Civil Religion and the Enlightenment in England, 1707-1800

Civil Religion and the Enlightenment in England, 1707-1800 PDF

Author: Ashley Walsh

Publisher: Boydell Press

Published: 2024-05-14

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781837651498

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This innovative book reveals how Enlightened writers in England, both lay and clerical, proclaimed public support for Christianity by transforming it into a civil religion, despite the famous claim of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that Christians professed an uncivil faith. This innovative book reveals how Enlightened writers in England, both lay and clerical, proclaimed public support for Christianity by transforming it into a civil religion, despite the famous claim of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that Christians professed an uncivil faith. In the aftermath of the seventeenth-century European wars of religion, civil religionists such as David Hume, Edward Gibbon, the third earl of Shaftesbury, and William Warburton sought to reconcile Christian ecclesiology with the civil state and Christian practice with civilized society. They built their arguments in the context of England's long Reformation, syncretizing 'primitive' gospel Christianity with ancient paganism as they attempted to render Christianity a modern version of Roman republican civil religion. They believed that outward observance of the reformed Protestant faith was vital for belonging to the Christian commonwealth of Hanoverian England. Uncovering a major theme in eighteenth-century intellectual and religious history that connected classical Rome with Italian Renaissance humanism and the Enlightenment, this deeply interdisciplinary book draws from recent post-secular trends in social and political theory. Combining intellectual history with the political and ecclesiastical history of the Church of England, it will prove as indispensable for historians as studentsof political theory, theology, and literature.

Anglican Enlightenment

Anglican Enlightenment PDF

Author: William J. Bulman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-05-12

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1107073685

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An original interpretation of the early European Enlightenment and the politics of religion in later Stuart England and its global empire. William J. Bulman provides a novel account of how the onset of globalization and the end of Europe's religious wars transformed English intellectual, religious and political life.

Religion and Society in England, 1850-1914

Religion and Society in England, 1850-1914 PDF

Author: Hugh Mcleod

Publisher: Red Globe Press

Published: 1996-03-06

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0333534905

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The book examines the evidence and evaluates the many, and contradictory, theories that have been advanced to explain why this happened.

Civil Religion in the Early Modern Anglophone World, 1550-1700

Civil Religion in the Early Modern Anglophone World, 1550-1700 PDF

Author: Rachel Hammersley

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2024-05-14

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 178327784X

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Civil Religion - a tradition of political thought that has argued for a close connection between religion and the state - made an important contribution to the development of religious and political thought at key moments of early modern British political and colonial history. As this volume shows, it was at work not just during the Enlightenment, but within a much wider periodical framework: the Reformation, the rise of the Puritan movement, the conflict over the Stuart state and church, the English Revolution, and the formation of key American colonies in the eighteenth century. Advocates of Civil Religion tried to reconcile a national church with religious toleration and design a constitution capable of preventing the church from interfering with affairs of state. The volume investigates the idea of Civil Religion in the works of canonical thinkers in the history of political thought (Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau), in the works of those who have been recognized as shaping political ideas (Hooker, Prynne et al.) during this period, and in the advocacy of those perhaps not previously associated with Civil Religion (William Penn). Although Civil Religion was often posited as a pragmatic solution to constitutional and ecclesiological problems created by the Reformation and the English Revolution, they also reveal that such pragmatism was not at odds with religious conviction or ideals. Civil Religion certainly enhanced citizenship in this period, but it did so in ways which depended on the truth claims of Protestantism, not on their domestication to politics.

Rational Dissenters in Late Eighteenth-century England

Rational Dissenters in Late Eighteenth-century England PDF

Author: Valerie Smith

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1783275669

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Rational Dissent was a branch of Protestant religious nonconformity which emerged to prominence in England between c. 1770 and c. 1800. While small, the movement provoked fierce opposition from both Anglicans and Orthodox Dissenters.

The National Covenant and the Solemn League and Covenant, 1660-1696

The National Covenant and the Solemn League and Covenant, 1660-1696 PDF

Author: James Walters

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1783276045

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Examines how the form and function of the Covenants were shorn of religious implications and repurposed, serving a pluralistic vision of the role of religion in politics and public life. Until now, scholarship on the Covenants has mainly focussed on their role in the conflicts of the 1640s, with discussion of the Covenants after 1660 mostly limited to the context of violent Scottish radicalism. This book moves beyond a rigid focus on Scotland to explore the legacy of the Covenants in England. It examines the discourse surrounding key events in the Restoration period and traces the influence of the Covenants in the context of radical Presbyterianism, and in mainstream debates around politics, church government, and the constitution of the British kingdoms. The Covenants continued to have relevance in two primary respects. Firstly, the Covenants were used as reference points for discussing the competing legacies of the English and Scottish Reformations and the confused issues of church and state that defined the Restoration period. Furthermore, the form of the Covenants as solemn individual subscriptions to a constitutional and religious model, and the political ideas that underpinned them, were emulated by those seeking to resist royal authority during the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81, and during the events surrounding the Revolution of 1688. Thus, this book holds particular interest for students of constitutionalism, legal pluralism or civil religion in seventeenth-century Britain, and for those seeking to deepen their understanding of the intellectual origins of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the Revolution of 1688-9.

Lollardy and Orthodox Religion in Pre-Reformation England

Lollardy and Orthodox Religion in Pre-Reformation England PDF

Author: Robert Lutton

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0861932838

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An account of how, in certain parts of sixteenth-century England, challenges to conventional piety anticipated the Reformation. Here is a richly detailed account of the relationship between Lollard heresy and orthodox religion before the English Reformation. Robert Lutton examines the pious practices and dispositions of families and individuals in relationto the orthodox institutions of parish, chapel and guild, and the beliefs and activities of Wycliffite heretics. He takes issue with portrayals of orthodox religion as buoyant and harmonious, and demonstrates that late medieval piety was increasingly diverse and the parish community far from stable or unified. By investigating the generation of family wealth and changing attitudes to its disposal through inheritance and pious giving in the important Lollard centre of Tenterden in Kent, he suggests that rapid economic development and social change created the conditions for a significant cultural shift. This study contends that in certain parts of England by the early sixteenth century piety was subject to dramatic changes which, in a number of important ways, anticipated the Reformation. Dr ROBERT LUTTON teaches in the Department of History at the University of Nottingham.

Eleusis and Enlightenment

Eleusis and Enlightenment PDF

Author: Ferdinand Saumarez Smith

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2024-03-21

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9004692304

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The age of Enlightenment – the so-called age of reason – was also, paradoxically, the age of the Eleusinian mysteries. By attempting to reveal Demeter's secret cult, British, French, and German thinkers and freemasons of the eighteenth century revealed more than they bargained for: the pagan origins of Christian doctrines such as the Trinity and the afterlife, and through the mythical gift of law and agriculture to Eleusis an alternative narrative of the origins of civilisation to that found in the Bible.

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