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Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

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God And Mr. Lincoln, Allen C. Guelzo Apr 2018

God And Mr. Lincoln, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

On the day in April 1837 that Abraham Lincoln rode into Springfield, Illinois, to set himself up professionally as a lawyer, the American republic was awash in religion. Lincoln, however, was neither swimming nor even bobbing in its current. “This thing of living in Springfield is rather a dull business after all, at least it is so to me,” the uprooted state legislator and commercially bankrupt Lincoln wrote to Mary Owens on May 7th. “I am quite as lonesome here as [I] ever was anywhere in my life,” and in particular, “I’ve never been to church yet, nor probably shall …


Did Religion Make The American Civil War Worse?, Allen C. Guelzo Aug 2015

Did Religion Make The American Civil War Worse?, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

If there is one sober lesson Americans seem to be taking out of the bathos of the Civil War sesquicentennial, it’s the folly of a nation allowing itself to be dragged into the war in the first place. After all, from 1861 to 1865 the nation pledged itself to what amounted to a moral regime change, especially concerning race and slavery—only to realize that it had no practical plan for implementing it. No wonder that two of the most important books emerging from the Sesquicentennial years—by Harvard president Drew Faust, and Yale’s Harry Stout—questioned pretty frankly whether the appalling costs …


Freedom Of The Will, Allen C. Guelzo Jan 2005

Freedom Of The Will, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

The exact nature of the human will is, like the nature of human consciousness, a question so subjective and so interior that no one is ever likely to arrive at a satisfactory judgment about how it functions or even what it is-which may be the best proof that philosophy is not a science, and the best evidence that those social sciences which try to measure, quantify, and control aspects of human consciousness are not sciences either. Still, there is no denying that we are aware of a power or an impulse within us which transJates thought into action, or at …


God's Designs: The Literature Of The Colonial Revival Of Religion, 1735-1760, Allen C. Guelzo Jan 1998

God's Designs: The Literature Of The Colonial Revival Of Religion, 1735-1760, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

In December of 1990, after the completion of a section on Jonathan Edwards at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in New York City, a dozen or so of mostly younger scholars of Jonathan Edwards swept around the corner from the convention hotel and settled themselves down to a staggering repast at a posh north Italian restaurant. In the midst of some very un-Edwardsean consumption, I offered a question to everyone around the table: What is the most important book which you've ever read on the Great Awakening? With only one exception, the Young Edwardseans gave the palm …