Angry God Research Articles

Emergence of the concept of endocrine function and endocrinology

Emergence of the concept of endocrine function and endocrinology

"The supreme harmony of all": the Trinitarian theology of Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards lived in an age in which the doctrine of the Trinity was sometimes openly repudiated and more often quietly ignored. But as this important book shows, Edwards in fact took care to creatively fashion the Trinity into the centerpiece of his Christian life and work. Through her pursuit of Edwards's writings, especially his lifelong intellectual diary, Amy Plantinga Pauw traces the way Edwards established the basic outlines of his trinitarian thought when he was only twenty years old, and how the doctrine continued to run like a subterranean river throughout his famed career as a pastor and teacher. Recognizing the centrality of the Trinity in Edwards's thought both nuances our understanding of his Puritan inheritance and challenges the narrowness of Edwards's enduring legacy as the preacher of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.

Blood in the Basin: The Civil War in Emily Dickinsonis "The name of it is Autumn "

It was Emily Dickinson herself who observed that "The Riddle we can guess / We speedily despise" (J1222), a comment that goes far, perhaps, to explain the self-consciously enigmatic nature of "The name - of it - is 'Autumn' -" (J656). A riddle of daunting complexity, Dickinson's poem continues both to beckon and to baffle its readers, and the present essay is devoted not so much to an attempt to "guess" its meaning as to the more modest task of recalling or reviving, palingenetically as it were, some faint ghost or echo at least of the rich, complex and increasingly remote cultural moment in which it came into being. Precisely because it seems to embody [End Page 25] Dickinson's response to one of the most bloody and traumatic periods in our national history—the season that John Greenleaf Whittier referred to as the "Battle Autumn" of 1862—this intense, evocative and volatile poem might well be thought of as a sort of essence, one of those poetic "Attar[s] so immense," as the poet herself has it, distilled from the "familiar species / That perished by the Door" (J448). The distiller's raw materials, in this case, included a remarkably wide range of literary sources, including contemporary travel essays and magazine stories, the Bible, religious poetry, anatomical texts, war news, and works by favorite authors such as Sir Thomas Browne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Ruskin, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, all of them subsumed into an emotionally-charged but typically oblique or "slant" commentary on or response to the notion (expressed, in the white heat of the moment, by many of Dickinson's contemporaries) that the ongoing Civil War was to be interpreted as a great purgative sacrifice or blood-offering demanded of an erring nation by an angry God. 1

