Author: Grant R. Brodrecht File Type: pdf On March 4, 1865, the day Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address, Reverend Doctor George Peck put the finishing touches on a collection of his sermons that he intended to send to the president. Although the politically moderate Peck had long opposed slavery, he, along with many other northern evangelicals, was not an abolitionist. During the Civil War he had come to support emancipation, but, like Lincoln, the conflict remained first and foremost about preserving the Union. Believing their devotion to the Union was an act of faithfulness to God first and the Founding Fathers second, Our Country explores how many northern white evangelical Protestants sacrificed racial justice on behalf of four million African-American slaves (and then ex-slaves) for the Unions persistence and continued flourishing as a Christian nation. By examining Civil War-era Protestantism in terms of the Union, author Grant Brodrecht adds to the understanding of northern motivation and the eventual failure of Reconstruction to provide a secure basis for African Americans equal place in society. Complementing recent scholarship that gives primacy to the Union, Our Country contends that non-radical Protestants consistently subordinated concern for racial justice for what they perceived to be the greater good. Mainstream evangelicals did not enter Reconstruction with the primary aim of achieving racial justice. Rather they expected to see the emergence of a speedily restored, prosperous, and culturally homogenous Union, a Union strengthened by God through the defeat of secession and the removal of slavery as secessions cause. Brodrecht eloquently addresses this so-called proprietary regard for Christian America, considered within the context of crises surrounding the Unions existence and its nature from the Civil War to the 1880s. Including sources from major Protestant denominations, the book rests on a selection of sermons, denominational newspapers and journals, autobiographies, archival personal papers of several individuals, and the published and unpublished papers of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and Ulysses S. Grant. The author examines these sources as they address the periods evangelical sense of responsibility for America, while keyed to issues of national and presidential politics. Northern evangelicals love of the Union arguably contributed to its preservation and the slaves emancipation, but in subsuming the ex-slaves to their vision for Christian America, northern evangelicals contributed to a Reconstruction that failed to ensure the ex-slaves full freedom and equality as Americans. **Review Grant Brodrechts illuminating study shows how highly northern evangelical Protestants exalted their idea of the national Union before, during, and after the Civil War. With deep research and absolute mastery of standard historical scholarship, Our Country explains why this evangelical commitment to the Union as a providential, Christian nation exerted such influence during the war. Even more impressive is Brodrechts account of how this evangelical vision of the Christian nation undercut the push for African American equality and hastened the end of Reconstruction. It is an unusually impressive book. (Mark A. Noll The Civil War as a Theological Crisis) About the Author Grant Brodrecht, PhD, teaches history at the Geneva School, Winter Park, Florida.

Author: Vincent Blok File Type: pdf This book examines the work of Ernst Junger and its effect on the development of Martin Heideggers influential philosophy of technology. Vincent Blok offers a unique treatment of Jungers philosophy and his conception of the age of technology, in which both world and man appear in terms of their functionality and efficiency. The primary objective of Jungers novels and essays is to make the transition from the totally mobilized world of the 20th century toward a world in which a new type of man represents the gestalt of the worker and is responsive to this new age. Blok proceeds to demonstrate Jungers influence on Heideggers analysis of the technological age in his later work, as well as Heideggers conceptions of will, work and gestalt at the beginning of the 1930s. At the same time, Blok evaluates Heideggers criticism of Junger and provides a novel interpretation of the Junger-Heidegger connection that Jungers work in fact testifies to a transformation of our relationship to language and conceptualizes the future in terms of the Anthropocene. This book, which arrives alongside several new English-language translations of Jungers work, will interest scholars of 20th-century continental philosophy, Heidegger, and the history of philosophy of technology.