A Forgotten Christian Deist

A Forgotten Christian Deist
Author: Jan van den Berg
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2021-07-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000417859

This is a cultural and intellectual biography of a neglected but important figure, Thomas Morgan (1671/2–1743). Educated at Bridgewater Academy, he was active as Presbyterian preacher, medical practitioner, and one of the first who called himself a Christian Deist. Morgan was not only a harbinger of the disparagement of the Old Testament, but also a prolific pamphleteer about things religious, and a publisher of medical books. He received praise for his medical work, but a negative press for his theological visions, and he ended as a forgotten figure in history; this book restores an overlooked writer to his due place in history. It is the first modern biography of Morgan and its readership comprises historians of deism, the enlightenment, the eighteenth century, theology and the church, Presbyterianism, and medical history.

The Fringes of Belief

The Fringes of Belief
Author: Sarah Ellenzweig
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2008-09-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0804769796

The Fringes of Belief is the first literary study of freethinking and religious skepticism in the English Enlightenment. Ellenzweig aims to redress this scholarly lacuna, arguing that a literature of English freethinking has been overlooked because it unexpectedly supported aspects of institutional religion. Analyzing works by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope, she foregrounds a strand of the English freethinking tradition that was suspicious of revealed religion yet often strongly opposed to the open denigration of Anglican Christianity and its laws. By exposing the contradictory and volatile status of categories like belief and doubt this book participates in the larger argument in Enlightenment studies—as well as in current scholarship on the condition of modernity more generally—-that religion is not so simply left behind in the shift from the pre-modern to the modern world.

Shapers of English Calvinism, 1660-1714

Shapers of English Calvinism, 1660-1714
Author: Dewey D. Wallace
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2011-05-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199744831

Dewey Wallace tells the story of several prominent English Calvinist actors and thinkers in the first generations after the beginning of the Restoration, illuminating the religious and intellectual history of the era between the Reformation and modernity.

Studies in the Historical Jesus

Studies in the Historical Jesus
Author: Justin J. Meggitt
Publisher: Mutual Academic
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2023-08-29
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1916570070

Studies in the Historical Jesus: Anarchy, Miracles, and Madness is a selection of key essays on the historical figure of Jesus published over the last fifteen years by Justin J. Meggitt. Each addresses a central question in the study of Jesus and his context, from the role of myth in the creation of traditions about him and the historicity of his miracles, to the problem of his politics and the reasons for his execution. The collection brings fresh perspectives and new data to bear on enduring debates, and demonstrates the value of "history from below" in making sense of the historical Jesus and the world that made him.