The Resurrection of the Body

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-260
Author(s):  
Martin Rheinheimer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Medical Progress ◽  
Material Life ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Bodily Resurrection ◽  
Church Paintings ◽  
Written Materials

This article analyses visual and written materials which indicate some of the interesting changes that the authoritative, Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection underwent in modernity. These materials document a growing gap between the authoritative creed and people’s beliefs, which cannot, I argue, be attributed solely to intellectual changes, but which was also highly reliant on changes in material living conditions and medical and hygienic progress. The article suggests that the belief in the resurrection of the body was quite firm in the general population even in the eighteenth century - the century of the Enlightenment, but that it faded towards the end of the nineteenth century due to changes in the material life conditions, such as medical progress and a decline in child mortality. My sources are gathered from the predominantly Lutheran former Duchy of Schleswig, and particularly from northern Friesland, and consist of personal letters, sermons, and visual sources such as church paintings and gravestone images. By means of selected examples, I investigate what the authoritative dogma of belief in the resurrection of the body meant to ordinary people. I trace the causes of this belief, and I discuss why it faded towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Average Man

2019 ◽  
pp. 163-180
Author(s):  
Steven J. Osterlind
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Probability Theory ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Crime Statistics ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Bell Shaped Curve

This chapter discusses the history and innovations that prompted people toward quantification after the Congress of Vienna ended the French Revolution and the era of Napoleon; this marked the beginning of the Enlightenment, wherein tremendous intellectual developments happened, specifically, in codifying probability theory. Two curious inventions had an unexpected effect on advancing quantification: the stereoscope and the slide rule. Each advanced mathematical development, and both were great levelers of society, bringing together experienced mathematicians and ordinary people. Jacques Quetelet, a mid-nineteenth-century French astronomer and mathematician, pursued the intention of bringing quantification into the contemporary society, following his mentor Laplace. He attempted to describe “l’homme moyen” (“the average man”). He collected data on all kinds of social phenomena (e.g., crime statistics). His work led to the display of the bell-shaped curve. Also described is his idea of plotting data as a means to understand phenomena and hence preserve social order over chaos.

Disease and Civilization: A Scottish Atlantic Network of Physicians in the Enlightenment

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Benjamin Rush ◽  
American Physician ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Current

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.

Yakir Englander and Avi Sagi, Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse, trans. Batya Stein. Boston: Academic Press, 2015. 298 pp.

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Body ◽  
Academic Press ◽  
Jewish State ◽  
Bodily Integrity ◽  
The Enlightenment

This chapter reviews the book Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (2015), by Yakir Englander and Avi Sagi, translated by Batya Stein. Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse examines the positions and debates about “sexuality” in one area of the Jewish public sphere in Israel—religious Jewry—and specifically that of the Israeli religious Zionists who, following the notion of “Torah ’im Derech Eretz” first formulated by Samson Raphael Hirsch as an answer to the Enlightenment, are now struggling in a Jewish state to combine halakhic commitment with the values of modernity. Englander and Sagi focus on questions of sexuality as defined by rabbinic notions of gender attraction and bodily integrity/autonomy: those dealing with homosexuality, lesbianism, masturbation, and the relationships between the sexes.

Newman's Early Roman Catholic Legacy, 1845-1854

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Michael Shea
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
European Continent ◽  
The Past ◽  
Immaculate Conception ◽  
Over Time

For the past several decades, scholars have stressed that the genius of John Henry Newman remained underappreciated among his Roman Catholic contemporaries, and in order to find the true impact of his work, one must look to the century after his death. This book takes direct aim at that assumption. Examining a host of overlooked evidence from England and the European continent, Newman’s Early Legacy tracks letters, recorded conversations, and obscure and unpublished theological exchanges to show how Newman’s 1845 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine influenced a cadre of Catholic teachers, writers, and Church authorities in nineteenth-century Rome. The book explores how these individuals then employed Newman’s theory of development to argue for the definability of the new dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary during the years preceding the doctrine’s promulgation in 1854. Through numerous twists and turns, the narrative traces how the theory of development became a factor in determining the very language that the Roman Catholic Church would use in referring to doctrinal change over time. In this way, Newman’s Early Legacy uncovers a key dimension of Newman’s significance in modern religious history.

