Read more
The Search for a Rational Faith presents a 400-year narrative history of Anglo-American Protestant intellectual defenses of the Christian faith from the seventeenth century to the present. It challenges popular assumptions about secularization by showing that faith and reason have long coexisted in American educational establishments and by demonstrating that the Enlightenment and Darwinian science were much more compatible with American Protestant Christianity than many assume.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: Puritan Arguments against Atheism
- Chapter 2: Arminianism and the Search for an Evidence-Based Faith
- Chapter 3: Refuting Deism
- Chapter 4: American Calvinists'Discovery of Christian Evidences
- Chapter 5: A Republic Founded on Christian Evidences
- Chapter 6: The Capstone of the Antebellum College Curriculum
- Chapter 7: The Challenge of Science and Biblical Criticism in the Antebellum Era
- Chapter 8: Natural Theology's Encounter with Darwin
- Chapter 9: The Liberal Protestant Apologetics of Experience
- Chapter 10: The Search for an Evangelical Apologetic
- Chapter 11: The Last Appearance of Liberal Protestant Christian Apologetics
- Chapter 12: The Resurgence of Christian Apologetics among Evangelicals
- Appendix: What about Catholic Apologetics?
- Glossary
About the author
Daniel K. Williams is a historian of American religion and politics who is currently a senior fellow at the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University. Before coming to Ashland University, he was a professor of history at the University of West Georgia. He is the author of several books on religion and politics in the United States, including
God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right and Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement before Roe v. Wade. His articles on American Christianity and conservatism have appeared in the
New York Times, the
Atlantic,
Christianity Today, and the
Washington Post.
