The typographic mind

...[Jonathan] Edwards was one of the most brilliant and creative minds ever produced by America. His contribution to aesthetic theory was almost as important as his contribution to theology. His interests were mostly academic; he spent long hours each day in his study. He did not speak to his audiences extemporaneously. He read his sermons, which were tightly knit and closely reasoned expositions of theological doctrine. Audiences may have been moved emotionally by Edwards' language, but they were, first and foremost, required to understand it.


If this preoccupation with literacy and learning be a 'form of insanity" as Coswell said of religious life in America, then let there be more of it. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, religious thought and institutions in America were dominated by an austere, learned, and intellectual form of discourse that is largely absent from religious life today. No clearer example of the difference between earlier and modern forms of public discourse can be found than in the contrast between the theological arguments of Jonathan Edwards and those of, say, Jerry Falwell, or Billy Graham, or Oral Roberts. The formidable content of Edwards' theology must inevitably engage the intellect; if there is such a content to the theology of television evangelicals, they have not yet made it known.

From Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, Viking Penguin Inc., pages 54-56.