In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• The Minister's Wooing's Calvinist Sentiment The Secular Versus Secularization
• Leah Marie Becker (bio)

The secularization thesis is dead. There is no doubt whatever about that.

Peter Coviello and Jared Hickman

As Peter Coviello and Jared Hickman jocularly point out in their reference to A Christmas Carol, for all the claims that we need no longer attend to the secularization thesis, like Jacob Marley's ghost, it refuses to die, haunting American literary studies even though there is "no doubt" that we have moved beyond its parameters. This helps explain why many scholars continue to frame Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel The Minister's Wooing (1859) as a critique of Calvinism and Stowe herself as an anti-Calvinist. Critics such as Nancy Lusignan Schultz, John Gatta, and Joseph Helminski—whose articles on The Minister's Wooing span a swath of twenty years that, ironically, saw the rise of postsecularism—all invoke the secularization thesis when they argue that Stowe's novel moves Calvinist doctrine away from strict Puritan ideology and toward a softened, "feminized" (i.e., less legitimate) version of itself. Even scholars who rightly differentiate the secular from concepts like secularism and secularization make this argument, such as Kristin Wilkes, who maintains that "it is possible for a novel to be both fully secular and fully religious" but also claims that Stowe used The Minister's Wooing to criticize and move away from the Edwardsian and Hopkinsian version of Calvinism in favor of her own experiential and sentimental version.¹ From all angles, Stowe's novel seems irrevocably tied to the secularization thesis's progressive narrative that, in the United States, dogma-heavy religion gave way to sympathetic secularity over the course of the nineteenth century. [End Page 151]

To be sure, Stowe puts a maternal, feminine, and domestic face on Calvinism in The Minister's Wooing that places it firmly within the parameters of the secular, or worldly. Her arguments that religion should pervade one's everyday life and that it is essential to balance one's theology with one's innate human nature prove as much. However, I find that many critics overestimate The Minister's Wooing's role in the supposed secularization of Calvinism due to a sweeping application of the term "secular," overreliance on Stowe's biography, and a continued belief that sentimentalism was the harbinger of nineteenth-century secularization.² I contend, instead, that Stowe redeems Calvinism for her nineteenth-century readers through the playful changes she makes to the genre's form and stock characters, illustrating that Calvinism makes room—and has always made room—for secular aspects of life like motherhood and fellow feeling. Indeed, when read this way The Minister's Wooing allows us to contemplate the secular outside the sticky bounds of the secularization thesis and opens new avenues for future approaches to the novel.

Defining Difference: The Secular, Secularism, and Secularization

Before turning to The Minister's Wooing, I contextualize Stowe's work via a history of academia's preoccupation with the secularization thesis and Calvinism's place in it. One of the reasons why the thesis refuses to "stay dead" (à la Coviello and Hickman) is that critics continue to debate the meaning of the terms "secular," "secularism," and "secularization," resulting in years of unspecific and contradictory usage of all three. While there is now some agreement among secularity scholars as to their definitions, outside the field, as Joan Wallach Scott notes, "secular (referring to things nonreligious), secularization (the historical process by which transcendent religious authority is replaced by knowledge that can only originate with reasoning humans), and secularity (a nonreligious state of being) tend to be conflated under the umbrella of secularism."³ Such conflation has resulted in a pattern of circular reasoning that historians and literary scholars have been attempting to rectify for years. Thanks to the likes of Talal Asad, Charles Taylor, Michael Warner, and others we now have (slightly) more stable definitions of these terms.

Warner explains that the root word of "secular" derives from Latin for "the age," meaning "temporal or worldly."⁴ In the Christian tradition, he explains, "secular" first referred to "secular clergy," or those "ordinary parish priests, as opposed to...

