Reconciling science and religion

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Jeremy Gray

Plato's Ghost examines the development of mathematics from 1880 to 1920 as a modernist transformation similar to those in art, literature, and music. --from publisher description.

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Pamela J. Walker

Those people in uniforms who ring bells and raise money for the poor during the holiday season belong to a religious movement that in 1865 combined early feminism, street preaching, holiness theology, and intentionally outrageous singing into what soon became the Salvation Army. In Pulling the devil's kingdom down, Pamela Walker emphasizes how thoroughly the Army entered into nineteenth-century urban life. She follows the movement from its Methodist roots and East London origins through its struggles with the established denominations of England, problems with the law and the media, and public manifestations that included street brawls with working-class toughs. The Salvation Army was a neighborhood religion, with a "battle plan" especially suited to urban working-class geography and cultural life. The ability to use popular leisure activities as inspiration was a major factor in the Army's success, since pubs, music halls, sports, and betting were regarded as its principal rivals. Salvationist women claimed the "right to preach" and enjoyed spiritual authority and public visibility more extensively than in virtually any other religious or secular organization. Opposition to the new movement was equally energetic and took many forms, but even as contemporary music hall performers ridiculed the "Hallelujah Lasses," the Salvation Army was spreading across Great Britain and the Continent, and on to North America. The Army offered a distinctive response to the dilemmas facing Victorian Christians, in particular the relationship between what Salvationists believed and the work they did. Walker fills in the social, cultural, and religious contexts that make that relationship come to life.

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Sandra M. den Otter

'Community' - how to define and to secure it has become a topic of lively discussion. This endeavour also struck a deep chord among Victorians encountering the urban, industrial culture that had emerged by the end of the nineteenth century. In this original and stimulating study, Sandra den Otter explores the idealists' search for 'connection', for a sense of community that fitted the new forms of society, characterized for many concerned observers by dislocation, a loosening of traditional bonds, and intense individualism. Idealist responses to these problems dominated social theory until the Great War. . This book illuminates the idealists' place in the vigorous contemporary debate about a new science of society. Idealist links to German thought, the teaching of philosophy in mid-century Oxford, and idealist criticisms of the naturalist underpinnings of much current social theory are assessed. Dr den Otter argues that idealists constructed an interpretive social theory which adopted various strands of positivist and even naturalist manners in its attempt to frame a social theory suited to the dilemmas of their age. Tracing the dialogue between idealists and sociologists like Herbert Spencer and Emile Durkheim, the study analyses idealist reinterpretations of the individual, the state, and community.

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Keith Robbins

The twentieth century has not been kind to Britain. The great empire of the Victorian Age now seems a distant echo. The transformation in status and power has inevitably been accompanied by a pervasive questioning about the very nature of 'British' history. How are its characteristics determined? The essays, written over the past twenty-five years, in History, Religion and Identity in Modern Britain can all be said, in one way or another, to be concerned with the 'Identity of Britain' in the modern period. They complement and elaborate themes developed in Keith Robbins' books. In the first group, as a former editor of History and President of the Historical Association, the author considers how British historians have themselves reflected and shaped the national understanding of the British past. He discusses the implications of such debates for the present. Have we reached the end of British history in the age of European integration? In the second group, attention is concentrated on beliefs and values, ranging from aspects of Edwardian religion to the problems posed for the churches by the rise of Nazism. This section also includes a discussion of religion and national identity in modern Britain. Another essay takes 1940 as its reference point for a searching enquiry into contemporary understandings of 'Christian Civilization'. What kind of Christian country was Britain? The third group, reflecting the author's teaching experience in England, Scotland and Wales, approaches the puzzling problem of the nature of 'Britishness' from distinct angles.