Bebbington Festschrift

My apologies for not posting in a very loooooong time. In my defense, I have been extremely busy. Last year I went through the arduous process of applying (successfully) for early promotion to associate professor, and also earned the additional title of UC Foundation professor. In the meantime, my family and I have been busy with the building of a house in the Chattanooga area. In nearly twenty years of marriage, my wife and I have never lived in one place longer than two years. Our hope is that we can finally break that cycle once our home is built.

Taking up most of my time lately has been my next book project entitled, Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture, which will be published with Oxford University Press, probably at some point in 2017. I have made a lot of progress on this book over the summer, thanks to the insight that I gained from my William Reese Fellowship at the University of Virginia's Rare Book School (RBS). For the first part of my fellowship, I took a RBS course in early July entitled "The History of the Book in America, c.1700-1830" with Jim Green, the librarian of the Library Company of Philadelphia (founded by Benjamin Franklin). For the second part of my fellowship, I traveled to Charlottesville, where I served on the RBS staff for a week in late July, assisting Professor Michael Winship of the University of Texas at Austin with his class on "Reading Publishers' Archives for the Study of the American Book." I owe a lot to Jim Green and Michael Winship for helping me with aspects of my research on the publications of Jonathan Edwards's works. Winship in particular, helped me decode the very confusing account book of the Boston bookseller Daniel Henchman, who published Edwards's The Life of Brainerd in 1749. I intend on blogging at some point in the near future on some of my research, but for now I will just say that I have uncovered an extraordinary amount of interesting details with regard to the publication of Edwards's books, including some very interesting people who played a crucial role behind the scenes in seeing his works printed. Most recently, I discovered that the English Baptist minister John Ryland, Jr. published two manuscript sermons by Edwards at the turn of the 19th century that until now have not been documented. I also am working with UTC's GIS manager in plotting the geographical locations of the people in America who subscribed for Freedom of the Will (1754), Original Sin (1758), and two later editions of The History of the Work of Redemption and Religious Affections. For those of you in the Chicago area this fall, please feel free to come to my talk at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School  on October 13, when I will share more about my research on Edwards's publications.

My second summer project is an essay on eighteenth-century evangelical Calvinists that will appear in the Oxford Handbook to Calvinism, edited by Bruce Gordon and Carl R. Trueman, in late 2016.

But enough about my projects, I wanted to alert people to the recently-published festschrift entitled, Pathways and Patterns in History: Essays on Baptists, Evangelicals, and the Modern World in Honour of David Bebbington. Published in the UK by Spurgeon's College and the Baptist Historical Society, the book contains essays by Mark Noll, Tim Larsen, Thomas Kidd, John Coffey, Ian Randall, Brian Stanley, John Wolffe, and several others (including me). To purchase your copy, click on the link above.