The Rites of Identity argues that Kenneth Burke was the most deciding influence on Ralph Ellison's writings, that Burke and Ellison are firmly situated within the American tradition of religious naturalism, and that this tradition--properly understood as religious--offers a highly useful means for considering contemporary identity and mitigating religious conflict.
Beth Eddy adds Burke and Ellison to a tradition of religious naturalism that traces back to Ralph Waldo Emerson but received its most nuanced expression in the work of George Santayana. Through close...
The Rites of Identity argues that Kenneth Burke was the most deciding influence on Ralph Ellison's writings, that Burke and Ellison are...
In the late nineteenth century, culture critics who were readers of Darwin's work on evolution pondered what the implications of natural selection might be for human culture, religion and ethics. American pragmatists, by and large, rejected a social Darwinian spin on ethics, economics, and theology in favor of a less determinate humanist version of the ethical implications that emphasized contingency and meliorism. The early arguments between T. H. Huxley and William Sumner over the issues mirrors the contemporary arguments between Stephen Jay Gould and others against "the New Atheists'"...
In the late nineteenth century, culture critics who were readers of Darwin's work on evolution pondered what the implications of natural selection mig...
