Poems, Propositions, and Dogma: The Controversy over Religious Language and the Demise of Theology in American Learning

1988 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 310-321
Author(s):  
D. G. Hart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Trinity

One of the ironies in the annals of nineteenth-century American Protestantism is the impact that Horace Bushnell's famed address “Dogma and Spirit” had upon the theological scene. In his remarks before the Porter Rhetorical Society at Andover Seminary in September 1848, the Congregationalist minister from Hartford established his reputation as one of the more controversial, if not gifted, theologians in New England. Bushnell offered a vision of Christianity that he hoped would eliminate the theological bickering that, as he saw it, had plagued the church throughout its history. To be sure, many in Andover's audience would not have been surprised if Bushnell's quirky views on the Trinity and the Atonement drew fire from New England Calvinists. But few would have predicted that this reconciliatory address would provoke one of the era's more noteworthy debates, a lengthy one-and-a-half-year, 250-page quarrel between America's two most prominent Calvinist theologians, Princeton Seminary's Charles Hodge and Andover's Edwards A. Park.

Select document: Catholic ownership of tithes: a County Wexford widow’s dispensation, 1595

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (162) ◽  
pp. 336-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Mac Cuarta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Rural Population ◽  
Catholic Priests ◽  
Ecclesiastical Authority ◽  
Agricultural Produce ◽  
Church Of Ireland ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

AbstractDown to the mid-nineteenth century, the rural population in Ireland was obliged by law to contribute to the upkeep of the Church of Ireland clergy by means of tithes, a measure denoting a proportion of annual agricultural produce. The document illustrates what was happening in the late sixteenth century, as separate ecclesial structures were emerging, and Catholics were beginning to determine how to support their own clergy. Control of ecclesiastical resources was a major issue for the Catholic community in the century after the introduction of the Reformation. However, for want of documentation the use of tithes to support Catholic priests, much less the impact of this issue on relationships within that community, between ecclesiastics and propertied laity, has been little noted. This text – a dispensation to hold parish revenues, signed by a papally-appointed bishop ministering in the south-east – illustrates how the recusant community in an anglicised part of Ireland addressed some issues posed by Catholic ownership of tithes in the 1590s. It exemplifies the confusion, competing claims, and anxiety of conscience among some who benefited from the secularisation of the church’s medieval patrimony; it also preserves the official response of the relevant Catholic ecclesiastical authority to an individual situation.

Scottish Presbyterianism and the National Education Debates, 1850–62

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 363-380
Author(s):  
Ryan Mallon
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Presbyterian Church ◽  
National Education ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Parish Schools ◽  
Religious Establishment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

This article examines the mid-nineteenth-century Scottish education debates in the context of intra-Presbyterian relations in the aftermath of the 1843 ‘Disruption’ of the Church of Scotland. The debates of this period have been characterized as an attempt to wrest control of Scottish education from the Church of Scotland, with most opponents of the existing scheme critical of the established kirk's monopoly over the supervision of parish schools. However, the debate was not simply between those within and outside the religious establishment. Those advocating change, particularly within non-established Presbyterian denominations, were not unified in their proposals for a solution to Scotland's education problem. Disputes between Scotland's largest non-established churches, the Free Church and the United Presbyterian Church, and within the Free Church itself over the type of national education scheme that should replace the parish schools severely hampered their ability to express common opposition to the existing system. These divisions also placed increasing strain on the developing cooperation in Scottish Dissent on ecclesiastical, political and social matters after the Disruption. This article places the issue of education in this period within this distinctly Dissenting context of cooperation, and examines the extent of the impact these debates had on Dissenting Presbyterian relations.

