Radicals, Secularists, and Republicans PDF Download

Author: Edward Royle
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719007835
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Author: David E. Campbell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108918344
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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American society is rapidly secularizing–a radical departure from its historically high level of religiosity–and politics is a big part of the reason. Just as, forty years ago, the Religious Right arose as a new political movement, today secularism is gaining traction as a distinct and politically energized identity. This book examines the political causes and political consequences of this secular surge, drawing on a wealth of original data. The authors show that secular identity is in part a reaction to the Religious Right. However, while the political impact of secularism is profound, there may not yet be a Secular Left to counterbalance the Religious Right. Secularism has introduced new tensions within the Democratic Party while adding oxygen to political polarization between Democrats and Republicans. Still there may be opportunities to reach common ground if politicians seek to forge coalitions that encompass both secular and religious Americans.

Author: Kevin Phillips
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101218843
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 585

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An explosive examination of the coalition of forces that threatens the nation, from the bestselling author of American Dynasty In his two most recent bestselling books, American Dynasty and Wealth and Democracy, Kevin Phillips established himself as a powerful critic of the political and economic forces that rule—and imperil—the United States, tracing the ever more alarming path of the emerging Republican majority’s rise to power. Now Phillips takes an uncompromising view of the current age of global overreach, fundamentalist religion, diminishing resources, and ballooning debt under the GOP majority. With an eye to the past and a searing vision of the future, Phillips confirms what too many Americans are still unwilling to admit about the depth of our misgovernment.

Author: Bernard Lightman
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000941574
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Scholars have tended to portray T.H. Huxley, John Tyndall, and their allies as the dominant cultural authority in the second half of the 19th century. Defenders of Darwin and his theory of evolution, these men of science are often seen as a potent force for the secularization of British intellectual and social life. In this collection of essays Bernard Lightman argues that historians have exaggerated the power of scientific naturalism to undermine the role of religion in middle and late-Victorian Britain. The essays deal with the evolutionary naturalists, especially the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, the physicist John Tyndall, and the philosopher of evolution, Herbert Spencer. But they look also at those who criticized this influential group of elite intellectuals, including aristocratic spokesman A. J Balfour, the novelist Samuel Butler, and the popularizer of science Frank Buckland. Focusing on the theme of the limitations of the cultural power of evolutionary naturalism, the volume points to the enduring strength of religion in Britain in the latter half of the 19th century.

Author: Rowan Strong
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192540149
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Victorian Christianity and Emigrant Voyages to British Colonies c.1840 - c.1914 considers the religious component of the nineteenth-century British and Irish emigration experience. It examines the varieties of Christianity adhered to by most British and Irish emigrants in the nineteenth century, and consequently taken to their new homes in British settler colonies. Rowan Strong explores a dimension of this emigration history that has been overlooked by scholars--the development of an international emigrants' chaplaincy by the Church of England that ministered to Anglicans, Nonconformists, as well as others, including Scandinavians, Germans, Jews, and freethinkers. Using the sources of this emigrants' chaplaincy, Strong also makes extensive use of the shipboard diaries kept by emigrants themselves to give them a voice in this history. Using these sources to look at the British and Irish emigrant voyages to new homes, this study provides an analysis of the Christianity of these emigrants as they travelled by ship to British colonies. Their ships were floating villages that necessitated and facilitated religious encounters across denominational and even religious boundaries. It argues that the Church of England provided an emigrants' ministry that had the greatest longevity, breadth, and international structure of any Church in the nineteenth century. The book also examines the principal varieties of Christianity espoused by most British emigrants, and argues this religion was more central to their identity and, consequently, more significant in settler colonies than many historians have often hitherto accepted. In this way, the Church of England's emigrant chaplaincy made a major contribution to the development of a British world in settler colonies of the empire.

Author: Ramsay Cook
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442629193
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
A crisis of faith confronted many Canadian Protestants in the late nineteenth century. With their religious beliefs challenged by the new biological sciences and historical criticism of the Bible, they turned from personal salvation to the dire social problems of the industrial age. The Regenerators explores the nature of social criticism in this era and its complex ties to the religious thinking of the day, showing how the path blazed by nineteenth-century religious liberals led not to the Kingdom of God on earth, but, ironically, to the secular city. The winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction when it was first published in 1985, The Regenerators became an instant classic for its fascinating portraits of evolutionists, rationalists, spiritualists, socialists, and free thinkers before the turn of the century. This new edition features an introduction by historian and biographer Donald Wright.

Author: Carolin Kosuch
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311068828X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
This volume brings together for the first time case studies on secularists of the 19th and early 20th centuries in national and transnational perspectives including examples from all over Europe. Its focus is on freethinkers taken as secular avant-gardes and early promoters of secularity. The authors of this book deal with multiple historical, religious, social, and cultural backgrounds and, in these contexts, analyze freethinkers' organizations, projects, networks, and contributions to forming a secular worldview, in particular, the promotion of concrete undertakings such as civil baptism or initiatives to leave church. Next to this secularist agenda, the contributions also take into account ambivalences and difficulties freethinkers were faced with, namely, the tensions between a national self-image and the transnational direction the movement has taken; the regional base of many projects and their transregional horizon; freethinkers' cultural programs and their immanent political mission; and the dialogue with respectively the conceptual distinction from other secularist groups. Readers interested in the history of secularity will learn that it was a heterogeneous enterprise already in its beginnings. This set the course for later European and global developments.

Author: James Owen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1846319447
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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By providing a comprehensive and multi-layered picture of the troubled relationship between working-class radicals and organised liberalism in England between 1868 and 1888, 'Labour and the Caucus' offers an innovative pre-history of the Labour Party.

Author: Murat Akan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231543808
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
Discussions of modernity—or alternative and multiple modernities—often hinge on the question of secularism, especially how it travels outside its original European context. Too often, attempts to answer this question either imagine a universal model derived from the history of Western Europe, which neglects the experience of much of the world, or emphasize a local, non-European context that limits the potential for comparison. In The Politics of Secularism, Murat Akan reframes the question of secularism, exploring its presence both outside and inside Europe and offering a rich empirical account of how it moves across borders and through time. Akan uses France and Turkey to analyze political actors' comparative discussions of secularism, struggles for power, and historical contextual constraints at potential moments of institutional change. France and Turkey are critical sites of secularism: France exemplifies European political modernity, and Turkey has long been the model of secularism in a Muslim-majority country. Akan analyzes prominent debates in both countries on topics such as the visibility of the headscarf and other religious symbols, religion courses in the public school curriculum, and state salaries for clerics and imams. Akan lays out the institutional struggles between three distinct political currents—anti-clericalism, liberalism, and what he terms state-civil religionism—detailing the nuances of how political movements articulate the boundary between the secular and the religious. Disputing the prevalent idea that diversity is a new challenge to secularism and focusing on comparison itself as part of the politics of secularism, this book makes a major contribution to understanding secular politics and its limits.

Author: Eugenio F. Biagini
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521548861
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
In common with republicanism or socialism in continental Europe, Liberalism in nineteenth-century Britain was a mass movement. By focussing on the period between the 1860s and the 1880s, this book sets out to explain why and how that happened, and to examine the people who supported it, their beliefs, and the way in which the latter related to one another and to reality. Popular suport for the Liberal party was not irrational in either its objectives or its motivations: on the contrary, its dissemination was due to the fact that the programme of reforms proposed by the party leaders offered convincing solutions to some of the problems perceived as being the most urgent at the time. This is a revealing, innovative synthesis of the history of popular support for the Liberal party, which emphasises the extent to which Liberalism stood in the common heritage of European and American democracy.