Religious Studies Category
Some Disjointed Thoughts on Democracy, Plato, and the Christian Roots of Liberalism
Posted on August 7, 2015 2 Comments
Yesterday I was inspired by someone dear to me to write out these thoughts. In a rather uncomfortable disagreement, this person, after I had complained about the direction society was moving (a common aghast of the postgraduate), they simply retorted, “that’s democracy.” My first impulse was to aggressively and disdainfully disagree. But I knew this […]
Progress as a Secularized Eschatology
Posted on August 29, 2014 Leave a Comment
Nineteenth-century Victorian scientific naturalists had a particular conception of scientific and social progress. In his “The Progress of Science 1837-1887” (1887), Thomas Henry Huxley argued that a “revolution” had taken place, both politically and socially, in the modern world. In brief, scientific progress came with the adoption of a naturalistic approach to studying nature. Any […]
“Religion” as a Modern Invention
Posted on July 29, 2014 1 Comment
Upon returning from my trip to England, I was delighted to find Amazon’s trademark smiling boxes waiting for me. I had ordered a number books before my trip, and among them was Brent Nongbri’s Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (2013). I first came across Nongbri’s book in a footnote in Peter Harrison’s […]
Building Bridges and Burning Down Myths
Posted on December 23, 2013 Leave a Comment
In their highly stimulating and engrossing book, W. Mark Richardson and Wesley J. Wildman’s (eds.) Religion and Science: History, Method, Dialogue (1996), offer an interdisciplinary approach to “building bridges” between religion and science. The various sections of the book correspond to three major kinds of inquiry: historical studies, methodological analyses, and substantive dialogue. Each section […]
Science and Religion: Some New Historical Perspectives: A Word on Narratives
Posted on November 21, 2013 Leave a Comment
Having discussed the implications of recent literature that categorizes both “science” and “religion” as nineteenth-century social constructs, the same argument is applied to the scientific revolution by Margaret J. Osler in “Religion and the Changing Historiography of the Scientific Revolution.” The idea that there was a “Scientific Revolution” between 1500 and 1700 and that this […]
Desecularizing the World
Posted on June 2, 2013 2 Comments
Continuing the trend from the last post, in this post we will be looking at a different book, The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (1999), edited by Peter L. Berger. Few scholars have contributed so much to our understanding of religion and modernity as Berger. Beginning in the 1960s, he advanced […]