Mill Town Mortality: Consequences of Industrial Growth in Two Nineteenth-Century New England Towns

1999 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan I. Hautaniemi ◽  
Alan C. Swedlund ◽  
Douglas L. Anderton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mortality Trends ◽  
Industrial Growth ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Connecticut Valley ◽  
Broad Objective ◽  
The Impact

Recent research has considerably increased our understanding of the factors associated with the American epidemiological transition in the late nineteenth century. However, uncertainty remains regarding the impact on mortality of specific changes ancillary to urbanization and industrialization in American cities and towns. The broad objective of the Connecticut Valley Historical Demography Project is to examine changing relationships between socioeconomic status, the rise of new urban-industrial communities, and cause-specific mortality trends during the rapid development of New England manufacturing. To address these issues, the present analysis examines two emergent urban centers in Massachusetts, adopting a micro-demographic approach to explore late-nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-century determinants of mortality.

The Mountain and the Flower: The Power and Potential of Nature in the World of Victorian Evangelicalism

2010 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 307-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The World ◽  
High Church ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Tradition

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century a new wind could be felt rustling in the branches of the Church of England. The transforming effect of the Oxford Movement on the High Church tradition is the most prominent example of this phenomenon but also well established in the literature are the transformations in contemporary Anglican Evangelicalism. David Bebbington in particular has stressed the impact of Romanticism as a cultural mood within the movement, tracing its effects in a heightened supernaturalism, a preoccupation with the Second Advent and with holiness which converged at Keswick, and also an emphasis on the discernment of spiritual significance in nature. But how did this emphasis play out in the lives of Evangelicals in the second half of the century and how might it have served their mission to society? This paper seeks to address the evangelical understanding of both the power and potential of nature through the example of one prominent Anglican clergyman, William Pennefather, and one little-known evangelical initiative, the Bible Flower Mission.

Verdi and Sacred Revivalism in Post Unification Italy

2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Basini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Late Life ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Giuseppe Verdi ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

This essay sets the late sacred works of Giuseppe Verdi in the context of the late-nineteenth-century fascination for the revival, performance, and festive celebration of historical cultural figures and artworks. From the 1870s onward, certain artistic trends became prevalent in post-unification Italy: anxiety to instill a sense of nation into art and everyday life, nostalgia for a vanished golden age of Italian artistic history, and an ever more energetic revival of historical artistic forms and styles. These currents were stimulated by a nationalistic Catholic revivalism that, I argue, was the strongest influence on Verdi's late career. I outline Verdi's reception in and his personal association with the Catholic revivalist movement, developing a view of Verdi's late life and works as articulating shifting trends in the Church and conservatory. As well as revealing the impact of revivalist aesthetics on the style of works such as Verdi's Pater noster, this inquiry suggests that revivalism contributed to a "canonization" of his image that intertwined civic and religious history.

Benthamism in England and America

1941 ◽  
Vol 35 (5) ◽  
pp. 855-871 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul A. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
American Political Thought ◽  
Christian Religion ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church ◽  
Direct Attack ◽  
Cross Current

The main purpose of this paper is not so much to measure the impact of utilitarianism on American political thought as to explain why utilitarian influence was so slight. The question I am seeking to answer may be phrased as follows: How did it come about that utilitarianism, the main current in English thought for two or three generations, was little more than a series of ripples, or at most a weak cross-current, on this side of the Atlantic? The problem becomes more puzzling when one reflects that the period of the rise and growth of utilitarianism in England (the first three or four decades of the nineteenth century) was an era in which intellectual relations between the two countries were especially close and one in which movements of political and social reform ran parallel courses. Quite reasonably, too, one might suppose that the qualities of Bentham's thought which contributed to its spread in England would have insured its enthusiastic reception here. A doctrine which contemptuously rejected tradition, preached hard-headed, calculating practicality, conceived of the individual as an isolated atomistic unit, and which in all its aspects and phases appealed to the virtues and limitations of the middle-class man of affairs—such a doctrine, one might think, would have flourished on nineteenth-century American soil.As preliminary to a direct attack on the problem, some definitions or distinctions are in order. “When I mention religion,” said Parson Thwackum, “I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England.”

