- An American essayist, poet, and popular philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) began his career as a Unitarian minister in Boston, but achieved worldwide fame as a lecturer and the author of such essays as “Self-Reliance,” “History,” “The Over-Soul,” and “Fate.” Drawing on English and German Romanticism, Neoplatonism, Kantianism, and Hinduism, Emerson developed a metaphysics of process, an epistemology of moods, and an “existentialist” ethics of self-improvement. He influenced generations of Americans, from his friend Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, and in Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche, who takes up such Emersonian themes as power, fate, the uses of poetry and history, and the critique of Christianity.
- Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (Wikisource)
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, one of the most famous of all fire and brimstone sermons, was first preached by Jonathan Edwards, a prominent Puritan minister, in Enfield, Connecticut, in 1741. It was the first and most enduring expression of the uncompromising Calvinist theology of the Great Awakening.
stanford encyclopedia of philosophy of