Books

Horace Bushnell (1802-1876) is one of the most studied figures in nineteenth- century American religious history, but there have been no recent major biographies of him. Robert Bruce Mullin’s Puritan as Yankee provides a much-needed look at this famous American Christian thinker.

Based on a close reading of Bushnell’s writings and unpublished sources and giving careful attention to how Bushnell’s contemporaries saw him, Mullin’s book throws fresh light on its subject. Breaking from the long tradition of portraying Bushnell as the father of American theological liberalism, Mullin offers a fundamentally new picture of Bushnell as a man deeply concerned with the questions of his age — and a far more interesting figure than previously thought. Bushnell emerges here as an innovator, a Yankee tinkerer in the field of religion, and a profoundly conservative figure.