Abstract

This book offers another in a long line of Creighton Peden’s contributions to understanding the thought of perhaps neglected religious thinkers in the American liberal tradition. Peden has stated that his approach in writing about figures like Gerald Birney Smith, George Burman Foster, and Edward Scribner Ames has not been critical or even comparative, but explicative. His goal is to make more of their work more accessible. And Peden is especially well positioned to do so in the case of Bernard Meland, as he has been a long-standing student, colleague, interlocutor, and ultimately literary executor to Meland.The book has a slightly quirky structure. The first twenty or so pages are an intellectual autobiography..