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Full-Text Articles in History

The Reverend Jim Jones And Religious, Political, And Racial Radicalism In Peoples Temple, Catherine Barrett Abbott Dec 2015

The Reverend Jim Jones And Religious, Political, And Racial Radicalism In Peoples Temple, Catherine Barrett Abbott

Theses and Dissertations

On November 18, 1978 over 900 members of Peoples Temple committed suicide or were murdered in Jonestown, Guyana under the direction of Reverend Jim Jones. This thesis explores the radical ideology of Jones leading up to and including the day of the murder-suicides by poisoned Flavor-Aid. Jones was a radical theologically, politically, and in racial thinking, although he was not an advocate for women’s rights. Jones claimed to be a prophet and then God, criticized the Bible and became atheistic, called himself a Marxist, a socialist, and a Communist, and strove for equal rights for minorities in the United States …


Did Religion Make The American Civil War Worse?, Allen C. Guelzo Aug 2015

Did Religion Make The American Civil War Worse?, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

If there is one sober lesson Americans seem to be taking out of the bathos of the Civil War sesquicentennial, it’s the folly of a nation allowing itself to be dragged into the war in the first place. After all, from 1861 to 1865 the nation pledged itself to what amounted to a moral regime change, especially concerning race and slavery—only to realize that it had no practical plan for implementing it. No wonder that two of the most important books emerging from the Sesquicentennial years—by Harvard president Drew Faust, and Yale’s Harry Stout—questioned pretty frankly whether the appalling costs …


Berkeley And The Mind Of God, Craig Berchet Knepley Aug 2015

Berkeley And The Mind Of God, Craig Berchet Knepley

Theses and Dissertations

I tackle a troubling question of interpretation: Does Berkeley's God feel pain? Berkeley's anti-skepticism seems to bar him from saying that God does not feel pain, for this would mean there is something to reality 'beyond' the perceptible. Yet Berkeley's concerns for common sense and orthodoxy bar him from saying that God does have an idea of pain. For Berkeley to have an idea of pain just is to suffer it, and an immutable God cannot suffer. Thus solving the pain problem requires answers to further questions: What are God's perceptions, for Berkeley? What are God's acts of will? How …


Introduction: A Legacy Of Raised Expectations, Leif Stenberg, Christa Salamandra Aug 2015

Introduction: A Legacy Of Raised Expectations, Leif Stenberg, Christa Salamandra

Book Chapters / Conference Papers

No abstract provided.


Mount Union Baptist Church - Summersville, Kentucky (Sc 2894), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives Mar 2015

Mount Union Baptist Church - Summersville, Kentucky (Sc 2894), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and full text scan for Manuscripts Small Collection 2894. Minute book containing minutes from business meetings of the Mount Union Baptist Church in Summersville, Green County, Kentucky. Also includes information about offerings and lists of members. Short history of the church included.


Union County, Kentucky - Letter (Sc 2888), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives Feb 2015

Union County, Kentucky - Letter (Sc 2888), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 2888. Portion of a letter, 25 December 1865, written from Morganfield, Kentucky, by a Presbyterian clergyman to his father. After a two-year lapse in communication, he updates his father on his teaching duties at a male academy and his preaching at two churches. He also mourns social ills such as crime and intemperance, and contrasts the irreligion of the North with the growth of evangelical churches in the South.


The Discourse Of Souls In Tana Toraja (Indonesia): Indigenous Notions And Christian Conceptions, Kathleen M. Adams Feb 2015

The Discourse Of Souls In Tana Toraja (Indonesia): Indigenous Notions And Christian Conceptions, Kathleen M. Adams

Kathleen M. Adams

No abstract provided.


The Potential Convergence Of Religious And Secular Interests In Voltaire's Traite Sur La Tolerance, John C. O'Neal Jan 2015

The Potential Convergence Of Religious And Secular Interests In Voltaire's Traite Sur La Tolerance, John C. O'Neal

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

When the Toulouse parliament condemned Jean Calas to death on March 9, 1762, and had him executed on the following day, Voltaire took up his pen to denounce what he saw as a brutal act of intolerance against a Protestant. Although Henry IV had signed the Edict of Nantes in 1598, guaranteeing freedom of conscience for all religions, Louis XIV revoked this edict in 1685 and claimed Catholicism as the one official religion of France. Already well known for his anticlericalism, Voltaire questioned a number of religious practices. But in his Traite sur la tolerance he does not reject religion …


Academic Library Core Collection For Celtic And Roman Religions In Roman Britain, Kim Woodring Jan 2015

Academic Library Core Collection For Celtic And Roman Religions In Roman Britain, Kim Woodring

ETSU Faculty Works

Presented here is a bibliography representing a core collection on the Celtic and Roman religion in Roman Britain. This religion, which was formed from the mixing of Celtic and Roman religions, was truly a new religion. It was formed from two powerful but different religions. The Celts believed in nature and the power it held within everything in their world. The Romans believed in the power of their pantheon of gods and goddesses. When these two factors merged it produced a religion unlike any other in the world during the Iron Age. This bibliography will list the resources to form …


Sacred Or Profane Pleasures? Erotic Ceremonies In Eighteenth-Century French Libertine Fiction, Marine Ganofsky Jan 2015

Sacred Or Profane Pleasures? Erotic Ceremonies In Eighteenth-Century French Libertine Fiction, Marine Ganofsky

