Rational Dissent Research Articles

The Problems of Performing Piety in some Exeter Dissenting Sermons c.1660–1745

This article explores the theme of hypocrisy in a multi-volume collection of hitherto unstudied manuscript sermons by Exeter Dissenting ministers from the Restoration to the mid-eighteenth century, held by the Devon and Exeter Institution. In these sermons, the theme of hypocrisy is addressed in a variety of senses and contexts, including the imposition by conformists of forms of worship not required by Scripture; the false accusations of hypocrisy made against Dissenters; the insincere performance of piety; the tendency of sinners to justify vice as virtue and virtue as vice; and the incompatibility of persecution with true New Testament Christianity. These sermons trace a move from Reformed orthodoxy towards rational Dissent, with a soteriology that increasingly makes moral performance a condition of final salvation. The possibility of insincere performance of piety and virtue by hypocrites may have created increased anxiety in a context in which soteriology and ethics were increasingly entangled.

Revelation, Revolution and Utopia, c.1770–1820

Abstract The philosophes and France’s revolutionaries are often held jointly responsible for the attack on revealed religion in the course of the eighteenth century. This article suggests that the culture of belief among the laity of Protestant and Catholic Europe was not seriously undermined or even radically altered by the ralliement of State churches to the rationalistic and utilitarian values of the Enlightenment. Scepticism remained a narrowly confined phenomenon and religious ‘enthusiasm’, including literal belief in biblical prophecy, recovered strongly towards the century’s end. Traumatic public events (including the destruction of the Jesuit Order, the war in America, the revolution in France, the rise of Napoleon) were capable of triggering a latent millenarian reflex in nearly all social milieus. Although frequently played down by researchers, biblical literalism, prophetic witness and the quest for spiritual utopia should be considered an integral part of the tumultuous politics of the 1790 and 1800s. The article focuses particularly on the outlook and behaviour of England’s Rational Dissenters, French and Italian Jansenists and German Pietists in order to illustrate this contention. It concludes that, even at elite levels, detachment from religion was superficial and mainly doctrinal in nature. God, in one form or another, survived both the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

Theologia Cambrensis: Protestant Religion and Theology in Wales, Volume 2: The Long Nineteenth Century, 1760–1900

Theologia Cambrensis: Protestant Religion and Theology in Wales, Volume 2: The Long Nineteenth Century, 1760–1900

Rational Dissent on Climate Change in Calgary: responding to Haney (2022)

Social scientists have been active participants in assessing and debunking climate change denialism. This paper applies the Scientific Method (Armstrong & Green 2022) to deconstruct the work of Haney (2022) who theorized that the massive 2013 flood in the City of Calgary, home to many oil sands and oil/gas industry head offices, would be understood by those well-to-do energy industry executives, living alongside the rivers, as evidence of climate change. Haney’s analysis of interviews with 40 such individuals assumes that it is a case of confirmation bias related to their livelihood or fear of change that these people continue to hold dissenting views on climate. This paper will expose the bias, flaws, and lack of research integrity in Haney (2022). Stirling, the author of this paper, acknowledges a direct connection to Friends of Science Society, referred to by Haney, though this is an independent work of hersstudy aimed to investigate the predictive factors of stress on parents of primary school students during the Covid-19 pandemic in Oman.A total of 384 parents of primary school children participated in this study. By using survey data technique and was analyzed by using quantitative research method. The results showed that there is a significant difference in the level of stress between employed and unemployed parents. In addition, the study found a significant difference in the stress level between parents with different educational levels. Based on the findings and analysis of the data obtained, COVID-19 has been determined to influence students’ learning negatively. It has created an unpleasant atmosphere for them in this area. It has been discovered that children and their parents are confronted with various problems and hurdles, in addition to a poor education level and parental stress as a result of a lack of resources at home.The study recommends that the government and educational institutions provide support to parents, especially those who are unemployed or have low levels of education

Rational Dissent on Climate Change in Calgary: Responding to Haney (2022)

Rational Dissent on Climate Change in Calgary: Responding to Haney (2022)

Rational Dissenters in late eighteenth-century England. ‘An ardent desire of truth.’ By Valerie Smith. (Studies in Modern British Religious History.) Pp. xviii + 350 incl. 2 figs and 17 tables. Woodbridge–Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2021. £75. 978 1 78327 566 3

