When the Canaanite Conquest Met the Enlightenment: How Christian Apologists of the English Enlightenment Harmonized the Biblical Canaanite Conquest with the Moral Values of the Eighteenth Century

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
pp. 579-602
Author(s):  
Daniel K. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
Divine Order

AbstractThis article examines British and American Christian apologists’ reinterpretation of the biblical account of the Canaanite conquest in response to concerns about natural rights and ethical behavior that emerged from the English Enlightenment. Because of Enlightenment-era assumptions about universal rights, a new debate emerged in Britain and America in the eighteenth century about whether the divine order for the biblical Israelites to slaughter the Canaanites was morally right. The article argues that intellectually minded Christians’ appropriation of Enlightenment values to reframe their interpretation of the biblical narrative (often in response to skeptical attacks from writers classified as deists) demonstrates that in the English-speaking world, Enlightenment rationalism and Christian orthodoxy frequently reinforced each other and were not opposing forces. Though many orthodox Christians repudiated traditional Calvinist interpretations of the biblical Canaanite conquest, they defended the authority of the biblical narrative by drawing on Enlightenment-era assumptions about natural rights to provide justifications for what some skeptics considered morally objectionable divine orders in the Bible. By doing so, they set the framework for the continued synthesis of natural rights and rationality with a biblically centered Protestantism in the early nineteenth-century English-speaking world and especially in the United States.

Two Revolutions: France 1789 and Mexico 1810

1990 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaime E. Rodríguez O.
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The North ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Global Vision ◽  
The Rich

It is sometimes alleged that “history is written by the victors.” Perhaps, it is more accurate to say that “history is written by the rich.” The wealthy nations of the North Atlantic world, which have tended to dominate scholarship in modern times, have molded events in their own image. Thus, when considering the eighteenth century transformations, scholars with “global” vision such as Peter Gay, Jacques Godechot, and R.R. Palmer have interpreted the “Enlightenment” and the “Age of Democratic Revolutions” broadly, including both the experience of the United States and of select Western European nations. Yet these cosmopolitan scholars find no place for Spain or Latin America in their works. Gay describes Spain as the “other side of the eighteenth century,” while both Godechot and Palmer end the age of revolutions in 1799, thus excluding the Spanish and the Spanish American revolutions which occurred in the early nineteenth century.

The Relations of Enlightenment and Religious Revival in Central Europe and in the English-Speaking World

1979 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 281-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
W.R. Ward
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Religious Revival ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Good Conscience ◽  
English Speaking World

Fifty years ago it was possible to write with a good conscience about relations between pietism and enlightenment; everyone knew what these spiritual entities were, and knew also that it was not proper (in the German-speaking world at least) to talk of religious revival until the enlightenment was almost spent. It is only in the historiography of the German Democratic Republic that any of these certainties seems to remain; there the enlightenment retains pride of place as the progenitor of progress and human liberation, with an honourable pedigree extending deep into the middle ages, its relations with ständisch politics or with pietist religion capable in principle of rational discussion. Contrast with this the sneer of A. J. P. Taylor in England that the enlightenment is now only of interest to those who are still worried about Christianity, and with the problems of definition encountered by historians in America and West Germany. To Henry May, the enlightenment in America is capable of structural analysis which reveals stages of development, each with its own objectives. The notion that enlightenment was a simple concept, patient of blanket condemnation, was a calumny put about by frightened conservatives, including many of evangelical views at the end of the eighteenth century.

The Estado da India and the Estado do Brasil. Opportunities for Research in Portuguese Overseas History

Itinerario ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 116-129
Author(s):  
A.J.R. Russell-Wood
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Political History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
American Historical Association ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
Interest In Research

In this year marking the sexcentenary of the birth of Prince Henry, known erroneously to the English speaking world as ‘the Navigator’, and the 450th anniversary of the Portuguese arrival in Japan, it is fitting to take stock of what has been achieved and what remains concerning research on Portuguese overseas history. In November 1969 a conference was held at the Newberry Library in Chicago to ‘stimulate in the United States scholarly interest in research on Brazil's colonial past’. In November 1978 an International Seminar on Indo-Portuguese History was held in Goa occasioned by ‘an awareness of a relative stagnation in the field of Indo-Portuguese historical studies, especially in India’. This was prompted by the feeling of a dearth of new interpretations, shortage of studies in English, and neglect of political history, biography and social and economic history. Whereas the tone of the Newberry Library meeting was upbeat as to what junior scholars were achieving, and Charles Boxer pointed with pride to scholarly accomplishments since 1950, by 1984 a lecture to mark the occasion of the centennial of the American Historical Association noted grounds for concern regarding studies in the United States on colonial Brazil and this situation has deteriorated further during the decades of the 80s and early 90s. By way of contrast, in 1981 Charles Boxer noted the vitality of the Estado da India in its broadest geographical meaning as a subject for historical research by Portuguese and how ‘after years — I might even say centuries – of neglect by foreigners, the history of the old Estado da India has lately come into its own in the wider world’. This was seconded by M.N. Pearson who noted that ‘Goan historiography seems to be on the verge of a renaissance’.

