Download or read book Rational Mothers and Infidel Gentlemen written by Evelyn A. Kirkley and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Calling themselves "Freethinkers, " self-proclaimed liberals organized across the United States after the Civil War to oppose endorsement of Christianity as the national religion. Heralding a trinity of science, rationalism, and progress, these atheists and agnostics advocated the complete separation of church and state. They were self-conscious prototypes of the modern, secular American and counted among their numbers Robert G. Ingersoll, Francis E. Abbott, Moses Harman, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. What did they think about masculinity and femininity? In her book, Evelyn Kirkley argues that their understanding of gender was more complex, ranging from biological determinism to historic constructionism. Kirkley asserts that "Freethinkers" accepted, rejected, and synthesized late Victorian gender norms, struggling both to achieve social and political respect and remain faithful to their principles. Most intriguing, she concludes, is their debate over man- and womanhood, which was a precursor to the late twentieth-century gender controversy in the academy, another institution prizing science, rationalism, and progress.
Download or read book Infidels and the Damn Churches written by Lynne Marks and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2017-06-09 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: British Columbia is at the forefront of a secularizing movement in the English-speaking world. Nearly half its residents claim no religious affiliation, and the province has the highest rate of unbelief or religious indifference in Canada. Infidels and the Damn Churches explores the historical roots of this phenomenon from the 1880s to the First World War. Lynne Marks reveals that class and racial tensions fuelled irreligion in a world populated by embattled ministers, militant atheists, turn-of-the-century New Agers, rough-living miners, Asian immigrants, and church-going settler women. White, working-class men often arrived in the province alone and identified the church with their exploitative employers. At the same time, BC’s anti-Asian and anti-Indigenous racism meant that their “whiteness” alone could define them as respectable, without the need for church affiliation. Consequently, although Christianity retained major social power elsewhere, many people in BC found the freedom to forgo church attendance or espouse atheist views. This nuanced study of mobility, gender, masculinity, and family in settler BC offers new insights into BC’s distinctive culture and into the beginnings of what has become an increasingly dominant secular worldview across Canada.
Download or read book Infidel feminism written by Laura Schwarz and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Infidel feminism is the first in-depth study of a distinctive brand of women’s rights that emerged out of the Victorian Secularist movement. It looks at the lives and work of a number of female activists, whose renunciation of religion shaped their struggle for emancipation. Anti-religious or secular ideas were fundamental to the development of feminist thought, but have, until now, been almost entirely passed over in the historiography of the Victorian and Edwardian women’s movement. In uncovering an important tradition of Freethinking feminism, this book reveals an ongoing radical and free love current connecting Owenite feminism with the more ‘respectable’ post-1850 women’s movement and the ‘New Women’ of the early twentieth century. This book will be invaluable to both scholars and students of social and cultural history and feminist thought, and to interdisciplinary studies of religion and secularisation, as well as those interested in the history of women’s movements more broadly.
Download or read book Evangelical Disenchantment written by David Hempton and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "David Hempton looks at evangelicalism through the lens of well-known individuals who once embraced the evangelical tradition, but later repudiated it. The author recounts the faith journeys of nine creative artists, social reformers, and public intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries"--Publisher description.
Download or read book Black Freethinkers written by Christopher Cameron and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-15 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Freethinkers argues that, contrary to historical and popular depictions of African Americans as naturally religious, freethought has been central to black political and intellectual life from the nineteenth century to the present. Freethought encompasses many different schools of thought, including atheism, agnosticism, and nontraditional orientations such as deism and paganism. Christopher Cameron suggests an alternative origin of nonbelief and religious skepticism in America, namely the brutality of the institution of slavery. He also traces the growth of atheism and agnosticism among African Americans in two major political and intellectual movements of the 1920s: the New Negro Renaissance and the growth of black socialism and communism. In a final chapter, he explores the critical importance of freethought among participants in the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Examining a wealth of sources, including slave narratives, travel accounts, novels, poetry, memoirs, newspapers, and archival sources such as church records, sermons, and letters, the study follows the lives and contributions of well-known figures, including Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker, as well as lesser-known thinkers such as Louise Thompson Patterson, Sarah Webster Fabio, and David Cincore.
Download or read book Systematic Atheology written by John R. Shook and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Atheology is the intellectual effort to understand atheism, defend the reasonableness of unbelief, and support nonbelievers in their encounters with religion. This book presents a historical overview of the development of atheology from ancient thought to the present day. It offers in-depth examinations of four distinctive schools of atheological thought: rationalist atheology, scientific atheology, moral atheology, and civic atheology. John R. Shook shows how a familiarity with atheology’s complex histories, forms, and strategies illuminates the contentious features of today’s atheist and secularist movements, which are just as capable of contesting each other as opposing religion. The result is a book that provides a disciplined and philosophically rigorous examination of atheism’s intellectual strategies for reasoning with theology. Systematic Atheology is an important contribution to the philosophy of religion, religious studies, secular studies, and the sociology and psychology of nonreligion.
