Bebbington Elected as Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh

It is with great joy that we announce that David Bebbington, Professor of History, the University of Stirling, was elected this year to be a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.  As the national academy of science and letters, the Royal Society of Edinburgh is the most prestigious learned society in Scotland.  Only 45 people were elected to full fellowship, and Bebbington was one of only two historians.  Congratulations, Professor Bebbington, FRSE!

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.

Thanksgiving Break!

The fall semester is finally over. I have graded the last papers and exams, just in time to enjoy Thanksgiving and the holidays.

In my last classes, I asked the students to evaluate each course and to give me feedback on the textbooks that we used. In my "Religion in Southern Culture" class, the students unanimously approved of Christine Heyrman's Southern Cross: The Beginning of the Bible Belt, and most liked Randall Stephens's The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South. But there were mixed opinions on Albert Raboteau's Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South and Charles Reagan Wilson's Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis. The issue with Raboteau's book had mostly to do with chapter two, which features extensive details on a debate between the sociologist Franklin Frazier and the anthropologist Melville Herskovitz on the retention of African rituals among the American slave population. Some students also complained that we didn't spend enough time studying the Civil War, and would have liked to read a book devoted specifically to that topic. I was surprised that not everyone approved Judgment and Grace in Dixie. The problem with this book, apparently had to do with the difficulty of the assignment that I gave them to find the thesis and two supporting evidences for each chapter. Since Wilson's chapters are so brief, students often struggled to find specific examples as evidence of the thesis.

In my final class on "The History of Evangelicalism," students raved about Barry Hankins's Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism: A Documentary Reader. They found many of the excerpts to be humorous, especially the last few that we read on anti-Catholicism, and liked the contemporary nature of the primary sources and subsequent discussion in class on those topics. I was surprised that there were mixed opinions about Mark Noll's The Rise of Evangelicalism and David Bebbington's The Dominance of Evangelicalism (out of fear, I didn't ask students about my own Early Evangelicalism: A Reader!). While I thoroughly enjoyed the books by Noll and Bebbington when I read them for the first time, many found these texts to be too dense and overwhelming, in terms of details. I didn't receive any substantial feedback on Brian Stanley's The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism. Both classes allowed me the opportunity to review the contents of my fall courses with fresh eyes so that I could think about potential changes that I may make if I teach them in the future.

During the past several weeks I have been reading a lot about colonial Boston. For those of you interested in the early Congregationalist churches in Boston, I highly recommend Mark Peterson's The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England. More than any other author, Peterson presents a detailed evaluation of the tensions among members of Boston's first churches. I have also been reading older books on Boston, such as Nathaniel Shurtleff's A Topographical Historical Description of Boston.

For my "fun" reading, I recently finished Eileen Bebbington's biography of her husband, A Patterned Life: Faith, History, and David Bebbington. As a former Bebbington student, I found the book to be very interesting and entertaining. It provided me insight on understanding Bebbington's quirky mannerisms, showing how much of his life is "patterned" into a disciplined regiment. During the Thanksgiving and holiday break, I intend to start reading Grant Wacker's new biography of Billy Graham.

Biography of David Bebbington

Tim Larsen at Wheaton College recently emailed me with news of a new biography of David Bebbington, published by Wipf and Stock. A Patterned Life: Faith, History and David Bebbington (no doubt paying homage to Bebbington's book, Patterns in History) is authored by none other than Bebbington's wife, Eileen.

Here is the abstract of A Patterned Life:

David Bebbington—one of the most influential historians working today—is widely acknowledged as a world authority on religious history. He is also recognized for having devised the Bebbington Quadrilateral as the standard definition of evangelicalism, one of the most important global religious movements of the twenty-first century. In this lively study, Eileen Bebbington—who first met her husband as an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge over forty years ago—paints a vivid portrait of the life and thought of this leading scholar. Many who know Professor Bebbington's most celebrated books, such as Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, Patterns in History, The Mind of Gladstone, and Victorian Religious Revivals, will be delighted to learn that his first such effort was actually A History of the Ancient World with Which Is Incorporated Classical Mythology, a duly footnoted, four-volume work written at the age of nine! A Patterned Life is much more than an account of the intellectual development of a preeminent historian; it is a study of a life lived as a disciple of Jesus Christ—a human and often humorous account of eccentricities, an honest acknowledgment of trials, and an inspiring witness to one person's efforts to integrate a deep, earnest Christian faith with the best of modern thought.

