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This “brilliant and gut-wrenching” (The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice) takedown of American gun culture argues that the nation’s founders did not intend the Second Amendment to guarantee an individual right to bear arms—and that this distortion of the record is an urgent threat to democracy. “At once eye-opening and enraging, One Nation Under Guns is that rare book that can help change the way we live in this country.”—Eddie S. Glaude Jr., bestselling author of Begin Again A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR More than a hundred lives are lost to firearms every day in America. The cost is more than the numbers—it is the fear, the anxiety, the dread of public...
The book combines intellectual, cultural and social history to address a major area of encounter between Christianity and British culture: the world of leisure.
It is widely assumed that science represents the enemy of religious faith. The Soul of Doubt proposes an alternative cause of unbelief: the Christian conscience. Dominic Erdozain argues that the real solvents of orthodoxy in the modern period have been concepts of moral equity and personal freedom generated by Christianity itself.
At the heart of the Soviet experiment was a belief in the impermanence of the human spirit: souls could be engineered; conscience could be destroyed. The project was, in many ways, chillingly successful. But the ultimate failure of a totalitarian regime to fulfill its ambitions for social and spiritual mastery had roots deeper than the deficiencies of the Soviet leadership or the chaos of a "command" economy. Beneath the rhetoric of scientific communism was a culture of intellectual and cultural dissidence, which may be regarded as the "prehistory of perestroika." This volume explores the contribution of Christian thought and belief to this culture of dissent and survival, showing how religi...
This open access book draws on conceptual resources ranging from medieval scholasticism to postmodern theory to propose a new understanding of secular time and its mediation in nineteenth-century technological networks. Untethering the concept of secularity from questions of religion and belief, it offers an innovative rethinking of the history of secularisation that will appeal to students, scholars, and everyone interested in secularity, Victorian culture, the history of technology, and the temporalities of modernity. Stefan Fisher-Hyrem (PhD) is a historian and Senior Academic Librarian at the University of Agder, Norway.
Sport is extremely popular. This ground-breaking book explains why. It shows that sport has everything to do with our deepest identity. It is where we resonate with the most-basic nature of reality. A Brief Theology of Sport sweeps across the fields of church history, philosophy and Christian doctrine, drawing the reader into a creative vision of sport. The book begins with an examination of how the Church has approached sport in the past, before turning to consider sport on the basis of the divine act of creation. In doing so, Harvey is able to distinguish sport from all other human activities, identifying it as a set-aside sphere in which the unnecessary-but-meaningful nature of life is celebrated. This constructive proposal is used to shed light on a wide range of issues in sport, including the role of competition, professionalization and celebrity culture today. As such, A Brief Theology of Sport constitutes a significant contribution to our understanding of the value of sport in human life. No one who reads this book will look at sport in the same way again.
Histories of unbelief typically emphasise external challenges to religious faith, such as the natural sciences, historical criticism, or changes in social conditions and lifestyle. This study accepts much of the chronology of the traditional account of 'secularization' but it proposes a very different cause: conscience. Tracing the liberation and expansion of the Protestant conscience from Martin Luther to Karl Marx, this book argues that Christian concepts of moral equity and personal freedom have consistently acted as the most powerful solvents of religious orthodoxy.
An illuminating history of how religious belief lost its uncontested status in the West This landmark book traces the history of belief in the Christian West from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, revealing for the first time how a distinctively modern category of belief came into being. Ethan Shagan focuses not on what people believed, which is the normal concern of Reformation history, but on the more fundamental question of what people took belief to be. Shagan shows how religious belief enjoyed a special prestige in medieval Europe, one that set it apart from judgment, opinion, and the evidence of the senses. But with the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation, the question of just w...
At a recent conference entitled Ancient Wisdom-Anglican Futures, theologians from across the denominational spectrum considered the question, What does it mean to inhabit the 'Great Tradition' authentically? As an expression of what C. S. Lewis called Deep Church, Anglicanism offers a test case of Tradition with a capital T in late modernity. Of particular interest is the highly dynamic transmission that has preserved a recognizable Anglican Way over the centuries. The process has been enlivened through constant negotiation and exchange with surprising convergences that have brought new life and direction. The contributors to this volume show how profitable and commodious (as Richard Hooker has said) the Great Tradition can be innurturing the worship, communal life, and mission of the Church. But it often demonstrates how hard it is to uphold the varied integrities of historic faith in the contemporary marketplace of religion and, especially, among evangelicals who continueto follow the Canterbury Trail.
It demonstrates that developments in technology, commerce, and infrastructure in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were closely linked to theological shifts and changing modes of religious life as British evangelicals developed new methods of spreading the gospel and new forms of personal religious practice.