Sarah Osborn's World

When Catherine A. Brekus first came across Sarah Osborn's memoir, she recalls being “enthralled” by Osborn, an obscure eighteenth-century New England schoolteacher and ardent New Light (p. 415). This biography is a testament to Brekus's fascination with and admiration of a spiritual fellow traveler. Rich with insights about the entangled history of Anglo-American evangelicalism with the political, intellectual, and economic transformations we associate with the Enlightenment and the rise of mercantile capitalism, Sarah Osborn's World is an insider's guide to the evangelical subculture that has so profoundly shaped our own world as well as that of colonial New England. The book has all of the virtues and some of the blind spots of a sympathetic biography. The densely biblical world in which Osborn thought, felt, and wrote is re-created in all its lyrical fullness, and we learn how America's first evangelicals absorbed the social and intellectual challenges of an emergent capitalist world in ways that sustained their faith in both an omnipotent God and a fallen humanity. The best sections of the book detail the uneasy accommodations Anglo-American Protestants made with new Enlightenment epistemologies that privileged individual experience (a word so commonplace today that its “revolutionary cadences” are difficult to detect) over traditional hierarchies of knowledge (p. 101). As Brekus argues, evangelicalism constituted not a rejection but a “vector of modernity,” a space where new ideas about human happiness and the banality of suffering could be incorporated into a larger vision of a redeemed world governed by a sovereign God (p. 8). In contrast with popular caricatures of American evangelicals as theological sadists who clung to the harsh dictates of their faith even as the world changed around them, Osborn and her fellow saints wanted to be happy in God's love

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