Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion

Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion

Author: Marcela K. Perett

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2018-09-07

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 0812295390

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In early fifteenth-century Prague, disagreements about religion came to be shouted in the streets and taught to the laity in the vernacular, giving rise to a new kind of public engagement that would persist into the early modern era and beyond. The reforming followers of Jan Hus brought theological learning to the people through a variety of genres, including songs, poems, tractates, letters, manifestos, and sermons. At the same time, university masters provided the laity with an education that enabled them to discuss contentious issues and arrive at their own conclusions, emphasizing that they held the freedom to make up their own minds about important theological issues. This marketplace of competing religious ideas in the vernacular emerged in Bohemia a full hundred years before the Reformation. In Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion, Marcela K. Perett examines the early phases of the so-called Hussite revolution, between 1412, when Jan Hus first radicalized his followers, and 1436, the year of the agreement at the Council of Basel granting papal permission for the ritual practice of the Utraquist, or moderate Hussite, faction to continue. These were years during which the leaders of competing reform movements needed to garner the laity's support and employed the vernacular for that purpose, translating and simplifying basic theological arguments about the Bible, the church's ritual practice, and authority in the church. Perett illustrates that the vernacular discourse, even if it revolved around the same topics, was nothing like the Latin debates on the issues, often appealing to emotion rather than doctrinal positions. In the end, as Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion demonstrates, the process of vernacularization increased rather than decreased religious factionalism and radicalism as agreement about theological issues became impossible.


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Publisher:

Published:

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0812250532

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Luther, Conflict, and Christendom

Luther, Conflict, and Christendom

Author: Christopher Ocker

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-08-30

Total Pages: 539

ISBN-13: 1107197686

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Martin Luther was the subject of a religious controversy that never really came to an end. The Reformation was a controversy about him.


Ireland

Ireland

Author: Gustave de Beaumont

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-07-01

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 0674031113

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Paralleling his friend Alexis de Tocqueville's visit to America, Gustave de Beaumont traveled through Ireland in the mid-1830s to observe its people and society. In Ireland, he chronicles the history of the Irish and offers up a national portrait on the eve of the Great Famine. Published to acclaim in France, Ireland remained in print there until 1914. The English edition, translated by William Cooke Taylor and published in 1839, was not reprinted. In a devastating critique of British policy in Ireland, Beaumont questioned why a government with such enlightened institutions tolerated such oppression. He was scathing in his depiction of the ruinous state of Ireland, noting the desperation of the Catholics, the misery of repeated famines, the unfair landlord system, and the faults of the aristocracy. It was not surprising the Irish were seen as loafers, drunks, and brutes when they had been reduced to living like beasts. Yet Beaumont held out hope that British liberal reforms could heal Ireland's wounds. This rediscovered masterpiece, in a single volume for the first time, reproduces the nineteenth-century Taylor translation and includes an introduction on Beaumont and his world. This volume also presents Beaumont's impassioned preface to the 1863 French edition in which he portrays the appalling effects of the Great Famine. A classic of nineteenth-century political and social commentary, Beaumont's singular portrait offers the compelling immediacy of an eyewitness to history.


Why Study History?

Why Study History?

Author: John Fea

Publisher: Baker Books

Published: 2024-03-26

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1493442708

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What is the purpose of studying history? How do we reflect on contemporary life from a historical perspective, and can such reflection help us better understand ourselves, the world around us, and the God we worship and serve? Written by an accomplished historian, award-winning author, public evangelical spokesman, and respected teacher, this introductory textbook shows why Christians should study history, how faith is brought to bear on our understanding of the past, and how studying the past can help us more effectively love God and others. John Fea shows that deep historical thinking can relieve us of our narcissism; cultivate humility, hospitality, and love; and transform our lives more fully into the image of Jesus Christ. The first edition of this book has been used widely in Christian colleges across the country. The second edition provides an updated introduction to the study of history and the historian's vocation. The book has also been revised throughout and incorporates Fea's reflections on this topic from throughout the past 10 years.


