Literature Network » Harriet Beecher Stowe

The "African enslavement of Anglo-Saxon minds": the Beechers as critics of Augustine.

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From: Church History
Date: 20030901
Author:Thuesen, Peter J.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, who achieved international fame for her 1852 antislavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, is best known to historians of American religious thought as a critic of New England Calvinism and its leading light, Jonathan Edwards. But in airing her frustrations with the Puritan tradition, Stowe also singled out a much earlier source of the problem: Augustine, the fifth-century bishop of Hippo. At his worst, Augustine typified for Stowe not only theological rigidity but also the obdurate refusal of the male system-builders to take women's perspectives seriously. ...

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