David Gelernter of Yale University and the Shalem Center delivers the February Bradley Lecture.

Among the millions who have said “I believe in America” with religious fervor, many have seen America not as a nation, but as a theological concept of enormous, transporting power that centers on the creed of liberty, equality, and democracy for all mankind, as well as on the doctrine of American Zionism—the idea that Americans are a new chosen people in a new promised land. (A nation that calls itself lucky owes nothing to anyone. A nation that calls itself blessed owes much to everyone, starting with God; continuing to all mankind.) Most historians note that Puritanism disappeared as a live force in America in the early nineteenth century. Gelernter will argue that Puritanism shaped and was then transformed into Americanism—the American religion. The transformative process can be seen most clearly in the religious thought of Abraham Lincoln.

David Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale University, a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard, and a board member of the National Endowment for the Arts. During 2005 he was a senior fellow in Jewish thought at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. His essays, fiction, and reviews have appeared in many publications, including Commentary, The Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal, T’cheilet (Israel), National Review, ArtNews, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Scientific American, and many others. He is the author of seven books, including The Muse in the Machine (Free Press, 1994), which comments on poetry and artificial intelligence; the novel 1939 (Harper Perennial, 1996); the memoir Drawing Life (Free Press, 1997), named a New York Times “notable book of the year”; Machine Beauty (Basic Books, 1998), about aesthetics and technology; and Mirror Worlds (Oxford University Press, 1991), which "foresaw" the World Wide Web, according to a Reuters article. His essays have been widely anthologized in numerous publications, including Best Spiritual Essays, 2004 (Houghton Mifflin, 2004); The New Humanists (Barnes & Noble, 2003); The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century (Vintage, 2002); and LIFE–Century of Change (Little Brown, 2001). His book Americanism is the Fourth Great Religion of the Western World will be published by Doubleday in 2006. The five parts of his “Judaism beyond Words” monograph that appeared in Commentary in 2002–2003 will be published as a book under the sponsorship of the Shalem Center.