Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards was born in East Windsor, Connecticut, the only son among eleven children of a minister. He entered Yale at thirteen and as a young man wrote notes on spiders, light and the mind as well as theology. In 1727 he joined his grandfather Solomon Stoddard as pastor in Northampton, Massachusetts, and soon succeeded him. In 1734 and 1735 a religious revival broke out in his church, which he described in A Faithful Narrative, a book read in Britain and America. During the larger Great Awakening of the 1740s he preached Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God at Enfield, Connecticut, and wrote careful books distinguishing true religious feeling from mere excitement. A dispute over who could receive communion led his congregation to dismiss him in 1750. He moved to the frontier town of Stockbridge, where he preached to Mohican and Mohawk people and wrote major works, including Freedom of the Will. Edwards owned enslaved servants. In 1758 he became president of the College of New Jersey, now Princeton, but died weeks later after a smallpox inoculation.

Jonathan Edwards is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Congregational minister and theologian who defended Puritan Calvinist orthodoxy. Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy