Ken Minkema will talk about how slavery was initially viewed as “ordained by the bible” and rationalized because of its “civilizing” and “Christianizing” effect on people from Africa. He will discuss how those views changed in one generation, as slavery became morally unacceptable and was deemed a sin. Emblematic of that change is the family of the Reverend Jonathan Edwards Sr., the fire-and- brimstone Puritan preacher and theologian who wrote “Sinners in the hands of an angry god.” Edwards Sr. possessed several slaves while his son, the Reverend Jonathan Edwards Jr., rejected the practice. As the younger Edwards lectured his parishioners, “You cannot sin at so cheap a rate as our fathers.” Times had changed.

Dr. Kenneth P. Minkema is the Executive Editor of The Works of Jonathan Edwards and of the Jonathan Edwards Center & Online Archive at Yale University, with appointments as Research Faculty at Yale Divinity School and as Research Associate at the University of the Free State, South Africa. He offers seminars in early American and early modern religious history, as well as reading courses in all periods of American religious history. From 2004 through 2009, he served as the Executive Secretary of the American Society of Church History. Besides publishing numerous articles on Jonathan Edwards and topics in early American religious history in professional journals including The Journal of American History, The William and Mary Quarterly, The New England Quarterly, Church History and The Massachusetts Historical Review, he has edited volume 14 in the Edwards Works, Sermons and Discourses: 1723-1729, and co-edited A Jonathan Edwards Reader; The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader; Jonathan Edwards at 300: Essays on the Tercentennial of His Birth; and Jonathan Edwards: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God: A Casebook. He has also co-edited The Sermon Notebook of Samuel Parris, 1689-1694, dealing with the Salem Witchcraft crisis, and The Colonial Church Records of the First Church of Reading (Wakefield) and the First Church of Rumney Marsh (Revere).