Seeds, and: Deluge, and: The Freedom of the City, and: Island of Miracles

SEEDS/Catherine MacCarthy (for Roger and Siobhari) My father's hands scatter grain, freckled, giant, as I stumble after him watching his palms cast from a jute sack this way and that as if he's performing a rite. And what I wonder about is how he measures out the ground and how he knows how thick and fast to plant as he paces forward and where exactly it lands? The Bible warns against stones. What about the birds already having a feast as they flock and lift treating our harrowed space as if it were Christmas? He's unconcerned about stones and it's important to cater for the birds. They'll soon have enough. As for the seeds I watch them sprout delicate ribby greens against the rainy earth and rise over months to a deep aquamarine that glistens and runnels under the breeze. Avid to catch the split second the colours change I play hide and seek vanish and appear, 54 · The Missouri Review eye to eye with ripening grain stilled by a tide shifting the field and close my eyes to listen as the harvest turns golden. Catherine MacCarthy The Missouri Review · 55 DELUGE/Catherine MacCarthy In the house next door are two small boys. They throw Beanie Babies across the fence and shout their names and call for someone to throw them back. I sit quiet with a book pretending not to exist as animals rain but they have climbed onto a ledge and spied a patch of dress through the lattice and red roses that bloom all round a gap in the hedge. Already there are lions, elephants, penguins, and several species of reptile looking sad. "Here's Amber," they holler undeterred. A striped cat lands at my feet. Two pairs ofbrown eyes observe. "Would you like to keep him?" They smile as I pick up the cat. Amber is soft, enough to take me off guard. More Beanies shower the fence. The boys are yelling and it's time for bed but from their incessant voices, I can hear that exhaustion is a deluge flooding the land, their parents are already drowned and I am beginning to understand what Noah in the ark must have felt: I am their only chance and my garden is the last high island left. 56 · The Missouri Review THE FREEDOM OF THE CITY/Catherine MacCarthy He slips out the back gate with a young woman, fair hair, pouting lips and long ethnic skirts, an old man with keys in his hand, his bald head turned to check the lie of the land, that one backward glance cautious as the bushy-tailed red fox whose eyes met mine in our garden after rain one November afternoon in a deluge of green between leaf fall and sunshine before he turned to light again high on the boundary wall. The Missouri Review · 57 ISLAND OF MSRACLES/Catherine MacCarthy Forty degrees. Not a soul on the beach. I began to dream of rain as we lay in our shuttered room, blood growing thin, of standing out in a field drenched to the skin, tongue out drinking as it poured down, of falling to my knees before the heavens. We sped north and east, the hot wind from Africa burning our heels, rose with the road, with our fear, the breath of an angry god through mountains above a ravine round Kera Pass, you could no longer steer and our bike was a trembling reed. I turned my face from the precipice as you steadied the wheel in that land of the mother goddess, and drove at full throttle. I could feel our lives in our hands, then mercy of the elements as we flew to the plain of a thousand springs where the gale ceased by the cave ofbaby Zeus, and we glimpsed the shadow of an eagle floating downstream. Catherine MacCarthy's first collection, 77f£s Hour ofthe Tide, was published in 1994, and her second, The Blue Globe, in 1998. "Word ofMouth," a third collection, is near completion. She was awarded Arts Council bursaries for poetry in 1994 and 1998. Her poems have been published in anthologies and reviews...

"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God": Some Unfinished Business

NEITHER in the height of popularity enjoyed while living nor in the fall from grace experienced thereafter does Jonathan Edwards approach the literary trajectory of a Longfellow. Still, one cannot help but conclude that Edwards is a casualty of the decentering of Puritanism and the devaluing of religious writing signaled by Philip Gura over a decade ago.' Though the editors of the Jonathan Edwards Reader, published since Gura issued his vade mecum, rightly label Edwards colonial America's greatest theologian and philosopher ... the towering figure of an age in which religion predominated,' the study of our early literature now begins in pre-Columbian Native America and ranges from charms to corridos. Such a broadening of focus has necessarily had its effect on the attention we devote to the Great White Fathers of our past. Thus we watch Edwards's presence in an oft frequented literary museum like the Heath Anthology of American Literature shrink from nine selections over sixty-seven pages to four over thirtyfour just across the three editions published in the 199os.3 Whatever the vagaries of critical whittling, however, I think it is still safe to say that there will never be an American literature without Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. It is simply

Feeling the Force of Certainty: The Divine Science, Newtonianism, and Jonathan Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"

F OR over two centuries, Jonathan Edwards's image of a loathsome spider dangling pitilessly over the gaping mouth of hell has defined Puritan terror preaching in the American cultural imagination. The precariousness associated with that image-and with countless others of falling, sliding, hanging-has led critic after critic to identify the terror of in the Hands of an Angry as the emotional product of uncertainty. But to understand the images in this way is to miss the full force of their power, for Edwards's intellectual achievement in Sinners rests not simply in his searing images of hellfire and the insecurity they elicit but also in his ability to draw upon the new science to infuse the old religion with an equally terrifying account of the logic of certainty. In other words, Edwards, master rhetorician that he was, coupled the certainty and universality of gravity's action upon objects in the physical world with the certainty and universality of unregenerate man's utter depravity and dependence on God in the metaphysical world. Sinners betrays an intricate and heretofore understudied cooperation among scriptural revelation, sermonic form (the designated structure of biblical citation, doctrine, and application), and Newtonian mechanics, particularly the notion of uni-

