A Moral Architecture

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-51
Author(s):  
Daniel Thomas Cook
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Present Problem ◽  
Liberal Protestantism ◽  
Horace Bushnell ◽  
Moral Architecture ◽  
Subsequent Rise

This chapter traces the interminglings of Lockean with Protestant conceptions of child malleability and innateness and their implications for the mother-child nexus in the nineteenth century. It revisits the key question of predestination posed by sociologist Max Weber and examines changing notions of innate depravity through the lens of Christian motherhood as found in an early Evangelical mothers’ periodical written by women, many of whom were mothers. The experiences and concerns of mothers and the ever-present problem of child malleability combined to undergird a new kind of understanding of the child—one that considers and perhaps enables the privileging of the child’s subjectivity as consequential for this-worldly action in the form of mothering practices and ideologies. In the process, the duty of knowing, intuiting, and imputing the actions, motivations, and responses of and to children devolved to white, Christian mothers. The “Liberal Protestantism,” exemplified and brought forth in the writings of Horace Bushnell in mid-century, enacted something beyond a “feminization” of religion through sentiment and affect. It also indispensably assisted in ushering the “child” to the forefront of consideration in ways consequential to the subsequent rise and cultural predominance of a “modern,” consumerist child subjectivity.

THE PROBLEM OF MORAL PROGRESS: THE SLAVERY DEBATES AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF LIBERAL PROTESTANTISM IN THE UNITED STATES

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
MOLLY OSHATZ
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Progress ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Liberal Protestantism ◽  
Horace Bushnell ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Slavery Debates

The slavery debates in the antebellum United States sparked a turning point in American theology. They forced moderately antislavery Protestants, including William Ellery Channing, Francis Wayland, and Horace Bushnell, to reconcile their contradictory loyalties to the Bible and to antislavery reform. Unable to use the letter of the Bible to make a scriptural case against slavery in itself, the moderates argued that although slavery had been acceptable in biblical times, it had become a sin. Antislavery Protestantism required a theory of moral progress, a deeply unorthodox idea that became fundamental to the development of late nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism. The antislavery argument from moral progress, along with the moral progress represented by abolition, established a progressive conception of revelation that would be further developed by late nineteenth-century liberal theologians, including Newman Smyth, Lyman Abbott, and Theodore Munger.

Liverpool Merchants in 19th-Century Niger Delta

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 310-340
Author(s):  
Nimi Wariboko
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Business Ethics ◽  
Niger Delta ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Ethics ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
Christian Missions ◽  
The Impact

Abstract How does religion or worldview affect business practices and ethics? This tradition of inquiry goes back, at least, to Max Weber who, in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, explored the impact of theological suppositions on capitalist economic development. But the connection can also go the other way. So the focus of inquiry can become: How does business ethics or practices affect ethics in a given nation or corporation? This paper inquires into how the political and economic conditions created and sustained by nineteenth-century trading community in the Niger Delta influenced religious practices or ethics of Christian missionaries. This approach to mission study is necessary not only because we want to further understand the work of Christian missions and also to tease out the effect of business ethics on religious ethics, but also because Christian missionaries came to the Niger Delta in the nineteenth century behind foreign merchants.

Scripture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Abraham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Biblical Authority ◽  
Scriptural Interpretation ◽  
Divine Inspiration ◽  
Liberal Protestantism ◽  
Papal Infallibility ◽  
Historical Investigation ◽  
Radical Reconstruction

This chapter discusses the epochal shift in scriptural interpretation in the nineteenth century. Applying historical investigation to accounts of divine inspiration and revelation resulted in a call for a radical reconstruction of Christian theology, especially as developed in liberal Protestantism. There were a number of responses to such reconstruction of Christian faith. One option was to resist the logic of liberal Protestantism’s normative apologetic while retaining an existential appropriation of biblical heroes and narratives. A second option was to develop a whole new apologetic for the traditional position on inspiration and inerrancy. A third option was to shore up the appeal to biblical authority by a theory of development culminating in a doctrine of papal infallibility. Fourth, there was the populist option of focusing on personal piety and working from a deflationary soteriological vision of Scripture. All five options, if we include liberal Protestantism, continue to flourish.

“We cannot spare you”: Phillips Brooks's Break with the Evangelical Party, 1859–1873

1999 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 930-953
Author(s):  
Gillis J. Harp
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
American Christianity ◽  
Liberal Protestantism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
American Evangelicalism ◽  
Church Historians

Despite renewed scholarly interest in Evangelical Episcopalianism recently, important questions persist about the party's demise in the last third of the nineteenth century. Though church historians have advanced some plausible explanations for its disappearance, these interpretations need now to be tested by more narrowly focused studies of individuals, both committed party men and their less partisan allies. Concomitant questions also linger about the relationship between Evangelicals and the emergent Broad Church movement within the American church and within the Anglican communion generally. Exactly how did Low Church Evangelicals become Low Church liberals by the turn of the century? More importantly, this subject has a broader significance for the history of American Christianity at large. Pursuing the foregoing questions can shed considerable light on the parallel transformation of a moderately Reformed American evangelicalism into turn-of-the-century liberal Protestantism.