Rational Dissenters in late eighteenth-century England. ‘An ardent desire of truth.’ By Valerie Smith. (Studies in Modern British Religious History.) Pp. xviii + 350 incl. 2 figs and 17 tables. Woodbridge–Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2021. £75. 978 1 78327 566 3 - Volume 73 Issue 4

Rational Dissenters in late eighteenth-century England, "An Ardent Desire of Truth." by Valerie Smith

Rational Dissenters in late eighteenth-century England, "An Ardent Desire of Truth." by Valerie Smith

Exploring dissent in the Supreme Court of Argentina

When dissents are allowed, judges must decide whether or when to write them. While the main insights of rational dissent theory have been documented and corroborated in several empirical studies, there has been much less evidence testing on how different types of dissent may affect the likelihood of dissent. Particularly, dissents in more salient cases, or more forceful dissents, may have stronger legal effects than dissents appearing in less relevant cases or very narrowly construed dissents. Our article aims to fill that gap in the literature by seeking to isolate varying levels of appeal intensity and types of dissents in the Supreme Court of Argentina. Unlike previous literature, we find that more important cases have a lower likelihood of carrying a dissenting opinion. Yet, when we breakdown dissents by type (that is, reasoned dissents versus boilerplate dissents), we find that majority decisions carrying dissents tend to be longer, but only in cases of reasoned dissents. Furthermore, we show that reasoned dissents are more likely to occur in important cases. Overall, our study highlights that not all dissents should be treated alike as different types of dissent carry different levels of collegial and effort related costs. These costs affect the likelihood of dissent in different and complex ways.

Religion Around Mary Shelley by Jennifer L. Airey

Reviewed by: Religion Around Mary Shelley by Jennifer L. Airey Staci Stone RELIGION AROUND MARY SHELLEY, by Jennifer L. Airey. Religion Around. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. 231 pp. $79.95 cloth; $24.95 paper. Readers interested in an overview of Mary Shelley’s works through the lens of religion and belief will find Jennifer L. Airey’s Religion Around Mary Shelley useful for its accurate biographical summary and thorough analysis of Shelley’s works, including those published after the death of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Airey’s monograph, which treats Mary Shelley’s “shifting depictions of religion across the length of her career” in order “to foreground Mary Shelley as an important religious thinker of the Romantic period,” is a welcome addition to Shelley scholarship (p. 2). Airey’s expertise in British religious history and gender provides a valuable perspective on Shelley’s works, as Airey achieves her goal of examining both the historical moment “and the ways in which [Shelley’s] works reflect and engage with the religious controversies of her day” (p. 3). [End Page 354] The titles of Airey’s main chapters focusing on Shelley’s works—“Doubt,” “Despair,” and “Domesticity”—simultaneously gesture toward stages of Shelley’s life, her psychological state, and religious faith. Interestingly, Airey subtitles her conclusion “On Ghosts” yet does not discuss the short Shelley essay of the same title, which refers to the “spirits” Shelley mourns in her later travel writings. Airey’s knowledgeable summary of religious movements and thought from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries provides an expansive backdrop for Shelley’s own beliefs, which, as Airey points out, were informed by Mary Wollstonecraft’s engagement with Rational Dissent, William Godwin’s Calvinism, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s atheism, and her reading of Humphry Davy, William Lawrence, John Milton, Constantine François de Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney, and others. Ultimately, Airey provides convincing evidence to support her main claim that Shelley’s works reveal her movement “from doubt to despair to domestic contentment” as she increasingly embraced “the feminine religious heritage of her mother over the doubts of her father and husband” (p. 66). This book, then, participates in bridging Shelley-as-wife and Shelley-as-daughter scholarship, as categorized by Charlotte Sussman in her article “Daughter of the Revolution: Mary Shelley in Our Times” (2004). As one would expect from a book on Shelley and religion, examples from Frankenstein (1818) abound—from discussion of John Milton’s Satan and the way Shelley rewrites his Paradise Lost (1667) to organized religion’s treatment of women. Airey also deftly uses examples from Shelley’s “Valerius: The Reanimated Roman” (1819) and Mathilda (1819–1820), offering the main characters as versions of Frankenstein’s creature. Airey argues that these early works illustrate that Shelley had taken up the theme of religion in the 1810s when she was struggling with doubt and atheism. However, Airey also points to the ways that Shelley observes the power and potential of writing, and her later works, such as Valperga (1823) and The Last Man (1826), are a celebration of human creativity and capability. By including “The Convent of Chaillot” (1828) as an example to support her argument—referencing the story in four separate places, noting only at the last mention that Shelley’s authorship is in question—Airey has taken up the challenge presented by Charles E. Robinson in Mary Shelley: Collected Tales and Stories (1976) and Nora Crook in “Sleuthing towards a Mary Shelley Canon” (2006) that scholars provide additional support for attributing this work to Shelley. Airey weaves a peripheral argument about Shelley’s authorship of this tale, as she uses details from other Shelley works to bolster the same points supported by “The Convent of Chaillot.” Airey jumps from the theme of “human happiness in a world without divine love” evident in Shelley’s mid-career stories and novels to Evangelicalism, arguing that “Shelley’s later works are not explicitly [End Page 355] religious, yet in them she adopts an argument common to many Evangelical texts” (pp. 68, 128). While Mary Poovey, in The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley...

