scholarly journals Introduction

2006 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 1-2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eamon Duffy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Early History ◽  
History Of Christianity ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The People ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Normative Value

Since the Enlightenment, historians and theorists of religion have often worked with a two-tiered model of Christianity, in which the pure belief and practice of the enlightened few was perceived as constantly under pressure and in danger of corruption or distortion from the grosser religion of the multitude. This imagined polarity between the sophisticated religion of the elite and the crude religion of the people at large underlay much Enlightenment historiography, most notably Gibbon’s account of the early history of Christianity, and has remained potent in such influential twentieth century works as Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic. Even the future Cardinal Newman could contrast ‘what has power to stir holy and refined souls’ with the ‘religion of the multitude’ which he once described as ‘ever vulgar and abnormal’. Newman, as more than one contributor to this volume shows, had in fact an acute sense of the value, even the normative value, of popular religious perceptions, but those implicit polarities and the historical condescension they encode have been recurrent and assertive ghosts, haunting the writing of religious history, in contrasts between official and unofficial religion, or those between clerical and lay, literate and illiterate, rich and poor, hierarchical and charismatic.

scholarly journals Art. VIII.—Notes on the Early History of Northern India

1888 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-363
Author(s):  
J. F. Hewitt
Keyword(s):  
Religious History ◽  
Early History ◽  
Northern India ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Written Materials

The most noteworthy part of the history of India must always be that which tells how the people known as Hindoos, speaking languages derived from the Sanskrit, and living in the country between the Himalayas and the Vindhyan Mountains, and in the Valley of the Indus, were formed from originally heterogeneous elements into a nation, and which dfurther describes the origin and development of their system of government and their early religious history. The written materials available for these purposes are unusually abundant, but vary greatly in value.

Reinventing Ramanand: Caste and History in Gangetic India

1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 549-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
William R. Pinch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Religious History ◽  
North India ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Indian History ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Literature And Religion ◽  
History Of

According to Sir George Grierson, one of the pre-eminent Indologists of the early twentieth century, Ramanand led ‘one of the most momentous revolutions that have occurred in the religious history of North India.’Yet Ramanand, the fourteenth-century teacher of Banaras, has been conspicuous by his relative absence in the pages of English-language scholarship on recent Indian history, literature, and religion. The aims of this essay are to reflect on why this is so, and to urge historians to pay attention to Ramanand, more particularly to the reinvention of Ramanand by his early twentieth-century followers, because the contested traditions thereof bear on the vexed issue of caste and hierarchy in colonial India. The little that is known about Ramanand is doubly curious considering that Ramanandis, those who look to Ramanand for spiritual and community inspiration, are thought to comprise the largest and most important Vaishnava monastic order in north India. Ramanandis are to be found in temples and monasteries throughout and beyond the Hindi-speaking north, and they are largely responsible for the upsurge in Ram-centered devotion in the last two centuries. A fairly recent anthropological examination of Ayodhya, currently the most important Ramanand pilgrimage center in India, has revealed that Ramanandi sadhus, or monks, can be grouped under three basic headings: tyagi (ascetic), naga (fighting ascetic), and rasik (devotional aesthete).4 The increased popularity of the order in recent centuries is such that Ramanandis may today outnumber Dasnamis, the better-known Shaiva monks who look to the ninth-century teacher, Shankaracharya, for their organizational and philosophical moorings.

Back to the Future: Modernist Architecture and All That Heaven Allows

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria L. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Colonial Revival ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Living Space ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modernist Architecture ◽  
Domestic Environments ◽  
Cultural Connotations

Since every stage of Ron Kirby and Carey Scott's relationship is marked by alterations in their domestic environments, Chapter 6 ("Back to the Future: Modernist Architecture and All That Heaven Allows") explores some of the conflicting social and cultural connotations that have been encoded into their respective dwellings. For instance, Ron's progressive renovation of the Old Mill recapitulates the history of twentieth-century Modernist architecture in reverse. The final incarnation of this structure evokes Le Corbusier's Machine Age villas of the 1920s rather than Frank Lloyd Wright's more organic mid-century Modernist aesthetic, which dissents from the dominant 1950s American view of the ideal home by suggesting a less materialistic way of life. By contrast, Carey's suburban Colonial Revival residence represents the negation of the freedom from traditional conventions that Ron's living space ultimately implies.

Gay Affections

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard P. Loughlin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gay Identity ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Gay Identities

This chapter considers how gay identities—and so gay affections—were formed in the course of the twentieth century, building on the late nineteenth-century invention of the ‘homosexual’. It also considers earlier construals of same-sex affections and the people who had them, the soft men and hard women of the first century and the sodomites of the eleventh. It thus sketches a history of continuities and discontinuities, of overlapping identities and emotional possibilities. The chapter resists the assumption that gay identity and experience can be reduced to anything less than the multitude of gay people, and that as Christians they have to give an account of themselves in a way that heterosexual Christians do not. The chapter warns against thinking gay identity undone in Christ.

