The Divine Dramatist
Essay title: The Divine Dramatist
The Divine Dramatist:
George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism
by Harry Stout
Part 1: The Author
Harry S. Stout is the Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Christianity and Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University, and is also an author. He received his B.A. from Calvin College, M.A. from Kent State University, and Ph.D. from Kent State University. Professor Stout is the author of several books, including The New England Soul, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for history; The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism, which received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for biography as well as the Critics Award for History in 1991; Dictionary of Christianity in America (of which he was co-editor), which received the Book of the Year Award from Christianity Today in 1990; A Religious History of America (coauthor with Nathan Hatch); and Readings in American Religious History (co-edited with Jon Butler). He most recently contributed to and co-edited Religion in the American Civil War and is currently writing a moral history of the American Civil War. He is also co-editing Religion in American Life, a seventeen-volume study of the impact of religion on American history for adolescent readers and public schools (with Jon Butler). He is general editor of both The Works of Jonathan Edwards and the “Religion in America” series for Oxford University Press. He has written articles for the Journal of Social History, Journal of American Studies, Journal of American History, Theological Education, Computers and the Humanities, and Christian Scholars Review. He is a contributor to the Concise Encyclopedia of Preaching, Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, and the Readers Encyclopedia of the American West.
Part 2: The Book
The Divine Dramatist:
George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism
by Harry Stout
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company (September 1991)
The thesis of this book is that George Whitefield (1714-1770) changed the nature of Christianity by promoting and conducting mass revivals