PLATO'S PHAEDO: ARE THE PHILOSOPHERS’ PLEASURES OF LEARNING PURE PLEASURES?

2019 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 566-584
Author(s):  
Georgia Mouroutsou
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Real Domain

Though Plato's Phaedo does not focus on pleasure, some considerable talk on pleasure takes place in it. Socrates argues for the soul's immortality and, while doing so, hopes to highlight to his companions how important it is to take care of our soul by focussing on the intellect and by neglecting the bodily realm as far as is possible in this life. Doing philosophy, so his argument goes, is something like dying, if we grant that death is the separation of the soul from the body and notice that genuine philosophers wish nothing else than to be detached from the bodily realm. For indulging into bodily pleasures has detrimental consequences on the soul, impeding the search of truth and distorting reality, and so philosophers should undertake to purify themselves from all bodily concerns and gratifications and love the objects of learning and knowledge without deviation and distraction. On the contrary, ordinary people fall for the bodily realm as the only real domain that should therefore be of priority and of their earnest concern.

“The Blackness of Darkness”

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-22
Author(s):  
Lara Langer Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Tourist Attraction ◽  
White Writers ◽  
The World ◽  
Newspaper Articles ◽  
Travel Accounts

Abstract This article considers Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave as an unexpected site for nineteenth-century theorizations of racialized Blackness. Mammoth Cave became a major tourist attraction in the 1840s, generating a host of guidebooks, travel accounts, magazine illustrations, panoramas, newspaper articles, and fiction. Crucial to its fame was the fact that the guides who led visitors through the cave were enslaved men. This article argues that white writers responded to the guides’ knowledge of the cave by reframing it as affinity. In doing so, they transformed Mammoth Cave’s subterranean darkness into a manifestation of racialized Blackness. But the writers’ racialization of Mammoth Cave also had a tendency to slip out of their control. As they associated its spatial darkness with racialized Blackness, the literal underground of Mammoth Cave flickered into an underground that was more than literal—a mysterious Black formation, of unguessed dimensions and certain danger, beneath the world as they knew it. Finally, the article asks what we can glean from the literature of Mammoth Cave about the body of Black thought it sought to disavow: the alternative relations between race and the underground that the guides theorized through their own subterranean explorations.

“To Make the World One in Christ Jesus”

2018 ◽  
Vol 87 (4) ◽  
pp. 575-592
Author(s):  
Gavin James Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Transnational Community ◽  
The World ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
In Christ

Scholarship on nineteenth-century missionary encounters emphasizes either how native converts “indigenized” Christian doctrine and practice, or how missionaries acted as agents of Western imperial expansion. These approaches, however, overlook the ways both missionaries and converts understood Protestant Christianity as a call to transnational community. This essay examines the ways that American Protestants and East Asian Christian converts looked for ways to build a transpacific communion. Despite radically different understandings of Christian scripture, and despite the geopolitics of empire, U.S. and East Asian Protestants nevertheless strove to bring together diverse theologies and experiences into a loosely defined, transnational Protestant community.

The Influence of Roman Law

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald R. Kelley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
The Law ◽  
Civil Science

Centuries of Roman jurisprudence were assembled in the great Byzantine collection, the Digest, by Tribonian and the other editors. Roman law became more formal when during the Renaissance of the twelfth century it came to be taught in the first universities, starting with Bologna and the teaching of Irnerius. The main channels of expansion were through the Glossators and post-Glossators, who commented on the main texts and on later legislation by the Holy Roman Emperors, which included “feudal law,” but also by notaries and other proto-lawyers. Christian doctrine also became part of the “Roman” tradition, and canon and civil law were taught together in the universities as “civil science.” According to the ancient Roman jurist Gaius, “all the law which we use pertains either to persons or to things or to actions,” three categories that exhaust the external human condition—personality, reality, and action. In the nineteenth century, the study of Roman law lost its ideological power and became part of philology and history, at least so concludes James Whitman.

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