By examining Samuel Taylor Coleridge's and John Henry Newman's parallel approaches to the central question of Christian apologetics - the existence of God - Coleridge and Newman: The Centrality of Conscience documents more fully than ever before the extent of Coleridge's influence on Newman. Both men sought to develop an argument for God's existence by understanding conscience as the moral self-awareness that makes us human. The study provides fresh readings of three texts by Colerdige and three by Newman. The result of these comparative readings is a rhetoric that both informs and invites the reader to personal reflection.
Sara Coleridge and the Oxford Movement is the first book to be devoted entirely to Sara Coleridge’s religious writings. It presents extracts from important religious works which have remained unpublished since the 1840s. These writings represent a bold intervention by a woman writer in the public spheres of academia and the Church, in the genre of religious writing which was a masculine preserve (as opposed to the genres of religious fiction and poetry). They offer the most original and systematic critique of Tractarian theology to appear in the 1840s. Sara Coleridge’s assertion of religious inclusivity and liberty of conscience is based on a radically Protestant theology underpinned by a Kantian epistemology. The book also presents substantial extracts from her unpublished masterpiece Dialogues on Regeneration (the equivalent of her father’s Opus Maximum) which show her remarkable literary originality and the continuing development of her innovative religious thought.
This book presents a fundamental reassessment of Sara Coleridge. It examines her achievements as an author in the public sphere, and celebrates her interventions in what was a masculine genre of religious polemics. Sara Coleridge the religious author was the peer of such major figures as John Henry Newman and F. D. Maurice, and recognized as such by contemporaries. Her strategic negotiations with conventions of gender and authorship were subtle and successful. In this rediscovery of Sara Coleridge the author revises perspectives upon her literary relationship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Far from sacrificing her opportunities in service of her father’s memory, her rationale is to exploit his metaphysics in original religious writings that engage with urgent controversies of her own times. Sara Coleridge critiques the Oxford theology of Newman and his colleagues for authoritarian and elitist tendencies, and for creating a negative culture in religious discourse. In response, she experiments with methodologies of collaborative, dialogic exchange, in which form as much as content will promote liberal, inclusive and productive encounters. She develops this agenda in her major religious work, the unpublished Dialogues on Regeneration (1850–51), which this book examines in its penultimate chapter.
In this brilliant study, Thomas Pfau argues that the loss of foundational concepts in classical and medieval Aristotelian philosophy caused a fateful separation between reason and will in European thought. Pfau traces the evolution and eventual deterioration of key concepts of human agency—will, person, judgment, action—from antiquity through Scholasticism and on to eighteenth-century moral theory and its critical revision in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Featuring extended critical discussions of Aristotle, Gnosticism, Augustine, Aquinas, Ockham, Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Hume, Adam Smith, and Coleridge, this study contends that the humanistic concepts these writers seek to elucidate acquire meaning and significance only inasmuch as we are prepared positively to engage (rather than historicize) their previous usages. Beginning with the rise of theological (and, eventually, secular) voluntarism, modern thought appears increasingly reluctant and, in time, unable to engage the deep history of its own underlying conceptions, thus leaving our understanding of the nature and function of humanistic inquiry increasingly frayed and incoherent. One consequence of this shift is to leave the moral self-expression of intellectual elites and ordinary citizens alike stunted, which in turn has fueled the widespread notion that moral and ethical concerns are but a special branch of inquiry largely determined by opinion rather than dialogical reasoning, judgment, and practice. A clear sign of this regression is the present crisis in the study of the humanities, whose role is overwhelmingly conceived (and negatively appraised) in terms of scientific theories, methods, and objectives. The ultimate casualty of this reductionism has been the very idea of personhood and the disappearance of an adequate ethical language. Minding the Modern is not merely a chapter in the history of ideas; it is a thorough phenomenological and metaphysical study of the roots of today's predicaments.
Schlossberg (senior research associate, the Ethics and Public Policy Center) argues that by the time Victoria became queen in 1837, Victorian culture was already in place. Focusing on the period between the 1790s and the 1840s, he shows how the religious revival that took hold of England's culture constituted a "silent revolution" that formed the basis of Victorian culture. He describes various manifestations of the religious revival, focusing on the main renewal movements in the Church of England and the spread of evangelicalism to dissenting religious groups. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