Jonathan Edwards and American Indians: The Devil Sucks Their Blood

ONATHAN EDWARDS (1703-58), American theologian who for two hundred fifty years has terrified readers with his escription of an angry God, had little but contempt for Indian religions. When trying to refute English Nonconformist John Taylor's notion of an innate human capacity for religious knowledge, Edwards played American Indians as his trump card. What did Europeans find when they came to America and discovered a people who had had benefit of thousands of years to develop this in-born capacity for religious truth? Nothing but the grossest ignorance, delusions, and most stupid paganism.' As one might expect of a man not uncomfortable with paradox, however, Edwards's views over time demonstrated more nuance and subtlety than this harsh proclamation suggests. For seven years, Edwards served as a missionary pastor to Indians of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. During that period, he seems to have approached population he was enlisted to serve as a test case of effectiveness of work of redemption. His findings, perhaps not surprisingly, ultimately tell us more about his own mind than they do about Indians or God's work among them.

Thomas Jefferson, Danbury Baptists, and "Eternal Hostility"

W Tr TH the decline and fall of the Federalist Party, Thomas Jefferson might well have thought that his troubles were over. But the twentieth century had several surprises in store for him. In I974, Fawn Brodie, with considerable skill, made her case for sexual affair, and, in i996, Conor Cruise O'Brien, with considerable animus, made his case for different kind of affair. Then, in i998, the combined forces of DNA and FBI trained their weapons upon the sage of Monticello.1 Jefferson has learned now, if he did not know before, what it is like for sinner to fall into the hands of an angry God. James Hutson's article on a controversy rejoined is actually quite benign. It is well researched, well expressed, nicely nuanced, reasonable, and restrained. He does not, for example, propose tearing down the Jefferson Memorial or defacing any of the words inscribed thereon. His thesis is modest one: Danbury Baptist letter must be understood in the political context in which Jefferson wrote it and . . . it was designed by the third president to respond to malignant and persistent Federalist campaign of political defamation. One should immediately concede the overall political milieu-more, the intense partisanship-in which Jefferson thought, wrote, and spoke in the early years of his first term. The campaign of i8oo had been, to put it simply, brutal. It was time for reconciliation, reconciling made more likely if all could agree that every difference of opinion is not difference of principle, as Jefferson stated in his First Inaugural.2 But his opinion regarding the proper relationship between the church and the state did rest upon an unshakable principle: namely, that religious tyranny was the most vicious of all tyrannies, the one most to be feared, the one most zealously to be guarded against. As history so clearly demonstrated. Parenthetically, it should be noted that persons polarize around Jefferson, and around the First Amendment, to some degree based on their sense of the liveliness, on one hand, or the

Increased CSF and brain quinolinic acid in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder

For millennia, infectious diseases were viewed as the result of malignant supernatural forces or punishments by angry gods for human transgressions. In the 19th century several advances occurred. Medicine became based on clinical observations; Rudolph Virchow laid the foundation of cellular pathology; Louis Pasteur dismantled the notion of spontaneous generation, and Robert Koch established the fundamental techniques of bacteriology, together creating the revolutionary paradigm shift of germ theory.Virology was born in the last decade of the 19th century in the study of tobacco mosaic virus; the crucial characteristics were the capacity to pass through a bacteria-retaining filter and the need for living cells in which to replicate. In 1901 yellow fever was shown to be the first human disease to be caused by a “filterable virus.” In 1903 rabies would be the first disease of the nervous system to be determined to be viral in nature, and polio followed soon thereafter.Paradoxically, because no agent has yet been shown to be the cause, the modern study of epidemic encephalitis began with encephalitis lethargica in 1917. However, the flood gates of viral isolations opened in the 1930s for the arboviral encephalitides, using experimental primates and mice, starting with St. Louis encephalitis and Japanese encephalitis. Within a decade, the viral nature of aseptic meningitis and herpes simplex sporadic encephalitis was demonstrated. From the 1950s through the 1970s great interest in “slow viral diseases” arose as potential models for chronic diseases of the nervous system.The era of modern neurovirology has been characterized by two principal features. The first is the remarkable advances in technology – witness the use of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for identifying infectious agents, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to image the nervous system, and the advance in therapeutics based on molecular medicine. The second has been the impact of emerging and re-emerging diseases – witness the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) epidemic, Nipah encephalitis, and the appearance of West Nile encephalitis in the western hemisphere.