THE “HARD FORM” OF SCULPTURE: MARBLE, MATTER AND SPIRIT IN EUROPEAN SCULPTURE FROM THE ENLIGHTENMENT THROUGH ROMANTICISM

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 455-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
LINDA WALSH
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
External Appearance ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Familiar World ◽  
A Site ◽  
Aesthetic Values

The apparently distinct aesthetic values of naturalism (a fidelity to external appearance) and neoclassicism (with its focus on idealization and intangible essence) came together in creative tension and fusion in much late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century sculptural theory and practice. The hybrid styles that resulted suited the requirements of the European sculpture-buying public. Both aesthetics, however, created difficulties for the German Idealists who represented a particularly uncompromising strain of Romantic theory. In their view, naturalism was too closely bound to the observable, familiar world, while neoclassicism was too wedded to notions of clearly defined forms. This article explores sculptural practice and theory at this time as a site of complex debates around the medium's potential for specific concrete representation in a context of competing Romantic visions (ethereal, social and commercial) of modernity.

Libraries in Africa: Pioneers, Policies, Problems. By ANTHONY OLDEN. Lanham, MD., and London: Scarecrow Press, 1996 (UK agent: Shelwing Ltd., Folkestone). Pp. xx + 170. £35.65 (ISBN 0-8108-3093-0).

1997 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-177
Author(s):  
A. D. ROBERTS
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
University Of Illinois ◽  
Carnegie Corporation ◽  
Library Research ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Per Se ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The University

This expensive little book, originally a thesis for the University of Illinois, is an artless but sometimes perceptive account of certain library endeavours in British East and West Africa, based on archival and library research in Britain and the United States. It is not a history of libraries per se so much as a study of instances of external aid to the development of libraries beyond the sphere of teaching institutions. In the 1930s, one such source – as in so much of the English-speaking world – was the Carnegie Corporation. Grants to Kenya underpinned a system of circulating libraries, the depot for which was housed in the McMillan Memorial Library, Nairobi; membership was confined to whites until 1958. In Lagos, Alan Burns, as chief secretary, secured a grant to start an unsegregated but fee-charging library: in 1934 just 43 of its 481 members were African. The grant ended in 1935, but the library was still going forty years later.

scholarly journals Race before Darwin: Variation, adaptation and the natural history of man in post-Enlightenment Edinburgh, 1790–1835

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-350
Author(s):  
BILL JENKINS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Human Variation ◽  
Adaptive Responses ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The University

AbstractThis paper draws on material from the dissertation books of the University of Edinburgh's student societies and surviving lecture notes from the university's professors to shed new light on the debates on human variation, heredity and the origin of races between 1790 and 1835. That Edinburgh was the most important centre of medical education in the English-speaking world in this period makes this a particularly significant context. By around 1800 the fixed natural order of the eighteenth century was giving way to a more fluid conception of species and varieties. The dissolution of the ‘Great Chain of Being’ made interpretations of races as adaptive responses to local climates plausible. The evidence presented shows that human variation, inheritance and adaptation were being widely discussed in Edinburgh in the student circles around Charles Darwin when he was a medical student in Edinburgh in the 1820s. It is therefore no surprise to find these same themes recurring in similar form in the evolutionary speculations in his notebooks on the transmutation of species written in the late 1830s during the gestation of his theory of evolution.

John Edwards (ed.), Language in Canada. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xvi, 504.

2000 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-299
Author(s):  
Monica Heller
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
First Languages ◽  
French And English ◽  
Official Languages ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
Language Profiles ◽  
Aboriginal Languages

This volume is meant as a companion piece to three previous volumes published by Cambridge on language in various parts of the English-speaking world (the volume on the United States, edited by Charles Ferguson and Shirley Brice Heath, appeared in 1981, followed in 1984 by one on the British Isles edited by Peter Trudgill, and in 1991 by a volume on Australia edited by Suzanne Romaine). This collection contains 26 short articles, divided into three sets. The first set attempts to provide an overview of sociolinguistic issues in Canada from historical, demographic, and policy perspectives. The second set treats aboriginal languages and the two official languages, French and English; this set includes two articles on language teaching – restricted, however, to the teaching of international languages, mainly as first languages, and to the teaching of French as a second language through immersion methods. The third set offers language profiles of each of Canada's ten provinces, as well as of its two (now three) territories. The organization of the book is meant to provide different angles on sociolinguistic issues in Canada, but unfortunately the result too often is that material is either repeated or consistently left out.

