Voice of Nonconformity

Voice of Nonconformity
Author: Keith A Ives
Publisher: Lutterworth Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2011-07-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0718845196

A study of William Robertson Nicoll, a non-conformist individual who had considerable influence in the late 19th Century. Originally a minister, he was considered a great leader and was also a theological conservative, and therefore committed to maintaining the orthodox stance of the Christian Churches, but at the same time, he encouraged many of the new ideas, which he felt would prove a useful and hopeful benefit for the Church. Due to health issues he was later forced to retire his position and focused on work as an editor and journalist, bringing with him the same sense of leadership he had previously been known for. The debate over his legacy continues and is addressed within this study using previously unstudied information on Nicoll's life.

Dealing with Darwin

Dealing with Darwin
Author: David N. Livingstone
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2014-05-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1421413264

How was Darwin’s work discussed and debated among the same religious denomination in different locations? Using place, politics, and rhetoric as analytical tools, historical geographer David N. Livingstone investigates how religious communities sharing a Scots Presbyterian heritage engaged with Darwin and Darwinism at the turn of the twentieth century. His findings, presented as the prestigious Gifford Lectures, transform our understandings of the relationship between science and religion. The particulars of place—whether in Edinburgh, Belfast, Toronto, Princeton, or Columbia, South Carolina—shaped the response to Darwin’s theories. Were they tolerated, repudiated, or welcomed? Livingstone shows how Darwin was read in different ways, with meaning distilled from Darwin's texts depending on readers' own histories—their literary genealogies and cultural preoccupations. That the theory of evolution fared differently in different places, Livingstone writes, is "exactly what Darwin might have predicted. As the theory diffused, it diverged." Dealing with Darwin shows the profound extent to which theological debates about evolution were rooted in such matters as anxieties over control of education, the politics of race relations, the nature of local scientific traditions, and challenges to traditional cultural identity. In some settings, conciliation with the new theory, even endorsement, was possible—demonstrating that attending to the specific nature of individual communities subverts an inclination to assume a single relationship between science and religion in general, evolution and Christianity in particular. Livingstone concludes with contemporary examples to remind us that what scientists can say and what others can hear in different venues differ today just as much as they did in the past.

Scottish Christianity in the Modern World

Scottish Christianity in the Modern World
Author: Stewart J. Brown
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2000-01-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780567087652

A new and wide-ranging study of Christianity in Scotland, from the eighteenth century to the present.The contributors include D. W. D. Shaw, Ian Campbell, Kenneth Fielding, William Ferguson, Barbara MacHaffie, Peter Matheson, John McCaffrey, Owen Chadwick, David Thompson, Keith Robbins, Andrew Ross, Stewart J. Brown and George Newlands.Topics encompass varieties of unbelief, challenges to the Westminster confession, John Baillie, Queen Victoria and the Church of Scotland, the Scottish ecumenical movement, the disestablishment movement, and Presbyterian-Catholic relations.