Revealing sparks: John Wesley and the religious utility of electrical healing

2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-362 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAOLA BERTUCCI
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Medical Applications ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Social Composition ◽  
Therapeutic Uses ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Fear Of God

In the eighteenth century, dramatic electrical performances were favourite entertainments for the upper classes, yet the therapeutic uses of electricity also reached the lower strata of society. This change in the social composition of electrical audiences attracted the attention of John Wesley, who became interested in the subject in the late 1740s. The paper analyses Wesley's involvement in the medical applications of electricity by taking into account his theological views and his proselytizing strategies. It sets his advocacy of medical electricity in the context of his philanthropic endeavours aimed at the sick poor, connecting them to his attempts to spread Methodism especially among the lower classes. It is argued that the healing virtues of electricity entailed a revision of the morality of electrical experiment which made electric sparks powerful resources for the popularization of the Methodist way of life, based on discipline, obedience to established authorities and love and fear of God.

Utopien des Übergangs. Don Quixote und Zarathustra

2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-180
Author(s):  
Henry Kerger
Keyword(s):  
Don Quixote ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Ultimate Question ◽  
Law And Morality ◽  
New Form ◽  
Ecce Homo ◽  
Good And Evil

Abstract The subject of this article points beyond a purely literary or literary-historical approach. The question is, whether and how a human being is able to change the (social) conditions of their life by changing himself through transition into another form of existence. In order to overcome established (social) conditions and one’s self, it is necessary to begin with a vision, a utopian dream. Those who pursue the utopian dream of overcoming their current (social) conditions must acknowledge their own good and evil, that is, their position vis-à-vis equality and justice, law and morality. The person itself, and its personality, is revealed in the relation between the utopia of changing its current way of life and its social reality. The ultimate question is: what is the essence of humanity, the ecce homo? Both the transition into a new form of being and the utopian dream differ decisively in Don Quixote and Zarathustra. It is not my concern to compare them as literary figures.

The Nun Immena and the Foundation of the Abbey of Beaulieu: a Woman’s Prospects in the Carolingian Church

1990 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 27-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Martindale
Keyword(s):  
Religious Life ◽  
Social World ◽  
Rite Of Passage ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Economic Support ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fear Of God ◽  
Louis The Pious ◽  
Made In

To our daughter Immena whom we give to God and to be clothed as a nun (sanctimonialis)… for the fear of God, and so that souls fighting for Christ can receive a remedy for their sins through our intermission …’. An aristocratic couple decide to give two of their children (a boy, as well as this girl) to the religious life, and their intention is recorded in a private charter. Lands which have been set aside for the economic support of Immena and her brother are listed at length; then the document concludes with the statement that the two donors, Count Rodulf and Aiga, his wife, ‘requested this concession to be made in the month of November in the tenth year of the reign of our most serene lord Louis, Emperor Augustus’ (that is, the Emperor Louis the Pious, AD 823). A girl is being given to God. Her entry into this new way of life is solemnized by a ceremony in which she will be dressed in clothes appropriate for her withdrawal from the ‘profane’ world: she will almost certainly be veiled in black or purple—although at this time that was a matter for debate in ecclesiastical legislation. The charter may also be interpreted as recording a ‘rite of passage’ which seems to signal Immena’s ‘aggregation’ into a new sacred community, and her separation from the social world of her kin.

Comment

1999 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 229-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. W. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Intellectual Challenge

The Articles By David Sorkin and Edmund Kern have a common starting point. Both address aspects of the reform movement that unfolded in the Habsburg lands under Maria Theresa. They underline an argument made by much recent work on the subject that the movement in question, though committed to substantial changes in the social and cultural fabric, was fundamentally Catholic in its inspiration and only loosely and partially aligned with either the great intellectual challenge of the Enlightenment or the fuller and later program of reconstruction that has come to be known in the Austrian context as Josephinism. Both writers acknowledge the powerful contributory stimulus from abroad to the new climate of ideas generated in the monarchy by the travails of the mid-eighteenth century, but submit that those ideas besically arose out of a domestic evolution, especially within ecclesiastical circles.

