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Author: Charles John Sommerville Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0195074270 Category : England Languages : en Pages : 238
Book Description
This study overcomes the ambiguity and daunting scale of the subject of secularization by using the insights of anthropology and sociology, and by examining an earlier period than usually considered. Concentrating not only on a decline of religious belief, which is the last aspect of secularization, this study shows that a transformation of England's cultural grammar had to precede that loosening of belief, and that this was largely accomplished between 1500 and 1700. Only when definitions of space and time changed and language and technology were transformed (as well as art and play) could a secular world-view be sustained. As aspects of daily life became divorced from religious values and controls, religious culture was supplanted by religious faith, a reasoned, rather than an unquestioned, belief in the supernatural. Sommerville shows that this process was more political and theological than economic or social.
Author: Charles John Sommerville Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0195074270 Category : England Languages : en Pages : 238
Book Description
This study overcomes the ambiguity and daunting scale of the subject of secularization by using the insights of anthropology and sociology, and by examining an earlier period than usually considered. Concentrating not only on a decline of religious belief, which is the last aspect of secularization, this study shows that a transformation of England's cultural grammar had to precede that loosening of belief, and that this was largely accomplished between 1500 and 1700. Only when definitions of space and time changed and language and technology were transformed (as well as art and play) could a secular world-view be sustained. As aspects of daily life became divorced from religious values and controls, religious culture was supplanted by religious faith, a reasoned, rather than an unquestioned, belief in the supernatural. Sommerville shows that this process was more political and theological than economic or social.
Author: C. John Sommerville Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0195360753 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 238
Book Description
This study overcomes the ambiguity and daunting scale of the subject of secularization by using the insights of anthropology and sociology, and by examining an earlier period than usually considered. Concentrating not only on a decline of religious belief, which is the last aspect of secularization, this study shows that a transformation of England's cultural grammar had to precede that loosening of belief, and that this was largely accomplished between 1500 and 1700. Only when definitions of space and time changed and language and technology were transformed (as well as art and play) could a secular world-view be sustained. As aspects of daily life became divorced from religious values and controls, religious culture was supplanted by religious faith, a reasoned, rather than an unquestioned, belief in the supernatural. Sommerville shows that this process was more political and theological than economic or social.
Author: Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9401202079 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 206
Book Description
Communities have often shaped themselves around cultural spaces set apart and declared sacred. For this purpose, churches, priests or scholars no less than writers frequently participate in giving sacred figures a local habitation and, sometimes, voice or name. But whatever sites, rites, images or narratives have thus been constructed, they also raise some complex questions: how can the sacred be presented and yet guarded, claimed yet concealed, staged in public and at the same time kept exclusive? Such questions are pursued here in a variety of English texts historically employed to manifest and manage versions of the sacred. But since their performances inhabit social space, this often functions as a theatrical arena which is also used to stage modes of dissent, difference, sacrifice and sacrilege. In this way, all aspects of social life – the family, the nation, the idea of kingship, gender identities, courtly ideals, love making or smoking – may become sacralized and buttress claims for power by recourse to a repertoire of religious symbolic forms. Through critical readings of central texts and authors – such as Sir Gawain, Foxe, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, or Vaughan – as well as less canonical examples – the Croxton play, Buchanan, Lanyer, Wroth, or the tobacco pamphlets – the twelve contributions all engage with the crucial question how, and to what end, performances of the sacred affect, or effect, cultural transformation.
Author: Harriet Lyon Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1009034618 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 303
Book Description
The dissolution of the monasteries was recalled by individuals and communities alike as a seismic rupture in the religious, cultural, and socio-economic fabric of early modern England. It was also profoundly important in shaping contemporary historical consciousness, the topographical imagination, and local tradition. Memory and the Dissolution is a book about the dissolution of the monasteries after the dissolution. Harriet Lyon argues that our understanding of this historical moment is enriched by taking a long chronological view of the suppression, by exploring how it was remembered to those who witnessed it and how this memory evolved in subsequent generations. Exposing and repudiating the assumptions of a conventional historiography that has long been coloured by Henrician narratives and sources, this book reveals that the fall of the religious houses was remembered as one of the most profound and controversial transformations of the entire English Reformation.
