The sermon is the first and most enduring genre of American
literature. At the center of the Puritan experience, it continued
in succeeding centuries to play a vital role-as public ritual,
occasion for passion and reflection, and, not least, popular
entertainment. The fifty-eight sermons collected in this volume
display the form's eloquence, intellectual rigor, and spiritual
fervor. Ranging from the first New England settlements to
mass-media evangelism and the civil rights movement in the 1960s,
these texts reclaim a neglected American tradition. The Puritan
sermons with which the volume opens are extraordinary in their
richness of imagery, force of argument, and probing psychological
insight. From John Winthrop's visionary injunction that "wee must
consider that wee shall be as a citty upon a Hill," to Samuel
Danforth's admonition not to deviate from the divine "errand into
the wilderness," these seventeenth-century works first explored
what it means to be an American. Jonathan Edwards's remarkable
"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," which stirred its
eighteenth-century audiences to frenzy, shows the intensity to
which the sermon could rise, while Jonathan Mayhew's "Discourse
Concerning Unlimited Submission" heralds the political thinking
that led to the American Revolution. The ferment of the nineteenth
century-the Mexican War, the struggle against slavery, the Civil
War-inevitably affected the sermon. Orthodoxies were challenged,
and a new diversity emerged in the Unitarianism of William Ellery
Channing, the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the new
Church of Latter Day Saints, and the gathering strength of the
African-American sermon tradition. The twentieth-century sermons
collected here continue to wrestle with fundamental spiritual and
civic concerns. They range from a homily on charity by the popular
evangelist Billy Sunday to a discourse on interfaith cooperation by
Abraham Joshua Heschel, and from Harry Emerson Fosdick's
controversial "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" to John Gresham
Machen's uncompromising riposte. The achievement of the
African-American sermon attains a new breadth of influence in the
inspiring oratory of Martin Luther King Jr. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is
an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to
preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping
permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing.
The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to
date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length,
feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are
printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
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