The Church of England in the eighteenth century

2002 ◽  
Vol 75 (187) ◽  
pp. 47-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Viviane Barrie
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
The South ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Church

Abstract This article is an attempt to study the position of the Church of England in one particular region – the diocese of London in the south-east of England – throughout the eighteenth century. It considers three problems which the author came across when first researching the subject several years ago: firstly, the social and economic status of parishes; secondly, clerical recruitment and the careers of the clergy; and finally, the pastoral life and work of the Church, especially through the corpus of episcopal visitations.

A “Religious Society under Heaven”: John Wesley and the Identity of Methodism

1986 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick Dreyer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Dual Role ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Interests ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Town

Methodism figures as a kind of puzzle in the history of eighteenth-century England. Even writers who are not unsympathetic to John Wesley sometimes find his thought incoherent and confused. “The truth should be faced,” writes Frank Baker, “that Wesley (like most of us) was a bundle of contradictions.” Albert Outler celebrates Wesley's merits not as a thinker but as a popularizer of other men's doctrines. His Wesley was “by talent and intent, afolk-theologian: an eclectic who had mastered the secret of plastic synthesis, simple profundity, the common touch.” One man's eclecticism, however, is another man's humbug. The very qualities that Outler admires are those that E. P. Thompson condemns inThe Making of the English Working Class. Here Methodist theology is dismissed as “opportunist, anti-intellectual, and otiose.” Wesley “appears to have dispensed with the best and selected unhesitatingly the worst elements of Puritanism.” In doctrinal terms Methodism was not a plastic synthesis but “a mule.” What offends Thompson is not so much Wesley's incoherence as the social ambivalence of the movement that he had created. In class terms Methodism was, Thompson says, “hermaphroditic.” It attracted both masters and men. It catered to hostile social interests. It served a “dual role, as the religion of both the exploiters and the exploited.” The belief that Methodism is socially incomprehensible and perhaps in some sense socially illegitimate is not original with Thompson. Early statements of this assumption can be found in Richard Niebuhr'sThe Social Sources of Denominationalismand in John and Barbara Hammond's The Town Labourer.

Utility and Audience in Eighteenth-Century Chemistry: Case Studies of William Cullen and Joseph Priestley

1988 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. V. Golinski
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Practical Applications ◽  
Social Settings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Degree Of Coherence ◽  
Cultural Climate ◽  
Joseph Priestley ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind ◽  
William Cullen

Historians of science are less inclined now than they were a few years ago to regard chemistry as having sprung full-grown from the mind of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. Many of the contours of pre-Lavoisierian chemistry have recently been mapped, its Newtonian and Stahlian theoretical traditions have been delineated, and the degree of coherence enforced on the subject by its didactic role has been argued. In addition, the social prominence and cohesion achieved by chemists in various national contexts, such as France, Scotland and Germany, have been investigated. Karl Hufbauer (arguing specifically from the case of Germany) and Christoph Meinel have proposed that the cultural climate of the European Enlightenment provided the language and the social settings in which chemistry could be detached from its previous role as a service-art for medicine, and presented as a science with diverse practical applications.

Beauty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John H. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Evolutionary Developmental Biology ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Philosophic Tradition ◽  
Independent Property

