Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England's Revival Tradition in Its British Context (Religion in America)

Seasons of Grace examines the evolution of the idea of a revival of religion in its social, institutional, and intellectual contexts within the transatlantic British evangelical community. Between the later seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, British evangelicals elaborated the concept of a revival of religion in terms of the transformation by grace of a community, a group of people bound together as a single moral entity by a covenant with God. Culminating with Jonathan Edwards, who described the revival of religion as the chief engine that drives redemption history, it was New Englanders who most explicitly developed the concept of revival as communal, as well as individual, conversion. During the Evangelical Revival of the mid-eighteenth century, the revival narrative came to embody this concept. This new literary genre treated a communal revival as a distinct phenomenon that possessed a morphology as recognizable as the morphology of individual conversion. Seasons of Grace explores the connections between the evangelical idea of a revival of religion and revivalistic techniques, including conversionist evangelism, passionate preaching, appeal to the affections, religious fellowship meetings, and congregational psalm and hymn singing, as they developed on both sides of the Atlantic.