Volume 46, Number 14 · September 23, 1999
Persuading the Persuaded
By Edmund S. Morgan
American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King Jr.
edited by Michael Warner
The Library of America, 939 pp., $40.00
With the publication of a volume of sermons ranging over three and a half centuries, the Library of America enters new territory. None of the previous 107 volumes in the series, which 'is dedicated to preserving America's best and most significant writing,' has included anything religious or theological. Until now the authors have been selected for their literary distinction or, in a few cases, for their political significance (writings of Washington and Jefferson, the debates on the Constitution). The format of the series has required that there be no introduction explaining or justifying the selections and none has been needed. There would be no point in cluttering the texts of William Faulkner or Nathaniel Hawthorne with yet another analysis of what they really said or meant or why they are worthy of the imprimatur of the series. The same might have been true of a volume allotted to, say, Jonathan Edwards or Reinhold Niebuhr. The sermons in this new volume are similarly presented as though their intrinsic merit were obvious. It is not. The publication itself is a kind of statement that sermons played an important role in American life, but why or how is not self-evident and does not become so in reading this collection of them. Edwards and Niebuhr are both here, but in strange company.
Review, 3214 words
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