Essays on Church, State, and Politics

Essays on Church, State, and Politics

Author: Christian Thomasius

Publisher: Natural Law and Enlightenment

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13:

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The essays selected here for translation derive largely from Thomasius's work on Staatskirchenrecht, or the political jurisprudence of church law. These works, originating as disputations, theses, and pamphlets, were direct interventions in the unresolved issue of the political role of religion in Brandenburg-Prussia, a state in which a Calvinist dynasty ruled over a largely Lutheran population and nobility as well as a significant Catholic minority. In mandating limited religious toleration within the German states, the provisions of the Peace of Westphalia (1648) also provided the rulers of Brandenburg-Prussia with a way of keeping the powerful Lutheran church in check by guaranteeing a degree of religious freedom to non-Lutherans and thereby detaching the state from the most powerful territorial church. Thomasius's writings on church-state relations, many of them critical of the civil claims made by Lutheran theologians, are a direct response to this state of affairs. At the same time, owing to the depth of intellectual resources at his disposal, these works constitute a major contribution to the broader discussion of the relation between the religious and political spheres.


Gods in the Global Village

Gods in the Global Village

Author: Lester R. Kurtz

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Published: 2015-04-01

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 1483386457

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In a world plagued by religious conflict, how can the various religious and secular traditions coexist peacefully on the planet? And, what role does sociology play in helping us understand the state of religious life in a globalizing world? In the Fourth Edition ofGods in the Global Village, author Lester Kurtz continues to address these questions. This text is an engaging, thought-provoking examination of the relationships among the major faith traditions that inform the thinking and ethical standards of most people in the emerging global social order. Thoroughly updated to reflect recent events, the book discusses the role of religion in our daily lives and global politics, and the ways in which religion is both an agent of, and barrier to, social change.


Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther

Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther

Author: Mark U. Edwards, Jr.

Publisher: Fortress Press

Published: 2004-11

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 9780800637392

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Mark Edwards's pioneering work on the Reformation as a"print event" traces how Martin Luther, the first Protestant,became the central figure in the West's first media campaign.He shows how Luther and his allies spread their messageusing a medium that was itself subversive: pamphlets writtenin the vernacular and directed to the broadest readingpublic. Closely examining Protestant and Catholic pamphletspublished in Strasbourg in the early years of theReformation, Edwards demonstrates Luther's dominance ofthe medium, the challenges posed by Catholic counterattacks,the remarkable success of Luther's New Testament, and theunforeseen effects of the new medium. This volume hasopened an exciting new vista on the European Reformation.


Selected Writings of Girolamo Savonarola

Selected Writings of Girolamo Savonarola

Author: Girolamo Savonarola

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 435

ISBN-13: 0300129041

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Five hundred years after his death at the stake, Girolamo Savonarola remains one of the most fascinating figures of the Italian Renaissance. This wide-ranging collection, with an introduction by historian Alison Brown, includes translations of his sermons and treatises on pastoral ministry, prophecy, politics, and moral reform, as well as the correspondence with Alexander VI that led to Savonarola’s silencing and excommunication. Also included are first-hand accounts of religio-civic festivities instigated by Savonarola and of his last moments. This collection demonstrates the remarkable extent of Savonarola’s contributions to the religious, political, and aesthetic debates of the late fifteenth century.


Infidel Feminism

Infidel Feminism

Author: Laura Schwartz

Publisher:

Published: 2015-01-03

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9780719097287

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Infidel feminism is the first in-depth study of a distinctive brand of women's rights that emerged out of the Victorian Secularist movement. Anti-religious or secular ideas were fundamental to the development of feminist thought, but have, until now, been almost entirely passed over in the historiography of the Victorian and Edwardian women's movement. In uncovering an important tradition of Freethinking feminism, this book reveals an ongoing radical and free love current connecting Owenite feminism with the more 'respectable' post-1850 women's movement and the 'New Women' of the early twentieth century. Schwartz looks at the lives and work of a number of female activists associated with organised Secularism, whose renunciation of religion encouraged and shaped their support for women's emancipation. These self-proclaimed 'infidel' feminists championed moral autonomy, free speech, and the democratic dissemination of knowledge. Alongside their rejection of god-given notions of sexual difference and a critique of the Christian institution of marriage such Freethinking principles provided powerful intellectual tools with which to challenge dominant and oppressive constructions of womanhood. Their contribution to the wider feminist movement was significant at a time when the issue of women's rights was integral to the creation of modern definitions of 'religion' and 'secularism' and when feminists and anti-feminists, Christians and Freethinkers battled over who had women's best interests at heart. This book will be invaluable to both scholars and students of social and cultural history and feminist thought, and to interdisciplinary studies of religion and secularisation. Its accessible style will also ensure that it appeals to those interested in the history of women's movements more broadly.