The Unintended Reformation

Author : Brad S. Gregory
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 067426407X
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Unintended Reformation written by Brad S. Gregory and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-16 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism—all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West. Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge. The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.

Author : Brad S. Gregory
Publisher : Belknap Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674088054
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Unintended Reformation written by Brad S. Gregory and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2015-11-16 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism—all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West. Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge. The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.

Author : Brad S. Gregory
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0062471201
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Rebel in the Ranks written by Brad S. Gregory and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-09-12 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Martin Luther published his 95 Theses in October 1517, he had no intention of starting a revolution. But very quickly his criticism of indulgences became a rejection of the papacy and the Catholic Church emphasizing the Bible as the sole authority for Christian faith, radicalizing a continent, fracturing the Holy Roman Empire, and dividing Western civilization in ways Luther—a deeply devout professor and spiritually-anxious Augustinian friar—could have never foreseen, nor would he have ever endorsed. From Germany to England, Luther’s ideas inspired spontaneous but sustained uprisings and insurrections against civic and religious leaders alike, pitted Catholics against Protestants, and because the Reformation movement extended far beyond the man who inspired it, Protestants against Protestants. The ensuing disruptions prompted responses that gave shape to the modern world, and the unintended and unanticipated consequences of the Reformation continue to influence the very communities, religions, and beliefs that surround us today. How Luther inadvertently fractured the Catholic Church and reconfigured Western civilization is at the heart of renowned historian Brad Gregory’s Rebel in the Ranks. While recasting the portrait of Luther as a deliberate revolutionary, Gregory describes the cultural, political, and intellectual trends that informed him and helped give rise to the Reformation, which led to conflicting interpretations of the Bible, as well as the rise of competing churches, political conflicts, and social upheavals across Europe. Over the next five hundred years, as Gregory’s account shows, these conflicts eventually contributed to further epochal changes—from the Enlightenment and self-determination to moral relativism, modern capitalism, and consumerism, and in a cruel twist to Luther’s legacy, the freedom of every man and woman to practice no religion at all. With the scholarship of a world-class historian and the keen eye of a biographer, Gregory offers readers an in-depth portrait of Martin Luther, a reluctant rebel in the ranks, and a detailed examination of the Reformation to explain how the events that transpired five centuries ago still resonate—and influence us—today.

Author : Amos Funkenstein
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691184267
Total Pages : 442 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Theology and the Scientific Imagination written by Amos Funkenstein and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theology and the Scientific Imagination is a pioneering work of intellectual history that transformed our understanding of the relationship between Christian theology and the development of science. Distinguished scholar Amos Funkenstein explores the metaphysical foundations of modern science and shows how, by the 1600s, theological and scientific thinking had become almost one. Major figures like Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, and others developed an unprecedented secular theology whose debt to medieval and scholastic thought shaped the trajectory of the scientific revolution. The book ends with Funkenstein’s influential analysis of the seventeenth century’s “unprecedented fusion” of scientific and religious language. Featuring a new foreword, Theology and the Scientific Imagination is a pathbreaking and classic work that remains a fundamental resource for historians and philosophers of science.

Author : Charles Taylor
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674986911
Total Pages : 889 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Secular Age written by Charles Taylor and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-17 with total page 889 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.

Author : Emily Michelson
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674075293
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.90/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Pulpit and the Press in Reformation Italy written by Emily Michelson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italian sermons tell a story of the Reformation that credits preachers with using the pulpit, pen, and printing press to keep Italy Catholic when the region’s violent religious wars made the future uncertain, and with fashioning a post-Reformation Catholicism that would survive the competition and religious choice of their own time and ours.

Author : Peter Marshall
Publisher : Oxford Illustrated History
ISBN 13 : 0199595488
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation written by Peter Marshall and published by Oxford Illustrated History. This book was released on 2015 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation is the story of one of the truly epochal events in world history - and how it helped create the world we live in today.

Author : Craig Harline
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190275189
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A World Ablaze written by Craig Harline and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's not always easy to find the human Martin Luther underneath the centuries of accumulated myth. This book focuses on the drama and uncertainty of the first few critical years of Luther's rise, when his personal struggles with salvation were transformed into a crisis of Christendom

Author : Michael Allen Gillespie
Publisher : ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN 13 : 1459606124
Total Pages : 762 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Theological Origins of Modernity written by Michael Allen Gillespie and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-10-21 with total page 762 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking as his starting point the collapse of the medieval world, Gillespie argues that from the very beginning moderns sought not to eliminate religion but to support a new view of religion and its place in human life- and that they did so not out of hostility but in order to sustain certain religious beliefs. He goes on to explore the ideas of such figures as William of Ockham, Petrarch, Erasmus, Luther, Descartes, and Hobbes, showing that modernity is best understood as the result of a series of attempts to formulate a new and coherent metaphysics or theology.

Author : Peter Marshall
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191578886
Total Pages : 168 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Reformation: A Very Short Introduction written by Peter Marshall and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-10-22 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Reformation transformed Europe, and left an indelible mark on the modern world. It began as an argument about what Christians needed to do to be saved, but rapidly engulfed society in a series of fundamental changes. This Very Short Introduction provides a lively and up-to-date guide to the process. It explains doctrinal debates in a clear and non-technical way, but is equally concerned to demonstrate the effects the Reformation had on politics, society, art, and minorities. Peter Marshall argues that the Reformation was not a solely European phenomenon, but that varieties of faith exported from Europe transformed Christianity into a truly world religion. The complex legacy of the Reformation is also assessed; its religious fervour produced remarkable stories of sanctity and heroism, and some extraordinary artistic achievements, but violence, holy war, and martyrdom were equally its products. A paradox of the Reformation - that it intensified intolerance while establishing pluralism - is one we still wrestle with today. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.