‘Religious Affections’: Textbook of the American Soul

For generations, evangelicals have been convinced that the works of Jonathan Edwards would remain indelibly in the American mind. In 1832, the young abolitionist Henry B. Stanton declared, “Edwards will live a thousand lives by means of his written works.”1 The famous revivalist and reformer Lyman Beecher, noting the timeless quality of Edwards’s writings, called the Northampton theologian “the immortal Edwards.”2Today, these assumptions have by no means proven false. In the past thirty years, t