Other English Language and Literature Commons^™

More Light? Biblical Criticism And Enlightenment Attitudes, Norman Vance

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Goethe's dying words-his request for Mehr Licht, more light in the darkened sickroom-were meant literally, but they were immediately given metaphorical significance. What did they signify? Did they imply Olympian confidence that more intellectual light would keep flooding in-or frustration and despair at the lack of it? A similar ambiguity is reflected in the history of biblical criticism, an archetypal Enlightenment enterprise that somehow failed to obey the rules and deliver as hoped and failed to obey the rules, despite all the dry light shed upon it. When Jurgen Habermas responded to the award of the Adorno Prize in …

"This Interesting Female Shone As The Morning Star": Protestant Missions, American Indian Schoolgirls, And The Rhetoric Of True Womanhood, Elizabeth J. Thompson

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

During the settlement era of the English colonies in North America, narratives that expressed hopefulness about the assimilation of Indians often did so through tropes of intermarriage. From William Byrd to Thomas Jefferson, writers fantasized that the most obvious, effective, and nonviolent solution to the ongoing Indian problem could have been-even should have been-intermarriage. Writers, however, seldom suggested their contemporary readers actually seize on this solution. Instead, the overwhelming majority cast such panaceas in the distant past, while a few imagined them taking place in the remote future. Almost all of them ignored actual intermarriage taking place between white men …

Full Issue

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

No abstract provided.

Teachers’ Professional Development Through Integrating Ict In English Language Education: A Case From Pakistan, Ayesha Bashiruddin

Book Chapters / Conference Papers

No abstract provided.

Evangelical Literacies: Predestination And Print, 1739-1740, Jennifer Snead

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In his 1744 The Reverend Mr. Whitefield's Answer to the Bishop of London's Last Pastoral Letter, the controversial evangelical George Whitefield claimed that he would indeed own up to any of his writings found "blameable in any Respect:' Reader John Holmes of Exeter commented in the margins of his copy, "Oh ho! And how do you know and distinguish your mistakes from verities? Supposing that there are any verities and realities:'1 Frank Lambert, in his 1994 study of Whitefield in the context of transatlantic print culture, cites Holmes's marginalia as an instance of "readers... [ engaging] in dialogue with writers …

Front Matter

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

No abstract provided.

Early American Mikvaot: Ritual Baths As The Hope Of Israel, Laura Arnold Leibman

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

On July 27, 1656, at the age of twenty-three, Baruch Spinoza was cast out of the Jewish community of Amsterdam. In a proclamation read publicly in the Portuguese Synagogue, the "Lords of the ma'amad" [Synagogue Board] declared that,

having long known of the evil opinions and the acts of Baruch de Spinoza... [and] having failed to make him mend his wicked ways, and, on the contrary, daily receiving more and more serious information about the abominable heresies which he practiced and taught and about his monstrous deeds... [we] have decided... that the said Espinoza should be excommunicated and expelled …

Preface, Brett C. Mcinelly

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

As I was breaking into the profession some years ago, religion was a mere blip on my radar of scholarly interests. Having come through graduate school in the 1990s, I naturally followed disciplinary trends in literary and eighteenth-century studies, focusing much of my research on issues of race, class, and gender and examining the relationships between Britain's imperial history and the literature and culture of the period. Religion factored into my queries at times, say, in considering the ways Crusoe's Protestantism informed his sense of self while taking possession of a West Indian island. But religion itself remained on the …

"Expectation And Amendment Maketh Me To Become An Usurer": Usury, Providentialism, And The Age Of Projects, Dwight D. Codr

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In an Internet postscript to his 1989 history of usury, Norman Jones remarks that "by the eighteenth century the moral issue of usury was no longer of interest to most Protestant thinkers. In practice lending at interest with collateral had become normal, as had deposit banking:'1 Indeed, usury itself was of relatively minor importance to economic theorization and debate in the eighteenth century when compared to the financial debates of the period Jones's work covers, 1571-1624, spanning Elizabeth's Act Against Usury and the Usury Act of 1624. During the earlier period, usury was not simply linked to an emerging system …

The Primitive Church, The Primitive Mind, And Methodism In The Eighteenth Century, Kathryn Stasio, Micheal J. Stasio

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists, Henry Abelove reminds his readers that Methodism was part of a larger evangelical movement that began in the 1730s but, while it grew, other sects barely sustained their numbers or disappeared entirely. Citing Frank Baker, Abelove notes that when Wesley died in 1791, Methodists owned 558 preaching houses in the British Isles, and membership totaled 72,476.1 Abelove then chronicles Wesley's ability to lead the Methodist movement, crediting much of its success to the force of Wesley's personality. Yet not all of Wesley's contemporaries found him so charming, as the anti-Methodist …

Sermon Publishing, Clerical Reading, And John Wilkins's Ecclesiastes, 1646-1750, Rosemary Dixon

