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Volume 7: Words of Grace is the last volume of letters rounding out Anne Dutton's correspondence as a significant spiritual writer and encourager of revival and growth in holiness. Particularly important is the precious treasure of her seventeen letters sent to the Rev. George Whitefield and his friends and acquaintances in 1745 to encourage his work and ministry in England and in the colonies, as well as his orphanage in Bethesda. Also included are two additional 1745 letters—one on the being and working of sin and the other on the duty and privilege of a believer—sent to Whitefield's Society at the Tabernacle in London. Three collections of Dutton's letters—Volumes I (1740), IV (1746), and VIII (1750)—on spiritual subjects addressed to relations and friends also appear in this volume. These letters show her to be a spiritual director, guide, and voice of holiness in evangelical revival in England in the eighteenth century.

Kierkegaard's writings are severely complicated and readers often do not know what to make of them given the array of genres he deploys. He is at once a philosopher, theologian, literary critic, and poet in his own right who writes under multiple pseudonyms directed at an unsure audience. Stages on Life's Way is one of his longer and more elusive texts, and even scholars often shy away from it. The Divine Madness of Romantic Ideals offers a close and extensive reading of this puzzling production, showing how its disarming, concrete themes of personal love and marriage help unlock more abstract conceptual boxes within Kierkegaard's authorship for a general readership, pointing out the forest while paying scrupulous attention to the trees.

This book begins with an introductory overview of the socio-political climate of the state of Mississippi during the 1850s and ends with a treatment of its post-war environment. In between, the work covers the pivotal events, issues, and personalities of the period. Wynne emphasizes the experiences of Mississippians--male and female, black and white--as they struggled to deal with the crisis. The political events leading to secession, Mississippians' initial enthusiasm for war, voices of dissent, the disbursement of troops in and out of the state, the home front, freedom for the slave community, waning enthusiasm (both in the military and on the home front) as the war dragged on, defeat, and the ultimate struggle to turn defeat into a moral victory through Lost Cause mythology are also discussed.

Among the most important and intricate of all the works of Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety is deeply rooted in the life and personality of its author. First published in 1844 under the cryptic pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis, The Concept of Anxiety is, according to its subtitle, A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Heriditary Sin. "Psychologically orienting" it may be; "simple" it is not. For Kierkegaard, burdened as he was with the guilt of his father, "heriditary sin" was not a theoretical abstraction but an existential reality. Yet the book, born of his daily struggle with anxiety, is perhaps Kierkegaard’s most difficult work, embodying the author's great learning as well as his irony and his passion. In this commentary eight recognized Kierkegaard scholars explore the sources and the continuing influence of The Concept of Anxiety. The Dane's debt to Augustine, Kant, and Schelling, his debate with Hegel and the overarching system of Idealism, and his intellectual legacy to modern thinkers like Martin Heidegger are analyzed and evaluated. The relation of anxiety to freedom and knowledge, to time and eternity, to sin and the demonic is assessed with the care and sensitivity that Kierkegaard's writing demands.

In late 1845 Søren Kierkegaard began a literary duel with the satiric Danish review The Corsair that had momentous effects on his life and work. The affair prompted Kierkegaard to ponder and write about the use and abuse of the press. His reflections on this subject led him to examine topics that included communication, the public, the public morale, and the issues of social legitimacy, the relation of the individual to society and, surprisingly enough, the nature of the comic. Standard Kierkegaard biographies and interpretations generally perceive the affair as decisive in leading Kierkegaard to give up his idea of becoming a country pastor and in driving him to continue his prodigious literary output. The Corsair Affair, is not like any other volume previously published or planned in the series. It contains only a few pages of Kierkegaard's own published writings, while his unpublished journals constitute most of the volume. The second-largest section reprints the cartoons and articles about Kierkegaard published in The Corsair and includes excerpts from the autobiography of Meir Goldschmidt, editor of The Corsair. Perkins states in his introduction that this commentary "is the first concerted effort by scholars of many persuasions, using different methods, to address this series of events and the concepts that were developed in and through them. Here we make a fresh new start to work our way through a new set of concepts derived from these documents and our cogitations on them. In the process, we also enrich our treatment of concepts that have long been prominent in Kierkegaard research."

