Abstract

Popular and groundbreaking crime novelist Sara Paretsky earned a PhD in history at the University of Chicago in the mid-1970s, with a dissertation on moral philosophy and religion in New England in the early and mid-nineteenth century. This edition of that work analyzes attempts by theologians at the Andover Seminary to square and secure Calvinist religious beliefs with emerging knowledge from history and the sciences. As Paretsky shows, the open-minded scholasticism of these theologians paradoxically led to the weakening of their intellectual credibility as conventional religious belief structures became discredited, and this failure incited reactionary forces within Calvinism. Leading religious scholar Amanda Porterfield provides an afterword discussing where Paretsky s work fits into the contemporary study of religion. Paretsky s foreword offers a sobering picture of what it was like to be a female graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 1970s."