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Francis Bacon had little to say about the study of divinity in The Advancement of Learning (1605), his critical survey of the state of knowledge at the turn of the seventeenth century. In contrast to the other fields of learning Bacon explored, divinity needed but little encouragement: "For I can finde no space or ground that lieth vacant and vnsowne in the matter of Diuinitie, so diligent haue men beene, either in sowing of good seede, or in sowing of Tares:' Bacon did, however, have an intriguing suggestion for a hypothetical theological book:

that forme of writing in Diuinitie, which …

The Holy Surprise Party: Glimpses Of Divinity In Suddenly Emerging Literary, Artistic, And Geographical Settings, 1660-1785, Kevin L. Cope

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Antiquity, eternity, and expectation often intersect in outof- the-way environments. In rural southwest Louisiana, an unlikely venue in which to encounter the Ancient of Days, the Zigler Museum, a pair of exhibition halls housed in an incongruous, somewhat less than Cajun colonial-style building, displays its collection of eighteenth-century paintings beneath an optimistic sign reading "The Age of Reason:' The symmetrically arranged portraits gaze on an imagined focal point near the center of the room while scattered landscape paintings open windows on a mild English pastoral world far away from rice fields and crawfish ponds. Imported memories of a British culture …

On The Origin Of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, And Fiction, Hope Hollocher, Agustín Fuentes, Charles H. Pence, Grant Ramsey, Daniel John Sportiello, Michelle M. Wirth

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

On The Good Name Of The Dead: Peace, Liberty, And Empire In Robert Morehead's Waterloo Sermon, Bob Tennant

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

On Sunday, July 2, 1815, a fortnight after the battle of Waterloo, the Scottish Episcopalian minister Robert Morehead ( 1777-1842) preached a sermon- On the Good Name of the Dead [Ecclesiastes 7:1]-which displayed many of the components of a theory of Christian empire and combined them with the radically new approach to pulpit oratory that Morehead was helping to develop. The present essay offers a method of exploring the connection between ideology and rhetoric based on tools belonging to linguistic analysis rather than conventional historiography. Thus it is hoped that the evidential base available to historians may be extended. …

Holy Land Travel And The Representation Of Prayer In The Enlightenment, Michael Rotenberg-Schwartz

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Something about publicized supplication embarrasses critical readers, especially of the Enlighenment, who, since Samuel Johnson, have been trained to doubt if not the sincerity at least the efficacy of rhetoricized prayer. Milton was "nothing satisfied" with the preliminary eight stanzas of his unfinished lyric "The Passion;' for example, and printing it anyway has been cause enough for his critics to remain so. For one, the closest Milton gets to the scene of

the crucifixion is Jesus's tomb after the resurrection; he finds the "sad Sepulchral rock / That was the Casket of Heav'ns richest store" ( 43-44; emphasis added). More …

Trauma And Transformation: The Political Progress Of John Bunyan: Book Review, Jeffrey Galbraith

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In these papers from the Third Triennial Conference of the International John Bunyan Society, the life and writings of John Bunyan assume a less tidy shape than appears in standard biographies. Bunyan braved the consequences of defying the Act of Uniformity of 1662, yet Trauma and Transformation does not view the Dissenting author as possessing an identity galvanized by persecution. Nor, on the other hand, do the essays reduce Bunyan's religious sensitivity to a psychological disorder. Rather, the contributors to this collection work to excavate the gaps in the existing record of Bunyan's life. Notably, they address Bunyan's silence concerning …

Jonathan Edwards's Metaphors Of Sin In Indian Country, Joy A. J. Howard

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

T he move to Indian country was an uncommon one for a preacher of Jonathan Edwards's status and age, but the seven years he lived in Stockbridge preaching to Mohawks, Mahicans, and colonial settlers proved to be some of the most fruitful of his career. Jonathan Edwards accepted the position in Stockbridge after his Northampton congregation voted to dismiss him in 1750 and, after visiting the mission town multiple times, he was officially installed as pastor in August of 1751. Edwards valued Protestant mission imperatives, and although the pastorate was remote and he faced a significant language barrier between him …

Porn, Popery, Mahometanism, And The Rise Of The Novel: Responses To The London Earthquakes Of 1750, Samara Anne Cahill

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In February and March of 1750, two earthquakes hit London, provoking panic in the population and generating a great deal of providentialist rhetoric from religious authorities and selfproclaimed prophets alike. Public figures used the earthquakes as didactic opportunities to structure domestic identity and national security along gridlines of reason, faith, and national guilt. Such representations indicate not only that religious identity and faith remained important to Britons throughout the eighteenth century but also that, although Britons used Christian belief to structure their national identity, they were by no means convinced of the superiority of actual Christian behavior compared to that …

Index

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

No abstract provided.

Fellow~Feeling And The Moral Life: Book Review, Patrick Mello

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In his Fellow-Feeling and the Moral Life, Joseph Duke Filonowicz challenges readers to modify the premises underlying much moral philosophy since Kant by considering with open minds whether human beings possess an innate moral sense. Despite the systematic logical satisfaction achieved by ethical rationalism, Filonowicz argues that the dogged adherence to reason reduces morality to a mere set of anemic thought-experiments having little to do with the actions undertaken by people living emotionally complex lives. Modifying rationalism, Filonowicz finds inspiration from a notion expressed in Henry Miller's Black Spring, that "what is not in the open streets is …