Theatre for an Angry God Public Burnings and Hangings in Colonial New York, 1741

Theatre for an Angry God Public Burnings and Hangings in Colonial New York, 1741

Encounter with an Angry God: Recollections of My Life with John Peabody Harrington by Carobeth Laird

188 WesternAmerican Literature Pat Mora’s first book of essays exhibits a broad intelligence about the contemporary culture wars, the ideal of the American university, and our complex global economic system which renders her both oppressed and op­ pressor. Best known as a Chicana poet (Chants, 1984, Borders, 1986, Communion, 1991), these essays reveal Mora’swork as administrator and museum director at University of Texas, El Paso. Mora describes herself as “a child of the border,” who lives through “multiple spaces.” But in Mora’s hands “la frontera” nudges the Chicana theory (Literary Left) in new directions. Nepantla means “place in the middle”in Nahuatl, and Mora’s “middle”refuses an easy conflation ofU. S. minorities with Third World subjects and challenges U. S. Latinos to formulate a “civic morality.”As a committed participant, Mora questions some of the most entrenched political assumptions within Chicano/a Studies. Two essays hold the book’s political philosophy together: “Endangered Species,” and “Universities, A Mirage?” The first argues that preservation of ignored histories and cultures contributes to racial pride and a sense of civic belonging. Latinos must be “full participants] in the nation’s public life,” and the category of citizenship must “affirm, not deny, [ethnic] identity.” The second, “Universities, A Mirage?”shows Mora’sstruggle to define the mission of American universities. “What responsibility do universities have to the histori­ cally underrepresented?” she asks. Mora believes universities must be a “com­ munity of searchers,” who “lead . . . society to question itself.” Mora sees the university as a place to shape American citizenship and she rescues the notion of “citizenship”as one worth the consideration of progressives. The remaining essays fall into two groups: the first, a series on Latin American countries, shows that, in an international context, Mora is a First World subject, and unwitting beneficiary of global relations that exploit Third World economies. The second series, ruminations on writing and art, demon­ strates Mora’s broad sense of culture and literary influence, and are ever aware that though she is a “minority,” she is a university intellectual, and exercises privileges that most Spanish-speaking Americans do not. Mora may ruffle feath­ ers of those less intellectually and politically honest. I wish more of us were willing to do so. KRISTA COMER Brown University Encounter with an Angry God: Recollections ofMy Life withJohn Peabody Harrington. By Carobeth Laird. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993. 190 pages, $11.00.) Carobeth Laird’s account of her life with John Peabody Harrington is not the traditional approach to the illusive quest for western history. Starting with Reviews 189 her first encounter with the linguist-ethnographer, she takes the reader into her private life with the legendary scholar, telling of their life as she remembered it. There is no attempt to romanticize her role as his wife and co-worker. She chronicles the events with a clarity that perhaps only comes with the passage of time. HAZEL McKIM Central Valley, California We Aspired: The Last Innocent Americans. By Pete Sinclair. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1993. 232 pages, $16.95.) “We chose our route according to the angle of the moon, moving in a pool of moonlight as if God held a lantern for us.” WeAspired: TheLastInnocentAmericansis the On theRoadof mountaineering literature. It is an autobiographical tale of adventure and initiation. Beginning with the historical first ascent of McKinley’s (Denali’s) southwest rib, Sinclair interweaves his story with the stories of friends and landscapes that range from Alaska to Mexico, from Wyoming to New York City. Mountaineers have been accused ofwriting mainly to promote themselves or as a means offinancing expeditions, and they sometimes tend to boast about their personal achievements. Sinclair is, if anything, self-effacing and humor­ ous, even humble. The descriptions of climbs and rescues are honest accounts of life and the loss of life, accounts of fear and sympathy, ofjoy and fulfillment. He discusses his fears—not only about mountaineering, but about life in gen­ eral—with honesty. Sinclair also discusses wrestling with relationships, with his place in society, and with his responsibility as a human being. Sinclair’s words are the words of an adventurer, a poet, an observer, and a...

