Thomas S Kidd

"Renowned as a printer, scientist, and diplomat, Benjamin Franklin also published more works on religious topics than any other eighteenth-century American layperson. Born to Boston Puritans, by his teenage years Franklin had abandoned the exclusive Christian faith of his family and embraced deism. But Franklin, as a man of faith, was far more complex than the "thorough" deist who emerges in his autobiography. As Thomas Kidd reveals, deist writers...

Most Americans know Patrick Henry as a fiery speaker whose pronouncement "Give me liberty or give me death!" rallied American defiance to the British Crown. But Henry's skills as an orator, sharpened in the small towns and courtrooms of colonial Virginia, are only one part of his vast, but largely forgotten, legacy. As historian Thomas S. Kidd shows, Henry cherished a vision of America as a virtuous republic with a clearly circumscribed central government....

A revelatory new biography of Thomas Jefferson, focusing on his ethical and spiritual life Thomas Jefferson was arguably the most brilliant and inspiring political writer in American history. But the ethical realities of his personal life and political career did not live up to his soaring rhetoric. Indeed, three tensions defined Jefferson's moral life: democracy versus slavery, republican virtue versus dissolute consumption, and veneration for Jesus...

The Zondervan Biblical and Theological Lectures series provides a unique audio learning experience. Unlike a traditional audiobook's direct narration of a book's text, America's Religious History: Audio Lectures includes high quality live-recordings of college-level lectures that cover the important points from each subject as well as relevant material from other sources. In the post-9/11 world, it is not difficult to see how important religion remains...