The Selected Writings of John Witherspoon

The Selected Writings of John Witherspoon PDF Author: Thomas P. Miller
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809334674
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Considered the first significant teacher of rhetoric in America, John Witherspoon also introduced Scottish moral philosophy to this country and as president of Princeton University reformed the curriculum to give emphasis to both studies. He was an active pamphleteer on religious and political issues and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Editor Thomas P. Miller argues that Witherspoon’s career exemplifies the Ciceronian ideal, and the eight selections Miller presents from the 1802 American edition of the Works corroborate that claim. This paperback edition includes a new preface by the editor that surveys the scholarship published on Witherspoon over the past twenty-five years and discusses how Miller’s own perspective on Witherspoon has changed during that time.

The Selected Writings of John Witherspoon

The Selected Writings of John Witherspoon PDF Author: Thomas P. Miller
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809334674
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Considered the first significant teacher of rhetoric in America, John Witherspoon also introduced Scottish moral philosophy to this country and as president of Princeton University reformed the curriculum to give emphasis to both studies. He was an active pamphleteer on religious and political issues and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Editor Thomas P. Miller argues that Witherspoon’s career exemplifies the Ciceronian ideal, and the eight selections Miller presents from the 1802 American edition of the Works corroborate that claim. This paperback edition includes a new preface by the editor that surveys the scholarship published on Witherspoon over the past twenty-five years and discusses how Miller’s own perspective on Witherspoon has changed during that time.

John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic

John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic PDF Author: Jeffry H. Morrison
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268087229
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Jeffry H. Morrison offers readers the first comprehensive look at the political thought and career of John Witherspoon—a Scottish Presbyterian minister and one of America’s most influential and overlooked founding fathers. Witherspoon was an active member of the Continental Congress and was the only clergyman both to sign the Declaration of Independence and to ratify the federal Constitution. During his tenure as president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton, Witherspoon became a mentor to James Madison and influenced many leaders and thinkers of the founding period. He was uniquely positioned at the crossroads of politics, religion, and education during the crucial first decades of the new republic. Morrison locates Witherspoon in the context of early American political thought and charts the various influences on his thinking. This impressive work of scholarship offers a broad treatment of Witherspoon’s constitutionalism, including his contributions to the mediating institutions of religion and education, and to political institutions from the colonial through the early federal periods. This book will be appreciated by anyone with an interest in American political history and thought and in the relation of religion to American politics.

John Witherspoon's American Revolution

John Witherspoon's American Revolution PDF Author: Gideon Mailer
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469628198
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
In 1768, John Witherspoon, Presbyterian leader of the evangelical Popular party faction in the Scottish Kirk, became the College of New Jersey's sixth president. At Princeton, he mentored constitutional architect James Madison; as a New Jersey delegate to the Continental Congress, he was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. Although Witherspoon is often thought to be the chief conduit of moral sense philosophy in America, Mailer's comprehensive analysis of this founding father's writings demonstrates the resilience of his evangelical beliefs. Witherspoon's Presbyterian evangelicalism competed with, combined with, and even superseded the civic influence of Scottish Enlightenment thought in the British Atlantic world. John Witherspoon's American Revolution examines the connection between patriot discourse and long-standing debates--already central to the 1707 Act of Union--about the relationship among piety, moral philosophy, and political unionism. In Witherspoon's mind, Americans became different from other British subjects because more of them had been awakened to the sin they shared with all people. Paradoxically, acute consciousness of their moral depravity legitimized their move to independence by making it a concerted moral action urged by the Holy Spirit. Mailer's exploration of Witherspoon's thought and influence suggests that, for the founders in his circle, civic virtue rested on personal religious awakening.

The Political Theory of the American Founding

The Political Theory of the American Founding PDF Author: Thomas G. West
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110714048X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
This book provides a complete overview of the Founders' natural rights theory and its policy implications.

The Importance of Feeling English

The Importance of Feeling English PDF Author: Leonard Tennenhouse
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691171270
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
American literature is typically seen as something that inspired its own conception and that sprang into being as a cultural offshoot of America's desire for national identity. But what of the vast precedent established by English literature, which was a major American import between 1750 and 1850? In The Importance of Feeling English, Leonard Tennenhouse revisits the landscape of early American literature and radically revises its features. Using the concept of transatlantic circulation, he shows how some of the first American authors--from poets such as Timothy Dwight and Philip Freneau to novelists like William Hill Brown and Charles Brockden Brown--applied their newfound perspective to pre-existing British literary models. These American "re-writings" would in turn inspire native British authors such as Jane Austen and Horace Walpole to reconsider their own ideas of subject, household, and nation. The enduring nature of these literary exchanges dramatically recasts early American literature as a literature of diaspora, Tennenhouse argues--and what made the settlers' writings distinctly and indelibly American was precisely their insistence on reproducing Englishness, on making English identity portable and adaptable. Written in an incisive and illuminating style, The Importance of Feeling English reveals the complex roots of American literature, and shows how its transatlantic movement aided and abetted the modernization of Anglophone culture at large.

