Marvelous Protestantism

Marvelous Protestantism PDF Author: Julie Crawford
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801881129
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Get Book Here

Book Description
Crawford examines accounts of monstrous births in popular pamphlets along with the strikingly graphic illustrations accompanying them, demonstrating how Protestant reformers used these accounts to guide their public through the spiritual confusion and social turmoil of the time.

Marvelous Protestantism

Marvelous Protestantism PDF Author: Julie Crawford
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801881129
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Get Book Here

Book Description
Crawford examines accounts of monstrous births in popular pamphlets along with the strikingly graphic illustrations accompanying them, demonstrating how Protestant reformers used these accounts to guide their public through the spiritual confusion and social turmoil of the time.

Protestantism after 500 Years

Protestantism after 500 Years PDF Author: Thomas Albert Howard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190612649
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Get Book Here

Book Description
The world stands before a landmark date: October 31, 2017, the quincentennial of the Protestant Reformation. Countries, social movements, churches, universities, seminaries, and other institutions shaped by Protestantism face a daunting question: how should the Reformation be commemorated 500 years after the fact? In this volume, leading historians and theologians, Protestant and Catholic, come together to grapple with this question and examine the historical significance of the Reformation. Protestantism has been credited for restoring essential Christian truth, blamed for disastrous church divisions, and invoked as the cause of modern liberalism, capitalism, democracy, individualism, modern science, secularism, and so much else. This book examines the historical significance of the Reformation and considers how we might expand and enrich the ongoing conversation about Protestantism's impact. The contributors conclude that we must remember the Reformation not only because of the enduring, sometimes painful religious divisions that emerged from this era, but also because a historical understanding of the Reformation is necessary for promoting ecumenical understanding and thinking wisely about the future of Christianity.

An Anxious Age

An Anxious Age PDF Author: Joseph Bottum
Publisher: Image
ISBN: 0385521464
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Get Book Here

Book Description
We live in a profoundly spiritual age, but not in any good way. Huge swaths of American culture are driven by manic spiritual anxiety and relentless supernatural worry. Radicals and traditionalists, liberals and conservatives, together with politicians, artists, environmentalists, followers of food fads, and the chattering classes of television commentators: America is filled with people frantically seeking confirmation of their own essential goodness. We are a nation desperate to stand of the side of morality--to know that we are righteous and dwell in the light. In An Anxious Age, Joseph Bottum offers an account of modern America, presented as a morality tale formed by a collision of spiritual disturbances. And the cause, he claims, is the most significant and least noticed historical fact of the last fifty years: the collapse of the mainline Protestant churches that were the source of social consensus and cultural unity. Our dangerous spiritual anxieties, broken loose from the churches that once contained them, now madden everything in American life. Updating The Protestant Ethic and the Sprit of Capitalism, Max Weber's sociological classic, An Anxious Age undertakes two case studies of contemporary social classes adrift in a nation without the religious understandings that gave them meaning. Looking at the college-educated elite he calls "the Poster Children," Bottum sees the post-Protestant heirs of the old mainline Protestant domination of culture: dutiful descendants who claim the high social position of their Christian ancestors even while they reject their ancestors' Christianity. Turning to the Swallows of Capistrano, the Catholics formed by the pontificate of John Paul II, Bottum evaluates the early victories--and later defeats--of the attempt to substitute Catholicism for the dying mainline voice in public life. Sweeping across American intellectual and cultural history, An Anxious Age traces the course of national religion and warns about the strange angels and even stranger demons with which we now wrestle. Insightful and contrarian, wise and unexpected, An Anxious Age ranks among the great modern accounts of American culture.

The Body of Evidence

The Body of Evidence PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004284826
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365

Get Book Here

Book Description
When, why and how was it first believed that the corpse could reveal ‘signs’ useful for understanding the causes of death and eventually identifying those responsible for it? The Body of Evidence. Corpses and Proofs in Early Modern European Medicine, edited by Francesco Paolo de Ceglia, shows how in the late Middle Ages the dead body, which had previously rarely been questioned, became a specific object of investigation by doctors, philosophers, theologians and jurists. The volume sheds new light on the elements of continuity, but also on the effort made to liberate the semantization of the corpse from what were, broadly speaking, necromantic practices, which would eventually merge into forensic medicine.

Miracles and the Protestant Imagination

Miracles and the Protestant Imagination PDF Author: Philip M. Soergel
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199844666
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book Here

Book Description
Generations of scholars have assumed that the Reformation represented a vital step on the way to the "disenchantment of the world." Philip Soergel's groundbreaking study on wonder books reveals that German evangelical Reformers were themselves active enchanters.

