Lane Theological Seminary Archives

Cover image of "Awakening to Justice" by Jemar Tisby et al.

Awakening to Justice, The Dialogue on Race and Faith Project, Jemar Tisby, Christopher P. Momany, Sègbégnon Mathieu Gnonhossou, David D. Daniels III, R. Matthew Sigler, Douglas M. Strong, Diane Leclerc, Esther Chung-Kim, Albert G. Miller, and Estrelda Y. Alexander. IVP Academic (ISBN: 9781514009185), 2024.

Summary: How a long-forgotten journal led a team to recover the stories of three abolitionists and their times.

Imagine working as an archivist when a large box arrives of miscellaneous memorabilia, that sat forgotten for many years in a college supply closet. Most of it looked like it came from the 1950’s except for an old notebook with a marble cover that was filled with handwriting with dates going back to the late 1830’s. This is what happened in 2015 when an archivist at Adrian College called Chris Momany, chaplain and religious historian.

As he read, he was stunned to find a drawing of a ship, Ulysses, impounded in Jamaica holding 556 slaves in incredibly cramped and sordid conditions. He was able to figure out that he was holding the diary of David Ingraham, an abolitionist missionary to Jamaica. He had been part of a group known as the “Lane Rebels” who left Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati to enroll at Oberlin College, where Charles Finney was on faculty of an abolitionist school that admitted Blacks. The college president was Asa Mahan, who became a mentor, and later left Oberlin to become Adrian College’s president, which may be how the notebook ended there.

But what to do? Consulting fellow historian Doug Strong, the two wondered if the journal might be the basis of a project studying the people around Ingraham, who died of tuberculosis in 1841 for what may be learned from these abolitionists for our day. Thus was formed The Dialogue on Race and Faith Project, convening a multiracial group of fourteen scholars who met together, traveled to Cincinnati and Oberlin, and produced the collection of papers that make up this work, amply fulfilling the vision of Momany and Strong. In particular, they focused on two others associated with Ingraham, James Bradley, a former slave and Lane Rebel, and Nancy Prince, an African American from Boston, who taught with Ingraham in Jamaica. Both wrote memoirs that served as compelling primary sources of their experiences in abolitionist and mission work.

After an introduction that sets the three in the revivalist/holiness context around Lane and Oberlin and the ministry of Finney, Christopher Momany offers a composite biography of Ingraham, Bradley, and Prince. In chapter two, Sègbégnon Mathieu Gnonhossou, describes what Ingraham found onboard the impounded Ulysses, and offers a detailed account of slaving in West Africa. David D. Daniels III, in chapter three recounts the experiences of both racism and inclusion encountered by Bradley and Prince in the North. Prince spent some years in Russia, which at the time was more racially enlightened than New England.

How were the abolitionists sustained in this arduous struggle, both at home and in Jamaica? R. Matthew Sigler explores in chapter four the important role of worship and personal devotional in the lives of the three. Chapter five examines the theological underpinnings of these “ordinary abolitionists.” showing how a sense of the all-embracing love of God and devotion to Christ spurred them both to evangelism and advocacy for justice for the slaves.

Diane Leclerc, in chapter six considers the hardships faced by both black and white women in this era. She details the exploitation of Black women’s bodies, and also the hardships faced by women like Sarah Ingraham Penfield, who followed her parents to Jamaica, also following them in death by tuberculosis while facing isolation due to her insistence on equality, the Oberlin Principles, convictions not shared by other missionaries. Philanthropy, such as that of the Tappans, played a vital role in the efforts of the abolitionist, as Esther Chung-Kim shows in chapter seven. Albert G. Miller shows the struggle Oberlin, both the town and the college, faced in maintaining racial equality in enrollments, campus housing, and restrictive title deeds for properties in Oberlin.

Read the appendices! They provide a helpful timeline of the persons and events and crucial writings of Bradley, Prince, and Ingraham, including a facsimile of his journal page with a diagram of the layout and confining dimensions of Ulysses. Hearing their own words about their faith and passion to fight slavery is stirring, including Ingraham’s plaintive question:

“O where are the sympathies of christians for the slave + where are their exersians (sic) for their liberation. O it seems as if the church were asleep + Satan has the world following him.”

I love this example of how a community of Christian scholars collaborate, using the discovery of a journal, to tell both the stories of Ingraham, Prince, and Bradley as well as the larger stories of slavery, racism, and abolitionist activism in their time and the inspiration it gives for our own day. As an Ohioan, I’ve been inspired by our Underground Railroad history, tracing its routes through the campus of Ohio State and through the areas around my home town of Youngstown. I’ve known some of the history of Lane and Oberlin, including seeing the historic buildings shown in archival photos in the book. Reading this work makes me both proud of this spiritual and abolitionist history and determined to carry it forward in our day.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life by Nancy Koester
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Harriet Beecher Stowe is forever known in American cultural history in the words Lincoln reportedly spoke to her when she met him in 1862: “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” What Nancy Koester’s “spiritual life” of Stowe gives us is a narrative of the spiritual journey of Stowe throughout her life. We see her spiritual development from the stern New School New England Calvinism of her father, Lyman Beecher, to a much broader Anglo-Catholic Christianity centered around the life and love of Christ.

488px-Harriet_Beecher_Stowe_by_Francis_Holl

Author: Francis Holl (1815–1884) after George Richmond (28 March 1809 – 19 March 1896)

Koester’s chronicle begins with her youthful struggles to meet the conversion criteria of New England Calvinists even as she awakens to a love for Christ. We follow her family west to Cincinnati and the struggles of her father as President of Lane Theological Seminary–a microcosm of the struggles within the Presbyterian church over versions of Calvinism, Old and New, her partnership with Catherine in a female academy, and her first exposures to slavery, and growing involvement with abolition and the Underground Railroad. This exposure provided the basis for the writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which had such a profound impact both upon the nation, and her own life.

While in Cincinnati, she married Calvin Stowe and moved back to New England so that he can pursue his academic career and Andover Seminary. During this decisive period, Koester chronicles her struggles with parenting including a six month hiatus at a water-cure spa, resulting from exhaustion and her struggle to write the book and the critical encouragement she received from brother Henry, her husband, and her publisher. Its publication, first in serial form and then as a book thrusts her into the competing factions of the abolitionist movement and attacks upon both the literary and factual character of the book. Koester explores these criticisms, which continue to the present, including the portrayal of Tom, the mawkish character of some passages, and the literary power of the book. She shows the grittiness of Harriet, who charts her own course and defends her work with a follow up work, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin that documented the work and showed that the reality of slavery was actually worse than she portrayed.

Perhaps lesser known and of great interest is her later life and her journey away from Calvinism. It seems that the decisive event was the death of her son Henry in 1857, due to a drowning accident. It was not clear that he was “converted” at the time and Stowe struggled with the question of the eternal fate of her son. She dabbled in spiritualism and moved to a position closer to universalism in envisioning a “wideness to God’s mercy.” She embraced a form of Anglo-Catholicism centered around liturgy, the sacraments, the church year that emphasized a growth into belief rather predestination and the struggle of her youth to experience conversion.

Koester chronicles her later literary career–she contributed the bulk of the family’s income. We see her contact with and differences with the women’s movement. We conclude with her and Calvin’s ministry in Florida, where they establish a church and promote Florida’s citrus agriculture. Koester helps us see the continuing center of Stowe’s faith in the person and work of Christ, however one may assess her later spiritual journey.

We have here a whole-life, multi-faceted portrait of Stowe against which we see the spiritual and national struggles of her age and her own role in those struggles. I would highly recommend it to understand the life of the woman who wrote the most published 19th century work after the Bible.

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