Freedom from Fatalism

by Robert C. Sturdy

2021 · Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

Samuel Rutherford's (1600-1661) scholastic theology has been criticized as overly deterministic and even fatalistic, a charge common to Reformed Orthodox theologians of the era. This project applies the new scholarship on Reformed Orthodoxy to Rutherford's doctrine of divine providence. The doctrine of divine providence touches upon many of the disputed points in the older scholarship, including the relationship between divine sovereignty and creaturely freedom, necessity and contingency, predetermination, and the problem of evil. Through a close examination of Rutherford's Latin works of scholastic theology, as well as many of his English works, a portrait emerges of the absolutely free and independent Creator, who does not utilize his sovereignty to dominate his subordinate creatures, but rather to guarantee their freedom. This analysis challenges the older scholarship while making useful contributions to the lively conversation concerning Reformed thought on freedom.

A Point of Controversy

by C. Stephen Badgley

2010 · Badgley Publishing Company

Was the "Shot heard round the World" at Lexington actually an echo from the gently rolling hills around the confluence of the Great Kanawha and Ohio Rivers? Was the Battle of Point Pleasant actually the first battle of the American Revolution? At the beginning of the 20th century, through the tireless efforts of Mrs. Livia Nye Simpson Poffenbarger, the battle site, the monuments and the recognition by congress that this was a "battle of the Revolution" were secured. If it was indeed a battle of the Revolution, then it was the first as it occurred six months before the fight at Lexington. Her adversary on the theory of it being a battle of the Revolution was Virgil Anson Lewis, noted Historian and Archivist for the State of West Virginia and a former proponent of the theory. Both Poffenbarger and Lewis wrote books on this controversial subject and these books are both presented complete in this volume. The author has provided some very interesting, thought provoking facts and speculations for you to consider as you ponder the works of these two adversaries and form your own opinion as to whether this battle was the first of the American Revolution.

Paintbrush for Hire

by Frederick C. Moffatt

2024 · University of Tennessee Press

“I was pulled into the story and read every word.” –Randolph Delehanty, author of Art in the American South: Works from the Odgen Collection Throughout the nineteenth-century, itinerant painters traveled the length and breadth of Europe and American in search of patronage. In the company of the his crupulous wife, Emma S. Cameron (1825–1907), the Scots-born James Cameron (1816–1882) sought to fulfill his ambitious dream of becoming an artist. Working primarily as a landscapist and portraitist—he was also an inventor, a missionary, an ordained minister, a land agent, farmer, clothing merchant, and Sunday school teacher—Cameron produced a small collection of paintings during the ten-year period the couple resided in East Tennessee and the American South. Driven by the wife’s lively journals, correspondence, and Civil War diary, Moffatt’s narrative details the couple’s marriage, their extended honeymoon in revolutionary Italy and, following a brief excursion in the Adirondacks, their subsequent residencies in Knoxville, Chattanooga, Memphis, Nashville, Augusta, central Mississippi, and New Orleans, between 1856 and 1868. While in Chattanooga, they settled near Col. James A. Whiteside’s fashionable summer resort, Lookout Mountain Hotel, where James reigned as resident artist and Emma, reluctantly, served as the house nurse and social entertainer. In the late 1860s they lived in Maine and, after 1874, in California, where they founded separate Presbyterian churches. The book emphasizes Cameron’s painting career, the patrons who supported it, and discusses his best-known works, all of which are reproduced here. The study demonstrated how persisted while working under a cultural cloud that often devalued artistic achievement Emma’s journals reveal her to be a perceptive observer of Protestant middle class “life-on-the-run” and yields insight into historic events in the making, including the Italian Risorgimento, the American Civil War, and the settlement of America’s Western frontier. Moffatt’s detailed joint biography provides a valuable contribution to women’s studies, art history, nineteenth-century frontier expansionism, and social history. Frederick C. Moffatt is emeritus professor of art history at the School of Art, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the author of Arthur Wesley Dow, 1857–1922; Errant Bronzes: George Grey Barnard’s Statue of Abraham Lincoln; and The Life, Art, and Times of Joseph Delaney, 1904–1991.

Strange Intelligence

by Hector C. Bywater

2015 · Biteback Publishing

Hector C. Bywater was perhaps the British secret service's finest agent operating in Germany before the First World War, tasked with collecting intelligence on naval installations. Recruited by Mansfield Cumming, the first 'C' (or head of what would become MI6), Bywater was given the designation 'H2O' in what was a rather obvious play on his name - and the equivalent of James Bond's '007'. Indeed, the charming, courageous Bywater probably came as close to the popular image of Ian Fleming's most famous character as any British secret agent ever did. Originally written up in 1930 as a series of thrilling articles in the Daily Telegraph, his experiences were soon turned into a book, with the help of Daily Express journalist H. C. Ferraby, collating Bywater's espionage endeavours in one rollicking tale of secret service adventure. Although the identities of the British spies carrying out the missions in Strange Intelligence are disguised, we now know that most of them were in fact Bywater himself. Ahead of a war that was to put the British Navy to its sternest test since Trafalgar, Bywater reveals how he and his fellow agents deceived the enemy to gather vital intelligence on German naval capabilities. His account is a true classic of espionage and derring-do.

Liberal Intellectuals and Public Culture in Modern Britain, 1815-1914

by William C. Lubenow

2010 · Boydell & Brewer

"Liberal Intellectual and Public Culture in Modern Britain shows how liberal values reconstructed public space in Britain after the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828) and the passage of Catholic emancipation (1829). It traces the century-long process against subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles. It examines the emergence of the intellectual authority of the universities and the social authority of the professions ... This cultural capital--antique and modern letters, mathematics--filled the public sphere and provided the materials for intellectual change. Roman Catholicism and nationalism revealed the fragilities of this public culture."--Back cover.