scholarly journals Revisiting a Moral Panic: Ascetic Protestantism, Attitudes to Alcohol and the Implementation of the Licensing Act 2003

2009 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 70-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Yeomans
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Moral Panic ◽  
Public Attitudes ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
British Society ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
Temperance Movements

This paper examines the popular reaction to the implementation of licensing reforms in England and Wales in 2005. It characterises these events as an episode of moral panic and seeks an ideological explanation for this alarmist response. Utilising historical perspectives, the paper draws particular attention to the formative importance of the Nineteenth Century in terms of constructing contemporary public attitudes towards alcohol. This paper draws on existing sociology and social history to highlight an international and chronological pattern which suggests a connection between Victorian temperance movements and ascetic brands of Protestantism. Through a consideration of Max Weber, E.P. Thompson and a variety of primary sources, an interpretive explanation for this pattern is provided. Legal evidence, showing the growth of alcohol regulation and the partial enforcement of temperance codes of behaviour, is then used to illustrate the survival and secularisation of temperance views from the Nineteenth Century onwards. An interpretive analysis of public discourse surrounding licensing reform in 2005 provides empirical support for this argument. Attitudes to alcohol exhibited during this episode were found to bear qualitative similarities to Calvinist-inspired temperance beliefs. The paper argues that ascetic Protestant attitudes to alcohol have achieved a wide currency and now occupy a hegemonic position within secular British society. The public reaction to the implementation of the Licensing Act 2003 is thus reinterpreted as a moral panic largely constructed by ascetic Protestant beliefs.

Piety, Power, and Powerlessness: Religion and Religious Groups in Germany, 1870–1945

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebekka Habermas
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
German Empire ◽  
Secularization Theory ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Power And Powerlessness

An examination of eligion and religious groups that prevailed in Germany during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries form the essence of this article. Many citizens of the Wilhelminian Empire believed they were seeing an increasing decline in the importance of religion. This view was also shared by scholars at the time including August Comte and Max Weber. Not only Weber and his contemporaries held this view; subsequent generations of sociologists and historians likewise adhered to the notion that modernity was secular; indeed, this alone sufficed to make it ‘modern’. This article focuses on the idea that the stronger the critique of the secularization theory became, the more intently people searched for alternative ways to explain the perceived changes in piety and religious institutions from the nineteenth century onward. This article moves further to explain the topographies of the religious and the secular under the German empire and reconfigurations of the same. An analysis of the religion and religious groups at the political backdrop concludes this article.

The Enlarged Freedom of Frederick Law Olmsted

2010 ◽  
Vol 83 (3) ◽  
pp. 508-538
Author(s):  
Andrew Menard
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Public Space ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
City Parks ◽  
Horace Bushnell ◽  
Frederick Law Olmsted

Frederick Law Olmsted's city parks represent a view of freedom derived from the offsetting influences of an orderly, systematic, public space. The author traces this view to the works of Francis Bacon, John Locke, Archibald Alison, Horace Bushnell, and the liberalism of nineteenth-century New England Whigs.

Disenchantment, Rationality and the Modernity of Max Weber

2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-137
Author(s):  
Anthony J. Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Practical Rationality ◽  
The World

Following Aristotle's distinction between theoretical and practical rationality, Max Weber holds that beliefs about the world and actions within the world must follow procedures consistently and be appropriately formed if they are to count as rational. Here, I argue that Weber's account of theoretical and practical rationality, as disclosed through his conception of the disenchantment of the world, displays a confessional architecture consistently structured by a nineteenth century German Protestant outlook. I develop this thesis through a review of the concepts of rationality and disenchantment in Weber's major works and conclude that this conceptual framework depicts a Protestant account of modernity.

The Cambridge Platonists of Old England and the Cambridge Platonists of New England

1988 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 470-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Walker Howe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Horace Bushnell ◽  
Rational Thought ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Cambridge Platonists

In 1875 the distinguished Unitarian minister and local historian Henry Wilder Foote preached a eulogy for his late colleague, the Reverend James Walker, philosopher and former president of Harvard University. It was an appropriate occasion to characterize the achievement of the antebellum generation of Harvard Unitarian leaders that Walker represented. “They were much more than mere denominationalists or founders of a sect,” Foote declared. “The whole tone of their teaching was profoundly positive in its moral and religious quality. Trained at our American Cambridge, they were really the legitimate heirs of that noble group of men nurtured at the Cambridge of England–the Latitude Men, as they were called–who blended culture and piety and rational thought in their teaching.” Building upon Foote's perceptive characterization, this article will explore the significance of the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists for the Harvard Unitarians of the mid-nineteenth century. In so doing it may illuminate other forms of New England religious thought that also drew upon Platonic or Neoplatonic sources, including Edwardseanism, Hopkinsianism, and the progressive orthodoxy of Horace Bushnell. In particular, I hope to shed light on the relationship between Unitarianism and Transcendentalism.

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