The Expanding World of Jacob Norton: Reading, Revivalism, and the Construction of a "Second Great Awakening" in New England, 1787-1804

2006 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Kupiec Cayton
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Second Great Awakening

The Second Great Awakening and the New England Social Order

1970 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard D. Birdsall
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Social Order ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
Henry Adams ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Social

“Only the shell of orthodoxy was left.” Such was the considered judgment of Henry Adams on the condition of the inherited socioreligious order of New England by the year 1800.1 The image of the shell of a gourd with loose seeds rattling within is a good one to convey the dissociation between the purposes of the society and the real beliefs of individuals that had come to pass by the end of the eighteenth century. And it presents a notable contrast to the close congruence of individual belief and the social aims of the first generation of New England Puritans.

The Second Great Awakening In Connecticut: Critique of the Traditional Interpretation

1980 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 401-415 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard D. Shiels
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Religious History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Evangelical Christianity ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
Yale College

As a doddering old man in 1850, Lyman Beecher told his children about the religious conditions at Yale College fifty-five years earlier. His words have become familiar to students of American religious history. The school had been “in a most ungodly state” when he entered as a student in 1795, he recalled. Its president, Ezra Stiles, had been ineffective as a pastor. Immorality and religious skepticism had been rife. Then Timothy Dwight replaced Stiles as president, and religion revived. Dwight's students embraced evangelical Christianity and followed him into battle against rationalists who challenged orthodoxy and politicians who wanted to separate church and state. Dwight transformed religious life at the college and, together with his students, rejuvenated the congregational churches of New England.

Educating the Heathen: the Foreign Mission School Controversy and American Ideals

1978 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Andrew
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
War Of 1812 ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The World ◽  
Mission School ◽  
Missionary Societies ◽  
Post War

“ Never in all past ages did a prospect so glorious rise to the view of any nation, as that which is disclosed to our own.” So wrote a reviewer in the years following the War of 1812, and he echoed the millennial feelings of his countrymen. Awash in a surge of post-war nationalism, and buffeted by the revivals of the Second Great Awakening, Americans struck out in search of themselves, their culture, and their future. Within a generation, the same reviewer proclaimed, “ fifty or sixty millions of men will have poured themselves over our country, carrying civilization and the arts to the extreme corner.”This spirit energized people in all sections, and in the Northeast missionary activity grew to significant proportions. Numerous state missionary societies formed, and by 1812 a larger body — the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) — had been organized to carry this spirit across the country and throughout the world. Board organizers had as their vision a world transformed, but one transformed along the lines of an idealized New England community. Religion would guide men's lives, and a spirit of morality would infuse the operations of government. They saw before them the dawning of a new age.

Presbyterians and Ethics

2019 ◽  
pp. 525-537
Author(s):  
Mark Douglas
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of Ethics ◽  
Presbyterian Church ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of

The history of ethics in the Presbyterian Church has been shaped by the theological commitments of Reformed theology, the church’s ecumenical and interreligious encounters, its interactions with the wider cultures in which it functions, and its global scope. Consequently, Presbyterian ethics have become increasingly diverse, culturally diffused, ecumenically directed, and frequently divisive. That said, its history can helpfully be divided into three lengthy periods. In the first (roughly from the church’s origins in 1559 to the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century), theology, ethics, and politics are so interwound that distinguishing one from the others is difficult. In the second (roughly from the Second Great Awakening to the end of World War II), moral concerns emerge as forces that drive the church’s theology and polity. And in the third (for which proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 might be a heuristically helpful starting point), ethics increasingly functions in ways that are only loosely tethered to either Reformed theology or polity. The strength of the church’s social witness, the consistency of its global engagements, and the failings of its internecine strife are all evident during its five-hundred-year history.

The Welsh Evangelical Community and ‘Finney's Revival’

1978 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Carwardine
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
High Pressure ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Public Commitment ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Agent Of Change ◽  
Spiritual State

The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the emergence in American Calvinist churches of a new brand of religious revivalism. Energetic evangelicals successfully challenged the authority of a Calvinist theology which had seemed to emphasise the exclusiveness of the elect, and man's helplessness and inability to act in securing his own conversion. These evangelicals adopted a revivalism which, in contrast, reminded man of his responsibility and power, and which experimented with means to win converts that conservative evangelicals thought an affront to the operations of the Holy Spirit. The ‘new measures’, as they were called, included more direct preaching, often by revivalists who itinerated solely to stir churches and win converts, the ‘protracting’ of services over several days or weeks, and the ‘anxious seat’—the use of a special pew at the front of the congregation where those concerned for their spiritual state could go to be exhorted and prayed for, and where a public commitment might be expected. These measures—and the ‘New Divinity’ which gave them theological justification—became increasingly widespread during the 1820s and 1830s, the climax of the ‘Second Great Awakening’. In large part the impetus for change had come from the rapidly-growing Methodists, Arminian in theology and determined exponents of a high-pressure revivalism; but within the Calvinist churches the single most influential agent of change was the ‘high priest’ of revivalism, Charles Grandison Finney.

Origins of the Eighteenth-Century Evangelical Revival: England and New England Compared

1987 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 361-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Western Society ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
First Great Awakening ◽  
Revival Movements ◽  
British Colonies

Current interpretations of North America's first Great Awakening present a paradox. Historians commonly interpret the Great Awakening as part of the revival of evangelical piety that affected widely scattered elements of the Protestant world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; however, studies of the Great Awakening have almost exclusively focused on the particular local circumstances in which the revival movements developed. Since historians of the Great Awakening have emphasized the peculiar circumstances of each of the regional manifestations, the Revival often appears in their writings to have been composed of several distinct movements separated in time, character, and cause and united only by superficial similarities. In contrast, to say that the local revival movements, despite their distinctive characteristics, were manifestations of a single larger movement is to imply that they shared the same general causes. If we suppose that the Great Awakening was part of the Evangelical Revival, our attempts to explain its origins should take into account those general causes.Two recent reconsiderations of the eighteenth-century revival movements in their broader context come to opposite conclusions. Jon Butler underscores the span of time over which the revivals occurred across the British colonies, their heterogeneous character from one region to the next, and the differences in cultural contexts in which they appeared. He concludes that “the prerevolutionary revivals should be understood primarily as regional events.” Although he sees the eighteenth-century American revivals as part of the long-term evangelical and pietistic reform movement in Western society, he denies any common, single, overwhelmingly important cause.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document