Driving back over the Appalachians from a family wedding in Canada we passed Stockbridge. This town was the lesser-known base of operations for Jonathan Edwards’s missionary labours. More famously, Edwards resided in Northampton, the central location for the dramatic revivals of the Great Awakening in New England of the 18th century.
Being something of an Edwards aficionado I was aware of the Edwards Stockbridge connection. I wasn’t cognisant of the even less well-known relationship between Edwards and McDonalds until, as we hurtled by Stockbridge in our minivan, we decided that the time had come to eat. And there and behold we did what surely would have surprised the famous evangelical leader: we picked up a Drive-Thru McDonalds.
It occurred to me to wonder whether there was anything that Edwards and McDonalds have in common. Could it be that the slight guilty feeling as I munched the salty fries was reminiscent of the stellar theological tome Original sin penned in self-same Stockbridge? Was our choice to do a Drive-Thru right there and right then predetermined in a classically philosophically charged ‘Freedom of the will’ fashion? Or even was the can-do spirit of the frontier that surrounded Edwards’s missionary journey represented, albeit somewhat differently, by the can-do franchise dominance of fast food chains in America?
