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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Gillis J. Harp. Brahmin Prophet: Phillips Brooks and the Path of Liberal Protestantism. (American Intellectual Culture Series.) Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. 2003. Pp. xi, 237. Cloth $80.00, paper $32.95.
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| Gillis J. Harp has written a book on two levels. The reader will find a thoroughly researched, gracefully written, learned, and insightful account of nineteenth-century Episcopal preacher Phillips Brooks's religious thought. But the book also contains evangelical ammunition for today's partisan religious wars against moderate and liberal believers. |
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Harp argues that Brooks "both reflected the intellectual and cultural tensions of his time and helped, in turn, to reshape American Protestantism" (p. x). Unlike earlier scholars who emphasized Brooks's evangelical affinities, Harp argues that Brooks's theology is more properly understood as "humanistic, Romanticized Christianity" (p. 9) and owes more to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and F. D. Maurice than to "Evangelicalism in its classic doctrinal form" (p. 67). |
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Harp places Brooks within general American Protestant, not merely Episcopal, thought. Comparisons extend from Ralph Waldo Emerson past Horace Bushnell to Charles Hodge and Dwight Moody. There are certainly reasons for doing this; Brooks's father was a Unitarian and his mother an orthodox Congregationalist. Yet this context can obscure as well as reveal. Episcopalians did not always define "Evangelical" the same way Congregationalists or Presbyterians did. Some of the cited quotations show Brooks using the word to separate himself from Oxford's high church ritualism rather than from incipient theological liberalism. |
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