Debating the Public Role of Religion

2019 ◽  
pp. 51-76
Author(s):  
Ted G. Jelen
Keyword(s):  
The Public ◽  
Public Role ◽  
Role Of Religion

Rome, Religion, and Christian Emperors

2020 ◽  
pp. 107-139
Author(s):  
Mattias P. Gassman
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Religious Tolerance ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Role ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Competing Ideas ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Public Decision

The controversy over the altar of Victory shows how pagans and Christians expressed competing ideas on the public role of religion in an increasingly Christian empire. In 382, Gratian revoked funding from the Roman state priesthoods and removed the altar from the Senate house. Following Gratian’s death in 383, the Senate appealed to his brother, Valentinian II, through the urban prefect, Symmachus, whose communiqué was successfully countered by Ambrose of Milan. Recent scholarship has favoured Symmachus’ account, which it sees as an appeal for religious tolerance, and argued that the affair was decided by the power politics of a child emperor’s unstable court. In response, this chapter argues that Symmachus was actually trying to exclude the emperor’s Christianity from public decision-making. All religions may, for Symmachus, lead to God, but the old cults are Rome’s divinely appointed defence, as well as the bond between Senate and emperors. Ambrose put Valentinian’s duty to God at the heart of his appeal. Ambrose’s Senate contained many Christians, and Ambrose was bound to resist an emperor who endorsed pagan sacrifices (the closest either work comes to explicit political gamesmanship). Together, their works show how malleable Rome’s public religion still was, more than seventy years after Constantine embraced Christianity.

Wall of Separation? Debating the Public Role of Religion

2000 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 109
Author(s):  
James M. Penning ◽  
Mary C. Segers ◽  
Ted G. Jelen
Keyword(s):  
The Public ◽  
Public Role ◽  
Role Of Religion

The politics of imagination and the public role of religion

2009 ◽  
Vol 35 (8) ◽  
pp. 985-1005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiara Bottici
Keyword(s):  
The Public ◽  
Public Role ◽  
Role Of Religion

The ‘public’ role of religion as sincerity

2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-65
Author(s):  
Stefano Semplici
Keyword(s):  
The Public ◽  
Public Role ◽  
Role Of Religion

The Public Role of Religion

2016 ◽  
pp. 87-100
Author(s):  
Roberto Cipriani
Keyword(s):  
The Public ◽  
Public Role ◽  
Role Of Religion

Who They Were and Why They Wanted to Suppress Obscene Literature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. C. Kemeny
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Moral Obligation ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Voluntary Organizations ◽  
Antisocial Behaviors ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Role ◽  
Role Of Religion

After examining who supported the Society for the Suppression of Vice, this chapter explores why so many social leaders and prominent liberal ministers, usually recognized as leading social and cultural progressive voices in their particular fields, wholeheartedly supported the censorship activities of the Watch and Ward Society. Four key sources shaped the anti-vice reformers’ rationale for the censorship of obscene literature: liberal Protestant theology, nineteenth-century moral philosophy, the Whig-Republican view of the public role of religion in society, and their Victorian view of literature. To the anti-vice activists, licentious literature fostered an animalism that hindered the gradual Christianization of society, ruined individuals moral character, encouraged other antisocial behaviors, and contradicted the basic canons of what constituted good literature. For these reasons, the moral reformers argued, voluntary organizations and the state had a moral obligation to suppress obscene works that threatened the well-being of society.

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