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Front Matter

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

No abstract provided.

Preface, Brett C. Mcinelly

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Volume 2 of Religion in the Age of Enlightenment brings together the work of both established and up-and-coming scholars from a variety of fields of study and helps to solidify RAE's thematic and methodological scope. Looked at collectively, their work spans more than a century, from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, and the varied topics and approaches demonstrate the rich possibilities for the study of religion during the Enlightenment.

Allegiance, Sympathy, And History: The Catholic Loyalties Of Alexander Pope, Steven Stryer

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

The charges leveled by John Dennis against the young author of An Essay on Criticism are characteristically hyperbolic: Alexander Pope is disparaged as a historical partisan whose loyalties (to the Catholics James II and his son the Pretender) and antipathies (to the Protestants Charles II and William III) are determined entirely by his allegiance to the Church of Rome. Dennis claims that in comparing the classical writers to absolute monarchs, Pope had hinted his approval of James's suspension of the operation of the penal laws against Catholics in defiance of Parliament-in contrast with his explicit rejection later in the poem …

"Improving The Present Moment": John Wesley's Use Of The Arminian Magazine In Raising Early Methodist Awareness And Understanding Of National Issues (January 1778-February 1791), Barbara Prosser

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In March 1747, when defending the Methodist practice of lay preaching, John Wesley announced: "I am not careful for what may be an hundred years hence. He who governed the world before I was born shall take care of it likewise when I am dead. My part is to improve the present moment:'' The same thought was apparent thirty years later when counseling Ann Bolton: "Whatever our past experience has been, we are now more or less acceptable to God as we more or less improve the present moment."

"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; …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

The Mentor's Anxiety: Conduct Books And The Proliferation Of Virtuous Guidance, David B. Paxman

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Thomas Fuller's Directions, Counsels and Cautions, Tending to Prudent Management of Affairs in Common Life (London, 1725) gives its audience of young readers 1,761 axioms of conduct. Later editions swelled the number to 3,152. Fuller's phrase "prudent management" seems ironic: no one could possibly remember so many points of advice, much less apply them in an orderly way. This book exemplifies a tendency that may deserve notice. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, guidance on virtue and goodness, in one sense a simple and unified project, tends to fragment into levels of multiplicity that outstrip the ability of basic …

Leibniz And China: Religion, Hermeneutics, And Enlightenment, Eric Sean Nelson

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is not typically seen as having formulated a "hermeneutics;' or as being a "hermeneutical thinker;' despite his discussions of the art of interpretation and his influence on the development of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century hermeneutics in Germany. Nonetheless, many of his works involve issues of how best to interpret texts and other persons. His voluminous writings thus contain-at least implicitly-a hermeneutics, or art of understanding signs, through his practice of interpretation. Furthermore, hermeneutical concerns are prevalent in a number of Leibniz's international projects. Through various philosophical and practical endeavors, Leibniz attempted to reconcile conflicting and seemingly irreconcilable arguments …

Irish Clergy And The Deist Controversy: Two Episodes In The Early British Enlightenment, Scott Breuninger

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

D uring the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, an important question facing Anglican divines was the relationship between reason and religion. Initiated by the publication of John Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), the controversy concerning deism raged across both sides of the Irish Sea and called into question the sanctity of revealed religion, forcing believers to articulate more "rational" defenses of Christianity. Closely associated with the problematic origins of the "English Enlightenment;' Toland's provocative tract valorized reason in matters of religion and drew heavily upon the ideas of natural philosophy. Although viciously attacked for its heretical tenets, Toland's position …

Walls And Vaults: A Natural Science Of Morals (Virtue Ethics According To David Hume): Book Review, Christopher Fauske

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

D avid Hume's place among intellectuals of the eighteenth century is at least in part based on the happy circumstance of when he wrote. Hume had the advantage of being in the position to begin to systematize, summarize, and develop the remarkable progress and theorizing that had characterized the period prior to his own contributions. Hume's work stretched from a time in which conjecture and exploration were the hallmark of intellectual activity to one in which it became possible-necessary even-to take stock of what had transpired over the preceding decades.

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.

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 …