George Marsden (Visiting Professor of American Religious and
Intellectual History, Harvard Divinity School) to Lecture at ENC on

"What Would Jonathan Edwards Have to Say to Twenty-First-Century America?"

Thursday, February 19, 7:00 pm, Shrader Lecture Hall
Free and Open to the Public

Sponsored by the DeFreitas Foundation


On Thursday, February 19th the distinguished American religious historian George Marsden will give a lecture at ENC on Jonathan Edwards.  Marsden, Visiting Professor of American Religious and Intellectual History at Harvard Divinity School, won the Bancroft Prize in 2004 for his richly detailed and wonderfully written Jonathan Edwards.  He brought the 18th-century evangelical theologian to life in a work hailed in the Wall Street Journal as a "magisterial biography." In the New York Times Book Review, Garry Wills observed, "It may not stretch the evidence to call Jonathan Edwards the most important religious figure in American history... Edwards's arguments are analyzed with great skill and sensitivity. Marsden puts Edwards back where he belongs, firmly in the theological world of the Reformation, and makes a convincing case for his greatness."

Marsden has recently written an abbreviated biography of Edwards, which students will be reading in professor Stephens Religion and American Cutlure course.  He will be speaking with students and faculty about that book on in an informal session before his lecture on the 19th.

Marsden taught history at Calvin College from 1965 to 1986 and was Professor of the History of Christianity in America at the Divinity School of Duke University from 1986 to 1992. From 1992 and until his retirement in 2008, he was the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He has also been a visiting professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley and a visiting professor of the history of Christianity at St. Mary's College, St. Andrews University, Scotland. Professor Marsden's books include Fundamentalism and American Culture, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism, The Soul of the American University, and The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. He has also written four other books and edited, co-edited, or co-authored another five.

Past ENC History Dept. Lectures

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