The Sewanee Review

Articles from The Sewanee Review

The Religious Opinions of Thomas Jefferson
(Sewanee Review, 1913)

The author argues that Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826) was neither an atheist or an Episcopalian or a Unitarian, as many have claimed. However, his fertile mind was not entirely devoid of any religious conviction but rather his views on theology were totally undigested and lacking in order and consistency. It is an interesting piece about one of America’s most fascinating Presidents concerning a topic that keeps coming up again and again.


Jefferson’s Bible is one of the ‘curiosities of literature’. This book, called by him, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth was published by congress in 1904.


(The article can be printed: which is good because the pages are out of order; sorry for the inconvenience.)


The historian Henry Steele Commager ranked Thomas Jefferson at number 14 insofar as his impact on the American mind was concerned – click here to understand his reasoning…

The American Civil War and the Unity it Created
(The Sewanee Review, 1913)

Written at the time when the United States was marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, Dudley Miles, a Professor of History at Columbia University, wrote this appreciation concerning one of the lasting virtues of the American Civil War:

The torrent of natural life has swept away the bitter memories of brother struggling with brother. In both North and South faces are turned from the past, and hearts are filled with pride and hope and aspiration for the future of the republic….The magnanimity which Grant displayed at Appomattox, the restraint which even political temper displayed during Reconstruction, stopping short of confiscation of property and the execution of prominent leaders…these things furnish a new chapter in the history of victor and vanquished.

Nietzsche and World War One
(Sewanee Review, 1920)

In this 1920 article the theologian George Burman Foster (1858 – 1918), examined the writings of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) and surmised how that philosopher might have understood the First World War, with all of it’s scientific and industrial power.

War constitutes one of of those dangerous ‘experiments’ undertaken by the wise man to further the progress of life, to test the value of an idea, of life. Hence, war is beneficial, good in itself; and thus Nietzsche predicts without dismay or regret that Europe is not far from entering into a period of great wars when nations will fight with one another for the mastery of the world.


Click here to read about the Nazi interpretation of Nietzsche.

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