Jonathan edwards biography yale
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Jonathan Edwards
Jonathan Edwards was born a little over seventy years after the first Puritan settlement of New England and, at the time of his birth, October 5, 1703, there were some 130 towns in the colony. Some were well established, others were small and on the frontiers of the wilderness. He spent his first twelve years in his parents’ home at East Windsor, close to the Connecticut river. His father, Timothy Edwards, was pastor of the local church, a good student and preacher, as well as a part-time school teacher and farmer. His mother, Esther, had eleven children—four girls, then Jonathan, to be followed by six more girls, and all of them six feet in height. Of the larger family circle, his maternal grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, was pastor of the largest church in New England, some thirty-five miles away at Northampton.
Jonathan Edwards would appear to have had a healthy and happy childhood, spent largely in female company. When he was not quite thirteen he was sent down
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The centuries-long relevance of Jonathan Edwards
By Emily L. Judd ’18 M.A.R.
While present-day Christian leaders in America vie to remain relevant, one colonial pastor stands out for having managed to maintain great interest in his work for 300 years.
Jonathan Edwards, widely regarded as North America’s greatest theologian, was a Christian revivalist preacher and missionary in the 18th century. His influence has spread around the world, in part with the help of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University. The YDS-based Center maintains an open-access online archive of documents by and about Edwards, totaling nearly 100,000 pages.
Edwards graduated from Yale College in 1720. Three-hundred years later, the alumnus will be the focus on campus during the International Jonathan Edwards Conference, hosted by Yale and YDS October 2-4. (The keynote and plenary sessions are free and open to the public. See conference schedule.)
While Edwards is best known for his landmark sermon “
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History
In 1931, University ledning borrowed a housing idea from Oxford and Cambridge, the two leading British Universities. The result was a development plan that forever changed the face of Yale College: the Residential College System.
The year 1932 saw the construction of the first of the original seven residential quadrangles beneath the direction of architect James Gamble Rodgers. Simple as that, Jonathan Edwards College, named for the child prodigy Yale alumnus (1720) and arguably the greatest theologian of The Great uppvaknande came into its glorious being.
Jonathan Edwards College began during the academic year 1932-33 when Professor Robert Dudley French, the first Master, appointed eight members of the faculty to be the first fellows of the College. These men were chosen because they combined distinction in both teaching and scholarship, and because of their individuality and diversity of interests. As a corporate body they constituted the essential qualities of an