About Us

The Jonathan Edwards Center Mission

The mission of the Jonathan Edwards Center is to support inquiry into the life, writings, and legacy of Jonathan Edwards by providing resources that encourage critical appraisal of the historical importance and contemporary relevance of America’s premier theologian.

The primary way that we do this is with the Works of Jonathan Edwards Online, a digital learning environment for research, education and publication, that presents all of Edwards’s writings, along with helpful editorial materials that allow the reader to examine Edwards' thought in incredibly powerful, useful ways.

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), pastor, revivalist, Christian philosopher, missionary, and college president, is widely regarded as North America’s greatest theologian. He is the subject of intense scholarly interest because of his significance as an historical figure and the profound legacy he left on America’s religious and intellectual landscapes. His writings are being consulted at a burgeoning rate by religious leaders, pastors, and churches worldwide because of the fervency of Edwards’s message and the acumen with which he appraised religious experience. Yet for centuries, scholars and readers of Edwards have had to rely on inaccurate and partial versions of his writings. The Works of Jonathan Edwards, the critical edition of Edwards’s writings, was created at Yale University in 1953 to overcome these obstacles.

But even with the Edwards Works amounting to a 26-volume letterpress series, less than half of Edwards’s total writings was available. To provide the entirety of Edwards’s corpus on a global basis, we have created the Works of Jonathan Edwards Online (WJE Online), a digital environment that supports and assists the research, reading, and teaching of Edwards’s writings, primarily through a comprehensive, searchable online database that contains the series published by Yale University Press but also tens of thousands of pages of unpublished computerized transcripts--sermons, notebooks, essays, letters, and personalia--that the Jonathan Edwards Center has on file. Complementing these primary texts are reference works, secondary works, chronologies, and audio, video, and visual sources. Simply put, no comparable digital resource for an American religious figure exists.

About the Jonathan Edwards Center

The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University (JEC) came into being in October 2003, on the three-hundredth anniversary of Jonathan Edwards' birth. The JEC grew out of the offices of the Works of Jonathan Edwards, the contemporary critical print edition of selections from the Edwards papers.

Key Staff
Harry S. Stout is the Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Religious History at Yale University, and General Editor of the Works of Jonathan Edwards, and director of the Jonathan Edwards Center.
Kenneth P. Minkema is the Executive Editor and director of the Works of Jonathan Edwards and Jonathan Edwards Center.
Adriaan C. Neele is the Associate Editor and director of the Works of Jonathan Edwards and Jonathan Edwards Center.

Support for the JEC

For many years, the Works of Jonathan Edwards was supported principally by The Pew Charitable Trusts, the Lilly Endowment, and the Henry Luce Foundation. More recently, and with the establishment of the Jonathan Edwards Center, our supporters include The National Endowment for the Humanities, Yale University, and two anonymous foundations.

The JEC has also received donations from individual donors, who together form “The Friends of Edwards.” If you find the resources on this website useful, we welcome your contribution to help us continue fulfilling our mission. If you would like to contribute, please send a check to the following:

The Jonathan Edwards Center
Yale Divinity School
409 Prospect St.
New Haven, CT 06511

All donations go directly to the JEC, and are tax deductible.

The Works of Jonathan Edwards Letterpress Edition

The Works of Jonathan Edwards was initially conceived by renowned literary historian Perry Miller in 1953. Its aim was to publish a modern critical edition of Edwards' published and unpublished works, issued in book form by Yale University Press. Twenty-six volumes, along with A Jonathan Edwards Reader (1995) and The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader (1999), have been released.

The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Grand List

All volumes published by Yale University Press unless otherwise indicated. To order, call Yale University Press Customer Service at 800-405-1619.

Previously Published:

  • PAUL RAMSEY, ed., Freedom of the Will (0-300-00848-1)
  • JOHN E. SMITH, ed., Religious Affections (0-300-00966-6)
  • CLYDE A. HOLBROOK, ed., Original Sin (0-300-01198-9)
  • C. C. GOEN, ed., The Great Awakening (0-300-01437-6)
  • STEPHEN J. STEIN, ed., Apocalyptic Writings (0-300-01945-9)
  • WALLACE E. ANDERSON, ed., Scientific and Philosophical Writings (0-300-02282-4)
  • NORMAN PETTIT, ed., The Life of David Brainerd (0-300-03004-5)
  • PAUL RAMSEY, ed., Ethical Writings (0-300-04020-2)
  • JOHN F. WILSON, ed., A History of the Work of Redemption (0-300-04155-1)
  • WILSON H. KIMNACH, ed., Sermons and Discourses, 1720-1723 (0-300-05136-0)
  • WALLACE E. ANDERSON & MASON I. LOWANCE, with DAVID WATTERS, eds., Typological Writings (0-300-05352-5)
  • DAVID D. HALL, ed., Ecclesiastical Writings (0-300-05897-7)
  • THOMAS A. SCHAFER, ed., The ““Miscellanies,” a-500 (0-300-06059-9)
  • KENNETH P. MINKEMA, ed., Sermons and Discourses, 1723-1729 (0-300-06841-7)
  • STEPHEN J. STEIN, ed., Notes on Scripture (0-300-07198-1)
  • GEORGE S. CLAGHORN, ed., Letters and Personal Writings (0-300-07295-3)
  • MARK VALERI, ed., Sermons and Discourses, 1730-1733 (0-300-07840-4)
  • AVA CHAMBERLAIN, ed., The "Miscellanies," 501-832 (0-300-08330-0)
  • M. X. LESSER, ed., Sermons and Discourses, 1734-1738 (0-300-08714-4)
  • AMY PLANTINGA PAUW, ed., The "Miscellanies," 833-1152 (0-300-06059-9)
  • SANG HYUN LEE, ed., Writings on the Trinity, Grace and Faith (0-300-09505-8)
  • HARRY S. STOUT & NATHAN O. HATCH, with KYLE P. FARLEY, eds., Sermons and Discourses, 1739-1742 (0-300-09572-4)
  • DOUGLAS A. SWEENEY, ed., The "Miscellanies," 1153-1360 (0-300-10102-3)
  • STEPHEN J. STEIN, ed., The "Blank Bible" (2 volumes) (0-300-10931-8)
  • WILSON H. KIMNACH, ed., Sermons and Discourses, 1743-1758 (0-300-11539-0)
  • PETER J. THUESEN, ed., Catalogues of Books (978-0-300-13394-3)

 
Anthologies:

  • JOHN E. SMITH, HARRY S. STOUT, & KENNETH P. MINKEMA, eds., A Jonathan Edwards Reader (1995, 2003)
  • WILSON H. KIMNACH, KENNETH P. MINKEMA, & DOUGLAS A. SWEENEY, eds., The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader (1999).

Conference Volumes:

  • NATHAN O. HATCH & HARRY S. STOUT, eds., Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience (New York, Oxford Univ. Press, 1988).
  • BARBARA O. OBERG & HARRY S. STOUT, eds., Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, and the Representation of American Culture (New York, Oxford Univ. Press, 1993)
  • STEPHEN J. STEIN, ed., Jonathan Edwards's Writings: Text, Context, Interpretation (Bloomington, Indian Univ. Press, 1996).
  • SANG HYUN LEE & ALAN GUELZO, eds., Edwards in Our Time: Jonathan Edwards and the Shaping of American Religion (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2000).
  • DAVID KLING & DOUGLAS A. SWEENEY, eds., Jonathan Edwards in Historical Memory (Columbia, Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2003).
  • HARRY S. STOUT, KENNETH P. MINKEMA, & CALEB J. D. MASKELL, eds., Jonathan Edwards at 300: Essays on the Tercentenary of His Birth (Lanham, Md., University Press of America, 2003).

The Yale Edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards occupies a special place in the larger world of American scholarship. Over the past several decades it has emerged as the single most sustained, scholarly, editorial undertaking in the United States alongside the Founding Fathers papers projects. It is the only one of its scope in the field of American religious history.

The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online

In 2003, in anticipation of the completion of the publication of The Works of Jonathan Edwards letterpress volumes, the birth of the Jonathan Edwards Center was announced. The JEC exists to support research and inquiry into the life and writings of the man often dubbed "America's Theologian." The primary vehicle by which we do this work is the publication of the Works of Jonathan Edwards Online, a comprehensive, fully-searchable, critical, annotated online edition of the papers of Jonathan Edwards, a corpus of some 100,000 pages of sermons, notebooks, letters, and treatises. The WJE Online edition, housed at the Jonathan Edwards Center and its international offices, is integrated with Scripture citations, primary sources--referenced by Edwards--and relevant scholarly books and articles.

Our Daily Work

The controlling objective of the Jonathan Edwards Center is to preserve and accurately transmit the texts of Edwards' writings. The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online has no cultural or theological agenda. The editors have never reflected a single or uniform view of Edwards, his ideas, or his writings. Collectively, they are committed to the finest scholarly standards for textual transcription, editing, and annotation. Safeguarding and presenting these texts as a cultural and literary legacy drives the investment of time and energy on the part of the Edition's scholars, editors, and assistants. Edwards' writings, not only for their sheer volume, extent, and scope, but for their enduring importance, are major documents in the story of American history and of global Christianity.

Since 1988, the Works of Jonathan Edwards has been generously hosted by Yale University Divinity School. Besides housing the editorial and administrative components of the letterpress and digital projects, our offices serve as a resource center. Staff members offer seminars on Edwards and early American religious history. They are also available to help students, faculty, and visiting researchers with questions and research on Edwards and related topics with the help of computerized transcripts of Edwards’s manuscripts and an archive of articles, books, and other materials relating to Edwards. A team of student editorial assistants, most of them Divinity students, assist the staff with the transcription of Edwards’s manuscripts at Beinecke Library.