James F. Cooper, Jr., received his Ph.D. in 1987 from the University of Connecticut working under Harry S. Stout.  He has served as a member of the Department of History at Oklahoma State University for the past seventeen years. Professor Cooper has written extensively in the field of colonial New England church history; in 1999 Oxford University Press published his Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts.  His current project in progress is entitled, “Edwards, Individualism, and the Decline of Eighteenth-Century Congregationalism.”