scholarly journals Scott Calhoun, U2 and the Religious Impulse: Take Me Higher

Volume ! ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 164-167
Author(s):  
Nicholas P. Greco
Keyword(s):  
Religious Impulse

Arnoldian Secularism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Lecourt
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Religious Impulse

This chapter explores how Matthew Arnold’s major essays of the 1860s and 1870s took up the racialized readings of religion that Müller had opposed and used them to construct a liberal counter-paradigm for thinking about religion, race, and self-cultivation. In texts such as Culture and Anarchy (1869), Arnold calls humankind’s religious impulse “Hebraism,” a racial inheritance of the Semitic peoples that can contribute to the development of a many-sided selfhood if it is balanced against the Greek genius for art and knowledge, the Celtic genius for beauty and sentiment, and so on. Yet Arnold’s Hebraism also becomes subtly overdetermined in that it represents simultaneously one particular side of human life and an ideal of one-sidedness that positively rejects any larger pluralist framework. This is the ambiguity at the heart of this study: how race-based religion comes to figure a narrow energy that pluralism wants to incorporate, but also fears as a competitor.

Institutional and Legal Responses to Begging in Medieval England

2002 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 447-473 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Clark
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Political ◽  
Community Life ◽  
Social Planning ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
Positive Aspect ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Legal Responses ◽  
Religious Impulse ◽  
The Needy

A great many factors other than philanthrophy influenced social policy in England during the Middle Ages. Although political thinkers steadfastly acknowledged the importance of received tradition, especially the religious command to help the poor, many lawmakers were profoundly ambivalent about begging. It is true that the opinion of the nineteenth century implied that medieval almsgiving was so “reckless” that English “beggars had an easy life,” but more recent research has challenged this perspective, bringing the parameters of medieval mendicancy into sharper focus. Seen individually, beggars were pathetic and vulnerable, but if viewed collectively they were thought to be dangerous and willfully idle. Parliament's decision to regulate begging in the years after the first appearance of the Black Death (1349–50) compelled the king's subjects to rethink the claims of the needy, even though almsgiving had long seemed a positive aspect of community life. Obviously by the close of the fourteenth century something had happened to broaden the story of casual relief, extending its boundaries beyond religious impulse to include the frustrations and passions that animated the political arena. Here contentious voices sounded, although parliamentary argument and debate were often tempered by the conviction that men of affairs could legislate a more orderly realm. Even so, efforts at social planning were by no means limited to statutory decree or confined to the late medieval world.

The Religious Impulse

2021 ◽  
pp. 3-27
Author(s):  
William Sims Bainbridge
Keyword(s):  
Religious Impulse

Inversions and Corruptions of the Religious Impulse

1975 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 294-301
Author(s):  
Henry Winthrop ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Religious Impulse

Deistic Piety in the Cults of the French Revolution

1933 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Lyttle
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
General Impression ◽  
Religious Impulse ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Church ◽  
Supreme Being ◽  
Public Worship ◽  
The French Revolution

Apart from the democratized Catholicism of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (July 12, 1790) the French Revolution occasioned four phenomena of novel significance: (a) The so-called “Cult of Reason” established in effect though not in name by decree of the Convention in November, 1793; (b) The nationalist Decadal fêtes, provided for that same autumn, when the church calendar was replaced by the republican; (c) the “Cult of the Supreme Being” originating in legislation of May 1794 and culminating in the Fête of the Supreme Being on June 8 following; (d) the Cult of Theophilanthropism whose prayerbook, called a Manuel at first, was composed in the summer of 1796, printed in the fall, adapted to the needs of public worship as well as domestic in December, and actually used in the former way for the first time on January 15, 1797. Following the precedent of the Abbé Grégoire, whose great History of the Sects of the Revolution appeared in 1814, these four phenomena have been classed together, with the obvious implication that all were tarred with the same stick, the ingredients of the tar consisting of infidel fatuity and political chicanery. Such indeed was the general impression that had already been conveyed by the hostile comments of conservative critics outside France. Consequently it became almost a tradition for decades to consider the four phenomena together as brilliant illustrations of the Deistic philosophy of religion, with the overt or implicit suggestion that they stand as incontrovertible proof of the infatuation of radical doctrinaires and of their folly in supposing that the religious impulse could be suffocated, or that its forms of expression nonchalantly improvised, or its nature changed from that of faith, mystery and revelation to that of reason and morality. Only recently have the researches of Aulard, Mathiez and others served to set before us accurate pictures of the actual ceremonies of these novel cults, as well as careful analyses of the sources and motives of their inception. These researches and revaluations justify a review of the traditional conceptions. Omitting the nationalistic Decadal fêtes as purely secular, our study will be devoted to the Cults of Reason, of the Supreme Being and of Theophilanthropism.

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