New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment

Download New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1683931629
Total Pages : 414 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (839 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment by : Brett C. McInelly

Download or read book New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment written by Brett C. McInelly and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-11-09 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Enlightenment, an eighteenth-century philosophical and cultural movement that swept through Western Europe, has often been characterized as a mostly secular phenomenon that ultimately undermined religious authority and belief, and eventually gave way to the secularization of Western society and to modernity. To whatever extent the Enlightenment can be credited with giving birth to modern Western culture, historians in more recent years have aptly demonstrated that the Enlightenment hardly singled the death knell of religion. Not only did religion continue to occupy a central pace in political, social, and private life throughout the eighteenth century, but it shaped the Enlightenment project itself in significant and meaningful ways. The thinkers and philosophers normally associated with the Enlightenment, to be sure, challenged state-sponsored church authority and what they perceived as superstitious forms of belief and practice, but they did not mount a campaign to undermine religion generally. A more productive approach to understanding religion in the age of Enlightenment, then, is to examine the ways the Enlightenment informed religious belief and practice during the period as well as the ways religion influenced the Enlightenment and to do so from a range of disciplinary perspectives, which is the goal of this collection. The chapters document the intersections of religious and Enlightenment ideas in such areas as theology, the natural sciences, politics, the law, art, philosophy, and literature.

Faith in the Age of Reason

Download Faith in the Age of Reason PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 212 pages
Book Rating : 4.X/5 (4 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Faith in the Age of Reason by : Jonathan Hill

Download or read book Faith in the Age of Reason written by Jonathan Hill and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.So begins Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. And without doubt the Age of Reason--the Enlightenment--was a period unlike any other. In many respects it was during this time that the modern world was forged.It was a time when worldviews clashed and new ways of seeing and understanding emerged. And it was in the arena of religion, above all, that this clash took place. Our modern ideas of religion, our modern ideas of science, and our perspectives on the interaction between religion and science were developed as the Enlightenment gathered momentum and encountered opposition.In this volume, part of the IVP Histories series, Jonathan Hill examines the Age of Reason, spanning the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He begins by describing how the Middle Ages came to an end with the Renaissance and the Reformation, setting the scene for the Enlightenment. He then takes you on a fascinating tour of the central themes and characters of this turbulent period. Themes covered include: the churches, the new science, the new philosophy, the question of authority, politices and society, God, humanity and the world, the reaction and the legacy. Key figures you'll encounter include Samuel Johnson, Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Hume, Voltaire, Pascal, Locke, Diderot, Rousseau and Kant.Packed with centuries worth of fascinating prose and beautiful four-color art yet small enough to fit in your pocket, Faith in the Age of Reason offers a wonderfully rich and enjoyable exploration of one of great perioed of human history.

The Enlightenment and Religion

Download The Enlightenment and Religion PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780719067419
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (674 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Enlightenment and Religion by : S. J. Barnett

Download or read book The Enlightenment and Religion written by S. J. Barnett and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This publication offers a critical survey of religious change and its causes in 18th-century Europe. Focusing on the Enlightenment in Italy, France and England, the text illustrates how the canonical view of 18th-century religious change has in reality been constructed upon scant evidence and assumption.

George Berkeley: Religion and Science in the Age of Enlightenment

Download George Berkeley: Religion and Science in the Age of Enlightenment PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 9048192439
Total Pages : 215 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (481 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis George Berkeley: Religion and Science in the Age of Enlightenment by : Silvia Parigi

Download or read book George Berkeley: Religion and Science in the Age of Enlightenment written by Silvia Parigi and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-10-04 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Berkeley was considered "the most engaging and useful man in Ireland in the eighteenth century". This hyperbolic statement refers both to Berkeley’s life and thought; in fact, he always considered himself a pioneer called to think and do new things. He was an empiricist well versed in the sciences, an amateur of the mechanical arts, as well as a metaphysician; he was the author of many completely different discoveries, as well as a very active Christian, a zealous bishop and the apostle of the Bermuda project. The essays collected in this volume, written by some leading scholars, aim to reconstruct the complexity of Berkeley’s figure, without selecting "major" works, nor searching for "coherence" at any cost. They will focus on different aspects of Berkeley’s thought, showing their intersections; they will explore the important contributions he gave to various scientific disciplines, as well as to the eighteenth-century philosophical and theological debate. They will highlight the wide influence that his presently most neglected or puzzling books had at the time; they will refuse any anachronistical trial of Berkeley’s thought, judged from a contemporary point of view.

