biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1703–58)
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| biography:
| Protestant clergyman and theologian, born in East Windsor, Connecticut, USA. He entered Yale at age 13, graduated in 1720, and studied theology there for two years. He was a pastor in New York City briefly before returning to Yale as a tutor. In 1726 he became an assistant to his grandfather Solomon Stoddard as minister of the Congregational Church at Northampton, MA, and succeeded him after his death (1729). Imbued with an almost perversely stern Calvinist doctrine, he was a powerful preacher, and is regarded as the greatest theologian of the extreme form of American Puritanism. His best-known sermon, ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’, declared man's baseness, and vividly described the conditions of damnation. In the early 1740s he helped inspire the religious revival ironically known as the Great Awakening. Dismissed from the Northampton pulpit (1750) for over-zealousness, he became a missionary to the Indian tribes around Stockbridge, MA. In 1757 he was appointed president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), but died (from a smallpox inoculation) only a few weeks after taking office. |
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