Church and State Seminar at the Witherspoon Institute

I'm currently at Princeton, taking a Witherspoon Institute Church and State Seminar on "Religious Liberty in the American Founding Era" taught by Gerald McDermott, Tommy Kidd, and Daniel Dreisbach. Our main text for the course is Daniel Dreisbach's and Mark David Hall's massive edited volume, The Sacred Rights of Conscience (see the syllabus).

I am halfway through the course and thoroughly enjoying the wonderful and insightful discussions on religion and politics in the founding era by the these professors and the dozen young scholars in attendance. I love listening to Kidd's (often humorous) insightful comments on the founders and American political history. When leading his sessions, Dreisbach usually asks very probing questions on issues pertaining to Constitutional and natural law theories. For his part, McDermott contributes a theological component to our discussions, which I find very interesting. McDermott was even able to sneak in an entire session on Jonathan Edwards.

As an update, I am happy to announce that Oxford University Press notified me that the first copies of my book on Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture are en route to my house, and I also am happy to say that I received a letter from UTC recently stating that my application for tenure was successful.