Fear and Trembling continues to fascinate and frustrate all who find, for many reasons, that they must struggle with it. Not only 'professional intellectuals,' but students and other seekers perennially wrestle with it, working their way through its difficult dialectic. Both philosophers and theologians are provoked by the prominence of typically Kierkegaardian terms, categories, and arguments—paradox, resignation, faith, the absurd, the individual, the poet, immediacy, the ethical, leap, offence, silence, and others. In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard challenges many of our modern assumptions, and he will continue to frustrate and fascinate us for so long as we attempt to sort out ourselves and our times. IKC 6 includes the first collection of essays to concentrate the talents of a number of scholars on Kierkegaard's obscure little book Repetition which is, in a word, about hope. Kierkegaard suggests that in the midst of our epistemological errors, the weakness and/or arrogance of our wills, and in making fools of ourselves, or being made fools of, there is everlasting hope for us. Repetition indeed goes to the heart of the matter, to the core of human existence.

In the fifty years since her death, Flannery O’Connor studies have been conventionally delimited to two critical parameters: the South and the Church of Rome. This work challenges the conception of O’Connor as inherent to a monolithic South and to orthodox Roman Catholicism by problematizing the “Southern Gothic” trope, positing a non-canonical Southern realism, and repositioning O’Connor as essentially ecumenical in her private theology. The study contextualizes O’Connor’s work within the American scene by detailing the varied political and literary histories of the “North” and “South” as well as opposing the notion of region-specific aesthetics and a native anti-realist mode in the South.

Adam Smith is best known for his magisterial Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, but his other great work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is as deserving of serious study. In this volume, scholars in economics, philosophy, and political science take up questions that range throughout Smith’s work, seeking to find connections between his moral theory and political economy. 

This volume, based on the 2013 A. V. Elliot Conference on Great Books and Ideas at Mercer University, represents a great diversity of disciplinary perspectives. Its authors take up a wide range of concerns that exist in the intersection of Smith’s political and moral theory. It also includes several articles that attempt to compare his work to thinkers that preceded and followed him, coming from as far back in the tradition as the Italian Renaissance, and moving forward in history to claim Smith’s relevance for contemporary research in experimental economics.

This narrative provides a comprehensive history of America’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). The book concludes that race, the Civil Rights movements, and black and white philanthropy had much affect on the development of these minority institutions. Northern white philanthropy had much to do with the start and maintenance of the nation’s HBCUs from 1837 into the 1940s. Even from 1950 to 1970, HBCUs depended upon financial support of philanthropic groups, benevolent societies, and federal and state government agencies, but the survival of HBCUs became dependent mostly on their own creative responses to the changing environment of higher education and have helped to shape our culture and society.

 

The essays in BETWEEN FETTERS AND FREEDOM explore a number of issues bearing on post-Civil War African American Baptists. With limited resources at their disposal, precisely what did freedom mean? Would African American Baptist organizations be recognized as legitimate by white peer organizations? What sort of internal stress would African American organizations face as they gained traction in the black community, and what sort of stress would a rapidly changing culture place on those organizations and the people who made them what they were? Through it all, preachers and lay people alike wondered how their voices would be heard above the din.

What does it mean to become a human being? This question was persistently repeated by Kierkegaard scholar Howard V. Hong (1912–2010) to students during his forty-year tenure at St. Olaf College. As one of Dr. Hong’s students, Jamie Lorentzen never forgot the question—one that always pointed to the ethical upbuilding of individuals. Lorentzen’s Kierkegaard studies inform commentary on how central characters in four works of literature help readers answer Howard Hong’s question. Twain’s Huck Finn becomes human by being an unwitting ethicist despite himself and the pro-slavery culture in which he was reared. Ishmael and Queequeg’s embrace of the neighbor and outcast in Melville’s Moby-Dick is an ethical counterpoint to Ahab’s terrifying narcissism. Meanwhile, Ibsen’s famous narcissist, Peer Gynt, offers an archetypal negative ethical model for becoming human. Finally, Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima and Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov show how ethics informs human development in both secular and religious cultures.

Should high-tech prosthetic limbs be permissible in elite sports competitions? Why are caffeine and altitude tents usually acceptable while some cold medications are not? What will happen as we engineer new enhancing options such as genetic modification technologies that increase muscle strength, or individualized nutritional genomic programs for elite athletes? The ethics debate about the use of enhancements in elite sport is becoming increasingly complex. Yet we are not asking what relevance sports’ religious dimension has to this debate. Through an examination of literature on the relationship between sport, religion and spirituality, hope emerges as a compelling feature of sport and a significant part of what makes sport meaningful. Trothen explores four main locations of hope in sport: winning, losing, and anticipation; star athletes; perfect moments; and relational embodiment, and examines how these locations intersect with the enhancement debate.