Reason, Ridicule, and Religion

Download Reason, Ridicule, and Religion PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780500278857
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (788 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Reason, Ridicule, and Religion by : John Redwood

Download or read book Reason, Ridicule, and Religion written by John Redwood and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study, with its examination of the lives and works of Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, George Berkley, John Locke and other Enlightenment scholars, rejects the idea that the early modern period was marked by a triumph of reason or that it should be seen as a simple battle between science and religion. The more far-reaching debate is focused on one great theme: the questioning of God's place and significance in the cosmos - and the threats that this doubt appeared to pose for the whole of society.

The Religious Enlightenment

Download The Religious Enlightenment PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691188181
Total Pages : 358 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (911 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Religious Enlightenment by : David Sorkin

Download or read book The Religious Enlightenment written by David Sorkin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In intellectual and political culture today, the Enlightenment is routinely celebrated as the starting point of modernity and secular rationalism, or demonized as the source of a godless liberalism in conflict with religious faith. In The Religious Enlightenment, David Sorkin alters our understanding by showing that the Enlightenment, at its heart, was religious in nature. Sorkin examines the lives and ideas of influential Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic theologians of the Enlightenment, such as William Warburton in England, Moses Mendelssohn in Prussia, and Adrien Lamourette in France, among others. He demonstrates that, in the century before the French Revolution, the major religions of Europe gave rise to movements of renewal and reform that championed such hallmark Enlightenment ideas as reasonableness and natural religion, toleration and natural law. Calvinist enlightened orthodoxy, Jewish Haskalah, and reform Catholicism, to name but three such movements, were influential participants in the eighteenth century's burgeoning public sphere and promoted a new ideal of church-state relations. Sorkin shows how they pioneered a religious Enlightenment that embraced the new science of Copernicus and Newton and the philosophy of Descartes, Locke, and Christian Wolff, uniting reason and revelation to renew faith and piety. This book reveals how Enlightenment theologians refashioned belief as a solution to the dogmatism and intolerance of previous centuries. Read it and you will never view the Enlightenment the same way.

Jesus in an Age of Enlightenment

Download Jesus in an Age of Enlightenment PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137512768
Total Pages : 506 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (375 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Jesus in an Age of Enlightenment by : Jonathan C. P. Birch

Download or read book Jesus in an Age of Enlightenment written by Jonathan C. P. Birch and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-07-18 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the religious concerns of Enlightenment thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to Thomas Jefferson. Using an innovative method, the study illuminates the intellectual history of the age through interpretations of Jesus between c.1650 and c.1826. The book demonstrates the persistence of theology in modern philosophy and the projects of social reform and amelioration associated with the Enlightenment. At the core of many of these projects was a robust moral-theological realism, sometimes manifest in a natural law ethic, but always associated with Jesus and a commitment to the sovereign goodness of God. This ethical orientation in Enlightenment discourse is found in a range of different metaphysical and political identities (dualist and monist; progressive and radical) which intersect with earlier ‘heretical’ tendencies in Christian thought (Arianism, Pelagianism, and Marcionism). This intellectual matrix helped to produce the discourses of irenic toleration which are a legacy of the Enlightenment at its best.

The Secular Enlightenment

Download The Secular Enlightenment PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691216762
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (912 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Secular Enlightenment by : Margaret Jacob

Download or read book The Secular Enlightenment written by Margaret Jacob and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers. Jacob reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. She takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Turin, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. Jacob demonstrates how secular values and pursuits took hold of eighteenth-century Europe, spilled into the American colonies, and left their lasting imprint on the Western world for generations to come. --Adapted from publisher description.

Civil Religion and the Enlightenment in England, 1707-1800

Download Civil Religion and the Enlightenment in England, 1707-1800 PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Boydell Press
ISBN 13 : 9781837651498
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (514 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Civil Religion and the Enlightenment in England, 1707-1800 by : Ashley Walsh

Download or read book Civil Religion and the Enlightenment in England, 1707-1800 written by Ashley Walsh and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 2024-05-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative book reveals how Enlightened writers in England, both lay and clerical, proclaimed public support for Christianity by transforming it into a civil religion, despite the famous claim of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that Christians professed an uncivil faith. This innovative book reveals how Enlightened writers in England, both lay and clerical, proclaimed public support for Christianity by transforming it into a civil religion, despite the famous claim of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that Christians professed an uncivil faith. In the aftermath of the seventeenth-century European wars of religion, civil religionists such as David Hume, Edward Gibbon, the third earl of Shaftesbury, and William Warburton sought to reconcile Christian ecclesiology with the civil state and Christian practice with civilized society. They built their arguments in the context of England's long Reformation, syncretizing 'primitive' gospel Christianity with ancient paganism as they attempted to render Christianity a modern version of Roman republican civil religion. They believed that outward observance of the reformed Protestant faith was vital for belonging to the Christian commonwealth of Hanoverian England. Uncovering a major theme in eighteenth-century intellectual and religious history that connected classical Rome with Italian Renaissance humanism and the Enlightenment, this deeply interdisciplinary book draws from recent post-secular trends in social and political theory. Combining intellectual history with the political and ecclesiastical history of the Church of England, it will prove as indispensable for historians as studentsof political theory, theology, and literature.

The Enlightenment

Download The Enlightenment PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0199591784
Total Pages : 169 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (995 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Enlightenment by : John Robertson

Download or read book The Enlightenment written by John Robertson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This introduction explores the history of the 18th-century Enlightenment movement. Considering its intellectual commitments, Robertson then turns to their impact on society, and the ways in which Enlightenment thinkers sought to further the goal of human betterment, by promoting economic improvement and civil and political justice.

God in the Enlightenment

Download God in the Enlightenment PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190267097
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (92 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis God in the Enlightenment by : William J. Bulman

Download or read book God in the Enlightenment written by William J. Bulman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-25 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We have long been taught that the Enlightenment was an attempt to free the world from the clutches of Christian civilization and make it safe for philosophy. The lesson has been well learned. In today's culture wars, both liberals and their conservative enemies, inside and outside the academy, rest their claims about the present on the notion that the Enlightenment was a secularist movement of philosophically driven emancipation. Historians have had doubts about the accuracy of this portrait for some time, but they have never managed to furnish a viable alternative to it-for themselves, for scholars interested in matters of church and state, or for the public at large. In this book, William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram bring together recent scholarship from distinguished experts in history, theology, and literature to make clear that God not only survived the Enlightenment but thrived within it as well. The Enlightenment was not a radical break from the past in which Europeans jettisoned their intellectual and institutional inheritance. It was, to be sure, a moment of great change, but one in which the characteristic convictions and traditions of the Renaissance and Reformation were perpetuated to the point of transformation, in the wake of the Wars of Religion and during the early phases of globalization. The Enlightenment's primary imperatives were not freedom and irreligion but peace and prosperity. As a result, Enlightenment could be Christian, communitarian, or authoritarian as easily as it could be atheistic, individualistic, or libertarian. Honing in on the intellectual crisis of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries while moving from Spinoza to Kant and from India to Peru, God in the Enlightenment takes a prism to the age of lights.