Max Weber and the Late Modernization of Catholicism

2019 ◽  
pp. 333-351
Author(s):  
Bryan S. Turner ◽  
Rosario Forlenza
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Vatican Ii ◽  
Party System ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
The Political ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
Political Modernization ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

While Max Weber wrote extensively on a range of religions—Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, and most extensively Protestantism—there is no fully developed sociology of Catholicism. This chapter attempts to construct Max Weber’s missing sociology of Catholicism from the various scattered comments across his works. While Weber saw Protestantism influencing the growth of capitalism (and more broadly modernization), his view of Catholicism was largely negative: it was ritualistic, magical, bureaucratic, and traditional. What would Weber have made of Catholicism in the twentieth century and twenty-first century? This chapter first examines developments in nineteenth-century Catholicism that lay behind Weber’s critical commentary. The second half asks how changes in Catholicism after the Second Vatican Council (informally known as Vatican II, 1962–1965) have brought about a modernization of Catholicism. The chapter argues for the relevance of Weber’s views today by considering the impact of Vatican II on Catholic teaching and practice, arguing that it represents the political modernization of Catholicism. Vatican II represented a radical departure from the political conservatism of the nineteenth century. In principle, the church was no longer critical of secular democracy, pluralism, the party system, and state sovereignty. This modernization, however, began to undermine the universalism of the church and pushed Catholicism toward denominationalism. However, the church did not modernize its teaching on contraception, abortion, marriage, divorce, and family life. This tension between political modernization and what we might simply call “familial conservatism” still haunts the church today.

scholarly journals Immigration, wealth and the ‘mortality plateau’ in emergent industrial cities of nineteenth-century Massachusetts

2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 433-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUSAN HAUTANIEMI LEONARD ◽  
JEFFREY K. BEEMER ◽  
DOUGLAS L. ANDERTON
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Urban Communities ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Alternative Hypothesis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Family Wealth ◽  
Industrial Cities ◽  
The Impact

The mortality transition in Western Europe and the United States encompassed a much more complex set of conditions and experiences than earlier thought. Our research addresses the complex set of relationships among growing urban communities, family wealth, immigration and mortality in New England by examining individual-level, sociodemographic mortality correlates during the nineteenth-century mortality plateau and its early twentieth-century decline. In contrast to earlier theories that proposed a more uniform mortality transition, we offer an alternative hypothesis that focuses on the impact of family wealth and immigration on individual-level mortality during the early stages of the mortality transition in Northampton and Holyoke, Massachusetts.

‘Our Brethren of the North’: The Scottish Episcopal Church and the Oxford Movement

1996 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 655-682 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Nockles
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Negative Influence ◽  
Episcopal Church ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
The North ◽  
The Subject ◽  
High Church ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

Studies of the Oxford or Tractarian Movement in Britain have almost exclusively focused on the Church of England. The impact of the Catholic revival within Scotland has been accorded little attention. This neglect partly reflects the small size of the Episcopal Church in Scotland. Yet the subject deserves fuller consideration precisely because the minority Scottish Episcopal Church was, by the nineteenth century, more uniformly High Church in its theology and outlook than the Church of England, a fact which predisposed it to be peculiarly receptive to Tractarianism, which in turn exacerbated its relations with the dominant Presbyterian Kirk. The few serious studies of the question, however, have been coloured by an uncritical assumption that the movement's impact on the Episcopal Church was altogether positive and benign. The differences between the Tractarians and nonjuring episcopalians of the north have been overlooked or understated. While according due weight to the affinities and continuities between the two traditions, this article will question the standard Anglo-Catholic historiography and reveal the tensions within the Episcopal Church sharpened by the often negative influence of the Catholic revival when transported north of the border.

The New England Contribution to Colonial American Presbyterianism

1948 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. J. Trinterud
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Church History ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
The Church

The contributions made to American Presbyterianism during the colonial period by those of its members who were of New England stock have never been adequately recognized. For various reasons this contribution was so greatly minimized during the nineteenth century that even today an essentially false picture of the origins of American Presbyterianism has become currently accepted. Typical of the nineteenth-century propaganda which was later to be accepted as fact, was the attitude of Samuel Miller, the first professor of Church History at Princeton Seminary. In 1833, Miller wrote a series of open letters to Presbyterians as part of the Old School party's polemic against the New England element in the Church.

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