Talking In The Library

Fireside Chat: America's First Celebrity Preacher and How He Perfected the Protestant Art of Talking about Yourself Dr. Seth Perry is Associate Professor of Religion in America at Princeton University. His first book, Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States (Princeton University Press, 2018) explores the performative, rhetorical, and material aspects of bible-based authority in early-national America. His work has appeared in Church History, Early American Studies, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Scholarly Publishing, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Sightings, and the LA Review of Books. Current projects include; an article on "scriptural failure"; a project on animals in early American religious history; and a biography of Lorenzo Dow, the early-national period's most famous itinerant preacher. Dr. Perry was a McNeil Center for Early American Studies Fellow at the Library Company in 2011. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, July 23, 2020.