The Village Enlightenment in America

The Village Enlightenment in America PDF Author: Craig Hazen
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252068287
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
The Village Enlightenment in America focuses on three nineteenth-century spiritual activists who epitomized the marriage of science and religion fostered in antebellum, pre-Darwinian America by the American Enlightenment. A theologian, writer, and apologist for the nascent Mormon movement, as well as an amateur scientist, Orson Pratt wrote Key to the Universe, or a New Theory of Its Mechanism, to establish a scientific base for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Robert Hare, an inventor and ardent convert to spiritualism, used his scientific expertise to lend credence to the spiritualist movement. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, generally considered the initiator of the American mind-cure movement, developed an overtly religious concept of science and used it to justify his system of theology. Pratt, Hare, and Quimby all employed a potent combination of popular science and Baconianism to legitimate their new religious ideas. Using the same terms--matter, ether, magnetic force--to account for the behavior of particles, planetary rotation, and the influence of the Holy Ghost, these agents of the Enlightenment constructed complex systems intended to demonstrate a fundamental harmony between the physical and the metaphysical. Through the lives and work of these three influential men, The Village Enlightenment in America opens a window to a time when science and religion, instead of seeming fundamentally at odds with each other, appeared entirely reconcilable.

The Village Enlightenment in America

The Village Enlightenment in America PDF Author: Craig Hazen
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252068287
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
The Village Enlightenment in America focuses on three nineteenth-century spiritual activists who epitomized the marriage of science and religion fostered in antebellum, pre-Darwinian America by the American Enlightenment. A theologian, writer, and apologist for the nascent Mormon movement, as well as an amateur scientist, Orson Pratt wrote Key to the Universe, or a New Theory of Its Mechanism, to establish a scientific base for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Robert Hare, an inventor and ardent convert to spiritualism, used his scientific expertise to lend credence to the spiritualist movement. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, generally considered the initiator of the American mind-cure movement, developed an overtly religious concept of science and used it to justify his system of theology. Pratt, Hare, and Quimby all employed a potent combination of popular science and Baconianism to legitimate their new religious ideas. Using the same terms--matter, ether, magnetic force--to account for the behavior of particles, planetary rotation, and the influence of the Holy Ghost, these agents of the Enlightenment constructed complex systems intended to demonstrate a fundamental harmony between the physical and the metaphysical. Through the lives and work of these three influential men, The Village Enlightenment in America opens a window to a time when science and religion, instead of seeming fundamentally at odds with each other, appeared entirely reconcilable.

The Village Enlightenment in America

The Village Enlightenment in America PDF Author: Craig James Hazen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 612

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Book Description


The Enlightenment in America

The Enlightenment in America PDF Author: Henry Farnham May
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Enlightenment
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
Throughout the book he relates the Enlightenment to Protestant Christianity, for it is out of the clashes and reconciliations between those two systems that 19th-century American culture--a culture that lasted almost to our own time--took shape. Defined so broadly, the religion of Enlightenment obviously included many different kinds of people--deists and skeptics and liberal Christians, aristocrats and democrats, conservatives and revolutionaries. May divides the European Enlightenment into four major categories, and shows how each had a different effect in America. Obviously some ideas could be transmitted more easily than others to a society overwhelmingly Protestant and rapidly becoming democratic. May shows how the Enlightenment affected the thoughts and actions of major figures like Jefferson, Franklin, and John Adams, but these familiar figures are treated against a background of less well-known people--doctors and ministers, scientists and planters and politicians.

A Republic of Mind and Spirit

A Republic of Mind and Spirit PDF Author: Catherine L. Albanese
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300134770
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 640

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Book Description
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mexicans and Americans joined together to transform the U.S.-Mexico borderlands into a crossroads of modern economic development. This book reveals the forgotten story of their ambitious dreams and their ultimate failure to control this fugitive terrain. Focusing on a mining region that spilled across the Arizona-Sonora border, this book shows how entrepreneurs, corporations, and statesmen tried to domesticate nature and society within a transnational context. Efforts to tame a 'wild' frontier were stymied by labour struggles, social conflict, and revolution. Fugitive Landscapes explores the making and unmaking of the U.S.-Mexico border, telling how ordinary people resisted the domination of empires, nations, and corporations to shape transnational history on their own terms. By moving beyond traditional national narratives, it offers new lessons for our own border-crossing age.