Faithful Narratives

Faithful Narratives PDF Author: Andrea Sterk
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801471044
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description
Historians of religion face complex interpretive issues when examining religious texts, practices, and experiences. Faithful Narratives presents the work of twelve eminent scholars whose research has exemplified compelling strategies for negotiating the difficulties inherent in this increasingly important area of historical inquiry. The chapters range chronologically from Late Antiquity to modern America and thematically from the spirituality of near eastern monks to women's agency in religion, considering familiar religious communities alongside those on the margins and bringing a range of spiritual and religious practices into historical focus. Focusing on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the essays address matters central to the study of religion in history, in particular texts and traditions of authority, interreligious discourse, and religious practice and experience. Some examine mainstream communities and traditions, others explore individuals who crossed religious or confessional boundaries, and still others study the peripheries of what is considered orthodox religious tradition. Encompassing a wide geographical as well as chronological scope, Faithful Narratives illustrates the persistence of central themes and common analytical challenges for historians working in all periods.

New Directions in the Radical Reformation

New Directions in the Radical Reformation PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004546227
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Get Book Here

Book Description
The eight essays in this volume approach the study of the Radical Reformation from new perspectives and challenge some of the basic assumptions of the field. Some critique and problematize the typologies developed to distinguish Reformation radicals from each other and from the Magisterial Reformers. Others apply an equally iconoclastic approach to existing scholarship on the relationship between religious change and socio-political radicalism in early modern Europe. A final group concentrate specifically on revising the history of Anabaptism by tracing its long-term development across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and recovering the lives of normal Anabaptists to write a true social history of the movement that avoids relying on the biographies and prescriptive writings of its leadership.

Ideas and Cultural Margins in Early Modern Germany

Ideas and Cultural Margins in Early Modern Germany PDF Author: Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754665687
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Get Book Here

Book Description
Exploring the methodologies of cultural transmission in early modern Germany, influenced by the scholarship of H.C. Erik Midelfort, this volume brings together a broad range of essays from leading European and North American scholars. By examining the ways in which people expected ideas to influence others, where influenced themselves, and the unexpected ways that ideas could permeate through society, the volume as a whole adds significant features to our conceptual map of life in early modern Europe.

They Flew

They Flew PDF Author: Carlos M. N. Eire
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300259808
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 513

Get Book Here

Book Description
An award-winning historian's examination of impossible events at the dawn of modernity and of their enduring significance Accounts of seemingly impossible phenomena abounded in the early modern era--tales of levitation, bilocation, and witchcraft--even as skepticism, atheism, and empirical science were starting to supplant religious belief in the paranormal. In this book, Carlos Eire explores how a culture increasingly devoted to scientific thinking grappled with events deemed impossible by its leading intellectuals. Eire observes how levitating saints and flying witches were as essential a component of early modern life as the religious turmoil of the age, and as much a part of history as Newton's scientific discoveries. Relying on an array of firsthand accounts, and focusing on exceptionally impossible cases involving levitation, bilocation, witchcraft, and demonic possession, Eire challenges established assumptions about the redrawing of boundaries between the natural and supernatural that marked the transition to modernity. Using as his case studies stories about St. Teresa of Avila, St. Joseph of Cupertino, the Venerable María de Ágreda, and three disgraced nuns, Eire challenges readers to imagine a world animated by a different understanding of reality and of the supernatural's relationship with the natural world. The questions he explores--such as why and how "impossibility" is determined by cultural contexts, and whether there is more to reality than meets the eye or can be observed by science--have resonance and lessons for our time.

The Fabulous Dark Cloister

The Fabulous Dark Cloister PDF Author: Tiffany J. Werth
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421404400
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book Here

Book Description
Romances were among the most popular books in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries among both Protestant and Catholic readers. Modeled after Catholic narratives, particularly the lives of saints, these works emphasized the supernatural and the marvelous, themes commonly associated with Catholicism. In this book, Tiffany Jo Werth investigates how post-Reformation English authors sought to discipline romance, appropriating its popularity while distilling its alleged Catholic taint. Charged with bewitching readers, especially women, into lust and heresy, romances sold briskly even as preachers and educators denounced them as papist. Protestant reformers, as part of their broader indictment of Catholicism, sought to redirect certain elements of the Christian tradition, including this notorious literary genre. Werth argues that through the writing and circulation of romances, Protestants repurposed their supernatural and otherworldly motifs in order to “fashion,” as Edmund Spenser wrote, godly "vertuous" readers. Through careful examinations of the period’s most renowned romances—Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia, Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, William Shakespeare’s Pericles, and Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania—Werth illustrates how post-Reformation writers struggled to transform the literary genre. As a result, the romance, long regarded as an archetypal form closely allied with generalized Christian motifs, emerged as a central tenet of the religious controversies that divided Renaissance England.