Download or read book Race in a Godless World written by Nathan G. Alexander and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-16 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is modern racism a product of secularisation and the decline of Christian universalism? The debate has raged for decades, but up to now, the actual racial views of historical atheists and freethinkers have never been subjected to a systematic analysis. Race in a Godless World sets out to correct the oversight. It centres on Britain and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, a time when popular atheist movements were emerging and scepticism about the truth of Christianity was becoming widespread. Covering racial and evolutionary science, imperialism, slavery and racial prejudice in theory and practice, it provides a much-needed account of the complex and sometimes contradictory ideas espoused by the transatlantic community of atheists and freethinkers. It also reflects on the social dimension of irreligiousness, exploring how working-class atheists’ experiences of exclusion could make them sympathetic to other marginalised groups.
Download or read book Heaven s Bride written by Leigh Eric Schmidt and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2010-12-07 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nineteenth-century eccentric Ida C. Craddock was by turns a secular freethinker, a religious visionary, a civil-liberties advocate, and a resolute defender of belly-dancing. Arrested and tried repeatedly on obscenity charges, she was deemed a danger to public morality for her candor about sexuality. By the end of her life Craddock, the nemesis of the notorious vice crusader Anthony Comstock, had become a favorite of free-speech defenders and women's rights activists. She soon became as well the case-history darling of one of America's earliest and most determined Freudians. In Heaven's Bride, prize-winning historian Leigh Eric Schmidt offers a rich biography of this forgotten mystic, who occupied the seemingly incongruous roles of yoga priestess, suppressed sexologist, and suspected madwoman. In Schmidt's evocative telling, Craddock's story reveals the beginning of the end of Christian America, a harbinger of spiritual variety and sexual revolution.
Download or read book Practicing Atheism written by Hannah K. Scheidt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although many individuals identify as atheists, little is understood about the belief system beyond the simple lack of a belief in a higher power. Hannah K. Scheidt's Practicing Atheism: Culture, Media, and Ritual in the Contemporary Atheist Network unpacks the cultural products, both corporate-driven and grassroots, that carry messages about atheism to examine the complicated relationship between organized atheism and religion.
Download or read book The Twilight of Atheism written by Alister McGrath and published by WaterBrook. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this bold and provocative new book, the author of In the Beginning and The Reenchantment of Nature challenges the widely held assumption that the world is becoming more secular and demonstrates why atheism cannot provide the moral and intellectual guidance essential for coping with the complexities of modern life. Atheism is one of the most important movements in modern Western culture. For the last two hundred years, it seemed to be on the verge of eliminating religion as an outmoded and dangerous superstition. Recent years, however, have witnessed the decline of disbelief and a rise in religious devotion throughout the world. In THE TWILIGHT OF ATHEISM, the distinguished historian and theologian Alister McGrath examines what went wrong with the atheist dream and explains why religion and faith are destined to play a central role in the twenty-first century. A former atheist who is now one of Christianity’s foremost scholars, McGrath traces the history of atheism from its emergence in eighteenth-century Europe as a revolutionary worldview that offered liberation from the rigidity of traditional religion and the oppression of tyrannical monarchs, to its golden age in the first half of the twentieth century. Blending thoughtful, authoritative historical analysis with incisive portraits of such leading and influential atheists as Sigmund Freud and Richard Dawkins, McGrath exposes the flaws at the heart of atheism, and argues that the renewal of faith is a natural, inevitable, and necessary response to its failures. THE TWILIGHT OF ATHEISM will unsettle believers and nonbelievers alike. A powerful rebuttal of the philosophy that, for better and for worse, has exerted tremendous influence on Western history, it carries major implications for the future of both religion and unbelief in our society.
Download or read book Mark Twain written by Gary Scott Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Twain's literary works have intrigued and inspired readers from the late 1860s to the present. His varied experiences as a journeyman printer, river boat pilot, prospector, journalist, novelist, humorist, businessman, and world traveller, combined with his incredible imagination and astonishing creativity, enabled him to devise some of American literature's most memorable characters and engaging stories. Twain had a complicated relationship with Christianity. He strove to understand, critique, and sometimes promote various theological ideas and insights. His religious perspective was often inconsistent and even contradictory. While many scholars have overlooked Twain's strong interest in religious matters, others disagree sharply about his religious views--with many labelling him a secularist, an agnostic, or an atheist. In this compelling biography, Gary Scott Smith shows that throughout his life Twain was an entertainer, satirist, novelist, and reformer, but also functioned as a preacher, prophet, and social philosopher. Twain tackled universal themes with penetrating insight and wit including the character of God, human nature, sin, providence, corruption, greed, hypocrisy, poverty, racism, and imperialism. Moreover, his life provides a window into the principal trends and developments in American religion from 1865 to 1910.