Author: David J. Davis Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0198834136 Category : England Languages : en Pages : 238
Book Description
Experiencing God in Late Medieval and Early Modern England demonstrates that experiences of divine revelation, both biblical and contemporary, were central to late medieval and early modern English religion. The book sheds light on previously under-explored notions about divine revelation andthe role these notions played in shaping large portions of English thought and belief. Bringing together a wide variety of source materials, from contemplative works and accounts of revelatory experiences to biblical commentaries, devotionals, and religious imagery, David J. Davis argues that in theperiod there was a collective representation of divine revelation as a source of human knowledge, which transcended other religious and intellectual divisions. Not only did most people think that divine revelation, through a ravishing encounter with God, was possible, but also divine revelation wasunderstood to be the pinnacle of religious experience and a source of pure understanding. The book highlights a common discourse running through the sources that underpinned this collective representation of how human beings experienced the divine, and it demonstrates a continual effort across largeswathes of English religion to prepare an individual's soul for an encounter with the divine, through different spiritual disciplines and devotional practices. Over a period of several centuries this discourse and the larger culture of revelation provided an essential structure and legitimacy bothto contemporary claims of divine revelation and the biblical precedents that contemporary experiences were modelled after. This discourse detailed the physical, metaphysical, and epistemological features of how a human being was understood to experience divine revelation, providing a means todelimit and define what happened when an individual was rapture by God. Finally, the book situates the experience of revelation within the wider context of knowledge and identifies the ways that claims to divine revelation were legitimated as well as stigmatized based on this common understanding ofthe experience of rapture.
Author: C. John Sommerville Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing ISBN: 0802864422 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 204
Book Description
During the last century American students and scholars have found it increasingly difficult to discuss the relation of religion to the mission of self-consciously secular colleges and universities. Respected scholar C. John Sommerville here offers thought-provoking reflections on this subject in a conversational style. / Sommerville explores the crisis of the secular university, argues that religion and secular universities need each other, and examines how Christianity shows up on both sides of our culture wars. The astute reflections in Religious Ideas for Secular Universities point the way to a dialogue that would do justice both to religious insights and to truly neutral secular education.
Author: Clive D. Field Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192588567 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 329
Book Description
Moving beyond the (now somewhat tired) debates about secularization as paradigm, theory, or master narrative, Periodizing Secularization focuses upon the empirical evidence for secularization, viewed in its descriptive sense as the waning social influence of religion, in Britain. Particular emphasis is attached to the two key performance indicators of religious allegiance and churchgoing, each subsuming several sub-indicators, between 1880 and 1945, including the first substantive account of secularization during the fin de siècle. A wide range of primary sources is deployed, many of them relatively or entirely unknown, and with due regard to their methodological and interpretative challenges. On the back of them, a cross-cutting statistical measure of 'active church adherence' is devised, which clearly shows how secularization has been a reality and a gradual, not revolutionary, process. The most likely causes of secularization were an incremental demise of a Sabbatarian culture (coupled with the associated emergence of new leisure opportunities and transport links) and of religious socialization (in the church, at home, and in the school). The analysis is also extended backwards, to include a summary of developments during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and laterally, to incorporate a preliminary evaluation of a six-dimensional model of 'diffusive religion', demonstrating that these alternative performance indicators have hitherto failed to prove that secularization has not occurred. The book is designed as a prequel to the author's previous volumes on the chronology of British secularization - Britain's Last Religious Revival? (2015) and Secularization in the Long 1960s (2017). Together, they offer a holistic picture of religious transformation in Britain during the key secularizing century of 1880-1980.
Author: Charles John Sommerville
Author: Charles John Sommerville
Author: C. John Sommerville
Author: Malcolm Gaskill
Author: Elizabeth Lane Furdell
Author: Arthur F. Marotti
Author: 
Author: Harriet Lyon
Author: David J. Davis
Author: C. John Sommerville
Author: Clive D. Field