Brad Gregory's new book on the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation is generating a fair bit of online discussion, and has already been reviewed in the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Times Higher. It's a brave book. It breaks out of chronological and disciplinary comfort zones in a way that few historians dare in these days of ever increasing specialisation. It's brave in another way too. Historians are typically inclined to sidestep normative debates about the true, the good and the beautiful. Gregory does not. This is a moral (and theological) history of Western modernity, which ends with a call for the desecularization of the university. It's already being compared with two other bracing works by Catholic thinkers, Macintyre's After Virtue, and Taylor's A Secular Age.
Of course, Protestants are likely to have some significant reservations about aspects of the argument. For a thoughtful engagement along these lines see Dale van Kley's review in Books and Culture:
http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2012/marapr/rotstarted.html
The book's homepage is here:
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674045637
Showing posts with label secularisation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label secularisation. Show all posts
Monday, 12 March 2012
Secularization revisited
The classic secularization paradigm has gone into decline over the past couple of decades. Many sociologists are no longer convinced that modernity is 'the engine dragging the gods into retirement' (as Rodney Stark and Roger Finke once put it). The current issue of the Historical Journal carries two historiographical reviews which further qualify modernist assumptions. The most ambitious and wide ranging is Jonathan Clark's essay, 'Secularization and modernization: the failure of a "grand narrative"'. Clark surveys a very wide range of historical research and is characteristically learned and provocative. Jeffrey Morris focusses on modern Britain in his piece on 'Secularization and religious experience'.
Both are worth reading alongside David Martin's latest book, The Future of Christianity (Ashgate, 2011). Martin was one of the earliest and most persistent critics of the traditional paradigm, but he has been careful to retain a modified theory of secularization, one that avoids strong teleology. He is wary of the bald claim that secularization has 'gone into reverse'. The book distils a lifetime of learning and reflection on topics like Pentecostalism, Eastern Europe, master narratives and religious violence.
Both are worth reading alongside David Martin's latest book, The Future of Christianity (Ashgate, 2011). Martin was one of the earliest and most persistent critics of the traditional paradigm, but he has been careful to retain a modified theory of secularization, one that avoids strong teleology. He is wary of the bald claim that secularization has 'gone into reverse'. The book distils a lifetime of learning and reflection on topics like Pentecostalism, Eastern Europe, master narratives and religious violence.
Thursday, 15 December 2011
The TLS & the scandal of the Evangelical mind
This week's TLS makes great reading for anyone interested in Christianity and History. Tom Wright has a two page spread on new studies of Jesus by Joseph Ratzinger (aka the Pope), Maurice Casey and Bruce Fisk. Anthony Kenny has a characteristically fair-minded review of a history of philosophical thought on the soul written by two Christian philosophers. The classicist Kate Cooper considers Peter Leithart's provocative study, Defending Constantine. David Martin reviews a book on secularisation.
Back in 1995, the historian Mark Noll lamented the scandal of the Evangelical mind. This week's TLS suggests that the health of the Evangelical mind might be improving (as Noll himself admits in Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind). Exhibit A is Tom Wright, the world's most renowned New Testament scholar; he reviews Bruce Fisk, who teaches at Westmont College, and presents a clever popularisation of recent work on the historical Jesus; the philosophers Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro (whom Kenny reviews) have both been involved with the Evangelical Philosophical Society; Peter Leithart is a Reformed theologian with a voracious intellectual appetite; the opening review engages with The Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science, co-edited by David Livingstone FBA, who has worked closely with Noll on the Evangelical response to Darwinism; and the book on secularisation is co-edited by Timothy Shah, a scholar of foreign relations who has been leading a two-year project on 'the opening of the Evangelical mind':
http://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/38/
This is not bad for a single issue of the TLS, and it shows how British and American Evangelicals (of various stripes) are producing first-rate scholarship in biblical studies, philosophy of religion, the history of science, sociology and foreign affairs.
Wright's review of the Pope's Life of Jesus can be read online:
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article842102.ece
Back in 1995, the historian Mark Noll lamented the scandal of the Evangelical mind. This week's TLS suggests that the health of the Evangelical mind might be improving (as Noll himself admits in Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind). Exhibit A is Tom Wright, the world's most renowned New Testament scholar; he reviews Bruce Fisk, who teaches at Westmont College, and presents a clever popularisation of recent work on the historical Jesus; the philosophers Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro (whom Kenny reviews) have both been involved with the Evangelical Philosophical Society; Peter Leithart is a Reformed theologian with a voracious intellectual appetite; the opening review engages with The Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science, co-edited by David Livingstone FBA, who has worked closely with Noll on the Evangelical response to Darwinism; and the book on secularisation is co-edited by Timothy Shah, a scholar of foreign relations who has been leading a two-year project on 'the opening of the Evangelical mind':
http://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/38/
This is not bad for a single issue of the TLS, and it shows how British and American Evangelicals (of various stripes) are producing first-rate scholarship in biblical studies, philosophy of religion, the history of science, sociology and foreign affairs.
Wright's review of the Pope's Life of Jesus can be read online:
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article842102.ece
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