Download or read book The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists written by James A. Herrick and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the works of lesser-known yet influential Deists, the author examines the 70-year polemic between the Church of England and the English Deists, illuminating the rhetorical war which raged between them. He contends that Deism owes its significance to these skilled controversialists.
Download or read book The English Deists written by Wayne Hudson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interprets the works of an important group of writers known as 'the English deists'. This title argues that this interpretation reads Romantic conceptions of religious identity into a period in which it was lacking. It contextualizes these writers within the early Enlightenment, which was multivocal, plural and in search of self definition.
Download or read book Atheism and Deism Revalued written by Wayne Hudson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Given the central role played by religion in early-modern Britain, it is perhaps surprising that historians have not always paid close attention to the shifting and nuanced subtleties of terms used in religious controversies. In this collection particular attention is focussed upon two of the most contentious of these terms: ’atheism’ and ’deism’, terms that have shaped significant parts of the scholarship on the Enlightenment. This volume argues that in the seventeenth and eighteenth century atheism and deism involved fine distinctions that have not always been preserved by later scholars. The original deployment and usage of these terms were often more complicated than much of the historical scholarship suggests. Indeed, in much of the literature static definitions are often taken for granted, resulting in depictions of the past constructed upon anachronistic assumptions. Offering reassessments of the historical figures most associated with ’atheism’ and ’deism’ in early modern Britain, this collection opens the subject up for debate and shows how the new historiography of deism changes our understanding of heterodox religious identities in Britain from 1650 to 1800. It problematises the older view that individuals were atheist or deists in a straightforward sense and instead explores the plurality and flexibility of religious identities during this period. Drawing on the most recent scholarship, the volume enriches the debate about heterodoxy, offering new perspectives on a range of prominent figures and providing an overview of major changes in the field.
Download or read book Radical Ideas and the Crisis of Christianity in England 1640 1740 written by Katherine A East and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-08-20 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the evolving relationship between Church and State, the character of radical thought in Enlightenment England, and the nature of that Enlightenment itself. A tribute to the work of the late Justin Champion, this volume explores the radical religious and political ideas of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England which were at the heart of Champion's intellectual contributions. Drawing on the debates and upheavals that dominated the period from the British Civil Wars to the mid-eighteenth century, the essays in this collection interrogate the challenging relationship between politics and religion which prompted what Champion called a 'Crisis of Christianity'. Diverse perspectives on that crisis are reconstructed, encompassing the experiences of republicans and radicals, philosophers and historians, atheists and clergymen. Through these individuals, a complex discourse which defies easy categorisation is recovered, but which speaks to central discussions concerning the evolving relationship between Church and State, the character of radical thought in Enlightenment England, and indeed the nature of that Enlightenment itself.
Download or read book Deism in Enlightenment England written by Jeffrey R Wigelsworth and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first complete study of English deists as a group in several decades and it argues for a new interpretation of deism in the English Enlightenment. While there have been many recent studies of the deist John Toland, the writings of other contemporary deists have been forgotten. With extensive analysis of lesser known figures such as Anthony Collins, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Chub, and Thomas Morgan, in addition to unique insights into Toland, Deism in Enlightenment England offers a much broader assessment of what deism entailed in the eighteenth century. Readers will see how previous interpretations of English deists, which place these figures on an irreligious trajectory leading towards modernity, need to be revised. This book uses deists to address a number of topics and themes and theme in English history and will be of particular interest to scholars of Enlightenment history, history of science, theology and politics, and the early modern era.
Download or read book The Enlightenment and religion written by S. J. Barnett and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book offers a critical survey of religious change and its causes in eighteenth-century Europe, and constitutes a challenge to the accepted views in traditional Enlightenment studies. Focusing on Enlightenment Italy, France and England, it illustrates how the canonical view of eighteenth-century religious change has in reality been constructed upon scant evidence and assumption, in particular the idea that the thought of the enlightened led to modernity. For, despite a lack of evidence, one of the fundamental assumptions of Enlightenment studies has been the assertion that there was a vibrant Deist movement which formed the “intellectual solvent” of the eighteenth century. The central claim of this book is that the immense ideological appeal of the traditional birth-of-modernity myth has meant that the actual lack of Deists has been glossed over, and a quite misleading historical view has become entrenched.
Download or read book The Spirituality of the English and American Deists written by Joseph Waligore and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-01-15 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The English and American deists rejected Christianity, which they believed portrayed God as cruel. In The Spirituality of the English and American Deists, Waligore shows how the deists were the first group of modern thinkers who were spiritual but not religious.
Download or read book Ridicule Religion and the Politics of Wit in Augustan England written by Roger D. Lund and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing for the importance of wit beyond its use as a literary device, Roger D. Lund outlines the process by which writers in Restoration and eighteenth-century England struggled to define an appropriate role for wit in the public sphere. He traces its unpredictable effects in works of philosophy, religious pamphlets, and legal writing and examines what happens when literary wit is deliberately used to undermine the judgment of individuals and to destabilize established institutions of church and state. Beginning with a discussion of wit's association with deception, Lund suggests that suspicion of wit and the imagination emerges in attacks on the Restoration stage, in the persecution of The Craftsman, and in criticism directed at Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and works by writers like the Earl of Shaftesbury, Thomas Woolston, and Thomas Paine. Anxieties about wit, Lund shows, were in part responsible for attempts to suppress new communal venues such as coffee houses and clubs and for the Church's condemnation of the seditious pamphlets made possible by the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695. Finally, the establishment's conviction that wit, ridicule, satire, and innuendo are subversive rhetorical forms is glaringly at play in attempts to use libel trials to translate the fear of wit as a metaphorical transgression of public decorum into an actual violation of the civil code.
