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Why did science emerge in the West and how did scientific values come to be regarded as the yardstick for all other forms of knowledge? Stephen Gaukroger shows just how bitterly the cognitive and cultural standing of science was contested in its early development. Rejecting the traditional picture of secularization, he argues that science in the seventeenth century emerged not in opposition to religion but rather was in many respects driven by it. Moreover, science did not present a unified picture of nature but was an unstable field of different, often locally successful but just as often incompatible, programmes. To complicate matters, much depended on attempts to reshape the persona of th...
In exploring ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s visits to Britain, Brendan McNamara expands the jigsaw of our knowledge of how “the east came west”. More importantly, by exploring the visits through the motives of those that received him, The Reception of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Britain: East Comes West demonstrates that the “cultic milieu” thesis is incomplete. Focusing on a number of well-known Edwardian Protestant reformers, the book demonstrates that the arrival of eastern forms of religions in Britain penetrated more mainstream Christian forms. This process is set within significant developments in the early formation of the study of religions, the rise of science and orientalism. All these elements are shown to be linked together. Significantly the work argues that the advent of World War One changed the direction of new forms of religion leading to a ‘forgetfulness’ that has lasted until the present time.
Ellen Ross has collected impressions from some of the half a million women involved in philanthropy by the 1890s, most of them active in the London slums. The contributors include Sylvia Pankhurst and Beatrice Webb, as well as many more less well known figures.
To the Victorians, the Chinese were invariably "inscrutable." The meaning and provenance of this impression—and, most importantly, its workings in nineteenth-century Protestant missionary encounters with Chinese religion—are at the center of Eric Reinders's Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies, an enlightening look at how missionaries' religious identity, experience, and physical foreignness produced certain representations of China between 1807 and 1937. Reinders first introduces the imaginative world of Victorian missionaries and outlines their application of mind-body dualism to the dualism of self and other. He then explores Western views of the Chinese language, especially ritual language, and Chinese ritual, particularly the kow-tow. His work offers surprising and valuable insight into the visceral nature of the Victorian response to the Chinese—and, more generally, into the nineteenth-century Western representation of China.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Victorians were seeking rational explanations for the world in which they lived. The radical ideas of Charles Darwin had shaken traditional religious beliefs. Sigmund Freud was developing his innovative models of the conscious and unconscious mind. And anthropologist James George Frazer was subjecting magic, myth, and ritual to systematic inquiry. Why, then, in this quintessentially modern moment, did late-Victorian and Edwardian men and women become absorbed by metaphysical quests, heterodox spiritual encounters, and occult experimentation? In answering this question for the first time, The Place of Enchantment breaks new ground in its consideration of ...
In nineteenth-century Britain, a large number of prominent Anglican and Presbyterian Evangelicals rejected the idea that salvation meant "going to heaven when you die." Instead, they proposed that God would establish his kingdom on earth, renewing the creation and reanimating embodied humans to live in a world of science and progress. This book introduces the writings and activities of these women and men, among whom were counted the ardent social reformer Lord Shaftesbury, the highly-respected clergyman Edward Bickersteth, the popular author Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, and the General Secretary of the Evangelical Alliance, Thomas Rawson Birks. The book shows that the catalyst for such theolo...
Examines Mendelssohn's relationship to the past, shedding light on the construction of historical legacies that, in some cases, served to assert German cultural supremacy only two decades after the composer's death.
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