An elucidating study of why hell continued to matter in early America.
Religion scholar Gin Lum (Religious Studies/Stanford Univ.) delves into the writings and memoirs of early Americans deeply concerned with the issues of hell and salvation.
The Calvinist doctrine of predestination held so dear by the first wave of immigrants to the New World began to split by the mid-18th century. While revivalists like Jonathan Edwards preached hell-and-brimstone sermons—e.g., “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”—a backlash urged by Universalists and other liberal ministers presented a more benevolent God, with an emphasis on “moral living over a change of heart,” as well as “the ethical example of Christ rather than the traditional Calvinist doctrine that Christ’s death on the cross saved the elect alone.” The Enlightenment notions of rationality and the perfectability of man influenced the latter ministers and the coterie of Deist founding fathers like Thomas Paine, who denounced the doctrine of original sin as “absurd” and “profane.” Gin Lum illuminates the two doctrinal camps by contrasting portraits of the two John Murrays who arrived in America in the mid-1700s: “Salvation” Murray became a popular and dynamic preacher of Universalism’s message that “at the final judgment all humanity would be cleansed of sin,” while “Damnation” Murray preached of the horrors of eternal damnation to enrapt revivalist audiences. The rise of republicanism helped temper the “efficacy of hell for social cohesion,” replaced gradually by an evangelical sense that repentance of sins could avoid punishment in hell. Gin Lum draws on a wealth of conversion memoirs from exemplary Americans like Sarah Osborn and Benjamin Abbott and takes into account the booming print industry churning out fiery sermons and passionate exhortations for mothers to keep children out of sin’s way—or else. The author also looks extensively at the messages of Western missionaries and anti-slavery crusaders in delivering souls from perdition.
An elucidating study of why hell continued to matter in early America.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-19-984311-4
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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