Since Princeton College and Princeton Seminary were major radii of Realist influence, the conservative Presbyterianism headquartered there is an ideal choice for a case study in the American impact of Baconianism. Presbyterian thinkers, already committed to a synthesis of Protestant religion and Newtonian science, were afforded with additional means of elaborating a doxological version of natural science and of defending it against naturalism and other enemies of Christian faith. Originally published in 1977. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

An examination of the role played by the Bible in the emergence of natural science.

We live in a profoundly spiritual age, but not in any good way. Huge swaths of American culture are driven by manic spiritual anxiety and relentless supernatural worry. Radicals and traditionalists, liberals and conservatives, together with politicians, artists, environmentalists, followers of food fads, and the chattering classes of television commentators: America is filled with people frantically seeking confirmation of their own essential goodness. We are a nation desperate to stand of the side of morality--to know that we are righteous and dwell in the light. In An Anxious Age, Joseph Bottum offers an account of modern America, presented as a morality tale formed by a collision of spiritual disturbances. And the cause, he claims, is the most significant and least noticed historical fact of the last fifty years: the collapse of the mainline Protestant churches that were the source of social consensus and cultural unity. Our dangerous spiritual anxieties, broken loose from the churches that once contained them, now madden everything in American life. Updating The Protestant Ethic and the Sprit of Capitalism, Max Weber's sociological classic, An Anxious Age undertakes two case studies of contemporary social classes adrift in a nation without the religious understandings that gave them meaning. Looking at the college-educated elite he calls "the Poster Children," Bottum sees the post-Protestant heirs of the old mainline Protestant domination of culture: dutiful descendants who claim the high social position of their Christian ancestors even while they reject their ancestors' Christianity. Turning to the Swallows of Capistrano, the Catholics formed by the pontificate of John Paul II, Bottum evaluates the early victories--and later defeats--of the attempt to substitute Catholicism for the dying mainline voice in public life. Sweeping across American intellectual and cultural history, An Anxious Age traces the course of national religion and warns about the strange angels and even stranger demons with which we now wrestle. Insightful and contrarian, wise and unexpected, An Anxious Age ranks among the great modern accounts of American culture.

In Antwerp in the Age of Reformation historian Guido Marnef charts the social and economic networks that enabled Protestant, especially Calvinists and Anabaptists, to create a well-organized church. Covering the period of the great Netherlands' revolt against Spain, he explores the interplay between religion and politics and examines tensions within the Protestant community.

To Live Ancient Lives signals a sharp redirection of Puritan studies. It provides the first comprehensive study of Puritan primitivism, defined as the drive to recover and return to church and society the ordinances of biblical times. This work traces a campaign to purify English Christianity of postapostolic accretions from the Henrician Reformation to the Great Migration of 1630 and through the first five decades in New England. Taking their bearings from a special past, Puritans were not concerned with the future in a modern sense. The Great Migration was not intended as an errand to reform the world or inaugurate the millennium, but as a flight to a free world in which long-lost biblical rules and ways could be reinstituted. Drawing on hundreds of sermons and tracts, Bozeman demonstrates how the search for the long-lost helps to identify Puritanism as a discrete order within Protestant dissent, and he locates that movement within the larger spectrum of restorationist Christian movements and of Western mythology. Originally published in 1988. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

In the years following World War II, American Protestantism experienced tremendous growth, but conventional wisdom holds that midcentury Protestants practiced an optimistic, progressive, complacent, and materialist faith. In Original Sin and Everyday Protestants, historian Andrew Finstuen argues against this prevailing view, showing that theological issues in general--and the ancient Christian doctrine of original sin in particular--became newly important to both the culture at large and to a generation of American Protestants during a postwar "age of anxiety" as the Cold War took root. Finstuen focuses on three giants of Protestant thought--Billy Graham, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Tillich--men who were among the era's best known public figures. He argues that each thinker's strong commitment to the doctrine of original sin was a powerful element of the broad public influence that they enjoyed. Drawing on extensive correspondence from everyday Protestants, the book captures the voices of the people in the pews, revealing that the ordinary, rank-and-file Protestants were indeed thinking about Christian doctrine and especially about "good" and "evil" in human nature. Finstuen concludes that the theological concerns of ordinary American Christians were generally more complicated and serious than is commonly assumed, correcting the view that postwar American culture was becoming more and more secular from the late 1940s through the 1950s.