David N. Hempton is University Distinguished Service Professor and Alonzo L. McDonald Family Professor of Evangelical Theological Studies at the Divinity School, Harvard University, where he also served as Dean from 2012-2023. An internationally acclaimed religious historian, he is the author of numerous books focused on the early modern and modern periods, several of them award winners. His publications include Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750-1850 (Hutchinson, 1984, which in the same year won the Whitfield Prize of the Royal Historical Society), Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1996), Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (Yale University Press, 2005), Evangelical Disenchantment: Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt (Yale University Press, 2008) and The Church in the Long Eighteenth Century (I. B. Tauris, 2011, winner of the 2012 Albert C. Outler Prize of the American Society of Church History). He has delivered, over the course of his career, several sets of endowed lectures including the Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham, the F. D. Maurice Lectures at King's College London, and the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, from which the present book is derived. He is in addition a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the Ecclesiastical History Society, and an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy.
