to analyze the sermon. The first comprehensive academic analysis of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" was published by Edwin Cady in 1949, who comments on the imagery of the sermon and distinguishes between the "cliché" and "fresh" figurative images, stressing how the former related to colonial life. Lee Stuart questions that the message of the sermon was solely negative and attributes its success to the final passages in which the sinners are actually "comforted". Rosemary Hearn argues that it is the logical structure of the sermon that constitutes its most important persuasive element. Lemay looks into the changes in the syntactic categories, like grammatical tenses, in the text of the sermon. Lukasik stresses how, in the sermon, Edwards appropriates Newtonian physics, especially the image of the gravitational pull that would relentlessly bring down the sinners. Gallagher focuses on the "beat" of the sermon, and on how the consecutive structural elements of the sermon serve different persuasive aims. Choiński suggests that the rhetorical success of the sermon consists in the use of the "deictic shift" that transported the hearers mentally into the figurative images of hell. Ironically, Jonathan Edwards wrote and spoke a great deal on heaven and angels, writes John Gerstner in Jonathan Edwards on Heaven and Hell, 1998, and those themes are less remembered, namely "Heaven is a World of Love". See also Calvinism Religious Affections A Faithful Narrative Freedom of the Will American philosophy Puritans Redemption The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners Great Awakening, generally, the term used for three or four distinct periods of religious revival in American Christian history Notes References External links Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, from DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Christian sermons 1741 works 18th-century Christian texts Enfield, Connecticut History of Christianity in the United States Hell