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A rare example of musical scholarship from the Tudor period, in translation and fully annotated

John Dygon was the prior of St. Augustine’s monastery in Canterbury when Henry VIII boldly dissolved the English Catholic Church during the 1530s and reorganized it under royal control. Only a single copy of Dygon’s manuscript on music theory has survived, held by Trinity College, Cambridge.  This volume will be the first publication of these two treatises, providing both a scholarly transcription and English translation.

Dygon’s treatise provides a rare and important example of musical scholarship from the early Tudor period, demonstrating the status of music education at the time, the affiliations of English scholarship with music study in Europe, and the music that was actually performed in England. The treatises address questions of musical notation, especially regarding rhythmic proportions, as well as practical issues about performance. Theodor Dumitrescu’s introduction situates Dygon’s treatises within the larger history of European music, paying close attention to its borrowings from and adaptations of prior treatises. 

John Henry Livingston (1746-1825) was from a prominent New York family of merchants, lawyers and statesmen but chose to become a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church. In his twenties he studied in the Netherlands, absorbing ideas that upheld simultaneously the authority of the individual conscience and the traditional Reformed beliefs rooted in the authority of a state-supported church. Returning to New York City he served as a pastor, as his denomination’s professor charged with educating students for ministry, and eventually, president of the American Dutch church’s college, then called Queens (but later called Rutgers). Throughout his career he articulated, and defended what he saw as the harmony between the traditional body of Reformed belief and the ideals of the American state.

Candidly, with a mixture of joy, poignancy, and gratitude, the chairman and president of the John Templeton Foundation reflects on the learning and growing he has experienced and the perspectives he has gained throughout his life. In so doing, he continues the legacy of his father, Sir John Templeton, who has used stories from his life to provide instruction for his children, grandchildren, and other future descendants, just as he has drawn on those stories in his many books of inspiration and guidance for the general public.

Dr. Templeton shares stories about his personal life, his career in medicine, his early involvement with philanthropy, and his commitment to the John Templeton Foundation and its mission. Events and circumstances in his youth opened him to spirituality, taught him about altruistic love, and introduced him to values he would cultivate throughout his life: thrift, saving, hard work, creativity, and responsibility.

His journey takes him from his early life in Winchester, Tennessee, to New Jersey, Yale University, medical school, the Navy, the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and the John Templeton Foundation. Along the way, there were lessons learned from his disruptive behavior in elementary school; the deaths of his grandmother and mother; travel to Europe, Africa, and throughout the U.S.; marriage and fatherhood; his growing commitment as a Christian; and his family's experience with an armed robbery. It continues with his experiences in pediatric surgery at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, including work with conjoined twins; experience with the mutual fund industry and a role with the Templeton Growth Fund; an intensely rewarding medical specialty in trauma; philanthropy and fund-raising efforts, including a sad experience with fraud; the pride of professorship; and serving as chairman and president of the John Templeton Foundation.

With gratitude he credits his many mentors for the wisdom they passed on to him. Among them are John Galbraith, Dr. C. Everett Koop, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, and, of course, always and above all, his father. With appreciation, he recounts the blessings of a full and productive life that continue today as he provides leadership to the diverse programs and initiatives of the John Templeton Foundation.

Jonathan Edwards has long epitomized the Puritan preacher as fiery scold, fixated on the inner struggle of the soul and the eternal flames of hell. In this book, Ronald Story offers a fundamentally different view of Edwards, revealing a profoundly social minister who preached a gospel of charity and community bound by love.

The first chapters trace Edwards's life and impact, examine his reputation as an intellectual, Calvinist, and revivalist, and highlight the importance for him of the gentler, more compassionate concepts of light, harmony, beauty, and sweetness. Story then explains what Edwards means by the “Gospel of Love”—a Christian faith that is less individual than interpersonal, and whose central feature is the practice of charity to the poor and the quest for loving community in this world, the chief signs of true salvation. As Edwards preached in his sermon “Heaven Is a World of Love,” the afterlife itself is social in nature because love is social.

Drawing on Edwards's own sermons and notebooks, Story reveals the minister's belief that divine love expressed in the human family should take us beyond tribalism, sectarianism, provincialism, and nationality. Edwards offers hope, in the manner of Walter Rauschenbusch, Karl Barth, Martin Luther King Jr., and other great “improvers,” for the coming of a world without want and war. Gracefully and compellingly written, this book represents a new departure in Edwards studies, revising the long-standing yet misleading stereotype of a man whose lessons of charity, community, and love we need now more than ever.

Incisive and illuminating, Joseph Fielding Smith examines the worldview and development of an influential theologian and his place in American religious and intellectual history.

Winner of the David Woolley Evans and Beatrice Evans Biography Award and a History Book Club selection, 1985.

The core of Mormon belief was a conviction about actual events. The test of faith was not adherence to a certain confession of faith but belief that Christ was resurrected, that Joseph Smith saw God, that the Book of Mormon was true history, and that Peter, James, and John restored the apostleship. Mormonism was history, not philosophy.

It is as history that Richard L. Bushman analyzes the emergence of Mormonism in the early nineteenth century. Bushman, however, brings to his study a unique set of credentials--he is both a prize-winning historian and a faithful member of the Latter-day Saints church. For Mormons and non-Mormons alike, his book provides a very special perspective on an endlessly fascinating subject.

Building upon previous accounts and incorporating recently discovered contemporary sources, Bushman focuses on the first twenty-five years of Joseph Smith's life--up to his move to Kirtland, Ohio, in 1831. Bushman shows how the rural Yankee culture of New England and New York--especially evangelical revivalism, Christian rationalism, and folk magic--both influenced and hindered the formation of Smith's new religion.

Mormonism, Bushman argues, must be seen not only as the product of this culture, but also as an independent creation based on the revelations of its charismatic leader. In the final analysis, it was Smith's ability to breathe new life into the ancient sacred stories and to make a sacred story out of his own life which accounted for his own extraordinary influence. By presenting Smith and his revelations as they were viewed by the early Mormons themselves, Bushman leads us to a deeper understanding of their faith.

Musser’s devotion to Joseph Smith’s vision and the faith’s foundational texts reflected a widespread uneasiness with, and reaction against, changes taking place across society. Rosetti analyzes how Musser’s writing and thought knit a disparate group of outcast LDS believers into a movement. She also places Musser’s eventful life against the backdrop of a difficult period in LDS history, when the Church strained to disentangle itself from plural marriage and leaders like Musser emerged to help dissident members make sense of their lives outside the mainstream.

The first book-length account of the Mormon thinker, Joseph White Musser reveals the figure whose teachings helped mold a movement.