What happened at or near the Cane Ridge meeting house in central Kentucky in August 1801 has become a legendary event in American religious history. Never before in America had so many thousands of people gathered for what became much more than the planned Presbyterian communion service. Never had so many families camped on the grounds. Never before had so many people been affected with involuntary physical exercises--sobbing, shouting, shaking, and swooning. And never before in American had a religious meeting led to so much national publicity, triggered so much controversy, or helped provoke such important denominational schisms. Paul Conkin tells the story of Cane Ridge in all its dimensions. The backdrop involves the convoluted history of Scotch-Irish Presbyterianism in America, the pluralistic religious environment in early Kentucky, and the gradual evolution of a new form of evangelical religious culture in eighteenth-century America. The aftermath was complex. Cane Ridge helped popularize religious camps and influenced the subsequent development of planned camp meetings. It exposed deep and developing divisions of doctrine among Presbyterian clergy, and contributed to the birth of two new denominations --Christians (Disciples of Christ) and Cumberland Presbyterians and furthered the growth of a new revival culture, keyed to a crisis-like conversion experience, even as it marked a gradual decline in sacramentalism.

"The 2019 Carroll Ellis Symposium, "America's Greatest Revival: Cane Ridge Reconsidered," was held August 13, 2019 at the Hillsboro Church of Christ in Nashville, Tennessee, hosted by Scott Sager of the Office of Church Services at Lipscomb University. The event coincided with the 218th anniversary week of the great Cane Ridge meeting led by Barton W. Stone from August 6th to 12th, 1801 in Bourbon County, Kentucky, at the meeting house of the Presbyterian congregation he served at Cane Ridge. Answered in Fire preserves the authors' presentations from that day for wider distribution and it provides something not available in the oral presentations: documentation of sources used by the presenters, including scattered eye-witness accounts of Cane Ridge and other revivals, as well as scholarly interpretations. It offers readers in one volume bibliographic pointers toward the literature about the revival's events, context, and impact. Through the narrative, analysis, and reflection takes a deeper look at a seminal event of the Second Great Awakening in America and ponders its meaning for its heirs today. The Cane Ridge revival can be considered the remarkable beginning of a reform movement in American Protestantism that under the initial leadership of Stone, Thomas and Alexander Campbell, and Walter Scott grew rapidly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Cane Ridge meeting attracted thousands of participants and observers from a wide variety of Christian groups in the region. Despite their differences, participants joined in fasting, prayer, singing, and preaching to seek repentance and renewal, compelled by a unifying sense of divine presence and awed by manifestations of the power of the Spirit of God. Yet, for the most part, the experiential narratives of this and similar revivals during the Second Great Awakening in America have not persisted in Churches of Christ, which have for nearly two centuries emphasized cognitive apprehension of the biblical message, conformity to scriptural examples in matters of church life, and obedience to the ethical demands of the New Testament"--

A Fresh Revival is Coming

A New York Times bestseller and Oprah's Book Club Pick-the unique and deeply moving saga of four generations of African-American women whose journey from slavery to freedom begins on a Creole plantation in Louisiana. Beginning with her great-great-great-great grandmother, a slave owned by a Creole family, Lalita Tademy chronicles four generations of strong, determined black women as they battle injustice to unite their family and forge success on their own terms. They are women whose lives begin in slavery, who weather the Civil War, and who grapple with contradictions of emancipation, Jim Crow, and the pre-Civil Rights South. As she peels back layers of racial and cultural attitudes, Tademy paints a remarkable picture of rural Louisiana and the resilient spirit of one unforgettable family. There is Elisabeth, who bears both a proud legacy and the yoke of bondage... her youngest daughter, Suzette, who is the first to discover the promise-and heartbreak-of freedom... Suzette's strong-willed daughter Philomene, who uses a determination born of tragedy to reunite her family and gain unheard-of economic independence... and Emily, Philomene's spirited daughter, who fights to secure her children's just due and preserve their dignity and future. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Cane River presents a slice of American history never before seen in such piercing and personal detail.