Category Archives: Jonathan Edwards

PRINCETON LOG #1: GETTING THERE

Packed and ready to go:

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Dinner (and spent the night) with wonderful friends, Bill and Helen.  A great restaurant Bill and Helen introduced us to:

Breakfast in Dallas with our oldest son, David, who works for Deloitte:
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Driving over the Mississippi River:
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Feeling peace because our dog, Dexter, is in the terrific hands of our friends, Bill and Diana.  Note well his Napoleon complex!
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Spent night in Knoxville with Doreen’s sister and brother-in-law.  Met a new family member.  He cried right after this picture was taken.  It had nothing to do with my skills, but everything to do because the little guy was hungry.  That’s my story…
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Stopped at Wayside Inn in Middletown Virginia.  We stayed here twenty-five years ago when Doreen was pregnant with David.
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Asymmetrical is critical when Doreen drives:
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Arrived in Princeton.  Our place is the second floor with balcony.  Surrounded by history and beauty on every corner.
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Coming up next: What we are researching and writing.

FRANKLIN NOT EDWARDS

“I think ironically American evangelicals often seem to be more followers of Benjamin Franklin that they are of Jonathan Edwards. They [evangelicals] admire practicality, friendliness, moralisms, easy formulas, and quantifiable results. And while these Franklin-esque traits aren’t all bad they sometimes contribute to evangelical superficiality.”[1]

George Marsden

[1] George Marsden, “The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards,” Beeson Divinity School, Nov. 12, 2004. Emphasis added. The two major feeder streams coming early into American culture are the Enlightenment and Puritanism. See David A. Hollinger, “The Accommodation of Protestant Christianity with the Enlightenment: the Old Drama Still Being Enacted,” Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 141 (1) Winter 2012 and Marshall Shelley and David Goetz, “The Weapons of War: an Interview with James Davison Hunter, Leadership Journal, Spring 1993: 14-15.

GLORIOUS COMPLEXITY

“I have heard it said a thousand times that people seek out religion in order to escape complexity and uncertainty. I was moved and instructed precisely by the vast theater Edwards’s vision proposes for complexity and uncertainty, for a universe that is orderly without being mechanical, that is open to and participates in possibility, indeterminacy, and even providence. It taught me to think in terms that finally did some justice to the complexity of things.”

Pulitzer-prize winning author Marilynne Robinson