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.

A Fresh Revival is Coming

"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"--

Called "a pioneer contribution" by Church History when it was first published in 1971, this volume has now been revised and enlarged by Vinson Synan to account for the incredible changes that have occurred in the church world in the last 25 years.

The Kentucky Encyclopedia's 2,000-plus entries are the work of more than five hundred writers. Their subjects reflect all areas of the commonwealth and span the time from prehistoric settlement to today's headlines, recording Kentuckians' achievements in art, architecture, business, education, politics, religion, science, and sports. Biographical sketches portray all of Kentucky's governors and U.S. senators, as well as note congressmen and state and local politicians. Kentucky's impact on the national scene is registered in the lives of such figures as Carry Nation, Henry Clay, Louis Brandeis, and Alben Barkley. The commonwealth's high range from writers Harriette Arnow and Jesse Stuart, reformers Laura Clay and Mary Breckinridge, and civil rights leaders Whitney Young, Jr., and Georgia Powers, to sports figures Muhammad Ali and Adolph Rupp and entertainers Loretta Lynn, Merle Travis, and the Everly Brothers. Entries describe each county and county seat and each community with a population above 2,500. Broad overview articles examine such topics as agriculture, segregation, transportation, literature, and folklife. Frequently misunderstood aspects of Kentucky's history and culture are clarified and popular misconceptions corrected. The facts on such subjects as mint juleps, Fort Knox, Boone's coonskin cap, the Kentucky hot brown, and Morgan's Raiders will settle many an argument. For both the researcher and the more casual reader, this collection of facts and fancies about Kentucky and Kentuckians will be an invaluable resource.