The Populist Vision

The Populist Vision PDF Author: Charles Postel
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195384717
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 626

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Book Description
A major reinterpretation of the Populist movement, this text argues that the Populists were modern people, rejecting the notion that Populism opposed modernity and progress.

A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders

A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders PDF Author: James Delbourgo
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674022997
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
"The first book to situate early American experimental science in the context of a transatlantic public sphere, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders offers a view of the origins of American science and the cultural meaning of the American Enlightenment."--BOOK JACKET.

Science and Christianity in Pulpit and Pew

Science and Christianity in Pulpit and Pew PDF Author: Ronald L. Numbers
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 0195320379
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
These essays address broad topics such as the popularization of scientific ideas, secularization and the development of the naturalistic worldview.

The Religion of Chiropractic

The Religion of Chiropractic PDF Author: Holly Folk
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469632802
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
Chiropractic is by far the most common form of alternative medicine in the United States today, but its fascinating origins stretch back to the battles between science and religion in the nineteenth century. At the center of the story are chiropractic's colorful founders, D. D. Palmer and his son, B. J. Palmer, of Davenport, Iowa, where in 1897 they established the Palmer College of Chiropractic. Holly Folk shows how the Palmers' system depicted chiropractic as a conduit for both material and spiritualized versions of a "vital principle," reflecting popular contemporary therapies and nineteenth-century metaphysical beliefs, including the idea that the spine was home to occult forces. The creation of chiropractic, and other Progressive-era versions of alternative medicine, happened at a time when the relationship between science and religion took on an urgent, increasingly competitive tinge. Many remarkable people, including the Palmers, undertook highly personal reinterpretations of their physical and spiritual worlds. In this context, Folk reframes alternative medicine and spirituality as a type of populist intellectual culture in which ideologies about the body comprise a highly appealing form of cultural resistance.

The Enlightenment in America, 1720-1825

The Enlightenment in America, 1720-1825 PDF Author: Jose R. Torre
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN:
Category : Enlightenment
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
Aims to modify the periodization for the American Enlightenment. Americans did accept an early and moderate Enlightenment characterised by the work of Locke and Newton. This collection highlights the functional nature of the Enlightenment in America.

Skepticism and American Faith

Skepticism and American Faith PDF Author: Christopher Grasso
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190494395
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the dialogue of religious skepticism and faith shaped struggles over the place of religion in politics. It produced different visions of knowledge and education in an "enlightened" society. It fueled social reform in an era of economic transformation, territorial expansion, and social change. Ultimately, as Christopher Grasso argues in this definitive work, it molded the making and eventual unmaking of American nationalism. Religious skepticism has been rendered nearly invisible in American religious history, which often stresses the evangelicalism of the era or the "secularization" said to be happening behind people's backs, or assumes that skepticism was for intellectuals and ordinary people who stayed away from church were merely indifferent. Certainly the efforts of vocal "infidels" or "freethinkers" were dwarfed by the legions conducting religious revivals, creating missions and moral reform societies, distributing Bibles and Christian tracts, and building churches across the land. Even if few Americans publicly challenged Christian truth claims, many more quietly doubted, and religious skepticism touched--and in some cases transformed--many individual lives. Commentators considered religious doubt to be a persistent problem, because they believed that skeptical challenges to the grounds of faith--the Bible, the church, and personal experience--threatened the foundations of American society. Skepticism and American Faith examines the ways that Americans--ministers, merchants, and mystics; physicians, schoolteachers, and feminists; self-help writers, slaveholders, shoemakers, and soldiers--wrestled with faith and doubt as they lived their daily lives and tried to make sense of their world.