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Historical person

Jonathan Edwards

1703–1758

Jonathan Edwards served as minister in Northampton, Massachusetts, where revival preaching and reports of conversion made him a major figure in the Great Awakening. His sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God became one of the period’s best-known texts.

Conflict with his Northampton congregation over church membership and communion led to Edwards’s dismissal in 1750. He then worked at Stockbridge, where he ministered among English settlers and Native communities and wrote major theological works including Freedom of the Will. In 1758 he became president of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University, but died soon afterwards following a smallpox inoculation.

Gilbert Morris’ The Indentured Heart places Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening within the religious atmosphere of pre-Revolutionary America. Edwards is not the novel’s central character, but his revival preaching represents the spiritual movement reshaping the world inherited by Adam Winslow and the families around him. The historical reference gives the fictional domestic story a wider setting in which arguments about faith, moral renewal and emerging ideas of liberty are unfolding together.

Series

Historical novels and book series featuring Jonathan Edwards (1 series)

House of Winslow in Order

by Gilbert Morris 40 books 4.4(8,071)

The House of Winslow is a forty-volume family saga tracing descendants of an English religious dissenter from the Mayflower era to the Second World War. Across three centuries, the Winslows take part in colonial settlement, revolution, western expansion, industrial growth, overseas missions, modern entertainment and global war. Each…

All books in this series