Other English Language and Literature Commons^™

Samuel Johnson At Prayer, Elizabeth Kraft

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Samuel Johnson's life was punctuated by prayer. In this essay, I will examine Johnson's prayer practice in terms of both meaning and behavior. Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language provides clear and succinct evidence in Johnson's own words of what he understood prayer and the act of praying to be. Of the two definitions of prayer and the seven definitions of to pray included in the Dictionary, the first in each category concerns religion and simply states that the noun and the verb are the same. According to Johnson the first meaning of to pray is "to make petitions to …

Review Of The Book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology Of Things, Karen Weingarten

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Scout's Daughters : Race And Creative Development In Contemporary Adolescent Literature, Amanda Malloy

Honors Theses

At the heart of what Roberta S. Trites titles ―adolescent literature‖ – works written both for and about young adults—is a question of agency (Disturbing 7). In Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature, Trites asserts that adolescent novels attempt to answer the question of young adults who wonder if they ―should or even can affect the world in which they live‖ (1). Trites‘ argument is based on the idea that the distinguishing characteristic of adolescent literature is its focus on ―the social forces‖ that …

"If God ... See Fit To Call You Out": "Public" And "Private" In The Writings Of Methodist Women, 1760-1840, Joanna Cruickshank

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In 1770, the renowned Methodist leader Mary Bosanquet (later Fletcher) published a letter of advice she had written to a young woman named Elizabeth Andrews. Amidst a flood of detailed advice about the life of faith, including recommendations about spiritual disciplines, reading matter, and marriage, Bosanquet urged her young friend:

Strive to be little and unknown; and remember that our Lord lived thirty years in private, and only three in publick, and that the word of God allows a woman, professing godliness, no adorning but that of a meek and quiet spirit. Strive, I say, to be little and unknown; …

Mulk Raj Anand: Moving India Forward, Sandy Wheeler

All Student Theses and Dissertations

Mulk Raj Anand is an innovator in literature. He is one of the first Indian authors to write in English about the humanitarian dilemmas facing India during the mid-twentieth century. His compassionate objective is to produce an awareness of the cruelty and inhumane practices of untouchability and social class distinctions and to seek the enlightening prospects of progress and modernity. In his three novels Coolie, Two Leaves and a Bud, and Untouchable, Anand explores the lives of of the down-trodden. The first chapter of this project defines and discusses the Hindu caste system of India as well as its unfavorable …

Ideological Criticism Of The National Football League's Increase In Helmet To Helmet Discipline, Dante Joseph Gentile

Communication Studies

No abstract provided.

Reading About China, Andrea Kempf

Library Papers and Presentations

A review of literature centered around Chinese culture and people. Originally published in US-China Review, Winter 2011, Vol. XXXV, No. 1.

US-China Review is a publication of US-China Peoples Friendship Association, A California non-profit corporation.

Heart Religion In The British Enlightenment: Gender And Emotion In Early Methodism: Book Review, Dustin D. Stewart

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Problems of agency often materialize as problems of attribution. Early in her remarkable new study, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment, historian Phyllis Mack describes how eighteenthcentury Methodists are typically viewed as either "emotionally needy followers or ... a mob of hysterical worshippers run amok:' Such Methodists, Mack contends, "have rarely been viewed as thinkers and actors" in their own right (5). To make amends, Mack delves into the agency of the everyday. She discloses how lay Methodists and leaders, men and women alike, used various forms of writing as tools for the work of emotional self-fashioning. What made …

"Chastisements Of A Heavenly Father": The Meaning Of The London Earthquakes Of 1750, Christopher Smyth

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

When two earthquakes struck London early in 1750, terror and fury broke forth just as suddenly as the shaking of the earth. Clergymen, newspaper writers, and concerned laymen poured forth angry diatribes on the sins that brought England to the brink of ruin. Scores of sermons flowed off the presses, condemning the instinctive panic of the populace even as they added to it. Hundreds fled the city, certain it was about to be swallowed up. For a month, the religious meaning of the shocks swamped all other discussions, as Englishmen confronted the seemingly obvious fact that God was angry with …

Revolutionary Spirits: The Enlightened Faith Of America's Founding Fathers: Book Review, Kevin L. Cope

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Many years ago, Walter Jackson Bate was asked by a student in a general education class what he thought about "Coleridge, you know, his opium use:' Jack Bate, ever the master of the comically surly rebuttal, retorted, "What do you want me to say, well, naughty naughty?" So it is with regard to that band of culturally ambitious yet permanently rusticated idealists and ideologues who once traded under the name "the founding fathers of America:' Having lived for decades, even centuries, atop the plinths and amid the applause created by Parson Weems, textbook authors, documentary directors, and special event producers, …

Peripheral Wonders: Nature, Knowledge, And Enlightenment In The Eighteenth~Century Orinoco: Book Review, Laura Miller

