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.
"Magisterial."-- Wall Street Journal
"It may not stretch the evidence to call Jonathan Edwards the most important religious figure in American history. . . . [Edwards'] arguments [are] analyzed with great skill and sensitivity in Jonathan Edwards: A Life. . . . Marsden, himself an evangelical believer, puts Edwards back where he belongs, firmly in the theological world of the Reformation. . . . Marsden makes a convincing case for his greatness."--Garry Wills, New York Times Book Review
"In his superb and engrossing new biography of Jonathan Edwards, George Marsden has given us the most comprehensive account we have of the man who, as much as Benjamin Franklin--in some ways more than Franklin--is the spiritual godfather of our nation. . . . What sets Marsden's work apart, what makes it so accessible, is that he has committed the entire enterprise to narrative, to telling a story--the saga of Jonathan Edwards."--Robert D. Richardson, Washington Post Book World
George M. Marsden is Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He has written numerous books, including The Soul of the American University and The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship.