American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • American History >
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
      • Grief
      • Public Service
      • First Lady
      • The Democratic Crusade
      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
      • A Note on Wikipedia as a Source
      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

COOK, JOSEPH

(26 January 1838, Ticonderoga, NY-25 June 1901, Ticonderoga, NY). Education: Attended Yale College, 1858-61; B.A., Harvard College, 1865; B.D., Andover Seminary, 1868; post-graduate study, Andover Seminary, 1868-69; travel and study in Europe, 1871-73. Career: Acting minister, First Congregational Church, Lynn, MA, 1869-71; lecturer and author, Boston, MA, 1874-95.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, many Christians were fascinated by the new discoveries in modern science but were disturbed with the possibility that such doctrines as evolution threatened traditional religious beliefs. Joseph Cook was one of those preachers who assured Congregationalists, and other Christians, that they could have their religion and science too.

He preached at Lynn and several other towns in the Boston area for a few years, but he found his calling in 1874 when he began to lead the Monday noon prayer meetings at Boston's Tremont Temple. Bostonians flocked to hear him during their lunch breaks. His performances, known as the Monday Lectures, were published in newspapers and books and translated into many languages. They gained Cook a national and international audience. Between 1880 and 1883 he made a triumphant world tour.

Cook was stridently orthodox, attacking those who appeared the enemies of religious orthodoxy. And yet he was comfortable with new findings in science and philosophy. Many of his lectures were reports on the latest discoveries in biology and sociology. He claimed that the best of science was always compatible with religion. But his critics pointed out that his knowledge was superficial-as indeed it was.

His career was more reflective of the yearning for a comfortable association of orthodoxy and modernity than the reality of a respectable synthesis. But in religion, as in life as a whole, men and women often express ourselves in what they desire, as well as in what they attain. Joseph Cook's superficial science found a receptive audience because it told orthodox Christians what they wanted to hear.

Bibliography
A: Boston Monday Lectures, 11 vols. (Boston, 1877-88) [Topics include Biology, Transcendentalism, Orthodoxy, Socialism, and Current Religious Perils.]
B: DAB 4, 371-72; DARB, 111-12; NCAB 2, 260-61; NIT, 26 June 1901,7; SH 3, 265.