Description
Book SynopsisFounding the Fathers explores the development of early Christian history and theology as a discipline in four nineteenth-century Protestant seminaries in the United States. Archival sources reveal how professors adjusted German scholarship to fit Americans' evangelical assumptions and to make the Catholic past more palatable.
Trade Review"This is a genuinely pioneering work from one of the most engaged historians of early Christianity. Elizabeth A. Clark's lucid exposition reveals a mastery of scholarship on German, British, and American educational curricula and intellectual life." * Mark Vessey, University of British Columbia *
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Founding the Fathers is sweeping in its view of the history of American higher education, its comprehensive sense of the study of religion, and its firm grasp of the transnational scope of nineteenth-century theological learning. An original and substantial contribution to both American intellectual history and the history of early Christian studies." * Leigh Eric Schmidt, Harvard University *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Higher Education and Religion in Nineteenth-Century United States
PART I. THE SETTING: CONTEXTUALIZING THE STUDY OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY IN AMERICA
1. The Institutions and the Professors
2. Infrastructure: Teaching, Textbooks, Primary Sources, and Libraries
PART II. HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY
3. Defending the Faith: European Theories and American Professors
4. History and Church History
5. Development and Decline: Challenges to Historiographical Categories
PART III. TOPICS OF EARLY CHRISTIAN HISTORY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ANALYSIS
6. Polity and Practice
7. Roman Catholicism
8. Asceticism, Marriage, Women, and the Family
9. The Uses of Augustine
Conclusion
Appendix: Student Notetakers
List of Abbreviations and Archival Sources
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