On the subject of beauty, theorists generally agree only on rudimentary points about the term: that it commends on aesthetic grounds, has absolute and comparative forms, applies to parts, aspects and wholes, and so forth. Beyond this, dispute prevails. Realists hold that judgements of beauty ascribe to their subjects either a response-independent property inherent in things or a capacity of things to affect respondents in a way that preserves objectivity. In both cases acute problems arise in defining the property and in explaining how it can be known. Classical Platonism holds that beauty exists as an ideal supersensible ‘form’, while eighteenth-century theorists view it as a quasi-sensory property. Kant’s transcendental philosophy anchors the experience of beauty to the basic requirements of cognition, conferring on it ‘subjective universality and necessity’. Sceptics complain that the alleged property is merely a reflection of aesthetic pleasure and hence lacks objective standing. Partly due to its preoccupation with weightier matters, the philosophic tradition has not yet developed a theory of beauty as fully and deeply as it has, say, theories in the domain of morality. For most of the twentieth-century the generally subjectivistic and relativistic bent of the social sciences and humanities, as well as the scorn heaped on beauty by avant-gardism in the arts, discouraged concentration on beauty. However, the turn of the century has brought a remarkable reawakening of interest in theorizing about beauty. The burgeoning fields of cognitive science and evolutionary developmental biology have played a part.

Beauty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John H. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Transcendental Philosophy ◽  
Sensory Property ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Philosophic Tradition

On the subject of beauty, theorists generally agree only on rudimentary points about the term: that it commends on aesthetic grounds, has absolute and comparative forms, and so forth. Beyond this, dispute prevails. Realists hold that judgments of beauty ascribe to their subjects either a nonrelational property inherent in things or a capacity of things to affect respondents in a way that preserves objectivity. In both cases acute problems arise in defining the property and in explaining how it can be known. Classical Platonism holds that beauty exists as an ideal supersensible Form, while eighteenth-century theorists view it as a quasi-sensory property. Kant’s transcendental philosophy anchors the experience of beauty to the basic requirements of cognition, conferring on it ‘subjective universality and necessity’. Sceptics complain that the alleged property is merely a reflection of aesthetic pleasure and hence lacks objective standing. Partly due to its preoccupation with weightier matters, the philosophic tradition has never developed any theory of beauty as fully and deeply as it has, say, theories in the domain of morality. Comparative neglect of the subject has been encouraged by the generally subjectivistic and relativistic bent of the social sciences and humanities, as well as by avant-gardism in the arts. However, several recent and ambitious studies have given new impetus to theorizing about beauty.

The Congregation of the Great Synagogue in Warsaw: Its Changing Social Composition and Ideological Affiliations

1998 ◽  
pp. 112-126
Author(s):  
Alexander Guterman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish Population ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Ongoing Process ◽  
Social Composition ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face

This chapter details how the congregation of the Great Synagogue in Warsaw reflected the social dynamics that had transformed the face of Warsaw Jewry. They included an increasingly large proportion of Jews whose way of life distanced them from the devoutly Orthodox masses. Many showed clear signs of acculturation, Polonization, and an ongoing process of assimilation, although such behaviour may not have been motivated by any clear ideology of integration into the Polish nation. While many of the Great Synagogue's leaders tried to influence the views of the congregation, it was the members themselves who shaped the image of the synagogue. Their loyalties represented the spectrum of allegiances in the Jewish population of Warsaw at the time, and as Jews from the countryside joined their brethren in the capital, the Great Synagogue came to reflect the social and ideological transformations taking place among Polish Jewry in the early part of the twentieth century, especially between the two world wars.

Alfenus Varus and the Faculty of Advocates: Roman Visions and the Manners that were Fit for Admission to the Bar in the Eighteenth Century

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W Cairns
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Social Composition ◽  
The Social

The Bar was a socially exclusive institution in most countries, even though it was in theory an open one. This chapter focuses on two curious episodes towards the end of the eighteenth century, when the Faculty unsuccessfully attempted to exclude two men — John Wright and Robert Forsyth — from membership. The debates among the Faculty arising from these episodes show the deployment of the language of manners, sentiment, and politeness, as well as argument about the traditional Roman models of what it was to be an advocate. To some extent, we can view these debates as helping redefine not only the advocates’ perception of themselves, whereby they moved away from identification with the Roman jurists, but also the role of Roman law in the training of the Bar. At the same time, the social composition of the Faculty was changing.

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