows the reader to conclude that, whatever else America might have become, it could never have developed into a society that took itself for granted. The title, Errand into the Wilderness, is taken from the title of a Massachusetts election sermon of 1670. Like so many jeremiads of its time, this sermon appeared to be addressed to the sinful and unregenerate whom God was about to destroy. But the original speaker's underlying concern was with the fateful ambiguity in the word errand. Whose errand? This crucial uncertainty of the age is the starting point of Mr. Miller's engrossing account of what happened to the European mind when, in spite of itself, it began to become something other than European. For the second generation in America discovered that their heroic parents had, in fact, been sent on a fool's errand, the bitterest kind of all; that the dream of a model society to be built in purity by the elect in the new continent was now a dream that meant nothing more to Europe. The emigrants were on their own. Thus left alone with America, who were they? And what were they to do? In this book, as in all his work, the author of The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century; The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, and The Transcendentalists, emphasizes the need for understanding the human sources from which the American mainstream has risen. In this integrated series of brilliant and witty essays which he describes as "pieces," Perry Miller invites and stimulates in the reader a new conception of his own inheritance.
You won't want to close your eyes in a hospital ever again." --Harvey Schwartz, author of Never Again A syringe is switched and the patient dies on the operating table. Dr. Gideon Lowell takes it upon himself to help the anesthesiologist, who happens to be his wife. The hospital and the police do not want his help, so Gideon ignores them, and carries out his investigation behind the scenes. He recruits an interesting cast of characters, including a newspaper reporter with a magic wand, a cybersecurity expert who likes to bend the rules, and a somewhat skeptical police detective. Gideon rattles cages and shakes things loose to solve the crime. A tale of murder, revenge and coercion, love and friendship, all told with tongue-in-cheek humor.
The late Perry Miller once stated, "I have been compelled to insist that the mind of man is the basic factor in human history," and his study of the mind in America has shaped the thought of three decades of scholars. The fifteen essays here collected--several of them previously unpublished--address themselves to facets of the American consciousness and to their expression in literature from the time of the Cambridge Agreement to the Nobel Prize acceptance speeches of Hemingway and Faulkner. A companion volume to "Errand into the Wilderness," its general theme is one adumbrated in Mr. Miller's two-volume masterpiece, "The New England Mind"--the thrust of civilization into the vast, empty continent and its effect upon Americans' concept of themselves as "nature's nation." The essays first concentrate on Puritan covenant theology and its gradual adaptation to changing conditions in America: the decline in zeal for a "Bible commonwealth," the growth of trade and industy, and the necessity for coexisting with large masses of unchurched people. As the book progresses, the emphasis shifts from religion to the philosophy of nature to the development of an original literature, although Mr. Miller is usually analyzing simultaneously all three aspects of the American quest for self-identity. In the final essays, he shows how the forces that molded the self-conscious articulateness of the early New Englanders still operate in the work of contemporary American writers. The introduction to this collection is by Kenneth Murdock, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature, Emeritus, Harvard University, who, with Perry Miller and Samuel Eliot Morison, accomplished what has been called "one of the great historical re-evaluations of this generation.
In The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, as well as its predecessor The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, Perry Miller asserts a single intellectual history for America that could be traced to the Puritan belief system.
In 1928, as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I unaccountably found John Winthrop’s Journal exerting upon me a baneful spell. I resisted manfully, as long as I could, but Governor Winthrop irresistibly lured me to the brink of commitment, and so I threw myself from the precipice of twentieth-century prejudice into the maelstrom of his epoch. One of my most revered instructors tried to prevent me. This, he said, was an ignis fatuus. All the hay of New England Puritanism had been threshed. I would wreck my career, even before it commenced, crawling through the dry stubble hoping to pick up stray gleanings. His counsel was generous and, furthermore, seemed at that time the soul of prudence. Some perversity of temper would not let me yield. Another beloved teacher, Percy Holmes Boynton, encouraged me to risk the try. Without him, I would have faltered. As I now look back on that academic drama, I realize that he was working on the principle which always made his tuition exciting: namely, that a student should be given enough rope to hang himself, if this he was resolved to do. Wherefore I dedicated the book to him. Wherefore I have endeavored to accord the same privilege to my own students.
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