Spiritual Birth Research Articles

For Love of a Statue: A Reading of Plato's Symposium 215A-B

In her conversation with Socrates, Diotima explains that ‘all men are pregnant both in body and soul, and when they come of age, our nature desires to give birth; it cannot give birth in anything ugly, only in what is beautiful’ (206c). The man who has been pregnant with wisdom, moderation and justice in his soul since early youth, now wishing ‘to beget and give birth’ (209b), goes in search of a beautiful boy in whose company he may produce his offspring. Through passionate communion with the youth, ‘he conceives and gives birth to what he has been carrying inside him for ages’ (209c), engendering the instructive speeches on virtue and other matters which he delivers to the beloved. Diotima's equation between physical and mental parturition seems so appropriate and intuitively right that we tend to gloss over the real puzzle of her account: in this mode of procreation, which holds good for literal as well as spiritual birth, pregnancy precedes the actual moment of intercourse. The reading of theSymposiumI wish to offer may not explain the biology of this unlikely reproductive act, but aims to set the riddle within the context of a leitmotif that weaves through the larger text: statues, and the particular mode of love they experience and inspire, are uniquely able to perform acts of autonomous generation.

The Great Awakening as Artifact. George Whitefield and the Construction of Intercolonial Revival, 1739–1745

Throughout the 1720s and 1730s evangelical preachers sparked revivals from New England to New Jersey. In his long pastorate at Northampton, Massachusetts, Solomon Stoddard reported five “harvests” of souls in the Connecticut Valley. His grandson Jonathan Edwards succeeded him and led a spiritual awakening in 1734 and 1735 resulting in the “Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton and Neighboring Towns and Villages.” In the late 1720s the pietist minister Jacob Frelinghuysen inspired a renewal of piety among the Dutch Reformed in New York. At the same time the Presbyterian evangelists William and Gilbert Tennent reported revivals in the churches they had established between New Brunswick, New Jersey and Staten Island, New York.1While sharing a common message, these evangelical revivals remained local, private affairs, contained within specific geographic and denominational boundaries. Although each proclaimed the necessity of a spiritual new birth and the primacy of divine grace in salvation, theawakenings did not expand into a larger, united movement.