Rhetoric and History in Revolutionary New England

Title: Rhetoric and History in Revolutionary New England
Author: Donald Weber
E: 1701569
ISBN: 0195051041
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1988
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Edition: First Edition
Number of Pages: 224
Section: Religion | Christian Ministry | Preaching
Condition Note: Excellent, unmarked copy with little wear and tight binding. We ship in recyclable American-made mailers. 100% money-back guarantee on all orders.
Publisher Description: The question of how religious and political languages interacted in the pulpit of the American Revolution has engaged scholars in literature, religion, intellectual history, symbolic anthropology, and American studies for over a generation. Drawing on recent work in ritual studies and the history of the sermon in colonial America, Weber enters the debate over the contexts of the mobilizing agency of revolutionary discourse through analysis of manuscript sermons, diaries, and letters of both evangelical and rationalist orators. By recreating the mental worlds of five individual ministers, this book dramatizes the rhetorical struggle of the clergy to make narrative sense out of the social and political upheaval around them and describes how patriot ministers eased their congregations through the bewildering passage from dependence to independence. In the process, it highlights the continuities in preaching modes from Awakening to Revolution as it reveals how the changing forms of ministerial discourse anticipate the eventual displacement of the evangelical clergy to the margins of social and communicative power by the end of the century.