We have long been taught that the Enlightenment was an attempt to free
the world from the clutches of Christian civilization and make it safe
for philosophy. The lesson has been well learned. In today's culture
wars, both liberals and their conservative enemies, inside and outside
the academy, rest their claims about the present on the notion that
the Enlightenment was a secularist movement of philosophically driven
emancipation. Historians have had doubts about the accuracy of this
portrait for some time, but they have never managed to furnish a
viable alternative to it-for themselves, for scholars interested in
matters of church and state, or for the public at large. In this book,
William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram bring together recent
scholarship from distinguished experts in history, theology, and
literature to make clear that God not only survived the Enlightenment
but thrived within it as well. The Enlightenment was not a radical
break from the past in which Europeans jettisoned their intellectual
and institutional inheritance. It was, to be sure, a moment of great
change, but one in which the characteristic convictions and traditions
of the Renaissance and Reformation were perpetuated to the point of
transformation, in the wake of the Wars of Religion and during the
early phases of globalization. The Enlightenment's primary imperatives
were not freedom and irreligion but peace and prosperity. As a result,
Enlightenment could be Christian, communitarian, or authoritarian as
easily as it could be atheistic, individualistic, or libertarian.
Honing in on the intellectual crisis of the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries while moving from Spinoza to Kant and from India
to Peru,_ God in the Enlightenment _takes a prism to the age of
lights.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780190602109
Publisert
2020
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Oxford University Press Academic US
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter