David L. Chappell, AuthorLucas's brisk, delightfully clear writing masks the great difficulty of his achievement. He gets closer to the ideal of objectivity than Dabney's contemporaries--let alone Lucas's own contemporaries--could probably imagine. This book is a tremendous feat of scholarly labor and intellectual discipline.
David B. Calhoun, Professor of Church HistoryA model biography--accurate, interesting, sympathetic, and critical. Dr. Lucas has mastered his material, and the result is a portrait of Dabney that will live on. Not only do we come to know the great Virginian better in this book, but we are also given a wonderfully nuanced treatment of the political, intellectual, and ecclesiastical climate of the nineteenth-century South.
Jack P. Maddex Jr., Professor of HistoryAn important resource. Lucas draws on the many sources for knowledge of Dabney's life and thought, places him squarely in his historical setting, and appropriately balances and relates the biographical and theological parts of his task. He also points out, and wrestles ably with, some of the knotty questions that Dabney's story and his legacy still pose for his present-day admirers and critics.
Eugene D. GenoveseThe nineteenth-century Southern church boasted intellectually and morally impressive men who exercised considerable influence over political and social life. Among them, none overmatched Robert Lewis Dabney as a theologian, teacher, and social critic. Sean Lucas has provided a long-needed critical study of this great if problematic man, thereby illuminating our time as well as his.