Age of Enlightenment

Download Age of Enlightenment PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Hourly History
ISBN 13 : 1540742814
Total Pages : 44 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (47 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Age of Enlightenment by : Hourly History

Download or read book Age of Enlightenment written by Hourly History and published by Hourly History. This book was released on 2016-12-06 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its beginnings as a loosely definable group of philosophical ideas to the culmination of its revolutionary effect on public life in Europe, the Age of Enlightenment is the defining intellectual and cultural movement of the modern world. Using reason as its core value, the Enlightenment believed that progress and the betterment of the human condition was inevitable. Inside you will read about… ✓ The Great Thinkers of the Enlightenment ✓ Engaging With Religion ✓ Morality in the Age of Enlightenment ✓ Society in the Age of Enlightenment ✓ Science and Political Economy ✓ The Enlightenment and the Public ✓ Print Culture and the Press Philosophies of the Enlightenment gave birth to the disciplines of political science, economic theory, sociology and anthropology, the disciplines that still form the basis of how we understand life in the 21st century. A bold attack on the Church, the State and the Monarchy, the Age of Enlightenment was a direct challenge to the status quo that sought freedom for all.

Let There Be Enlightenment

Download Let There Be Enlightenment PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421426021
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (214 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Let There Be Enlightenment by : Anton M. Matytsin

Download or read book Let There Be Enlightenment written by Anton M. Matytsin and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2018-09-14 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the triumphalist narrative of Enlightenment secularism. According to most scholars, the Enlightenment was a rational awakening, a radical break from a past dominated by religion and superstition. But in Let There Be Enlightenment, Anton M. Matytsin, Dan Edelstein, and the contributors they have assembled deftly undermine this simplistic narrative. Emphasizing the ways in which religious beliefs and motivations shaped philosophical perspectives, essays in this book highlight figures and topics often overlooked in standard genealogies of the Enlightenment. The volume underscores the prominent role that religious discourses continued to play in major aspects of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought. The essays probe a wide range of subjects, from reformer Jan Amos Comenius’s quest for universal enlightenment to the changing meanings of the light metaphor, Quaker influences on Baruch Spinoza’s theology, and the unexpected persistence of Aristotle in the Enlightenment. Exploring the emergence of historical consciousness among Enlightenment thinkers while examining their repeated insistence on living in an enlightened age, the collection also investigates the origins and the long-term dynamics of the relationship between faith and reason. Providing an overview of the rich spectrum of eighteenth-century culture, the authors demonstrate that religion was central to Enlightenment thought. The term “enlightenment” itself had a deeply religious connotation. Rather than revisiting the celebrated breaks between the eighteenth century and the period that preceded it, Let There Be Enlightenment reveals the unacknowledged continuities that connect the Enlightenment to its various antecedents. Contributors: Philippe Buc, William J. Bulman, Jeffrey D. Burson, Charly Coleman, Dan Edelstein, Matthew T. Gaetano, Howard Hotson, Anton M. Matytsin, Darrin M. McMahon, James Schmidt, Céline Spector, Jo Van Cauter

Science, Philosophy and Religion in the Age of the Enlightenment

Download Science, Philosophy and Religion in the Age of the Enlightenment PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 9781409400585
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (5 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Science, Philosophy and Religion in the Age of the Enlightenment by : John Gascoigne

Download or read book Science, Philosophy and Religion in the Age of the Enlightenment written by John Gascoigne and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking as its focus the wide-ranging character of the Enlightenment, both in geographical and intellectual terms, this second collection of articles by John Gascoigne explores this movement's filiation and influence in a range of contexts. It emphasises the evolutionary rather than the revolutionary character of the Enlightenment and its ability to change society by adaptation rather than demolition. It refers, firstly, to developments in Britain tracing the changing views of history in relation to the Biblical account, the ideological uses of science (and particularly the work of Newton) and their connections to developments in moral philosophy and teaching. The collection then turns to the wider global setting and the way in which the Enlightenment served to provide a justification for European exploration and expansion, and explores the interplay between the experience of Pacific contact and currents of thought in Enlightenment Germany.

