The Works of Bishop Butler
The Works of Bishop Butler

Author: Joseph Butler

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 443

ISBN-13: 1580462103

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The complete works of Joseph Butler, newly edited, with an introduction, notes, glossary, and an analytic index. This edition of Bishop Joseph Butler's [1692-1752] complete works is the first newly edited version to appear in a century, and is the only one to include a single, analytic index to the whole works. The editor's introduction presents Butler's ethics and philosophy of religion as a single, comprehensive system of pastoral philosophy and surveys the vast influence Butler exerted, especially in the nineteenth century. Included here are all fifteen published sermons from Butler's tenure as Preacher at the Rolls Chapel, the only sermons in English routinely studied by secular ethicists to this day; six additional sermons on the great public institutions; his Charge to the Clergy at Durham, controversial in its day for its defense of external religion; his youthful letters sent anonymously to Samuel Clarke, and the complete text of his Analogy of Religion, an apologetic tour de force, including the famous introduction on probability as the guide to life, the analogical defense of immortality, free will and the moral order of nature, as well as his famous rebuttal of deism and his dissertations on virtue and on personal identify. Butler's work is among the monuments of classical Anglican theology. He is a major source for work in ethical theory and philosophy of religion, as well as for the background of Victorian literature. David E. White teaches philosophy at St. John Fisher College and is an officer in the New York State Philosophical Association.

Bishop Butler and Logic, Love, and the Pursuit of Happiness in the Age of Unreason
Bishop Butler and Logic, Love, and the Pursuit of Happiness in the Age of Unreason

Author: David E. White

Publisher:

Published: 2021-11

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781527573888

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Using ordinary language and appealing to the acknowledged facts of experience, Bishop Butler presented a guidebook on how to live in pursuit of happiness and the benefit of all. This book introduces readers to Butler's philosophy as a whole and to the primary texts in his own words. Butler was an advocate and consistently defended the Church of England and its associated morality and theology in all his works. He insisted on the necessity of having good reasons to support any belief or practice toward which one was attracted. Butler's ideas are presented here as a good fit with the full range of theistic piety and with the varieties of ethical atheism. The imposition of dogma and the exposition of bias are discarded as distractive from the search for truth. The life, sources, works, and reception of Bishop Butler serve as a bridge, or navigational aid, joining the wisdom of the ancients, sacred and secular, with our experience as moderns and with our expectations for future generations. Since Butler insists on grounding his views in evidence and argumentation, his appeal extends well beyond the Anglican Communion. Butler's clarity of expression and cogency of argumentation free him from the bias associated with philosophical and religious thought. His work remains critical of, and receptive to, a wide range of ways to carry on the business of living a human life without falling into the kind of error and distraction most likely to lead to misery.

Joseph Butler: The Analogy of Religion
Joseph Butler: The Analogy of Religion

Author: David McNaughton

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-09-02

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 0191088919

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Joseph Butler's The Analogy of Religion (1736) is an important work in terms of its historical influence and its contemporary relevance. In it, Butler defends Christian belief against many well-known objections: for instance, that the evidence for Christianity is weak; that it is impossible to believe in miracles; that if God existed he would have revealed himself clearly to everyone. The problems Butler discusses are current in contemporary philosophy of religion, but his answers are often ignored, or given short shrift. Butler argues that by examining this world we have reason to believe its Creator is both benevolent and just; that virtue will be rewarded and vice punished. Even if we have doubts, we would be well advised to take Christianity seriously, given what is at stake. The work includes seminal discussions of life after death, personal identity, and the structure of our ethical thought. In addition to extensive notes, David McNaughton's edition includes a detailed synopsis, a selection from the correspondence between Butler and Samuel Clarke, and an oveview of philosophical influences on Butler's thought.

Awash in a Sea of Faith
Awash in a Sea of Faith

Author: Jon Butler

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 9780674056015

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Challenging the formidable tradition that places early New England Puritanism at the center of the American religious experience, Yale historian Jon Butler offers a new interpretation of three hundred years of religious and cultural development. Butler stresses the instability of religion in Europe where state churches battled dissenters, magic, and astonishingly low church participation. He charts the transfer of these difficulties to America, including the failure of Puritan religious models, and describes the surprising advance of religious commitment there between 1700 and 1865. Through the assertion of authority and coercion, a remarkable sacralization of the prerevolutionary countryside, advancing religious pluralism, the folklorization of magic, and an eclectic, syncretistic emphasis on supernatural interventionism, including miracles, America emerged after 1800 as an extraordinary spiritual hothouse that far eclipsed the Puritan achievement--even as secularism triumphed in Europe. Awash in a Sea of Faith ranges from popular piety to magic, from anxious revolutionary war chaplains to the cool rationalism of James Madison, from divining rods and seer stones to Anglican and Unitarian elites, and from Virginia Anglican occultists and Presbyterians raised from the dead to Jonathan Edwards, Joseph Smith, and Abraham Lincoln. Butler deftly comes to terms with conventional themes such as Puritanism, witchcraft, religion and revolution, revivalism, millenarianism, and Mormonism. His elucidation of Christianity's powerful role in shaping slavery and of a subsequent African spiritual "holocaust," with its ironic result in African Christianization, is an especially fresh and incisive account. Awash in a Sea of Faith reveals the proliferation of American religious expression--not its decline--and stresses the creative tensions between pulpit and pew across three hundred years of social maturation. Striking in its breadth and deeply rooted in primary sources, this seminal book recasts the landscape of American religious and cultural history.

Everything Happens for a Reason
Everything Happens for a Reason

Author: Keith Butler

Publisher: Destiny Image Publishers

Published: 2015-02-03

Total Pages: 110

ISBN-13: 1680310240

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In an attempt to give meaning to what appears to be inexplicable circumstances in life, many people say, “Well, everything happens for a reason, you know.” The truth of the matter is that everything does happen for a reason!In this book, Bishop Butler explores the truths found in the Parable of the Sower, uncovering the...