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This essay examines the relationship between Christian theology, environmental aesthetics, and environmental justice in colonial America. As opposed to the work of secular writers from the early republic like J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and Thomas Jefferson, the Christian environmental aesthetics of Jonathan Edwards and John Woolman have potential to address questions of environmental justice in American literary history, such as tenant exploitation, African enslavement, and Indigenous displacement. Edwards, however, worked in a pastoral literary tradition, which limited his ability to imagine environmental justice due to his commitment to the doctrine of election. Woolman, on the other hand, worked in a tradition of agrarian jeremiad that was able to connect a Christian theology of creation with a concern for those marginalized by agrarian capitalism. This article reconfigures the standard account of pastoral and agrarian writing in American literature, foregrounding how Christian environmental aesthetics can both fail and succeed in imagining environmental justice.

The abolitionist John Woolman (1720-72) has been described as a \"Quaker saint,\" an isolated mystic, singular even among a singular people. But as historian Geoffrey Plank recounts, this tailor, hog producer, shopkeeper, schoolteacher, and prominent Quaker minister was very much enmeshed in his local community in colonial New Jersey and was alert as well to events throughout the British Empire. Responding to the situation as he saw it, Woolman developed a comprehensive critique of his fellow Quakers and of the imperial economy, became one of the most emphatic opponents of slaveholding, and helped develop a new form of protest by striving never to spend money in ways that might encourage slavery or other forms of iniquity. Drawing on the diaries of contemporaries, personal correspondence, the minutes of Quaker meetings, business and probate records, pamphlets, and other sources,John Woolman's Path to the Peaceable Kingdomshows that Woolman and his neighbors were far more engaged with the problems of inequality, trade, and warfare than anyone would know just from reading the Quaker's own writings. Although he is famous as an abolitionist, the end of slavery was only part of Woolman's project. Refusing to believe that the pursuit of self-interest could safely guide economic life, Woolman aimed for a miraculous global transformation: a universal disavowal of greed.

Quakers were early adopters and promoters of inoculation, but the procedure became a contested issue among Friends. This study analyzes eighteenth-century Quaker writings on inoculation, which emphasized both human reason and divine revelation. Highlighting the diversity of ideas about the meaning of smallpox and the value of inoculation, the essay demonstrates how debates over inoculation drew Quakers into broader discourses surrounding religion, disease, and medicine in Enlightenment Britain.

The growing appeal of abolitionism and its increasing success in converting Americans to the antislavery cause, a generation before the Civil War, is clearly revealed in this book on the Methodist Episcopal Church in America. The moral character of the antislavery movement is stressed. Originally published in 1965. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Doubly mediated though it is, Papunehang's statement highlights the uniquely \"close\" exercises that Woolman's own prose demands: exercises that the following pages propose to explore.2 At some point between October 1755 and the autumn of 1756, not long after the outbreak of the Seven Years' War and the defeat of Edward Braddock's British army in the forests of western Pennsylvania, John Woolman \"felt a motion of love\" to begin his journal. (185-86) The next morning, like a seasoned trumpet player, Woolman slowly moistened his dry tongue to help \"prepare my mouth that I could speak\" and with the aid of \"divine power\" repeated a verse from Galatians that opened the dream's mystery (186).

In 1769 John Woolman, fearing his own mortality, discovered that he was \"exercised for the good of my fellow-creatures in the West Indies.\" Meranze explores Woolman's highly developed sense of sympathetic humanitarianism in order to raise the question of the paradoxes of conscience from within the workings of conscience itself.

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, which Franklin himself called his Memoirs, is the unfinished record of his life written between 1771 and 1790. It has become one of the most well-known and influential autobiographies in history, and has been praised both as a historical document and a piece of literature in its own right. William Dean Howells declared that \"Franklin's is one of the greatest autobiographies in literature, and towers over other autobiographies as Franklin towered over other men.\"

Writers on John Woolman seem compelled to assimilate him to later American and modern traditions, often erroneously discounting his Christian faith, which gives form and motive to his thinking and action.

Slavery affected the development of religious organizations, national churches, and Protestant theology. In colonial America, British settlers used religious doctrine to justify the capture and enslavement of Africans, in part because they were heathens, and in part because enslavement would allow for their conversion. At the same time, members of pietistic faiths, Mennonites and Quakers, and an occasional Puritan, opposed slavery on religious grounds. By the time of the revolution most Quakers had renounced slaveholding (although they had not all given up their slaves), as had Baptists and Methodists. On the other hand, almost all high church Protestants, as well as the Catholic Church, supported slavery.

The seminar is a central curricular offering of John Woolman College, an international educational institution dedicated to peacemaking. The college, currently in its organizational phases, has 29 principals located in different parts of the world, some of whom operate centers and institutes where peacemaking is taught, and others of whom are affiliated with existing colleges and universities, or otherwise creatively involved in peacemaking.