The Limits of Tolerance

Download The Limits of Tolerance PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231547048
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Limits of Tolerance by : Denis Lacorne

Download or read book The Limits of Tolerance written by Denis Lacorne and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern notion of tolerance—the welcoming of diversity as a force for the common good—emerged in the Enlightenment in the wake of centuries of religious wars. First elaborated by philosophers such as John Locke and Voltaire, religious tolerance gradually gained ground in Europe and North America. But with the resurgence of fanaticism and terrorism, religious tolerance is increasingly being challenged by frightened publics. In this book, Denis Lacorne traces the emergence of the modern notion of religious tolerance in order to rethink how we should respond to its contemporary tensions. In a wide-ranging argument that spans the Ottoman Empire, the Venetian republic, and recent controversies such as France’s burqa ban and the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, The Limits of Tolerance probes crucial questions: Should we impose limits on freedom of expression in the name of human dignity or decency? Should we accept religious symbols in the public square? Can we tolerate the intolerant? While acknowledging that tolerance can never be entirely without limits, Lacorne defends the Enlightenment concept against recent attempts to circumscribe it, arguing that without it a pluralistic society cannot survive. Awarded the Prix Montyon by the Académie Française, The Limits of Tolerance is a powerful reflection on twenty-first-century democracy’s most fundamental challenges.

Rousseau and "L'Infame"

Download Rousseau and

Author :
Publisher : Rodopi
ISBN 13 : 9042025050
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (42 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Rousseau and "L'Infame" by : Ourida Mostefai

Download or read book Rousseau and "L'Infame" written by Ourida Mostefai and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2009 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecrasez l'infâme! Voltaire's rallying cry against fanaticism resonates with new force today. Nothing suggests the complex legacy of the Enlightenment more than the struggle of superstition, prejudice, and intolerance advocated by most of the Enlightenment philosophers, regardless of their ideological differences. The aim of this book is to undertake a reconsideration of the controversies surrounding the questions of religion, toleration, and fanaticism in the eighteenth century through an examination of Rousseau's dialogue with Voltaire. What come to light from this confrontation are two leading and at times competing world views and conceptions of the place of the engaged writer in society.

Culture of Enlightening

Download Culture of Enlightening PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN 13 : 0268105448
Total Pages : 757 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (681 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Culture of Enlightening by : Jeffrey D. Burson

Download or read book Culture of Enlightening written by Jeffrey D. Burson and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 757 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent scholarly and popular attempts to define the Enlightenment, account for its diversity, and evaluate its historical significance suffer from a surprising lack of consensus at a time when the social and political challenges of today cry out for a more comprehensive and serviceable understanding of its importance. This book argues that regnant notions of the Enlightenment, the Radical Enlightenment, and the multitude of regional and religious enlightenments proposed by scholars all share an entangled intellectual genealogy rooted in a broader revolutionary "culture of enlightening" that took shape over the long-arc of intellectual history from the waning of the sixteenth-century Reformations to the dawn of the Atlantic Revolutionary era. Generated in competition for a changing readership and forged in dialog and conflict, dynamic and diverse notions of what it meant to be enlightened constituted a broader culture of enlightening from which the more familiar strains of the Enlightenment emerged, often ironically and accidentally, from originally religious impulses and theological questioning. By adapting, for the first time, methodological insights from the scholarship of historical entanglement (l'histoire croisée) to the study of the Enlightenment, this book provides a new interpretation of the European republic of letters from the late 1600s through the 1700s by focusing on the lived experience of the long-neglected Catholic theologian, historian, and contributor to Diderot's Encyclopédie, Abbé Claude Yvon. The ambivalent historical memory of Yvon, as well as the eclectic and global array of his sources and endeavors, Burson argues, can serve as a gauge for evaluating historical transformations in the surprisingly diverse ways in which eighteenth-century individuals spoke about enlightening human reason, religion, and society. Ultimately, Burson provocatively claims that even the most radical fruits of the Enlightenment can be understood as the unintended offspring of a revolution in theology and the cultural history of religious experience.