"The "African Enslavement of Anglo-Saxon Minds
The Beechers as Critics of Augustine
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3733459 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Peter J Thuesen (Tufts University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2003 |
| Volume | 72 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 569-592 |
| Publication date | 2003-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Church History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0009-6407 • E-ISSN: 1755-2613 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0009640700100368 |
| OpenAlex | W2139409328 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 47 |
Harriet Beecher Stowe, who achieved international fame for her 1852 antislavery novel,Uncle Tom's Cabin, is best known to historians of American religious thought as a critic of New England Calvinism and its leading light, Jonathan Edwards. But in airing her frustrations with the Puritan tradition, Stowe also singled out a much earlier source of the problem: Augustine, the fifth-century bishop of Hippo. At his worst, Augustine typified for Stowe not only theological rigidity but also the obdurate refusal of the male system-builders to take women's perspectives seriously. Consequently, in the New England of the early republic, when "the theology of Augustine began to be freely discussed by every individual in society, it was the women who found it hardest to tolerate or assimilate it." In leveling such criticism, Stowe echoed her elder sister Catharine Beecher, a prominent educator and social reformer, whose well-known writings on the role of women in the home have often overshadowed her two companion volumes of theology, in which she devotes more attention to Augustine than to any other figure. Yet for all her extended critiques of Augustinian themes, Beecher buried her most provocative rhetorical flourish, as one might conceal a dagger, in the last endnote on the last page of the second volume. Seizing upon the African context of Augustine's career as a metaphor for his deleterious influence on Christian theology, she concluded that reasonable people have a duty to resist the "African enslavement of Anglo-Saxon minds" no less than to combat the "Anglo-Saxon enslavement of African bodies
Art · Calvinism · Context (archaeology) · Criticism · Duty · Literature · Metaphor · Rhetorical question · Sister · Sociology · Theology · Anthropology · Classics · History · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Philosophy · Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment · Religious studies · Theological Perspectives and Practices
The feminization of American culture
The Democratization of American Christianity
The political culture of the American Whigs
Without God, Without Creed
Roads to Rome
Augustine of Hippo
Race and Manifest Destiny
Augustine through the Ages
The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West from the Carolingians to the Maurists
The Anglican Aspect of Harriet Beecher Stowe
A Colonial Woman's Bookshelf
Chariot of Fire
The Rungless Ladder
Cosmos Crumbling
The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher
Changing Conceptions of Original Sin
Samuel Willard, 1640-1707
The Correspondence of John Cotton
Orthodoxies in Massachusetts
Methodism and the Southern Mind, 1770-1810
A Certain Magnificence
Catharine Beecher
Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Politics of the Universe
Benjamin Franklin and the Zealous Presbyterians
The Rungless Ladder
John Cotton on the Churches of New England
Edwards on the Will
To Live Ancient Lives
The Covenant Sealed
Sworn on the Altar of God
Reinventing Cotton Mather in the American Renaissance
Benjamin Franklin and the Zealous Presbyterians
The New England Mind
The Politics of the Universe
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |