Happy 300th Birthday, George Whitefield!

The day is finally here – the 300th birthday of George Whitefield, the greatest evangelist of the eighteenth century, and the best known person in colonial America prior to the Revolution. I have been waiting for this day for a long time, but I started getting serious about writing a Whitefield biography in time for his 300th birthday sometime after my 2007 book on the Great Awakening. There were fine biographies of Whitefield available from both Christian devotional and academic perspectives, but there wasn’t an up-to-date academic biography that spoke widely to a popular (and especially Christian) audience, along the lines of what my doctoral mentor George Marsden did for Jonathan Edwards ten years ago. I would not compare my biography to the quality of Marsden’s stunning achievement, but I am certainly using his model of an openly Christian, but academically serious approach to biography of a a great minister. Dr. Marsden may not remember it, but he actually suggested to me some years ago that we needed a new biography of Whitefield along these lines.