With blurbs from George Marsden and Mark Noll:

"Everyone who knows David Bebbington has a David Bebbington story. Now, we have the David Bebbington story. It is told with grace by his wife, Eileen. She provides, in the Bebbington manner, a thorough and illuminating account. All who have learned from David and his remarkable work will appreciate it."
—George Marsden, author of Jonathan Edwards

"If the personal history of a bookish historian might sound like a very dull subject, Eileen Bebbington's 'life' of her husband, David, upsets expectations. This warmly human and intellectually insightful account is full of unusual insight about an unusually gifted historian—the result is an unusually successful book."
—Mark A. Noll, author of America's God

Insomnia, Print Culture, the Bebbington Quadrilateral, and Conceived in Doubt at the ASCH

One of the downsides of attending conferences for me is that I almost always have insomnia. From my days as a graduate student to the present, I have grown accustomed to reading, writing, and even sleeping with a steady flow of noise. It may be hard to believe, but I am most productive when I work at home with my children playing somewhere in the house, my wife on the phone or talking with my boys, and even when the television is on in the background. My friends at graduate school did not believe me when I told them that I pored through monographs with the television on and my children playing in the same room until they heard testimony to this fact from my wife and kids. I even require noise while sleeping. Since the beginning of my seventeen-year marriage, I have fallen asleep to the ambient sounds of a noisemaker that plays throughout the night. My lived experience of operating amidst constant clamor is contrasted when I am away from home. When I attend conferences, and stay in a hotel, I suddenly experience nearly complete silence, and I find it eerie. This kind of silence strikes my senses as unnatural and almost inevitably leads to insomnia for me throughout my time at the conference. After three or four days of functioning on only a few hours of sleep, I am desperate to return to the comfort of my home where there is more steady pattern of familiar sounds.

I awoke from about two hours of sleep on Friday, feeling like a zombie as I headed to breakfast with my fellow panelists before our 8:30am-10:00am session on "Printing Evangelicalisms: Evangelical Book Culture across Three Centuries," where I gave my paper on "The Role of Samuel Kneeland and Daniel Henchman as Jonathan Edwards's Chief Printer and Publisher at Boston." I think that all of the panelists, including myself, were shocked that the room was packed with people at such an early time in the morning. My fellow panelists Keith Grant and Daniel Vaca gave excellent papers, and I was particularly pleased with Catherine Brekus's insightful comments as the respondent. It was also nice to meet some of the people in the audience, including Rhys Bezzant, who has an exciting new book out on Jonathan Edwards and the Church, published by Oxford University Press.

After "Printing Evangelicalisms," I attended the 10:30am session, "Evangelicalism in Modern Britain Turns-Five: Re-Examining David Bebbington's 'Quadrilateral' Thesis." My friend Charlie Phillips and I put this panel together and sponsored the session. The papers by Kelly Elliott, Tommy Kidd, and Amanda Porterfield exceeded my expectation in their thoughtful analysis of Bebbington's book. I was equally impressed with Bebbington's response to each of the papers. He seems to thrive in these kinds of settings.

The other interesting session that I attended was on "Doubting the Democratization Thesis: A Roundtable Discussion of Amanda Porterfield's Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation." After hearing the glowing reviews of Michael Altman, James Byrd, and Kathryn Gin Lum, I awoke from my catatonic sleepless state when Mark Noll took the lectern and broke the series of compliments by offering a respectful, but sharp criticism of Amanda's book. Even though Mark commended Conceived in Doubt at the end of his paper, I was surprised at the extent to which he excoriated her thesis. I thought that Amanda's response throughout the whole of the session, and even with regard to Mark's comments, was extremely gracious, demonstrating a model on how scholars should respond in these kinds of situations.

After this final session, I ate dinner with the Bebbington panelists at Smith and Wollensky, which UTC and the Maclellan Foundation sponsored as a way of thanking the contributors.

Now that I have had one hour and a half of sleep, perhaps I will go exercise. I wonder if the hotel gym is open at 2:30am.

Congratulations Andy!

Congratulations to Andy Tooley, who successfully defended his PhD thesis on 19th-century Methodist thought! I look forward to reading the published version of his dissertation.

Andy and I began our doctoral studies under David Bebbington at the University of Stirling in 2006. I have fond memories of eating at the Edinburgh Pizza Hut for lunch, drinking a pint outside the Stirling bus station, attending conferences, and watching football together.

Best of luck with your next endeavors Andy!