God in the Enlightenment

ISBN-13: 9780190267087 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 336 str.

William J. Bulman; Robert G. Ingram

Opis

We have long been taught that the Enlightenment was an attempt to free the world from the clutches of Christian civilization and make it safe for philosophy. The lesson has been well learned. In today's culture wars, both liberals and their conservative enemies, inside and outside the academy, rest their claims about the present on the notion that the Enlightenment was a secularist movement of philosophically driven emancipation. Historians have had doubts about the accuracy of this portrait for some time, but they have never managed to furnish a viable alternative to it-for themselves, for scholars interested in matters of church and state, or for the public at large.

In this book, William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram bring together recent scholarship from distinguished experts in history, theology, and literature to make clear that God not only survived the Enlightenment but thrived within it as well. The Enlightenment was not a radical break from the past in which Europeans jettisoned their intellectual and institutional inheritance. It was, to be sure, a moment of great change, but one in which the characteristic convictions and traditions of the Renaissance and Reformation were perpetuated to the point of transformation, in the wake of the Wars of Religion and during the early phases of globalization. The Enlightenment's primary imperatives were not freedom and irreligion but peace and prosperity. As a result, Enlightenment could be Christian, communitarian, or authoritarian as easily as it could be atheistic, individualistic, or libertarian.

Honing in on the intellectual crisis of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries while moving from Spinoza to Kant and from India to Peru, God in the Enlightenment takes a prism to the age of lights.

Recenzje

This work shines with essays from an intellectual diversity of important scholars and often strikingly original perspectives. It not only addresses the increasingly problematic interaction of religion and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in provocative and significant ways, it goes to the underlying issue of the place of God in Enlightenment debate, dilemmas, continuities, and reevaluations. This is a genuinely important collection.

O autorze

William J. Bulman is Assistant Professor of History at Lehigh University. Robert G. Ingram is Associate Professor of History and Director of the George Washington Forum on American Ideas, Politics, and Institutions at Ohio University.