Faithful Traditions in Dialogue:
Preparing Peacemakers for 175 Years
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The Great Awakening Tour
Sunday afternoon, October 19, began our week's celebration events with a half-day Great Awakening tour of sites related to one of America’s greatest theologians, Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758).
The tour was jointly sponsored by Hartford Seminary and First Congregational Church of Simsbury in honor of Hartford Seminary’s 175th Anniversary.
Ken Minkema, director of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale Divinity School, was the guide for the the tour. The trip began at Edwards’ birthplace in East Windsor Hill. There participants were able to view his home church, the family cemetery dating 
back to the late seventeenth century, and the president’s house of the East Windsor Hill Seminary, founded in 1834.
From there, the tour continued up the historic highway through Enfield, where in 1741, at the height of the Great Awakening,
Edwards preached his famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” At the original site of the sermon, Enfield Congregational Church, Reverend and Hartford Seminary alumni, Joe 
Callahan, offered a historic re-enactment of the event by delivering a portion of this landmark sermon. The photo on the left is shows the Sinners plaque near the church.
The next stop on the tour was Northampton, MA, where Edwards ministered for nearly a quarter of a century. Sites visited in Northhampton included the First Churches of Northampton, the Edwards Church, and the Bridge Street Cemetery, where the famous missionary David Brainerd is buried.
The tour concluded with tea and light refreshments at Hartford Seminary, the institutional descendant of the East Windsor Seminary.