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In France, the Age of Enlightenment was also an age of literary levity that saw a proliferation of erotic and pornographic narratives in which philosophy often fused with sexual gratification. The famous Choderlos de Lados with his Liaisons dangereuses (1782) and the infamous Marquis de Sade, along with authors such as Crebillon and Vivant Denon, epitomize this moment in French literary history, when erotic freedom paired with intellectual liberty. This "libertine" literature, as it is known, is characterized by its focus on fleshly desires and pleasures. The subject matter of libertine novels, short stories, poems, and paintings is the rendezvous …


Religious Dissent And The Aikin-Barbauld Circle 1740-1860: Book Review, Nigel Aston Jan 2015

Religious Dissent And The Aikin-Barbauld Circle 1740-1860: Book Review, Nigel Aston

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

There has been a remarkable rise of interest during the last decade in Anna Letitia Barbauld's (nee Aikin) significance in the formation of Romantic literature, and Religious Dissent and the Aikin-Barbauld Circle 1740-1860 places her appropriately within the thriving nexus of her intellectually creative Dissenting family. This volume of nine essays has its origins in a conference at Dr. Williams's library, currently the engine room of many initiatives into British dissenting history. The Aikins were a talented, hardworking, group of men and women down several generations, sparking off each other, inspired by their non -trinitarian Christian faith, and making complex …


Telescopes, Microscopes, And The Problem Of Evil, Christopher Fauske Jan 2015

Telescopes, Microscopes, And The Problem Of Evil, Christopher Fauske

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Astronomers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries found themselves for a while at the center of an alignment of scientific, cultural, and religious curiosity. Theirs was an endeavor embraced by significant segments of the established churches of England and Ireland who supported the founding of scientific societies in both countries and who drew on their network of contacts with continental Protestants to keep abreast of current developments abroad. In England, for example, works such as the Reverend William Derham's Astro-theology drew on mounting evidence that the universe might well be far larger than could be imagined to raise …


The Elect Methodists: Calvinistic Methodism In England And Wales, 1735-1811: Book Review, Isabel Rivers Jan 2015

The Elect Methodists: Calvinistic Methodism In England And Wales, 1735-1811: Book Review, Isabel Rivers

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

The Calvinistic Methodists have received far less attention from historians than the Wesleyan or Arminian Methodists, and this book sets out to remedy that neglect. The imbalance is not surprising-Methodism of the Wesleyan kind became and remains a multimillion, worldwide movement, with many variants that retain the Wesleyan emphasis on holiness and salvation open to all, whereas eighteenth-century English Calvinistic Methodism is now represented only by the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion, active on a small scale in England and Sierra Leone, while its Welsh co-movement became the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Church, now known as the Presbyterian Church of Wales. The …


Philosophy And Religion In Enlightenment Britain: New Case Studies: Book Review, Bob Tennant Jan 2015

Philosophy And Religion In Enlightenment Britain: New Case Studies: Book Review, Bob Tennant

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

This collection of twelve individually strong pieces was published in tribute to M. A. Stewart, the former Gifford Lecturer and, until lately, professor of philosophy at Lancaster University. The editor, Ruth Savage, succeeded in putting together an outstanding list of contributors from across Britain, Europe, and North America. This in itself is a tribute to Stewart's eminence in research and evident excellence as a teacher.


Sacred Alliance? The Critical Assessment Of Revelation In Fichte And Kant, Tom Spencer Jan 2015

Sacred Alliance? The Critical Assessment Of Revelation In Fichte And Kant, Tom Spencer

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Religion encountered a host of problems in the eighteenth century: the decline of Biblical authority, the rise of scientific skepticism, and an emerging spirit of human autonomy. Each of these developments diminished the function of religious institutions in public life, but this is not to say that religion lost its importance. Western modernity has not been able to ignore or replace Christianity- even if modernity generally cannot incorporate it. As Jonathan Sheehan observes, "secularization always is and always must be incomplete. Even as religion seems to vanish from politics and public culture, it never ceases to define the project of …


Providential Empiricism: Suffering And Shaping The Self In Eighteenth~Century British Children's Literature, Adrianne Wadewitz Jan 2015

Providential Empiricism: Suffering And Shaping The Self In Eighteenth~Century British Children's Literature, Adrianne Wadewitz

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In "Praise for Creation and Providence" eighteenth-century Dissenting cleric Isaac Watts conveys God's encompassing presence-not only is he in heaven and hell, but he also inhabits (and owns) Earth and everything in it. This poem was reprinted for more than 150 years in Watts's Divine Songs: Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children (1775). A child reciting this poem is made keenly aware of how much he or she owes to God-soul, planet, and life. Watts emphasizes how one senses God's physical presence ("Beams of love:' "His Hand;' and "his Eye") with the body ("I stand or move" …


John Adams And Unitarian Theology, Wesley Edward Farmer Jan 2015

John Adams And Unitarian Theology, Wesley Edward Farmer

Online Theses and Dissertations

This thesis looks at the religious beliefs of John Adams and argues that the proper definition of Adams's belief system should only be "Unitarianism." It goes through the basic history of Unitarianism and the religious context of the Founding Fathers, and it analyzes relevant historiography on Adams's theological system, arguing against terms such as "Christian Deist" and "Theistic Rationalist." Then, the thesis suggests possible applications for Adams's religion, particularly when considering his emphasis on the ethical Jesus in relation to his desire for a moral society brought about by religion. Adams's theology can be applied to political actions he took …