The Wonder of Rational Christianity

2021 ◽  
pp. 59-87
Author(s):  
Gretchen Murphy
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Charles Taylor ◽  
Liberal Conception ◽  
Aesthetic Sense

This chapter examines Sally Sayward Wood’s 1800 novel Julia and the Illuminated Baron in the context of the Bavarian Illuminati crisis, arguing that Wood engaged this conflict in order to address concerns about secularity in the early republic. These concerns stemmed from several developments: the rising liberal conception of rational Christianity, the New England Federalist conception of established religion as an efficient means of promoting morality in a republic, and the fragilization of faith that Charles Taylor has associated with religious pluralism. The chapter argues that Wood’s use of gothic form sought to stave off feared secularization by combining an aesthetic sense of religious wonder with Enlightened rationalism. The chapter interprets this blend as a postsecular expression of intertwined modernity and Protestantism that was essential to Wood’s Federalist conception of religion in a republic. The chapter also considers the theological and political influence of Wood’s father Nathanial Barrell’s Sandemanisnism on Wood’s conception of rational Christianity.

scholarly journals Understanding the Essex Junto: Fear, Dissent, and Propaganda in the Early Republic

2015 ◽  
Vol 88 (4) ◽  
pp. 623-656
Author(s):  
Dinah Mayo-Bobee
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
The Federalist

Historians have never formed a consensus over the Essex Junto. In fact, though often associated with New England Federalists, propagandists evoked the Junto long after the Federalist Party’s demise in 1824. This article chronicles uses of the term Essex Junto and its significance as it evolved from the early republic through the 1840s.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Gretchen Murphy
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Partisan Politics ◽  
Women Authors ◽  
Judith Sargent Murray ◽  
Autobiographical Fiction ◽  
Lydia Sigourney ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
Democratic Life

Beginning with a discussion of partisan politics in Catharine Sedgwick’s juvenile letters and her autobiographical fiction, the introduction makes a case for considering five prominent New England women authors (Sedgwick, Judith Sargent Murray, Sally Sayward Wood, Lydia Sigourney, and Harriet Beecher Stowe) as profoundly influenced by and invested in a Federalist understanding of religion in a republic. This investment, which treats Protestant Christianity as a force necessary for public morality in democratic life, shaped their writing careers and forms an unacknowledged contribution to political and religious debates about church and state in the early republic and nineteenth century. Situating this argument as a contribution to scholarship in literary studies, postsecular studies, and political history, the introduction explains contributions to each area.

Mind Cure and Mental Therapeutics in the Late 19th-Century United States

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Schmit
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New England ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
New Thought ◽  
Non Invasive ◽  
Therapeutic Philosophy

Mind cure, or mental healing, was a late 19th-century American healing movement that extolled a metaphysical mind-over-matter approach to the treatment of illness. Emerging in New England in the mid-19th century out of a mix of mesmerism and metaphysical philosophies, due to its effectiveness, by the 1880s it achieved national recognition. Three individuals are credited with creating and popularizing mental (or metaphysical) healing: Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, Warren Felt Evans, and Mary Baker Eddy. Mind cure was appealing because it helped treat ailments for which the medicines of the day were ineffective, especially problems with the “nerves.” Mental healers employed non-invasive mental and spiritual methods to treat ailing people, called mental therapeutics. As a practice and therapeutic philosophy, mind cure is historically noteworthy because it shaped the earliest forms of psychotherapy in the United States, advanced therapeutic work within the realm of mind-body medicine, birthed the influential New Thought movement, and helped set the stage for the beginnings of religious pluralism and the positive reception of Asian meditation teachers in the West.

Charismatic Revelations

2021 ◽  
pp. 185-202
Author(s):  
Douglas H. Shantz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Charles Taylor ◽  
Personal Commitment ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Direct Encounter ◽  
The Impact

The notion of ‘charismatic revelations’ is a modern one, reflecting the individualism and theological conflicts arising from the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Charismatic revelations can be found in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Protestant movements such as German Pietism and English Evangelicalism and are notable in twentieth-century Pentecostalism and charismatic renewal. Charles Taylor has described the burden of individualism that came with the break-up of Christendom under the impact of the Reformation and the rise of modern science. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there arose ‘a new Christianity of personal commitment’ (Taylor 2007, 143–144). In German Pietism and English Methodism the stress was upon feeling, emotion, and a living faith, reflecting the logic of Enlightenment ‘subjectification’. The predicament of these believers and their religious individualism was marked by spiritual instability, melancholy, and doubt. This predicament provides the context for understanding the rise of charismatic revelations. Under the burden of growing secularism, religious pluralism, and existential angst and isolation, a host of modern believers found meaning and hope through experiences of direct encounter with God that included his personal speaking addressed to their inmost being.

The “African Enslavement of Anglo-Saxon Minds”: The Beechers as Critics of Augustine

2003 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 569-592 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter J. Thuesen
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Social Reformer ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Catharine Beecher ◽  
African Context

Harriet Beecher Stowe, who achieved international fame for her 1852 antislavery novel,Uncle Tom's Cabin, is best known to historians of American religious thought as a critic of New England Calvinism and its leading light, Jonathan Edwards. But in airing her frustrations with the Puritan tradition, Stowe also singled out a much earlier source of the problem: Augustine, the fifth-century bishop of Hippo. At his worst, Augustine typified for Stowe not only theological rigidity but also the obdurate refusal of the male system-builders to take women's perspectives seriously. Consequently, in the New England of the early republic, when “the theology of Augustine began to be freely discussed by every individual in society, it was the women who found it hardest to tolerate or assimilate it.” In leveling such criticism, Stowe echoed her elder sister Catharine Beecher, a prominent educator and social reformer, whose well-known writings on the role of women in the home have often overshadowed her two companion volumes of theology, in which she devotes more attention to Augustine than to any other figure. Yet for all her extended critiques of Augustinian themes, Beecher buried her most provocative rhetorical flourish, as one might conceal a dagger, in the last endnote on the last page of the second volume. Seizing upon the African context of Augustine's career as a metaphor for his deleterious influence on Christian theology, she concluded that reasonable people have a duty to resist the “African enslavement of Anglo-Saxon minds” no less than to combat the “Anglo-Saxon enslavement of African bodies.”

Land Policy in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire: the Sale of Crown Lands in the Ceded Islands, 1763–1783

1984 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 549-574 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. H. Murdoch
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Land Policy ◽  
Land Values ◽  
Average Size ◽  
Traditional Pattern ◽  
Returns On Investment

Amid the continuing re-evaluations of how the eighteenth-century British empire functioned, the role of land policy remains neglected. Yet it would not be disputed that land was the primary colonial resource. For colonists, its acquisition and exploitation was the most obvious route to wealth, privilege and political power, while in Britain, for those with access to government favour, colonial land was an investment opportunity for making monetary profit from political influence. By the mid eighteenth century, however, opportunities deriving from possession of colonial land varied a good deal. Proprietorial rights in Maryland and Pennsylvania, largely worthless up to the 1730s, rapidly became highly lucrative. In New England, mounting pressure on the supply of land had sharply forced up land values but diminished the average size of landholdings. For both colonists and British investors seeking new opportunities the highest returns on investment in land were likely to be made in the royal colonies of America and the West Indies, where title to land lay in the crown and its acquisition and tenure were subject to regulations which collectively amounted to crown policy. As it had developed over one hundred and fifty years, crown land policy offered terms which were relatively generous and restrictions which were easy to evade. Its study therefore, and particularly examination of attempts by the crown to change the traditional pattern, contribute to a clearer understanding of the imperial nexus in the period before the American Revolution.

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