'Jean Calvin, the French Renaissance humanist and Reformation theologian known to the English-speaking world as John Calvin, has been extraordinarily influential and highly controversial since he published the Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536 at the age of twenty-seven. However, outside the few special circles in which he is not only revered but also read, Calvin is often regarded as a religious authoritarian who imposed on his followers a regime of intolerance, prudery, obscurantism, and asceticism together with a passion for work based solidly on metaphysical angst. Those who comment on American history and culture tend to assign any unlikable aspect of it to the influence of Calvinism, which has caused Calvinism to be seen as a repository of regrettable biases and delusions, not only in the public mind, but also in the minds of the various learned who debate such topics. If we could disabuse ourselves of this notion of Calvinism as the explanation for whatever ails modern American culture, we could liberate the theologian and his thought from the encumbrances that make them unknown and unknowable to modern inquirers. Calvin as a disembodied glower would cease to be a factor in our thinking. Then he might emerge as what he was, a human being of exceptional gifts who, against his own wishes but as a consequence of his abilities, occupied a position of great influence during the European Reformation and long afterward.' -from the foreword by Marilynne Robinson
