The New England Theology"-the tradition of American Reformed thought originating in the work of Jonathan Edwards (1703-58)-was, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a subject of opprobrium and condescension. In the 1980s and 1990s a new wave of revisionist scholarship reassessed the New England theologians, arguing for their centrality to early American intellectual history. This article asks why, in the wake of these studies, almost no new work has been done on the New England Theology in more than a decade. It argues that the decline in the subfield is due to the capture of the subject by evangelical scholars at evangelical institutions, tying this phenomenon to the rise of the "new evangelical thesis" in academic history. Finally, the article seeks to chart a way forward for the study of New England Theology by going beyond evangelical readings of the sources.

Critiques of religion in Arab political life have long been framed as a project of the left. Since the uprisings of 2011, however, the most forceful critics of theology’s presence in politics have been conservatives. This article reconstructs the intellectual history of the Arab right through the work of philosopher Mohammed Jaber al-Ansari. Revisiting the intellectual and historical context of the 1990s, it advances a new genealogy of conservative Arab political thought, one that saw in all transcendental and religious identifications not only the dangers of revolution but also a forfeiture of politics itself. In decoupling conservatism from Islam, the article advances an understanding of conservatism as both contingent and structural, or permanent in its formal presence but not necessarily in content, to suggest that histories of conservatism not only provide resources for a better understanding of the present, but also can complement the task that radical and ecumenical accounts of the Arab past have long pursued in disputing the religious or cultural nature of conservatism. In that sense, intellectual history of secular conservatism is important not because it is more or less dominant than theologically inflected varieties of it today, but because of how it might help free the historian from the need to restrict her endeavour to the correction of essentialist misrepresentation and to write histories where contingency is assumed rather than histories whose burden it has been to prove it.

William Godwin is predominantly recognized as a theoretical anarchist who envisioned a tranquil anarchy wherein no government was deemed necessary. Equally emphasized in academic literature is Godwin’s unwavering advocacy for gradualism and pacifism as a transition mechanism toward the ideal society—a strategy criticized by some as inadequate or naive in realizing this ideal. Scholars of Godwin have identified a contradiction within his thought on this basis. This article, however, argues that this contradiction dissolves when we shift the focus to what could be termed the “time-regime” of Godwin’s politics: the business of the present differed from the business of the future, even as the present served as road to the future. Viewed through this lens of time-regime, the remarkable significance of democracy in Godwin’s scheme of anarchy becomes evident. Accordingly, this article seeks to analyze his concept of democracy within the backdrop of the French revolutionary decade.