Delightful Conviction: Jonathan Edwards and the Rhetoric of Conversion.

Preface Remarkable Seasons The Little Awakening The Great Awakening An Apostle in Exile The Richardsonian Heritage The Edwardsean Legacy Works Cited Three Sermons by Jonathan Edwards A Divine and Supernatural Light Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God True Grace Distinguished From the Experience of Devils Chronology Selected Bibliography Index

Identification and the preconscious

Kenneth Burke's claim that the value of identification lies in its ability to integrate “partially” unconscious factors into rhetorical theory has been acknowledged, but has never been tested. This essay attempts to demonstrate their value in explaining the immediate and long‐term effects of Jonathan Edwards’ powerful sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

"In Retrospect These Journeys Loom Very Large": Carobeth Laird's Encounter With an Angry God and Limbo

Carobeth Laird's Encounter With an Angry God and Limbo unravel the notion that man/self is the focus of autobiography as genre. Instead, Laird's concept of selfhood rejects masculinist centrality and includes American Indians, the elderly, and the western landscape of the early 20th century as self-extension. Ultimately, Laird's strategies for self-recovery illuminate a personal ecosphere in which life writing not only documents but integrates self, history, and myth.

CT 58, no. 70. A Middle Babylonian eršahunga

Stefan Maul has presented Assyriology with a model study of an important genre of liturgical texts, the so-called eršahunga-prayers designed to still the heart of an angry god. The texts appear in autograph copies and transliterations, with lucid translations, useful philological notes, and a comprehensive glossary. The present reviewer has not checked the copies, since M.-C. Ludwig has collated the British Museum tablets for her own review of this volume.Maul's introduction to the eršahunga-prayers offers a brief survey of the genre, although the discussion is somewhat too specialized for the general reader unfamiliar with Assyriology. There is a need for a review of both Sumerian and Akkadian prayer which addresses the relationship between prayer and incantation, since both genres can appear together in certain types of apotropaic rituals. The problem of appeasing an angry god, for instance, was a theme common to both liturgy and incantations. The eršahunga, ‘lament to still the heart’, is paralleled by incantations known as dingir-šà-dib-ba gur-ru-da ‘(incantations) to appease the angry god’, composed as a confessional of unwitting sins. It is not clear when one would recite an eršahunga-prayer or a dingir-šà-dib-ba incantation, since both types of texts attempt to appease a god who is angered by some unspecified or unknown transgression. The eršahunga is typically composed in the Emesal dialect of Sumerian associated primarily (but not exclusively) with prayer and cultic texts, while exorcistic incantations are composed in the main Sumerian dialect (Emegir) of literary texts; both of these genres appear in the first millennium with Akkadian translations. It is possible that the distinction between prayer and incantation simply represents professional divisions between the kalû (lamentation priest) and the āšipu (exorcist), but it is not easy to define the conditions in which the various types of prayers and incantations were employed.

Rethinking “the public”: The role of emotion in being‐with‐others

This essay attempts to resolve the controversy surrounding the status and constitution of “the public” by turning to Martin Heidegger's description of what it means to be with others and how such an existence is oriented by emotions. It then provides a reading of Aristotle on the pathe and emphasizes how his analysis enables critics to make more meaningful assessments of the use of emotion in rhetorical discourse. The third section of the article illustrates this point with an examination of pathos in Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