Download or read book Scripture and Deism written by Diego Lucci and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2008 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals with the British deists' biblical hermeneutics, its roots, and its effects on European culture and society. Deist thinkers such as John Toland, Anthony Collins and Matthew Tindal pointed out the historical and anthropological origins of positive religions. Focusing on the human roots of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Ancient Paganism, they advocated tolerance and freedom of thought. In the context of the deists' research on the history of positive religions, the study of the Scriptures played a key role. Deists and freethinkers fought against the influence of Christian doctrine on political and social life. They denied the supernatural foundations of Christianity and of Christian institutions, and analyzed the Bible with the aim to promote the free search for truth. This book thus stresses the significance of the deists' biblical criticism for the development of Enlightenment views of religion and for the secularization of Europe.
Download or read book Islam and the English Enlightenment 1670 1840 written by Humberto Garcia and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2012-01-30 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A corrective addendum to Edward Said’s Orientalism, this book examines how sympathetic representations of Islam contributed significantly to Protestant Britain’s national and imperial identity in the eighteenth century. Taking a historical view, Humberto Garcia combines a rereading of eighteenth-century and Romantic-era British literature with original research on Anglo-Islamic relations. He finds that far from being considered foreign by the era’s thinkers, Islamic republicanism played a defining role in Radical Enlightenment debates, most significantly during the Glorious Revolution, French Revolution, and other moments of acute constitutional crisis, as well as in national and political debates about England and its overseas empire. Garcia shows that writers such as Edmund Burke, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Percy and Mary Shelley not only were influenced by international events in the Muslim world but also saw in that world and its history a viable path to interrogate, contest, and redefine British concepts of liberty. This deft exploration of the forgotten moment in early modern history when intercultural exchange between the Muslim world and Christian West was common resituates English literary and intellectual history in the wider context of the global eighteenth century. The direct challenge it poses to the idea of an exclusionary Judeo-Christian Enlightenment serves as an important revision to post-9/11 narratives about a historical clash between Western democratic values and Islam.
Download or read book Miracles in Enlightenment England written by Jane Shaw and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Enlightenment, considered an age of rationalism, is not normally associated with miracles. In this intriguing book, however, Jane Shaw presents accounts of inscrutable miracles that occurred to ordinary worshippers in early modern England. She considers the reactions of intellectuals, scientists, and physicians to these miraculous events and through them explores the relations between popular and elite culture of the time. Miraculous events in England between the 1650s and the 1750s were experienced mainly not by Catholics, but by Protestants. The book looks at the political and social context of these events as well as interpretations and explanations of them by scientists, the Court, and the Church, as well as by preachers, pamphleteers, friends, and neighbors. Shaw links the lived religion of the time to intellectual history and amends the hitherto received view. The religious practice of ordinary people was as crucial to the development of Enlightenment thought as the philosophical and theological writings of the elite.
Download or read book Enlightenment and Modernity written by Wayne Hudson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-09-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The writers known as the English deists were not simply religious controversialists, but agents of reform who contributed to the emergence of modernity. This title claims that these writers advocated a failed ideology which itself declined after 1730. It argues for an evolution of their ideas into a more modern form.
Download or read book A Forgotten Christian Deist written by Jan van den Berg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-22 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a cultural and intellectual biography of a neglected but important figure, Thomas Morgan (1671/2–1743). Educated at Bridgewater Academy, he was active as Presbyterian preacher, medical practitioner, and one of the first who called himself a Christian Deist. Morgan was not only a harbinger of the disparagement of the Old Testament, but also a prolific pamphleteer about things religious, and a publisher of medical books. He received praise for his medical work, but a negative press for his theological visions, and he ended as a forgotten figure in history; this book restores an overlooked writer to his due place in history. It is the first modern biography of Morgan and its readership comprises historians of deism, the enlightenment, the eighteenth century, theology and the church, Presbyterianism, and medical history.
Download or read book The English Deists written by Wayne Hudson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wayne Hudson reinterprets the works of an important group of writers known as 'the English deists': Charles Blount, John Toland, Anthony Collins, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Woolston, Thomas Morgan, Thomas Chubb and Peter Annet.
Download or read book Revolutionary Deists written by Kerry Walters and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2011-03 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating study of America's first culture war, one that in many ways has continued to this day. Includes profiles of six rational infidels: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Ethan Allen, Thomas Paine, Elihu Palmer, and Philip Freneau.
Download or read book Deism and Social Ethics written by Robert Corfe and published by Arena books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through surveying the traditions of the major religions in the world, this book shows that those based on revelation too often tend towards a tenacity of belief which leads to irrationalism and then, in turn, to fanaticism. It presents a vision for a regenerated deism for the 21st century in helping resolve the difficult conflicts.
Download or read book Bodies of Thought written by Ann Thomson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2008-07-03 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: `The church in danger' : latitudinarians, socinians, and hobbists -- Animal spirits and living fibres -- Mortalists and materialists -- Journalism, exile, and clandestinity -- Mid-eighteenth-century materialism -- Epilogue: Some consequences.
