George Mish Marsden (born 1939) is an American historian who has written extensively on the interaction between Christianity and American culture, particularly on Christianity in American higher education and on American evangelicalism. He is best known for his award-winning biography of the New England clergyman Jonathan Edwards, a prominent theologian of Colonial America.^[3]

Biography

Marsden was born on February 25, 1939, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.^[2] He attended Haverford College, Westminster Theological Seminary, and Yale University, completing a Doctor of Philosophy degree^[2] in American history under Sydney E. Ahlstrom. He taught at Calvin College (1965–1986), Duke Divinity School (1986–1992), and as Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame (1992–2008).^[4] As of 2017 Marsden is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame.^[5] His former doctoral students include Diana Butler Bass, Matthew Grow, Thomas S. Kidd, Steven Nolt, and Rick Ostrander.^[6]

He was awarded the Bancroft Prize for his book Jonathan Edwards: A Life in 2004, the Merle Curti Award in 2004,^[7] and the Grawemeyer Award in Religion in 2005.^[4]

Selected works

• Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. 1970.
• Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925. New York: Oxford University Press. 1980.
• Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans. 1991.
• The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief. New York: Oxford University Press. 1994.
• Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans. 1995.
• Marsden, George M. (1997). The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. New York: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195122909.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-512290-9.
• Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. 2003. ISBN 9780300096934.
• A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans. 2008.
• The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief. New York: Basic Books. 2014.
• C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity: A Biography. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 2016.