The Chronology of the Sena Kings of Bengal

1930 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
P. C. Barat
Keyword(s):  
Great Powers ◽  
Early History ◽  
Late Professor ◽  
Indian History ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of

Since the beginning of the present century students of Indian history have been making strenuous efforts to collect such materials as would help them to reconstruct the early history of Bengal. But so far they have not succeeded in ascertaining definitely even the dates of those kings of the Sena Dynasty who governed dominions of large extent and took rank among the great powers. The discovery of the era with which is associated the name of Laksmana Sena Deva induced several well-known archaeologists to bring its initial date to bear on the history of Bengal. From the scanty data which were then available the late Professor Kielhorn after much laborious calculation definitely settled that the Lakṣmaṇa Samvat or La-Sam began in A.D. 1119–20. According to him the La-Sam was an ordinary Southern (Kārttikādi) year with Amānta scheme of lunar fortnights; and the first date of the era was October 7, A.D. 1119. As this date has not been made use of in reconstructing the chronology of the Sena kings, it may be accepted for the present; and time will show whether the conclusion of the learned doctor is right or wrong. But the assertion of the historians that the initial date of the Lakṣmaṇa Sena era synchronizes with the commencement of Lakṣmaṇa Sena's reign is quite untenable and can never be accepted as true. In Indian history there is no era which does not commemorate some epoch-making event which affected the people of the country in general. And ordinary succession to the throne in its normal course, as was the case with Lakṣmaṇa Sena Deva, does not justify the inauguration of an era in place of the usual regnal years to which the people in those days were accustomed.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Hans Joas
Keyword(s):  
Religious History ◽  
The Future ◽  
False Sense ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

This book is an attempt to divest of its enduring enchantment one of the concepts central to the way in which modernity understands itself, namely that of disenchantment. As we will see, this concept is profoundly ambiguous, as are contrasting terms such as “enchantment” and “re-enchantment,” which also began to circulate after it was coined. Such ambiguity may lead to confusion and has, in fact, often done so in this case. Conveyed covertly along with the term itself, this ambiguity may also serve to establish a false sense of certainty. This undoubtedly applies to the narrative of a progressive process of disenchantment extending across millennia. If my argument is correct, we cannot simply project this narrative forward into the future. What we need, then, is an alternative to it, or perhaps several such alternatives—new narratives of religious history as it is intertwined with the history of power, narratives that might supersede that of disenchantment....

Church Historians of the Early Twentieth Century: Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930)

2001 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. H. C. FREND
Keyword(s):  
Historical Development ◽  
Principal Factor ◽  
Early History ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
History Of Christianity ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Great Complexity

As in every other branch of learning, the study of the early history of Christianity has undergone massive changes during the last century. This has been due not only to the vast accumulation of knowledge through new discoveries, but to new approaches to the subject, together with the rise of archaeology as a principal factor in providing fresh information. The study of the early Church has as a result moved steadily from dogma to history, from attempts to interpret divine revelation through the development of doctrinal orthodoxy down the ages, to research into the historical development of an earthly institution of great complexity and of great significance in the history of mankind over the past two thousand years.

The Legacy of Peggy Hiscock: European Women’s Contribution to the Growth of Christianity in Zambia

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 316-333
Author(s):  
Jonathan Kangwa
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Missionaries ◽  
History Of Christianity ◽  
Methodist Church ◽  
Missionary Movement ◽  
Church And Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church ◽  
European Women

The history of Christianity in Africa contains selected information reflecting patriarchal preoccupations. Historians have often downplayed the contributions of significant women, both European and indigenous African. The names of some significant women are given without details of their contribution to the growth of Christianity in Africa. This article considers the contributions of Peggy Hiscock to the growth of Christianity in Zambia. Hiscock was a White missionary who was sent to serve in Zambia by the Methodist Church in Britain. She was the first woman to have been ordained in the United Church of Zambia. Hiscock established the Order of Diaconal Ministry and founded a school for the training of deaconesses in the United Church of Zambia. This article argues that although the nineteenth- and twentieth-century missionary movement in Africa is associated with patriarchy and European imperialism, there were European women missionaries who resisted imperialism and patriarchy both in the Church and society.

On the Applicability of Mathematics to Nature: Roger Bacon and his Predecessors

1982 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Lindberg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
History Of Mathematics ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Mathematical Physics ◽  
The Past ◽  
Applicability Of Mathematics ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of

Roger Bacon has often been victimized by his friends, who have exaggerated and distorted his place in the history of mathematics. He has too often been viewed as the first, or one of the first, to grasp the possibilities and promote the cause of modern mathematical physics. Even those who have noticed that Bacon was more given to the praise than to the practice of mathematics have seen in his programmatic statements an anticipation of seventeenth-century achievements. But if we judge Bacon by twentieth-century criteria and pronounce him an anticipator of modern science, we will fail totally to understand his true contributions; for Bacon was not looking to the future, but responding to the past; he was grappling with ancient traditions and attempting to apply the truth thus gained to the needs of thirteenth-century Christendom. If we wish to understand Bacon, therefore, we must take a backward, rather than a forward, look; we must view him in relation to his predecessors and contemporaries rather than his successors; we must consider not his influence, but his sources and the use to which he put them.

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