Download or read book Secularists Religion and Government in Nineteenth Century America written by Timothy Verhoeven and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-12-19 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows how, through a series of fierce battles over Sabbath laws, legislative chaplains, Bible-reading in public schools and other flashpoints, nineteenth-century secularists mounted a powerful case for a separation of religion and government. Among their diverse ranks were religious skeptics, liberal Protestants, members of minority faiths, labor reformers and defenders of slavery. Drawing on popular petitions to Congress, a neglected historical source, the book explores how this secularist mobilization gathered energy at the grassroots level. The nineteenth century is usually seen as the golden age of an informal Protestant establishment. Timothy Verhoeven demonstrates that, far from being crushed by an evangelical juggernaut, secularists harnessed a range of cultural forces—the legacy of the Revolutionary founders, hostility to Catholicism, a belief in national exceptionalism and more—to argue that the United States was not a Christian nation, branding their opponents as fanatics who threatened both democratic liberties as well as true religion.
Download or read book Mrs Stanton s Bible written by Kathi Kern and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mrs. Stanton's Bible traces the impact of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's religious dissent on the suffrage movement at the turn of the century. Stanton is best remembered for organizing the Seneca Falls convention at which she first called for women's right to vote. Yet she spent the last two decades of her life working for another cause: women's liberation from religious oppression. In 1895, she collaboratively authored the Woman's Bible and found herself arguing not only against male clergy members but also against devout female suffragists. Kathi Kern demonstrates that the Woman's Bible played a fundamental role in the new conservatism of the women's movement because it sparked Stanton's censure and the elimination of her fellow radicals from the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Book jacket.
Download or read book O Sisters Ain t You Happy written by Suzanne R. Thurman and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2001-12-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her account of the founding, golden years, and eventual demise of the two Massachusetts villages, Thurman (history, U. of Alabama- Huntsville) augments the narrative history with discussion of how gender, family, and community functioned in them. They were founded by English-born visionary Ann Lee. She called her sect the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, but they were commonly known as Shakers or Believers. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Belva Lockwood written by Jill Norgren and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2008-03 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foreword by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg A legal historian recounts the influential life of women's rights activist Belva Lockwood, the first woman to practice at the bar of the Supreme Court In Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President, prize-winning legal historian Jill Norgren recounts, for the first time, the life story of one of the nineteenth century’s most surprising and accomplished advocates for women’s rights. As Norgren shows, Lockwood was fearless in confronting the male establishment, commanding the attention of presidents, members of Congress, influential writers, and everyday Americans. Obscured for too long in the historical shadow of her longtime colleague, Susan B. Anthony, Lockwood steps into the limelight at last in this engaging new biography. Born on a farm in upstate New York in 1830, Lockwood married young and reluctantly became a farmer’s wife. After her husband's premature death, however, she earned a college degree, became a teacher, and moved to Washington, DC with plans to become an attorney-an occupation all but closed to women. Not only did she become one of the first female attorneys in the U.S., but in 1879 became the first woman ever allowed to practice at the bar of the Supreme Court. In 1884 Lockwood continued her trailblazing ways as the first woman to run a full campaign for the U.S. Presidency. She ran for President again in 1888. Although her candidacies were unsuccessful (as she knew they would be), Lockwood demonstrated that women could compete with men in the political arena. After these campaigns she worked tirelessly on behalf of the Universal Peace Union, hoping, until her death in 1917, that she, or the organization, would win the Nobel Peace Prize. Belva Lockwood deserves to be far better known. As Norgren notes, it is likely that Lockwood would be widely recognized today as a feminist pioneer if most of her personal papers had not been destroyed after her death. Fortunately for readers, Norgren shares much of her subject’s tenacity and she has ensured Lockwood’s rightful place in history with this meticulously researched and beautifully written book.
Download or read book America s Religions written by Peter W. Williams and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A panoramic introduction to religion in America, newly revised and updated
Download or read book Providence Has Freed Our Hands written by Karen K. Seat and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-07 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the close of the nineteenth century, American women missionaries traveled far afield to spread Christianity across the globe. Their presence abroad played a significant role in shaping foreign perceptions of America. At the same time, the cultural knowledge and independence these women missionaries gained had a profound impact on gender roles and racial ideologies among Protestants in the United States. In Providence Has Freed Our Hands, Karen K. Seat tells the history of women’s foreign missions in Japan and reveals the considerable role they played in liberalizing American understandings of Christianity, gender, and race. The author uses the story of Elizabeth Russell, a colorful missionary to Japan, as the backbone for her study. As a member of the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the most powerful women’s institutions of the late nineteenth century, Russell founded a progressive school for girls in Japan, defying the conservative ideologies not only of her own organization but also of the government of Japan. Transformed by her experience in Japan, Russell became a forceful advocate for racial tolerance and women’s access to education. With a storyteller’s gift for narration, Seat illustrates how Russell’s own life reflected the key issues fueling women’s missions: increased access to higher education, the impact of evangelical spirituality on women’s identities, and the broadening horizons available to women, while Russell’s missionary work in turn opened up new discourses in American culture.
