The Jonathan Edwards Center Germany

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The Jonathan Edwards Center Germany advances research and teaching on Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), the tradition of New England Puritanism from which he came, and his legacies in contemporary global Christianity. A pastor, revivalist, Christian philosopher, missionary, and college president, Edwards is widely regarded as North America’s greatest theologian and has attracted intense scholarly interest across disciplines and around the globe.

A special interest of the center is to study Edwards’s times, thought, and global reception from a European and comparative perspective that sees the American revivals as part of a much larger transatlantic movement of Protestant awakening, encompassing not only British evangelicalism but also continental Pietist groups.

Directed by Jan Stievermann, the center is a partnership between the Department of Theology and the Heidelberg Center for American Studies at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg with the Jonathan Edwards Center at the Yale Divinity School.

Together these institutions advance work on Edwards and early American religious history by supporting and advising related academic projects, providing resources, offering seminars, organizing lectures and conferences, and collaborating with the other international centers.

Director:

JAN STIEVERMANN is Professor of the History of Christianity in the U.S. at Heidelberg University, and director of the Jonathan Edwards Center Germany. He has written books and essays on a broad range of topics in the fields of American religious history and American literature, including a comprehensive study of the theology and aesthetics of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Schoeningh, 2007) and Prophecy, Piety, and the Problem of Historicity: Interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures in Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana (Mohr Siebeck, 2016). In the scholarly edition of the Biblia Americana manuscript, he is responsible for volumes 5 and 10 (the first came out in 2015, the other is scheduled for 2021), and serves as the executive editor of the whole project. Among other multi-authored volumes, he co-edited A Peculiar Mixture: German-Language Cultures and Identities in Eighteenth-Century North America (Pennsylvania State UP, 2013), Religion and the Marketplace in the United States (Oxford UP, 2014) and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Jonathan Edwards.

Research Associate:

RYAN P. HOSELTON is a postdoctoral Research Associate and Instructor (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) in the Faculty of Theology and the American Studies program at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. He teaches a range of courses on American religious history, has published various studies on eighteenth-century transatlantic evangelicalism, and he serves on the editorial team for Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana Project (10 vols., Mohr Siebeck). His doctoral dissertation (supervised by Prof. Stievermann) examined the intersection of experimental philosophy and experimental piety in the exegesis of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards in the context of the early enlightenment. Currently, he is researching colonial evangelical missions in the context of early transatlantic awakened Protestantism.

Former Research Associates:

DANIEL SILLIMAN is a news editor for Christianity Today and a humanities adjunct instructor at Milligan University. Silliman did his doctoral work in American Studies with Jan Stievermann at Heidelberg University and taught religious history at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies between 2013-2017. He then pursued postdoctoral teaching and research at the University of Notre Dame and as a Lilly Fellow at Valparaiso University. Silliman has written on bestselling evangelical novels, the economic history of the Left Behind series, how evangelicals imagine the Bible, class issues in Billy Sunday’s early revivals, the reception of the Heidelberg Catechism in America, and Reformed interpretations of World War I. Currently, Daniel is working on a biography of Richard Nixon for Eerdmans press.