Victorian testaments

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Jude V. Nixon

"This collection of essays addresses the disparate personal, historical, and critical ways religion informs the literature and culture of nineteenth-century England. The volume presents Victorian religious discourse not as monologic but as dialogic. It makes available new understandings of nineteenth-century British literature, shows how prominent Victorians negotiated its impress, and elucidates the extent to which religious discourse is vested in Victorian cultural thought and practice."--BOOK JACKET.

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Ronald C. Wendling

Best known as a romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge also mounted a strong challenge to the skepticism and relativism we inherit from the Enlightenment. Ronald C. Wendling shows Coleridge, modern in his critical spirit and chronic anxiety, nevertheless progressing toward a total head-and-heart acceptance of Church of England orthodoxy. The tension between Coleridge's poetic feeling for the divinity of the sensible world and his reverential sense of God's personality and transcendence stimulated this development. Adopting a personalist approach to the study of Coleridge's thought, Wendling explains how the circumstances contributing to his addictive personality helped shape his spiritual and intellectual life.

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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.

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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.