Religious and Secular Reform in America

Religious and Secular Reform in America PDF Author: David K. Adams
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 9780814706862
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
From its earliest days, the United States has provided fertile ground for reform movements to flourish. In this volume, twelve eminent historians assess religious and secular reform in America from the eighteenth century to the present day. The essays offer a mix of general overviews and specific case studies, addressing such topics as radical religion in New England, leisure in antebellum America, Sabbatarianism, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and Evangelicalism, social reform, and the U.S. welfare state. Suitable for students, the essays, each based on original research, will also be of interest to researchers and academics working in this area, as well as to all those with an interest in the history of religious and secular reform in America.

Religious and Secular Reform in America

Religious and Secular Reform in America PDF Author: David K. Adams
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 9780814706862
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
From its earliest days, the United States has provided fertile ground for reform movements to flourish. In this volume, twelve eminent historians assess religious and secular reform in America from the eighteenth century to the present day. The essays offer a mix of general overviews and specific case studies, addressing such topics as radical religion in New England, leisure in antebellum America, Sabbatarianism, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and Evangelicalism, social reform, and the U.S. welfare state. Suitable for students, the essays, each based on original research, will also be of interest to researchers and academics working in this area, as well as to all those with an interest in the history of religious and secular reform in America.

Secularism in Antebellum America

Secularism in Antebellum America PDF Author: John Lardas Modern
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226533255
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Ghosts. Railroads. Sing Sing. Sex machines. These are just a few of the phenomena that appear in John Lardas Modern’s pioneering account of religion and society in nineteenth-century America. This book uncovers surprising connections between secular ideology and the rise of technologies that opened up new ways of being religious. Exploring the eruptions of religion in New York’s penny presses, the budding fields of anthropology and phrenology, and Moby-Dick, Modern challenges the strict separation between the religious and the secular that remains integral to discussions about religion today. Modern frames his study around the dread, wonder, paranoia, and manic confidence of being haunted, arguing that experiences and explanations of enchantment fueled secularism’s emergence. The awareness of spectral energies coincided with attempts to tame the unruly fruits of secularism—in the cultivation of a spiritual self among Unitarians, for instance, or in John Murray Spear’s erotic longings for a perpetual motion machine. Combining rigorous theoretical inquiry with beguiling historical arcana, Modern unsettles long-held views of religion and the methods of narrating its past.

Education Reform

Education Reform PDF Author: Craig S. Engelhardt
Publisher: IAP
ISBN: 1623963249
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Education Reform proposes and defends an alternate paradigm of public education. It challenges “secular education” as a failed educational model and proposes an alternate model with far-reaching potential. It reveals how secular schools have insufficient resources to support the public’s educational interests while religious schools, within a plural public education system, have the superior capacity to nurture citizens with the moral, intellectual, and civic qualities of good citizenship. The fulcrum upon which Engelhardt’s argument rests is the recognition that beliefs and values of a religious nature not only provide motivating frameworks for individual life, but also, they naturally provide core sources of meaning, understanding, and motivation for education efforts. Whereas secular schools avoid these ideological resources, they potentially suffuse the curriculum, climate, and community of “religious” schools to increase their educational success. Thus, this book argues that the move to a plural public education system, in which families are free to choose either secular or publicly supportive “religious” schools, will advance the educational interests of America. This argument is developed in three parts. The first entails a multi-chapter analysis of education history to discern the relationship between religion and the public’s education goals. By tracing ways in which “religion” is a key resource for curricular meaning, parent buy-in, rational thought, individual morality, public unity, and academic inspiration, it correlates school secularization with many of our current education problems. Part two engages criticisms that may arise from this reform proposal - such as concerns regarding autonomy, deliberative skills, equity, and public cohesion. Part three illumines superior ways in which religious schools can address the public’s educational concerns. The book concludes by proposing ideas and principles to guide the development of an American plural public education system that allow the public to draw from the strengths of religious schools without secularizing them in the process or breaching church/state boundaries.