The Early Reception of Karl Barth's Theology in Britain: A Supplementary View

2001 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 504-527
Author(s):  
D. Densil Morgan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
The United States ◽  
Church History ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Theological Method ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
To Come ◽  
English Speaking World

One of the axioms of modern church history in Britain is that whereas Anglo-Saxon thought was on the whole impervious to the appeal and achievement of Karl Barth, it was among the Scots alone that the Swiss theologian's theories found any real resonance and creative response. Stephen Sykes in a 1979 volume of studies in Barth's theological method, mentions the somewhat bewildered response to his publications in Britain and the United States between 1925 and the mid-1980s and goes on to say that ‘from now onwards it is in Scotland that Barth is taken with the greatest seriousness in the English speaking world’. In a later volume of centenary essays, R. H. Roberts traced the reception of the theology of Karl Barth ‘in the Anglo-Saxon world’ by quoting the evidence of such late 1920s and early 1930s figures as J. H. Morrison, John McConnachie, H. R. Mackintosh, Norman Porteous and A. J. MacDonald to claim that ‘it is clear from an early stage that enthusiasm for Barth's work … was primarily a Scottish attribute’. In another essay in the same volume, Colin Gunton contrasted the usual English attitude to Barth with that of theologians from other lands: ‘For the most part and despite exceptions’, he claimed, ‘the English find it difficult to come to terms with the theology of Karl Barth’, while in a companion volume Geoffrey Bromiley noted that this was hardly the case for theologians and pastors ‘in such diverse lands as Switzerland, Germany, France, Holland, Hungary, and Scotland’. Again and again, it is Scotland which is emphasised as being the place within the British Isles where Barth's ideals took root.

ALEXANDER GEDDES AT THE LIMITS OF THE CATHOLIC ENLIGHTENMENT

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK GOLDIE
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Catholic Priest ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Catholic Enlightenment ◽  
French Republicanism ◽  
The Revolution ◽  
Episcopal Authority

ABSTRACTIn the closing decades of the eighteenth century, Alexander Geddes (1737–1802) pressed Catholicism and the Enlightenment to the limits of their tolerance. A Catholic priest, he fled the censure of his Scottish superiors and settled in England, where he became a spokesman for the Catholic laity in their controversies with the hierarchy, and mingled in radical Protestant circles among the ‘Rational Dissenters’. In three domains, he appalled his contemporaries. First, Geddes prepared a new version of the Bible, which threatened to undermine the integrity of revelation, and offered mythopoeic accounts of the Old Testament that influenced Blake and Coleridge. Second, he embraced ‘ecclesiastical democracy’, denouncing papal and episcopal authority and proclaiming British Catholics to be ‘Protesting Catholic Dissenters’. Third, he applauded French republicanism, and adhered to the Revolution long after Edmund Burke had rendered such enthusiasm hazardous. Geddes was an extreme exponent of the Catholic Enlightenment, yet equally he was representative of several characteristic strands of eighteenth-century Catholicism, which would be obliterated in the ultramontane revanche of the following century.

Tatiana's Garden: Noble Sensibilities and Estate Park Design in the Romantic Era

Slavic Review ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-349
Author(s):  
Priscilla R. Roosevelt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Garden Design ◽  
Universal Form ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Estate Owner ◽  
Park Design

In “Baryshnia-krestianka” Aleksandr Pushkin introduces us to Grigorii Ivanovich Muromskii, a “nastoiashchii russkii barin” reduced to living on his one remaining estate, who squanders his remaining wealth creating an “Angliiskii sad.” The gardening revolution of eighteenth century England, inspired by the overgrown ruins of Rome and Naples and by a new feeling for untrammeled nature, set in motion a vogue for informal, picturesque landscaping that swept across Europe, altered garden design in the United States, and reached Russia in the reign of Catherine as the harbinger of a later, more pervasive aristocratic Anglomania. As Muromskii's landscaping proclivities suggest, by the early nineteenth century the English or “irregular” garden had become a universal form for the Russian country estate, its basic motifs carried out on whatever scale an estate owner could afford.

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