Jan Stievermann is Professor of the History of Christianity in the U.S. at Heidelberg University. He has written books and essays on a range of topics in the fields of American religious history and American literature, including Prophecy, Piety, and the Problem of Historicity: Interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures in Cotton Mather's Biblia Americana (2016). Caitlin B. Smith is Assistant Professor of Early American Literature at St. Bonaventure University. She has published multiple journal articles on nineteenth-century American literature and religion, with a special focus on early freethinking societies and constructions of doubt.Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own and We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For. Glaude is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton University.

• Jan Stievermann: Introduction: Rediscovering James W.C. Pennington, Black Reformed Minister, Intellectual, and Activist I. Transatlantic Reform 1: John Ernest: Pennington, the Colored Conventions Movement, and the Struggle for Black Self-Determination 2: Manisha Sinha: Reverend James W.C. Pennington's Transnational Abolitionist Mission 3: Sandra M. Gustafson: James W.C. Pennington and the Peace Cause 4: Mischa Honeck: Revolutionary Encounters: American Abolitionists and Europe's 1848ers II. Philosophy and Politics 5: John Witte Jr.: James W.C. Pennington's Human Rights Campaign 6: Kenyon Gradert: James W.C. Pennington's Romanticism 7: Eddie S. Glaude Jr.: "To Make Me More Efficient for Good": Black Democratic Perfectionism and James W.C. Pennington III. Religious Contexts, Theology, and Literary Ethics 8: Jan Stievermann: James W.C. Pennington and the New Divinity Tradition 9: Caitlin B. Smith: "What Is This but Infidelity?": James W.C. Pennington's Engagements with Skepticism 10: William L. Andrews: Freedom vs. Family in the Pre-Emancipation African American Fugitive Slave Narrative: The Singular Case of James W.C. Pennington