The Science of Religion in Britain, 1860-1915 PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download The Science of Religion in Britain, 1860-1915 PDF full book. Access full book title The Science of Religion in Britain, 1860-1915 by Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813930510
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327
Get Book Here
Book Description
Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay argues that, although the existence and significance of the science of religion has been barely visible to modern scholars of the Victorian period, it was a subject of lively and extensive debate among nineteenth-century readers and audiences. She shows how an earlier generation of scholars in Victorian Britain attempted to arrive at a dispassionate understanding of the psychological and social meanings of religious beliefs and practices—a topic not without contemporary resonance in a time when so many people feel both empowered and threatened by religious passion—and provides the kind of history she feels has been neglected. Wheeler-Barclay examines the lives and work of six scholars: Friedrich Max Müller, Edward B. Tylor, Andrew Lang, William Robertson Smith, James G. Frazer, and Jane Ellen Harrison. She illuminates their attempts to create a scholarly, non-apologetic study of religion and religions that drew upon several different disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, the classics, and Oriental studies, and relied upon contributions from those outside as well as within the universities. This intellectual enterprise—variously known as comparative religion, the history of religions, or the science of religion—was primarily focused on non-Christian religions. Yet in Wheeler-Barclay’s study of the history of this field within the broad contexts of Victorian cultural, intellectual, social, and political history, she traces the links between the emergence of the science of religion to debates about Christianity and to the history of British imperialism, the latter of which made possible the collection of so much of the ethnographic data on which the scholars relied and which legitimized exploration and conquest. Far from promoting an anti-religious or materialistic agenda, the science of religion opened up cultural space for an exploration of religion that was not constricted by the terms of contemporary conflicts over Darwin and the Bible and that made it possible to think in new and more flexible ways about the very definition of religion.
Author: Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813930510
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327
Get Book Here
Book Description
Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay argues that, although the existence and significance of the science of religion has been barely visible to modern scholars of the Victorian period, it was a subject of lively and extensive debate among nineteenth-century readers and audiences. She shows how an earlier generation of scholars in Victorian Britain attempted to arrive at a dispassionate understanding of the psychological and social meanings of religious beliefs and practices—a topic not without contemporary resonance in a time when so many people feel both empowered and threatened by religious passion—and provides the kind of history she feels has been neglected. Wheeler-Barclay examines the lives and work of six scholars: Friedrich Max Müller, Edward B. Tylor, Andrew Lang, William Robertson Smith, James G. Frazer, and Jane Ellen Harrison. She illuminates their attempts to create a scholarly, non-apologetic study of religion and religions that drew upon several different disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, the classics, and Oriental studies, and relied upon contributions from those outside as well as within the universities. This intellectual enterprise—variously known as comparative religion, the history of religions, or the science of religion—was primarily focused on non-Christian religions. Yet in Wheeler-Barclay’s study of the history of this field within the broad contexts of Victorian cultural, intellectual, social, and political history, she traces the links between the emergence of the science of religion to debates about Christianity and to the history of British imperialism, the latter of which made possible the collection of so much of the ethnographic data on which the scholars relied and which legitimized exploration and conquest. Far from promoting an anti-religious or materialistic agenda, the science of religion opened up cultural space for an exploration of religion that was not constricted by the terms of contemporary conflicts over Darwin and the Bible and that made it possible to think in new and more flexible ways about the very definition of religion.
Author: Aileen Fyfe
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226276465
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 343
Get Book Here
Book Description
Threatened by the proliferation of cheap, mass-produced publications, the Religious Tract Society issued a series of publications on popular science during the 1840s. The books were intended to counter the developing notion that science and faith were mutually exclusive, and the Society's authors employed a full repertoire of evangelical techniques—low prices, simple language, carefully structured narratives—to convert their readers. The application of such techniques to popular science resulted in one of the most widely available sources of information on the sciences in the Victorian era. A fascinating study of the tenuous relationship between science and religion in evangelical publishing, Science and Salvation examines questions of practice and faith from a fresh perspective. Rather than highlighting works by expert men of science, Aileen Fyfe instead considers a group of relatively undistinguished authors who used thinly veiled Christian rhetoric to educate first, but to convert as well. This important volume is destined to become essential reading for historians of science, religion, and publishing alike.
Author: Peter J. Bowler
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226068595
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 494
Get Book Here
Book Description
Although much has been written about the vigorous debates over science and religion in the Victorian era, little attention has been paid to their continuing importance in early twentieth-century Britain. Reconciling Science and Religion provides a comprehensive survey of the interplay between British science and religion from the late nineteenth century to World War II. Peter J. Bowler argues that unlike the United States, where a strong fundamentalist opposition to evolutionism developed in the 1920s (most famously expressed in the Scopes "monkey trial" of 1925), in Britain there was a concerted effort to reconcile science and religion. Intellectually conservative scientists championed the reconciliation and were supported by liberal theologians in the Free Churches and the Church of England, especially the Anglican "Modernists." Popular writers such as Julian Huxley and George Bernard Shaw sought to create a non-Christian religion similar in some respects to the Modernist position. Younger scientists and secularists—including Rationalists such as H. G. Wells and the Marxists—tended to oppose these efforts, as did conservative Christians, who saw the liberal position as a betrayal of the true spirit of their religion. With the increased social tensions of the 1930s, as the churches moved toward a neo-orthodoxy unfriendly to natural theology and biologists adopted the "Modern Synthesis" of genetics and evolutionary theory, the proposed reconciliation fell apart. Because the tensions between science and religion—and efforts at reconciling the two—are still very much with us today, Bowler's book will be important for everyone interested in these issues.
