It is widely assumed that science is the enemy of religious faith. The idea is so pervasive that entire industries of religious apologetics converge around the challenge of Darwin, evolution, and the "secular worldview." This book challenges such assumptions by proposing a different cause of unbelief in the West: the Christian conscience. Tracing a history of doubt and unbelief from the Reformation to the age of Darwin and Karl Marx, Dominic Erdozain argues that the most powerful solvents of religious orthodoxy have been concepts of moral equity and personal freedom generated by Christianity itself. Revealing links between the radical Reformation and early modern philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza and Pierre Bayle, Erdozain demonstrates that the dynamism of the Enlightenment, including the very concept of "natural reason" espoused by philosophers such as Voltaire, was rooted in Christian ethics and spirituality. The final chapters explore similar themes in the era of Darwin and Marx, showing how moral revolt preceded and transcended the challenges of evolution and "scientific materialism" in the unseating of religious belief. The picture that emerges is not of a secular challenge to religious faith, but a series of theological insurrections against divisive accounts of Christian orthodoxy.

The Soul of Doubt: The Religious Roots of Unbelief from Luther to Marx

History

Erdozain, Dominic

World

Oxford University Press

This takedown of American gun culture argues that the nation's founders did not intend the Second Amendment to guarantee an individual right to bear arms--and that this distortion of the record is an urgent threat to democracy. "At once eye-opening and enraging, One Nation Under Guns is that rare book that can help change the way we live in this country."--Eddie S. Glaude Jr., bestselling author of Begin Again More than a hundred lives are lost to firearms every day in America. The cost is more than the numbers--it is the fear, the anxiety, the dread of public spaces that an armed society has created under the tortured rubric of freedom. But the norms of today are not the norms of American history or the values of its founders. They are the product of a gun culture that has imposed its vision on a sleeping nation. Historian Dominic Erdozain argues that we have wrongly ceded the big-picture argument on guns: As we parse legislation on background checks and automatic-weapons bans, we fail to ask what place guns should have in a functioning democracy. Taking readers on a brilliant historical journey, Erdozain shows how the founders feared the tyranny of individuals as much as the tyranny of kings--the idea that any person had a right to walk around armed was anathema to their notion of freedom and the peaceful republic they hoped to build. They wrote these ideas into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, ideas that were subsequently affirmed by two centuries of jurisprudence. And yet the twin scourges of racism and nationalism would combine to create a darker American vision--a rogue and reckless freedom based on birth and blood. It was this freedom, not the liberty promised by the Constitution, that generated our modern gun culture, with its mystic conceptions of good guys and bad guys, innocence and guilt. By the time the U.S. Supreme Court reinvented the Second Amendment in 2008's District of Columbia v. Heller, an opinion that Erdozain convincingly eviscerates, many Americans had already acceded to the fiction: the unfreedom of an armed society. To save our democracy, he argues, we must fight for the founders' true idea of what it means to be free.

One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Crown

This book traces the rise and fall of the evangelical movement, the powerhouse of Victorian religion, via its preoccupation with pleasure. Victorian evangelicalism demonstrated an ability to excite the affections but also a corresponding suspicion of worldly pleasures. Suspicion developed into hostility, and a movement premised on freedom became coercive and alienating. The crisis of Victorian religion began.  It is generally held that the mid-Victorian turn to recreation and sport solved the problem, 'justifying God to the people' through cricket, cycling and football. This book argues otherwise - that the problem of pleasure was inflamed by the ecclesiastical remedy. The problem of overdrawn boundaries between church and world gave way to a new and subtle confusion of gospel and culture. Historians have praised the mood of engagement but the costs were profound. In fact, sport became the perfect vehicle for that humanistic, 'unmystical' morality that defines the secularity of the twentieth century. Secularisation did not wait for the Dionysian rebellions of the 1960s: it emerged - almost a hundred years earlier - in the Victorian transformation of religion into ethics. Central to the process was the problem of pleasure.  DOMINIC ERDOZAIN is Lecturer in the History of Christianity, King's College London

The Problem of Pleasure: Sport, Recreation and the Crisis of Victorian Religion (Studies in Modern British Religious History, 22) (Volume 22)

Europe

Boydell Press

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