June 24, 2003

An agency of the United Methodist Church has, for the first time, awarded dual first prizes to assist in publication of a non-English-language manuscript and an English manuscript related to the history of Methodism.

The denomination's Commission on Archives and History, with headquarters at Drew University in Madison, N.J., has announced two Jesse Lee Prizes for 2003. Last fall, the commission received its first non-English book-length manuscript. Fortunately, the commission's selection committee included a member from Germany who had credentials comparable with those of the judges of the English-language entries.

Friedemann Wilhelm Burkhardt, a pastor in the deaconess hospital Martha-Maria in Munich, has been awarded $2,000 to help defray costs of publishing his manuscript. It will be published in German, but the English translation of the title is Christoph Gottlob Mueller and the Rise of Methodism in Germany.

Burkhardt has been a United Methodist pastor for 10 years and completed his doctoral work and some post-doctoral study in 2002 at the Lutheran Faculty, Ludwig-Maximillians University of Munich. His doctorate, which dealt with pietism, was awarded "magna cum laude." Burkhardt's undergraduate degree was in music, and some of his several publications in Germany on Methodism and church history reflect this interest, including one on Charles Wesley and one on Methodist hymnology.

David Hampton is the English-language winner and has been awarded $2,000 toward publication of An Empire of the Spirit: The Rise of Methodism in the North Atlantic Region, 1730-1860. He is a professor of church history at United Methodist-related Boston University.

A fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Hampton is a former professor of modern history and director of the School of History in the Queen's University of Belfast. He has also served as chairman of the Wiles Trust, founded in 1951 by Sir Herbert Butterfield to promote innovative thinking on the history of civilization, broadly conceived.

Hampton is the author of more than 50 books and articles, including Methodism and Politics in British Society 1750-1890, for which he was awarded the Whitfield prize of the Royal Historical Society; Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of the Empire; and The Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion c. 1750-1900.

He was a visiting scholar at St. John's College Oxford and has delivered several sets of endowed lectures, including the Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham in 1994 and the F.D. Maurice Lectures at King's College London in 2000.

The awards are named for the Rev. Jesse Lee, who wrote the first history of American Methodism, published in 1810.

United Methodist News Service