Words, works, and ways of knowing

The author, a crime writer, is known the world over for her acclaimed series of mysteries starring Chicago private investigator V.I. Warshawski. Before she started a writing career, the author earned a PhD in history from the University of Chicago with a dissertation on moral philosophy and religion in New England in the early and mid-nineteenth century. Now fans of the author can read that earliest work. It analyzes attempts by theologians at Andover Seminary to square and secure Calvinist religious beliefs with emerging knowledge from history and the sciences. The text shows how the open-minded scholasticism of these theologians paradoxically led to the weakening of their intellectual credibility as conventional religious belief structures became discredited, and how this failure then incited reactionary forces within Calvinism.