Race and Secularism in America

Race and Secularism in America PDF Author: Jonathon S. Kahn
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231541279
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
This anthology draws bold comparisons between secularist strategies to contain, privatize, and discipline religion and the treatment of racialized subjects by the American state. Specializing in history, literature, anthropology, theology, religious studies, and political theory, contributors expose secularism's prohibitive practices in all facets of American society and suggest opportunities for change.

Secular States and Religious Diversity

Secular States and Religious Diversity PDF Author: Bruce J. Berman
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774825154
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Contemporary nation-states have seen the rise of religious pluralism within their borders, brought about by global migration and the challenge of radical religious movements. Secular States and Religious Diversity explores the meaning of secularism and religious freedom in these new contexts. The contributors chart the impact of globalization, the varying forms of secularism in Western states, and the different kinds of relations between states and religious institutions in the historical traditions and contemporary politics of Islamic, Indic, and Chinese societies. They also examine the limitations and dilemmas of governmental responses to religious diversity, and grapple with the question of how secular states deal (and should deal) with such pluralism. This volume brings in perspectives from the non-Western world and engages with viewpoints that might increase states’ capacities to accommodate religious diversity positively.

A Secular Age

A Secular Age PDF Author: Charles Taylor
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674986911
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 889

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Book Description
The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.

The Unintended Reformation

The Unintended Reformation PDF Author: Brad S. Gregory
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067426407X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism—all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West. Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge. The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.

Creating the Culture of Reform in Antebellum America

Creating the Culture of Reform in Antebellum America PDF Author: T. Gregory Garvey
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820326852
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
In this study, T. Gregory Garvey illustrates how activists and reformers claimed the instruments of mass media to create a freestanding culture of reform that enabled voices disfranchised by church or state to speak as equals in public debates over the nation’s values. Competition among antebellum reformers in religion, women’s rights, and antislavery institutionalized a structure of ideological debate that continues to define popular reform movements. The foundations of the culture of reform lie, according to Garvey, in the reconstruction of publicity that coincided with the religious-sectarian struggles of the early nineteenth century. To counter challenges to their authority and to retain church members, both conservative and liberal religious factions developed instruments of reform propaganda (newspapers, conventions, circuit riders, revivals) that were adapted by an emerging class of professional secular reformers in the women’s rights and antislavery movements. Garvey argues that debate among the reformers created a mode of “critical conversation” through which reformers of all ideological persuasions collectively forged new conventions of public discourse as they struggled to shape public opinion. Focusing on debates between Lyman Beecher and William Ellery Channing over religious doctrine, Angelina Grimke and Catharine Beecher over women’s participation in antislavery, and William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass over the ethics of political participation, Garvey argues that “crucible-like sites of public debate” emerged as the core of the culture of reform. To emphasize the redefinition of publicity provoked by antebellum reform movements, Garvey concludes the book with a chapter that presents Emersonian self-reliance as an effort to transform the partisan nature of reform discourse into a model of sincere public speech that affirms both self and community.

Cosmos Crumbling

Cosmos Crumbling PDF Author: Robert H. Abzug
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Others offered programs of physiological and spiritual self-reform: phrenology, vegetarianism, the water-cure, spiritualism, and miscellaneous others. "Even the insect world was to be defended," Emerson mused, "and a society for the protection of ground-worms, slugs, and mosquitoes was to be incorporated without delay.".

The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism

The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism PDF Author: Robert William Fogel
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226256627
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
Robert William Fogel was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 1993. "To take a trip around the mind of Robert Fogel, one of the grand old men of American economic history, is a rare treat. At every turning, you come upon some shiny pearl of information."—The Economist In this broad-thinking and profound piece of history, Robert William Fogel synthesizes an amazing range of data into a bold and intriguing view of America's past and future—one in which the periodic Great Awakenings of religion bring about waves of social reform, the material lives of even the poorest Americans improve steadily, and the nation now stands poised for a renewed burst of egalitarian progress.