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Margaret R. Ewalt's Peripheral Wonders: Nature, Knowledge, and Enlightenment in the Eighteenth-Century Orinoco responds to several essential topics in eighteenth-century studies, including the connections between scientific work and socioeconomic forces, the interpenetration of colonial powers and Amerindian populations, the recasting of the Enlightenment, and the variable uses of rhetoric to address print audiences. Peripheral Wonders centers on Jesuit missionary Joseph Gumilla's El Orinoco ilustrado ( 17 41, 17 45), a natural history that offers a narrative in which Catholicism and scientific inquiry mutually engage. In El Orinoco ilustrado, natural history remains informed by religious beliefs as well as local …

Submissions Policy, Brett C. Mcinelly

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment (RAE) is an annual, peer-reviewed journal that publishes scholarly examinations of (1) religion and religious attitudes and practices during the age of Enlightenment; (2) the impact of the Enlightenment on religion, religious thought, and religious experience; and (3) the ways religion informed Enlightenment ideas and values, from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including, but not limited to, history, theology, literature, philosophy, the social and physical sciences, economics, and the law.

Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice Of The Enlightenment: Book Review, Robert K. Lapp

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

The subtitle of this long-awaited, monumental biography of Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment, captures both McCarthy's achievement as a scholarly biographer and the vital relevance of Barbauld's wide-ranging and lucid articulations of Enlightenment values in Britain. McCarthy's twenty years of meticulous scholarship have literally brought to revisionary light what we need to know about a woman of letters uniquely positioned to propagate the impulses of the Enlightenment in education, literature, political debate, and religion. As McCarthy points out in his preface, "[Barbauld's] story is part of the story of Protestant Dissent's campaign for equal political rights, and …

Theological Enlightenments And Ridiculous Theologies: Contradistinction In English Polemical Theology, David Manning

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In 1730 high-churchman Richard Grey (1696-1771) delivered a sermon at St. Mary's Church, Leicester, in which he revelled in England's "Enlighten'd Age ... where the Gospel shines forth in its utmost purity:' unfettered "from those Corruptions and Superstitions, which so much disguise and dishonour it in other places:' Grey went on to use this representation of the epistemological superiority of England's established faith to lament the status of an apparently belligerent minority who would not or could not discern the truth of the Church of England. Such claims had long been part of the Church's Reformation mantra against heretics in …

Index

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

No abstract provided.

Reading Diderot's La Religieuse As An Evangelical Novel, Muriel Schmid

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

D enis Diderot's novel, La Religieuse, has traditionally been read as a diatribe against convent life. Diderot's critique is then described as twofold: first, he strongly condemns the common practice of forced vows; and second, he describes life in a convent as fundamentally unnatural, leading individuals to perverse behaviors. Suzanne Simonin, the third daughter of a Parisian lawyer, is the main character of the novel, and her fate illustrates Diderot's critique. As the reader discovers in the course of the narrative, her birth is the result of an affair, and her mother regards her illegitimate daughter as a source …

Enlightenment And Modernity: The English Deists And Reform: Book Review, Scott Breuninger

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

The traditional view of the Enlightenment has often dismissed the study of religion as peripheral to a larger narrative of progress that describes the triumph of reason and liberty over superstition and autocracy. Recent work has begun to correct this impression, as scholars have examined the nature and extent of a "religious Enlightenment" ( or more appropriately "Enlightenments") that developed during the long eighteenth century. Although innovations in political and philosophical thought during this period were relatively cosmopolitan, the religious dimension of the Enlightenment typically reflected national concerns and disputes. This was especially true in England, where the loosely defined …

Enlightenment Sermon Studies: A Multidisciplinary Activity, Bob Tennant

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

The past two decades have seen a collective reconsideration of the positions occupied by religion in the eighteenth century, amounting to a fundamental shift in historiography. The revived study of the period's sermon literature seems to contribute to this. The present essay suggests the need for more interdisciplinary cooperation in better defining sermon studies and presents four questions about sermons to scholars working on the British Enlightenment, and, more generally, the Long Eighteenth Century, which will be referred to as "our period": What are the characteristics of the corpus? What is distinctive about the relationship of sermons to theological and …

Religion In The Age Of Enlightenment: Putting John Wesley In Context, Jeremy Gregory

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Wesley's long life ( 1703-91) spanned almost the whole of the eighteenth century, and any attempt to understand him undoubtedly needs to include some sense of the period in which he lived. There have, of course, been many attempts to evoke Wesley's context, whether broadly defined-as in the thousands of books and scholarly articles that have been written about the era in general, ranging from the economy, politics, and society to cultural, intellectual, and religious matters (and much else besides), or in the various studies that have more directly positioned Wesley, and early Methodism, within his, and its, time. Most …

Submissions

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment (RAE) is an annual, peer-reviewed journal that publishes scholarly examinations of (1) religion and religious attitudes and practices during the age ofEnlightenment; (2) the impact of the Enlightenment on religion, religious thought, and religious experience; and (3) the ways religion informed Enlightenment ideas and values, from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including, but not limited to, history, theology, literature, philosophy, the social and physical sciences, economics, and the law.