The natural surroundings of the Connecticut Valley were clearly a source of Jonathan Edwards's philosophical idealism. This essay traces and interprets his conceptions of the natural world, the development of his philosophical idealism, and the religious symbolism which he applied to nature and biblical events.

Virtue theory has become an important development in Christian ethics. Efforts are made in this volume to bring pastoral theology into conversation with these developments. This book probes the philosophical theology of Jonathan Edwards, who proposed that virtue is a form of beauty defined as "consent to being." This leads to the notion of compassion as ontological consent. Since language is the vehicle by which our experiences are conveyed, the book probes the issue of how moral vision is expressed in "experience-near" language through parable, poem, and lament. Moral vision is articulated most adequately through such language, and finding it is a kind of quest The last chapter is a proposal for a mature pastoral theology of virtue as an expansion of Edwards's concept of "consent to being" from the vantage point of pastoral theology. A dynamic vision of virtue requires some connection between the experience of suffering and the inward striving toward the greatest good. The essence of virtue can be best understood, from a pastoral theological perspective, as the relational dynamic of "suffering with" another human being.

This Handbook offers a state-of-the-art summary of scholarship on Jonathan Edwards by a diverse, international, and inter-disciplinary group of active Edwards scholars.

Jonathan Edwards is the greatest theologian of colonial America as well as its first important philosopher. As a theologian, he represents without any concession Calvinistic Orthodoxy, re-thought and re-lived through the experience of the Great Awakening. The large majority of his writings are of a theological character, yet this theology is articulated and expressed through a systematic philosophical reflection. Edwardsian thought covers three major areas: First, being, grace, and glory; then, the doctrine of the will extending to the study of the original sin and evil; finally, an entirely original theory of knowledge synthesizing spirituality, aesthetics, and epistemology. The present book, the first edition of which appeared in French almost thirty years ago, is a uniquely comprehensive study of the work of Jonathan Edwards. It discusses all the aspects of his thought over against the background of classical Protestant theology and of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Western philosophy. Our time witnesses a significant renewal of interest in Jonathan Edwards. Professor Veto's book should prove to be a major contribution to assist and to guide the readers of "America's Theologian."

The eighteenth century remains contemporary more than 200 years later because the fundamental questions raised then about politics in both the American and French Revolutions still speak to us. The writings of Edmund Burke on these and other political events of his time are today acknowledged as the basis of modern conservative thought. This volume brings together an outstanding collection of interpretative essays on Burke, and serves as a basic introduction to this seminal thinker. A member of the British Parliament from 1766 to 1794, Edmund Burke had sympathized with the American War of Independence and argued for reform of British policy toward Ireland and India, but he surprised many of his friends by his early, vehement opposition to the French Revolution. This volume brings together assessments of these and other statements by Burke by contemporaries such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt, along with essays by Irving Babbitt and Russell Kirk, who established his significance for twentieth-century conservatism. This is a collection of the best, previously published interpretive essays on Burke. It will be of interest to all those interested in the philosophical roots of conservatism, in the history of political thought, in revolution, and in modern political ideologies.