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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

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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

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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 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

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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 …

Art And Religion In Eighteenth~Century Europe: Book Review, Karen Bryant

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

With publications such as The French Revolution 1789-1804: Liberty, Authority and the Search for Stability (Palgrave, 2004), Christianity in Revolutionary Europe, 1760-1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), Anticlericalism in Britain from the Reformation to the First World War (Sutton, 2000), Religion and Revolution in France, 1780-1804 (Macmillan, 2000), and now Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2009, Reaktion), Nigel Aston has established himself as an erudite sleuth bent on uncovering in meticulous detail those subjects within eighteenth-century religious scholarship that hitherto have been either ignored or given short shrift. Aston does not disappoint with his latest book in which he …

Vice, Virtue, And Industry: The Church Of Scotland's Employment Of Political Economy, C. 1700-C. 1750, Ryan K. Frace

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

When describing the Scottish Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge in 1750, Edinburgh's minister Hugh Blair proclaimed:

It must be the interest of every good man, of every Briton, to encourage this design tending so evidently to make us a happy, a free, and a united nation. Religion and liberty, industry and joy, are sisters, and never appear to such advantage as when in company [together], so that now, Religion and Industry go hand in hand, strengthen and establish one another.

Blair's comment illustrates an intriguing and important development: by the mid-eighteenth century, political economy-a central component of the Scottish Enlightenment-had …

Bodies Of Thought: Science, Religion, And The Soul In The Early Enlightenment: Book Review, Robin Runia

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Of what does the soul consist? What is the relationship of the soul to the body? What are the implications of the soul's materiality or immateriality for its immortality? Ann Thomson's meticulous examination of these questions and the answers posed by early Enlightenment thinkers sets out to show how previous critical labels have failed to adequately reflect the complexity of the period's debates about the soul.

Full Issue

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

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Police Brutality Makes Headlines: Retelling The Story Of The 1938 Pecan Shellers’ Strike, Laura Cannon Dixon

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The 1938 San Antonio pecan shellers’ strike was a unique labor event. It involved conflicts between a dominant white power elite and workers who were culturally, ethnically, linguistically, and religiously different. The power elite separated and suppressed Tejano workers, who were seen as inferior. The five-week strike was an attempt to shake off that suppression. As newspaper reports from the period showed, the power elite responded to picketers with brutal police tactics, but nightsticks, ax handles and tear gas failed to curb worker resistance. The strike was important, therefore, because unlike other Southern labor actions, workers in San Antonio succeeded, …

The Attitudes Of Middle Eastern Faculty Toward The Use Of Distance Education In The Middle Eastern State Universities: A Comparative Study Between The Middle Eastern Faculty And Usa Faculty, Farooq A. Altameemy

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although distance education is offered in many academic institutions, specifically universities, in most of the developed countries, utilizing it as a part of the educational system in the Middle East is still in the development stage and not at the same stage as Western and European countries. Of the institutions in the Middle East that have started utilizing distance education, many face difficulties, an example of which is that these distance programs are not accredited by the educational system in the country. In turn, this leads to other problems for graduates of these distance programs, such as inability to find …

Joseph Priestley: Scientist, Philosopher, And Theologian: Book Review, Michael Austin

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

I n two hundred or so published works between 17 60 and his death in 1804, Joseph Priestley established himself as an important voice in more than a half a dozen important fields. He was a grammarian and pedagogue, philosopher and political theorist, historian, world famous scientist who played a major part in the discovery of oxygen, and important figure in the development of Unitarianism. Covering all of this in a single introductory volume is a big job, and Joseph Priestley: Scientist, Philosopher, and Theologian does it well, providing a much needed introduction to the thought of one of the …

A Companion To Hume: Book Review, Eva Dadlez

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Blackwell's fortieth Companion to Philosophy is a splendid and long-overdue Companion to Hume, expertly pulled together by Elizabeth Radcliffe, a former editor of the journal Hume Studies. Although the Blackwell Companions are promoted as a student reference series, this particular volume is clearly of considerable value to serious scholars as well and probably accessible only to advanced students with a strong philosophical background.

Religion, Reform, And Modernity In The Eighteenth Century: Thomas Secker And The Church Of England: Book Review, Bob Tennant

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Thomas Secker was born in 1693 into a Dissenting family, joined the Church of England in his early twenties, and ultimately served as Archbishop of Canterbury, from 1758 until his death in 1768-the last one to head the communion in an undivided Anglophone political community. Robert Ingram has produced an impressively organized account of his personal and, especially public, life with an unprecedented breadth of research and reading. He has also done it with an obvious, indeed, self-confessed, enthusiasm for his subject and in a free-flowing (though sometimes disconcertingly breezy) style that is a pleasure to read, although the prose …