Author: John Glendening
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134088345
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278
Get Book Here
Book Description
Criticism about the neo-Victorian novel — a genre of historical fiction that re-imagines aspects of the Victorian world from present-day perspectives — has expanded rapidly in the last fifteen years but given little attention to the engagement between science and religion. Of great interest to Victorians, this subject often appears in neo-Victorian novels including those by such well-known authors as John Fowles, A. S. Byatt, Graham Swift, and Mathew Kneale. This book discusses novels in which nineteenth-century science, including geology, paleontology, and evolutionary theory, interacts with religion through accommodations, conflicts, and crises of faith. In general, these texts abandon conventional religion but retain the ethical connectedness and celebration of life associated with spirituality at its best. Registering the growth of nineteenth-century secularism and drawing on aspects of the romantic tradition and ecological thinking, they honor the natural world without imagining that it exists for humans or functions in reference to human values. In particular, they enact a form of wonderment: the capacity of the mind to make sense of, creatively adapt, and enjoy the world out of which it has evolved — in short, to endow it with meaning. Protagonists who come to experience reality in this expansive way release themselves from self-anxiety and alienation. In this book, Glendening shows how, by intermixing past and present, fact and fiction, neo-Victorian narratives, with a few instructive exceptions, manifest this pattern.
Author: Frank M. Turner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521372572
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392
Get Book Here
Book Description
A volume of essays which constitutes a major overview of the Victorian intellectual enterprise.
Author: Richard J. Helmstadter
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804716024
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 422
Get Book Here
Book Description
A Stanford University Press classic.
Author: Christopher Lane
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300168810
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 245
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Victorian era was the first great ";Age of Doubt"; and a critical moment in the history of Western ideas. Leading nineteenth-century intellectuals battled the Church and struggled to absorb radical scientific discoveries that upended everything the Bible had taught them about the world. In "The Age of Doubt," distinguished scholar Christopher Lane tells the fascinating story of a society under strain as virtually all aspects of life changed abruptly. In deft portraits of scientific, literary, and intellectual icons who challenged the prevailing religious orthodoxy, from Robert Chambers and Anne Bronte; to Charles Darwin and Thomas H. Huxley, Lane demonstrates how they and other Victorians succeeded in turning doubt from a religious sin into an ethical necessity. The dramatic adjustment of Victorian society has echoes today as technology, science, and religion grapple with moral issues that seemed unimaginable even a decade ago. Yet the Victorians'; crisis of faith generated a far more searching engagement with religious belief than the ";new atheism"; that has evolved today. More profoundly than any generation before them, the Victorians came to view doubt as inseparable from belief, thought, and debate, as well as a much-needed antidote to fanaticism and unbridled certainty. By contrast, a look at today';s extremes-;from the biblical literalists behind the Creation Museum to the dogmatic rigidity of Richard Dawkins';s atheism-;highlights our modern-day inability to embrace doubt."
Author: Julie Melnyk
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244
Get Book Here
Book Description
Religion permeated almost every aspect of Victorian life and culture, from Parliamentary politics to issues of marriage and sexuality, from class relations to literature and the life of the imagination. In order to understand Victorian culture and writings, modern readers need to understand Victorian religion in its public and its private aspects. But much in Victorian religious life can be baffling for modern readers. The sheer diversity of Victorian religious experience is one source of confusion. Also, doctrinal disputes and discoveries in science or textual criticism that loomed so large for Victorian Christians are now hard for most people to appreciate. The Anglican Church, its hierarchy, and its enormous range of ecclesiastical titles open up further opportunities for confusion. Here, Melnyk offers a lively, thorough introduction to Victorian religious life, including the period between 1828 and 1901. Making sense of the diversity of religious thought and experience in Victorian Britain, she provides readers with a clear understanding of its role in the family and for the individual, the community, and society at large. This entertaining, readable introduction to Victorian religious life and controversies is ideal for anyone interested in Victorian life, literature, and culture.
Author: Peter Harrison
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022618448X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315
Get Book Here
Book Description
Peter Harrison takes what we think we know about science and religion, dismantles it, and puts it back together again in a provocative new way. It is a mistake to assume, as most do, that the activities and achievements that are usually labeled religious and scientific have been more or less enduring features of the cultural landscape of the West. Harrison, by setting out the history of science and religion to see when and where they come into being and to trace their mutations over timereveals how distinctively Western and modern they are. Only in the past few hundred years have religious beliefs and practices been bounded by a common notion and set apart from the secular. And the idea of the natural sciences as discrete activities conducted in isolation from religious and moral concerns is even more recent, dating from the nineteenth century. Putting the so-called opposition between religion and science into historical perspective, as Harrison does here for the first time, has profound implications for our understanding of the present and future relations between them. "
Author: Thomas Dixon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199295514
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 169
Get Book Here
Book Description
The debate between science and religion is never out of the news: emotions run high, fuelled by polemical bestsellers like The God Delusion and, at the other end of the spectrum, high-profile campaigns to teach "Intelligent Design" in schools. Yet there is much more to the debate than the clash of these extremes. As Thomas Dixon shows in this balanced and thought-provoking introduction, a whole range of views, subtle arguments, and fascinating perspectives can be found on this complex and centuries-old subject. He explores the key philosophical questions that underlie the debate, but also highlights the social, political, and ethical contexts that have made the tensions between science and religion such a fraught and interesting topic in the modern world. Dixon emphasizes how the modern conflict between evolution and creationism is quintessentially an American phenomenon, arising from the culture and history of the United States, as exemplified through the ongoing debates about how to interpret the First-Amendment's separation of church and state. Along the way, he examines landmark historical episodes such as the Galileo affair, Charles Darwin's own religious and scientific odyssey, the Scopes "Monkey Trial" in Tennessee in 1925, and the Dover Area School Board case of 2005, and includes perspectives from non-Christian religions and examples from across the physical, biological, and social sciences. About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.
