The Nicholson Center for British Studies presents a public lecture:
“Wesley Agonistes and the Calvinist Sublime: The Early Evangelical Movement as a Devotional School”
Dr. Bruce Hindmarsh
Professor of Spiritual Theology
Regent College (Vancouver, Canada)
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
4:30 p.m.
Swift Hall Common Room
Followed by a dinner. Please RSVP to dje@uchicago.edu. Space is limited.
This lecture reinterprets the Calvinist-Arminian controversies of the eighteenth century in terms of the changing social space for debate in the eighteenth century. Rather than interpreting the evangelical movement through geometric models, this lecture views early evangelicalism as a devotional school, in the way that art historians speak of artistic schools. An experiment in interdisciplinary criticism, the lecture includes slides of a number of paintings and examines evangelical religion from the point of view of an art historian, drawing analogies and establishing parallels between developments in British academic art and religion in the period, and then employing two terms of art—the agonistic and the sublime—to illuminate the character of evangelical spiritual ideals.
Co-sponsored by the History of Christianity Club and the Theology Workshop
For more information, contact Debra Erickson, dje@uchicago.edu