Robert Lloyd - a Sir Gar Blog of random news . . . and some Clecs!

One of the authors of a book on the life and work of 18th century American evangelist George Whitefield says its publication is timely in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential elections. Aberystwyth University historian Dr David Ceri Jones co-edited George Whitefield: Life, Context and Legacy (Oxford, 2016) with Geordan Hammond, also from Aberystwyth University. The collection of essays explores many aspects of the eighteenth-century evangelist’s life and influence. “With evangelicals much in the news over their critical role in the election of US President Elect, Donald Trump, a reassessment of the life of George Whitefield seems particularly timely,” said Dr Jones. “The evangelical movement, such a powerful force in contemporary US politics, has its origins in a series of religious revivals that took place throughout the British Isles and the North American colonies in the mid eighteenth century. Led by George Whitefield and John Wesley in Britain, and by W...

Aberystwyth University historian Dr David Ceri Jones has signed a major contract to publish the correspondence of the 18th Century Transatlantic evangelical revivalist George Whitefield (1714-70). The contract, signed with leading academic publisher Oxford University Press, will see the Whitefield letters published in full for the first time. The first volume, which will be jointly-edited by Dr Jones and Dr Geordan Hammond, is scheduled for publication in 2018, with a further six volumes scheduled to appear at eighteenth month intervals subsequently. In 2014 Dr Jones, Reader in Welsh and Atlantic History at the Department of History and Welsh History at Aberystwyth University, was awarded £115,527 by the Leverhulme Trust to study the early evangelical movement through a reassessment of Whitefield’s life, context and legacy. Working with research assistant Dr Geordan Hammond, Dr Jones has spent the past year locating, collecting and transcribing the 3000 letters written by Whitefi...

Evangelical religion is one of the most dynamic and rapidly growing religious movements in the world today. While still a vibrant force in the USA evidenced in a recent evangelical President, that growth has taken place way beyond its traditional English-speaking heartlands to the Global South which includes China, South Korea, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. The present-day global evangelical movement had its origins in the religious revivals that swept the British Atlantic world in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Dr David Ceri Jones from the Department of History & Welsh History, Aberystwyth University, has been awarded a £115,527 grant from the Leverhulme Trust to better understand the early evangelical movement through a reassessment of the life, context and legacy of its inventor and chief inspiration, the trans-Atlantic revivalist, George Whitefield (1714-70). George Whitefield was probably the most famous religious figure of the eighteenth century, cros...