The Evils of Necessity

The Evils of Necessity PDF Author: Eric Robert Papenfuse
Publisher: American Philosophical Society
ISBN: 9780871698711
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Robert Goodloe Harper (1765-1825), a prominent attorney congressman from South Carolina & Maryland, was one of the most influential Federalists of the early national period. Harper is traditionally remembered as an extreme example of unthinking, reactionary conservatism in an era of intense partisanship & bitter sectional conflict. In this lively, revisionist account, Eric Robert Papenfuse reinterprets Harper's political philosophy in light of his personal struggle with the moral dilemma of slavery. Papenfuse uses newly discovered documents to show how Harper rose to power among back country South Carolinians as both an advocate of innate racial equality & a proponent of the gradual end to slavery's westward expansion. Though deeply troubled by slavery's irremediable moral & political evils, Harper accepted the system as a temporary necessity, & turned his efforts to achieving social progress through the education of lower-class white Americans & the "emancipation" of European peasants from Napoleonic tyranny. The establishment of the American Colonization Society in 1816 renewed Harper's commitment to resolving the problem of slavery by educating blacks & transporting them to an environment free from white racial prejudice, where they might one day become a "great nation." By conveniently reproducing & indexing four of Harper's most important speeches & letters, Papenfuse invites readers to examine for themselves a fundamental paradox of the age: how an abiding conviction that all races were inherently equal could allow for such forced rationalizations, painful self-deceptions, & maddening compromises.

The Founders and the Bible

The Founders and the Bible PDF Author: Carl J. Richard
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442254653
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
The religious beliefs of America’s founding fathers have been a popular and contentious subject for recent generations of American readers. In The Founders and the Bible, historian Carl J. Richard carefully examines the framers’ relationship with the Bible to assess the conflicting claims of those who argue that they were Christians founding a Christian nation against those who see them as Deists or modern secularists. Richard argues that it is impossible to understand the Founders without understanding the Biblically infused society that produced them. They were steeped in a biblical culture that pervaded their schools, homes, churches, and society. To show the fundamental role of religious beliefs during the Founding and early years of the republic, Richard carefully reconstructs the beliefs of 30 Founders; their lifelong engagements with Scripture; their biblically-infused political rhetoric; their powerful beliefs in a divine Providence that protected them and guided the young nation; their beliefs in the superiority of Christian ethics and in the necessity of religion to republican government; their beliefs in spiritual equality, free will, and the afterlife; their religious differences; the influence of their biblical conception of human nature on their formulation of state and federal constitutions; and their use of biblical precedent to advance religious freedom.

The Ninth Amendment: Key to Understanding the Bill of Rights

The Ninth Amendment: Key to Understanding the Bill of Rights PDF Author: Duane L Ostler
Publisher: Duane L Ostler
ISBN: 1311986936
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 79

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Book Description
This book explains how the Ninth Amendment is the key to understanding rights in the United States. The founders created the Ninth Amendment to protect unlisted natural law rights as they were understood in their day. This amendment was never intended to allow future generations to create new rights. Rather, it was to safeguard the morality and natural rights of the founding generation.

The Last Presbyterian? Tenth Anniversary Edition

The Last Presbyterian? Tenth Anniversary Edition PDF Author: Kenneth L. Cuthbertson
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1666779733
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
In a time when organized religion is suffering an identity crisis, the author of The Last Presbyterian? examines the faith culture that shaped him and his family over the last half millennium. Filled with historical, theological, and spiritual reflections and set in the context of both old family stories and current trends, Cuthbertson’s book addresses such timely issues as practicing faith within families, setting aside time for God, and the changing facets of leadership and discipleship within the Presbyterian tradition. Starting with the “Psalm-singing, Sabbath-keeping, Shorter-Catechism-memorizing” branches of Scots-American Presbyterianism, this book offers an affectionate look back, and a hopeful look ahead, to an emergent Presbyterianism coming to terms with issues such as LGBT ordination and same-gender marriage, interfaith relations, and care for the earth.

The Religious Roots of the First Amendment

The Religious Roots of the First Amendment PDF Author: Nicholas P. Miller
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199942803
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Traditional understandings of the genesis of the separation of church and state rest on assumptions about "Enlightenment" and the republican ethos of citizenship. In The Religious Roots of the First Amendment, Nicholas P. Miller does not seek to dislodge that interpretation but to augment and enrich it by recovering its cultural and discursive religious contexts--specifically the discourse of Protestant dissent. He argues that commitments by certain dissenting Protestants to the right of private judgment in matters of Biblical interpretation, an outgrowth of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, helped promote religious disestablishment in the early modern West. This movement climaxed in the disestablishment of religion in the early American colonies and nation. Miller identifies a continuous strand of this religious thought from the Protestant Reformation, across Europe, through the English Reformation, Civil War, and Restoration, into the American colonies. He examines seven key thinkers who played a major role in the development of this religious trajectory as it came to fruition in American political and legal history: William Penn, John Locke, Elisha Williams, Isaac Backus, William Livingston, John Witherspoon, and James Madison. Miller shows that the separation of church and state can be read, most persuasively, as the triumph of a particular strand of Protestant nonconformity-that which stretched back to the Puritan separatist and the Restoration sects, rather than to those, like Presbyterians, who sought to replace the "wrong" church establishment with their own, "right" one. The Religious Roots of the First Amendment contributes powerfully to the current trend among some historians to rescue the eighteenth-century clergymen and religious controversialists from the enormous condescension of posterity.