Science and spirituality

Sample

Peter J. Bowler

Although much has been written about the vigorous debates over science and religion in the Victorian era, little attention has been paid to their continuing importance in early twentieth-century Britain. Reconciling Science and Religion provides a comprehensive survey of the interplay between British science and religion from the late nineteenth century to World War II. Peter J. Bowler argues that unlike the United States, where a strong fundamentalist opposition to evolutionism developed in the 1920s (most famously expressed in the Scopes "monkey trial" of 1925), in Britain there was a concerted effort to reconcile science and religion. Intellectually conservative scientists championed the reconciliation and were supported by liberal theologians in the Free Churches and the Church of England, especially the Anglican "Modernists." Popular writers such as Julian Huxley and George Bernard Shaw sought to create a non-Christian religion similar in some respects to the Modernist position. Younger scientists and secularists--including Rationalists such as H.G. Wells and the Marxists--tended to oppose these efforts, as did conservative Christians, who saw the liberal position as a betrayal of the true spirit of their religion. With the increased social tensions of the 1930s, as the churches moved toward a neo-orthodoxy unfriendly to natural theology and biologists adopted the "Modern Synthesis" of genetics and evolutionary theory, the proposed reconciliation fell apart. Because the tensions between science and religion--and efforts at reconciling the two--are still very much with us today, Bowler's book will be important for everyone interested in these issues.

Sample

Henrik Lagerlund and Mikko Yrjönsuuri

The essays in this book give the first comprehensive picture of the medieval development of philosophical theories concerning the nature of emotions and the influence they have on human choice. The historical span reaches from the late ancient to the early modern philosophy, showing in detail how old and new ideas were bred and brought into the Middle Ages, and how they resulted in a genuinely modern perspective in the thought of Descartes.

Sample

Philip Hughes

This second volume concentrates on the West from the time of Constantine's conversion, when the the Church was beginning to make a world of its own, and it pursues the Church's history in this world of its making to the end of the thirteenth century, when the high point was reached and a new secular order was already appearing.

Sample

Andrew Phillips

"What are international orders, how are they destroyed, and how can they be defended in the face of violent challenges? Advancing an innovative realist-constructivist account of international order, Andrew Phillips addresses each of these questions in War, Religion and Empire. Phillips argues that international orders rely equally on shared visions of the good and accepted practices of organized violence to cultivate cooperation and manage conflict between political communities. Considering medieval Christendom's collapse and the East Asian Sinosphere's destruction as primary cases, he further argues that international orders are destroyed as a result of legitimation crises punctuated by the disintegration of prevailing social imaginaries, the break-up of empires, and the rise of disruptive military innovations. He concludes by considering contemporary threats to world order, and the responses that must be taken in the coming decades if a broadly liberal international order is to survive"-- "International orders do not last forever. Throughout history, rulers have struggled to cultivate amity and contain enmity between different political communities. From ancient Rome down to the Sino-centric order that prevailed in East Asia as recently as the nineteenth century, the impulse for order was most often realised via the institution of empire. The rulers of the Greek city-states, their Renaissance counterparts, and the feuding kings of China's Period of Warring States alternatively secured order within the framework of sovereign state systems. The papal-imperial diarchy that prevailed in Christendom from the eleventh century to the early sixteenth century provides yet a third form of international order, which was neither imperial nor sovereign but rather heteronomous in its ordering principles"--