Sovereign Beauty: Jonathan Edwards and the Nature of True Virtue

RECENT DECADES have witnessed a new appreciation of contribution of Jonathan Edwards to American thought and culture. The originality of his religious and ethical position has attracted a spectrum of scholars, now that it is freed from cramped interpretations of his New England successors and consistent Calvinism of nineteenth century. James M. Gustafson terms him the greatest theologian in American history and William A. Clebsch ranks him with Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James as prime fashioners of a distinctively American spirituality. Roman Catholic thinkers who are investigating distinctively American resources to offset traditional dependence upon European thought would do well to begin with this Puritan pastor from eighteenth-century Massachusetts. Perry Miller and Alan Heimert situated Edwards in intellectual tradition of Locke and Newton and in religious upheaval of Great Awakening. Joseph Haroutunian followed controversy between Edwards' successors and dissatisfied New England divines who became first Unitarians. A more recent stage of criticism has concentrated on his distinctive philosophical and theological positions and has brought these insights to bear upon contemporary discussions of religious psychology, human freedom, ethics, and aesthetics. John E. Smith, Paul Ramsey, and Roland Delattre have been joined by Douglas Elwood, Conrad Cherry, and Harold Simonson in this rediscovery of his works' theological depth, a depth undreamt of by those whose only exposure to Edwards has come through dolorous rhetoric of Sinners in Hands of an Angry God. The one item of Edwards' voluminous production which these commentators have found most difficult to interpret is his essay The Nature of True Virtue. This philosophical consideration of relation of religion and morality dates from last stage of his life and was

Jonathan Edwards: The First Two Hundred Years

Occasionally, even the student of American culture grown accustomed to its odd couples — Thomas Morton and lasses in beaver coats, Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Mark Twain and the Reverend Joseph Twichell — is brought up short. One does not, after all, expect to encounter the language and cadences of Jonathan Edwards' Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God in a Walt Disney production of Pollyanna, a film in which the heroine's gladness has come to fulfill roughly the function of divine grace. And it is only slighdy less improbable to encounter in the New Yorker for 31 July 1978 the disembodied, dialectical voices of Donald Barthelme's The Leap, agreeing to postpone the leap of faitli to another day, setting aside their awareness that “We hang by a slender thread. — The fire boils below us — the pit. Crawling with roaches and other tilings. — Torture unimaginable.”The use and misuse of Jonathan Edwards, or less moralistically, the observable process of advocacy, condemnation, adaptation, and creative redefinition focussed on his life and work, has a long and instructive history. In October of 1903 an important stage in that process had been reached when bicentennial celebrations of Edwards' birth resulted in a flourishing of tributes to die Edwards legacy and assessments of the permanent and the passing in his diought, as one writer put it. We may now, three quarters of a century later, have reached a stage of comparable significance, with a potential both for summing up and for speculating on what lies ahead.

Varieties of Retribution

One of the functions of philosophy is to combat ambiguity and muddle. Yet in discussions of the justification of punishment, philosophers persist in talking of ‘retribution’ and ‘retributive theory’ as if the labels stood for something relatively simple and straightforward. Exactly how or why suffering something unpleasant should count as payment for an offence is left unexplained; but it has to be admitted that the notion is both ancient and widely held. Kant, universally regarded as a retributivist, asserts that the reason why punishment is imposed must always be because the individual on whom it is inflicted has committed a crime. Failure to punish is unfair to those who practise self-restraint and respect the rights of others. The logic of justification implied by Kant seems heavily tied up with the Old Testament notions of sacrifice and placation. Murder involves blood guilt for which an angry God will take vengeance.

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God: Fundamentalist Fears about Drunken Driving

Using data from four yearly probability surveys (1972-1975) in a deep-south city, an effort is made to explore the feasibility of deterrence theory for understanding how involvement in Protestant religious subcultures affects drunken driving. Among the more religious respondents, fundamentalists are more likely than others to believe there is a higher risk of receiving specific sanctions for dunken driving. This relationship is strongest among males, the better educated, and respondents over 35. To the extent that these differences in fear of sanctions are linked to variations in deviant conduct, deterrence theory is a promising approach for understanding the consequences of religion for deviance.