by Kathryn Gin Lum ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2014
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
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by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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