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Jonathan Edwards on the Experience of Beauty
Jonathan Edwards Classic Studies Series
Imprint: Wipf and Stock
Louis J. Mitchell is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and a graduate of Duquesne University. Ordained as a Presbyterian minister, he served in two churches in the Boston area before returning to Pittsburgh to become the Senior Pastor of an active congregation on the urban campus of the University of Pittsburgh, where he was also a chaplain of the university. Although Dr. Mitchell again left Pittsburgh, he continues to be a Steelers fan. For the past seventeen years he has been the senior pastor and head of staff of the historic First Presbyterian Church, Cranbury, New Jersey, which in the 1740s partnered with missionary David Brainerd in the Native American community of Bethel.
Dr. Mitchell holds a Master of Divinity degree from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and both a Master of Theology and Doctor of Theology degree from Harvard University. His doctoral dissertation, directed by Richard R. Niebuhr, focused on the idea of beauty in the thought of Jonathan Edwards. Dr. Mitchell's work on Edwards and beauty has been published in Theology Today, Theology Matters, and in Princeton Theological Seminary's monograph series, Studies in Reformed Theology and History.
Dr. Mitchell has been an adjunct professor at Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he currently serves in that capacity. Additionally, he has lectured in the Summer Theology Program at Princeton Theological Seminary. He has also been a participant in the Pastor-Theologian Program at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey.
"More and more Christian theologians are beginning to recognize that Jonathan Edwards was not only America's premier theologian but also the thinker who did more than anyone else in the history of Christian thought to relate God and beauty in an integral fashion. Louis Mitchell shows that at the center of Edwards's vaunted 'sense of the heart' was an infusion of God's beauty. Because of its fresh approach and elegant execution, this book should be required reading for all students of Edwards, aesthetics, and religious experience."
Gerald McDermott
Beeson Divinity School
"In this concise study, Louis Mitchell makes clear that beauty is a central category for Jonathan Edwards' theology, and indeed that Edwards was among the very first western Christian theologians to place beauty at the center of his thought. Even more, Mitchell shows how Edwards used the concept of beauty as a means to describe true religious experience. Readers of Edwards and of early modern philosophical theology can be thankful that this formative essay, which has long been difficult to access, is now readily available."
Kenneth Minkema
The Jonathan Edwards Center,
Yale University
"Both elegant and insightful, this study of aesthetics in Edwards' theology enables us to grasp the role of beauty in Edwards' understanding of human experience. This work contains a definitive introduction to the field and illuminating expositions of particular areas of thought. The section on the person and work of Christ is deeply suggestive, and the articulation of religious experience opens up Edwards' work to the uninitiated reader. This volume remains required reading for those wrestling with the depth and breadth of Edwards' thought."
Michael McClenahan, The BibleMesh Institute; author of Jonathan Edwards and Justification by Faith.