中文翻译：

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部长的求爱 加尔文主义情绪 世俗化与世俗化

代替摘要，这里是内容的简短摘录：

• 牧师的求爱加尔文主义情绪 世俗化与世俗化
• 莉亚·玛丽·贝克尔 (bio)

世俗化论点已死。这是毫无疑问的。

彼得 Coviello 和 Jared Hickman

正如 Peter Coviello 和 Jared Hickman 在他们提到的《圣诞颂歌》中诙谐地指出的那样，对于我们不再需要关注世俗化论题的所有主张，就像 Jacob Marley 的鬼魂一样，它拒绝死去，困扰着美国文学研究，尽管有“毫无疑问”我们已经超越了它的参数。这有助于解释为什么许多学者继续将哈丽特·比彻·斯托的小说《部长的求爱》（1859 年）视为对加尔文主义的批判，而斯托本人则是反加尔文主义者。Nancy Lusignan Schultz、John Gatta 和 Joseph Helminski 等评论家——他们关于部长求爱的文章具有讽刺意味的是，在长达二十年的时间里，后世俗主义兴起——当他们认为斯托的小说将加尔文主义教义从严格的清教徒意识形态转向软化、“女性化”（即不那么合法）的版本时，他们都引用了世俗化论点本身。即使是正确地将世俗与世俗主义和世俗化等概念区分开来的学者也提出了这一论点，例如克里斯汀威尔克斯，他坚持认为“一部小说有可能既完全世俗又完全宗教”，但也声称斯托使用了部长的求爱批评并远离爱德华和霍普金斯的加尔文主义版本，转而支持她自己的经验和感伤版本。¹从各个角度来看，斯托的小说似乎都与世俗化论点的进步叙事不可逆转地联系在一起，即在 19 世纪的美国，教条重的宗教让位于同情的世俗主义。[结束第 151 页]

可以肯定的是，斯托在《牧师的求爱》中为加尔文主义赋予了母性、女性化和家庭化的面孔，将其牢牢地置于世俗或世俗的范围内。她认为宗教应该渗透到一个人的日常生活中以及平衡一个人的神学与一个人与生俱来的人性至关重要的论点也证明了这一点。然而，我发现许多批评家高估了部长的求爱在所谓的加尔文主义世俗化中的作用，因为“世俗”一词的广泛应用，过度依赖斯托的传记，以及继续相信感伤主义是 19 世纪的先兆世俗化。²相反，我认为斯托通过她对流派的形式和角色的有趣改变为她 19 世纪的读者赎回了加尔文主义，说明加尔文主义为世俗的生活方面（如母亲和同伴）腾出了空间——而且一直都在感觉。确实，当以这种方式阅读时，《部长的求爱》让我们能够在世俗化论题的棘手范围之外思考世俗，并为未来的小说研究开辟新途径。

定义差异：世俗、世俗主义和世俗化

在转向部长的求爱之前，我通过学术界对世俗化论文的关注以及加尔文主义在其中的地位的历史，将斯托的作品置于背景之中。论文拒绝“死去”（la Coviello 和 Hickman）的原因之一是批评者继续争论“世俗”、“世俗主义”和“世俗化”等术语的含义，导致多年的不具体和三者的矛盾用法。虽然现在世俗学者之间就他们的定义达成了一些共识，但在该领域之外，正如琼瓦拉赫斯科特所指出的那样，“世俗的（指非宗教的事物），世俗化（超越的宗教权威被只能源自推理人类的知识所取代的历史过程），而世俗性（一种非宗教的存在状态）往往被混为一谈，归于世俗主义的保护伞之下。” ³这种混杂导致了一种模式历史学家和文学学者多年来一直试图纠正的循环推理。多亏了 Talal Asad、Charles Taylor、Michael Warner 等人，我们现在对这些术语有了（稍微）更稳定的定义。

华纳解释说，“世俗”的词根源自拉丁语“时代”，意思是“世俗的或世俗的”。⁴他解释说，在基督教传统中，“世俗”首先指的是“世俗神职人员”或那些“普通教区牧师，而不是……