Description
Higman (history, U. of the West Indies, and history, Australian National U.) examines the life of Scottish native Reverend John Lindsay. Ordained as a clergyman in the Church of England, Lindsay lived the second half of his life in Jamaica, serving as rector of several parishes. He also married into Jamaican plantocracy and became a slave-owner, seeing no conflict between his ownership of people and his Christianity. Based on extensive research of Lindsay's written works--sermons, a natural history of Jamaica, a proslavery polemic, a novel, poetry--the biography focuses on the intellectual world of Lindsay and his desire to understand the world around him not only in religious terms but also within the framework of 18th-century philosophy and science. Distributed by Longleaf Services, Inc. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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Child of the Church of Scotland and product of the Scottish Enlightenment, John Lindsay was an ordained minister of the Church of England, serving church and state in the British Atlantic. The second half of his life was spent in Jamaica, where – in the midst of slave society – he had leisure to live a life of ideas and develop literary and philosophical interests. As well as sermons, he published a novel, a poem and an account of a voyage to West Africa. At his death, Lindsay left manuscript sermons, a natural history of Jamaica and a proslavery polemic. These texts address central questions of eighteenth-century British imperial thought. How might faith and reason sit together, and the laws of nature with the laws of God? How might conjecture, hypothesis, speculation and curiosity fit with the authority of scripture? What does it mean to be human? How could liberty coexist with slavery?
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