Dwight L. Moody
Dwight L. Moody

Author: James F. Findlay

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2007-09-01

Total Pages: 459

ISBN-13: 1556356234

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No one can claim to understand the American social and religious mind of the last half of the nineteenth century who does not understand sympathetically what evangelist Dwight L. Moody and his career represented. Moody was an entrepreneur, a self-made man, a living expression of much that was hearty and some of what was crass about religion in his day. This is the first biography to place him fully within the context of the broad social, theological, and cultural developments of his time. Most of the existing biographical literature about Moody is either simplistically eulogistic or sarcastically hostile. These polar views reflect the split that occurred within the Protestant church between fundamentalists and modernists during and after Moody's career. It is with an objective overview of these divergencies that the author has prepared his biography. Mr. Findlay demonstrates how Moody's outlook evolved from the small-town framework of early nineteenth-century New England and developed into the mainstream of American evangelicalism. In the rising cities of Boston and Chicago, he concentrated his efforts to urbanize revivalism as part of a general struggle to adapt a traditional faith to a rapidly changing external environment. After his triumphant revival crusades of the 1870s, the impact of his style and message faded before the progressive liberal approach to religion that was to shape twentieth-century Protestantism. The present biography of this great evangelist is far superior to any other, both for its scholarly approach in determining the place of evangelicalism in American social and religious history and for its portrayal of the overpowering impact of Moody's personality. It will be particularly fascinating to those interested in American social history and the history of evangelism, the man and the movement.

Business of the Heart
Business of the Heart

Author: John Corrigan

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-04-28

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 0520924320

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The "Businessmen's Revival" was a religious revival that unfolded in the wake of the 1857 market crash among white, middle-class Protestants. Delving into the religious history of Boston in the 1850s, John Corrigan gives an imaginative and wide-ranging interpretive study of the revival's significance. He uses it as a focal point for addressing a spectacular range of phenomena in American culture: the ecclesiastical and business history of Boston; gender roles and family life; the history of the theater and public spectacle; education; boyculture; and, especially, ideas about emotion during this period. This vividly written narrative recovers the emotional experiences of individuals from a wide array of little-used sources including diaries, correspondence, public records, and other materials. From these sources, Corrigan discovers that for these Protestants, the expression of emotion was a matter of transactions. They saw emotion as a commodity, and conceptualized relations between people, and between individuals and God, as transactions of emotion governed by contract. Religion became a business relation with God, with prayer as its legal tender. Entering this relationship, they were conducting the "business of the heart." This innovative study shows that the revival--with its commodification of emotional experience--became an occasion for white Protestants to underscore differences between themselves and others. The display of emotion was a primary indicator of membership in the Protestant majority, as much as language, skin color, or dress style. As Corrigan unravels the significance of these culturally constructed standards for emotional life, his book makes an important contribution to recent efforts to explore the links between religion and emotion, and is an important new chapter in the history of religion.

Ladies, Women, and Wenches
Ladies, Women, and Wenches

Author: Jane H. Pease

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2017-10-01

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1469639629

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Pursuing the meaning of gender in nineteenth-century urban American society, Ladies, Women, and Wenches compares the lives of women living in two distinctive antebellum cultures, Charleston and Boston, between 1820 and 1850. In contrast to most contemporary histories of women, this study examines the lives of all types of women in both cities: slave and free, rich and poor, married and single, those who worked mostly at home and those who led more public lives. Jane Pease and William Pease argue that legal, political, economic, and cultural contraints did limit the options available to women. Nevertheless, women had opportunities to make meaningful choices about their lives and sometimes to achieve considerable autonomy. By comparing the women of Charleston and Boston, the authors explore how both urbanization and regional differences -- especially with regard to slavery -- governed all women's lives. They assess the impact of marriage and work on women's religious, philanthropic, and reform activity and examine the female uses of education and property in order to illuminate the considerable variation in women's lives. Finally, they consider women's choices of life-style, ranging from compliance with to defiance of increasingly rigid social precepts defining appropriate female behavior. However bound women were by society's prescriptions describing their role or by the class structure of their society, they chose their ways of life from among such options as spinsterhood or marriage, domesticity or paid work, charitable activity or the social whirl, the solace of religion or the escape of drink. Drawing on a variety of sources including diaries, court documents, and contemporary literature, Ladies, Women, and Wenches explores how the women of Charleston and Boston made the choices in their lives between total dependence and full autonomy.