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Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life. By Nancy Koester. Library of Religious Biography. (Grand Rapids, Mich., and Cambridge, Eng.: William B. Eerdmans, 2014. Pp. [xii], 371. Paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-08028-3304-4.)
"I did not write it," Harriet Beecher Stowe once remarked of Uncle Tom's Cabin (Boston, 1852); "God wrote it. I merely did his dictation" (p. 322). In her biography of Stowe, Nancy Koester comes close to endorsing Stowe's claim. Koester, a historian of American Christianity and an ordained Lutheran minister, presents a portrait of a deeply devout Christian whose personal relationships, political activism, and public writings were shaped by and expressions of her faith. While Stowe's Christian faith was always central to her life, it was far from static. The story Koester tells is of the gradual, occasionally arduous evolution of Stowe's faith, as she eventually distanced herself from the doctrines of New England Calvinism in favor of what Koester characterizes as "a kinder,...