The right of resistance in Richard Price and Joseph Priestley

ABSTRACTThis article is concerned with the writings on resistance by Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, the leaders of the Rational Dissenters who supported the American and French Revolutions, from the late 1760s to 1791. The article discusses the differences between Rational Dissent and mainstream (Court) Whig resistance theory, as regards history in particular: the Dissenters viewed the Glorious Revolution as a lost opportunity rather than a full triumph and claimed the heritage of the Puritan opposition to Charles I, some of them justifying the regicide. Price's and Priestley's views on resistance are assessed against the benchmark of John Locke's conception of the breach of trust. While both thinkers presented themselves as followers of Locke, they departed from his thought by their emphasis on the constantly active role of the people. Each in their own way, they also argued that early, possibly peaceful, resistance was preferable to violent resistance as a last resort against a tyranny. In the end, Price and Priestley each articulated an original theory derived from Locke; their views were very close and their main difference concerned the treatment of history, Price's caution contrasting with Priestley's justification of tyrannicide.

Demonstration and Damnation


 
 
 
 In Blake’s mythopoeia, as well as his personal eschatology, belief is the source of life itself; all creative acts, all visionary episodes, stem from an individual’s belief. “Eternal Death,” which is the cycle of Generation, is the result of unbelief. Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke were, for Blake, the triumvirate of culpable votaries for the propagation of rational reductionism which had led to the reification of “Natural Religion” in the form of Deism and Rational Dissent in England and, with the addition of Rousseau and Voltaire, of the apotheosis in France of the Cult of Reason. The French philosophes and the English empiricists were not only at fault for forming the wheels which turned the “dark Satanic Mills?” (M 514 1.8) of man’s cognizance but, and what Blake considered their primary offence, of unbelief. This paper will discuss how unbelief is the main cause of division in Blake’s universe, accentuated “by the cruelties of Demonstration” (M 578 29.36) of empiricists who “Doubt Doubt & dont believe without experiment” (NB 609 5–9), and how the Limits placed upon man’s fall(s) act as one possible mode of redemption which allows for the return of belief and the individual’s creative vision.
 
 
 

Writing the Lives of Dissent: Life Writing, Religion and Community from Edmund Calamy to Elizabeth Gaskell

ABSTRACTThis essay explores the collaborative life writing of communities across time: specifically, the disparate, questioning, quarrelsome religious groupings of Rational Dissent as Unitarianism gradually emerged as a separate sect at the turn of the nineteenth century. It focusses on three moments of life writing in different genres by Rational Dissenters: sermons by Theophilus Lindsey, a memoir by his wife Hannah Lindsey, and the novel North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. Moving across genre and century, it analyses the ways in which a Unitarian identity evolved through the nineteenth century, and asks how individuals constructed their own religious identity while also participating in a larger Dissenting tradition. Lacking a unifying creed, and with its adherents often professing different and sometimes contradictory theological beliefs, Unitarianism is not easy to define or describe. Yet this is precisely why group historiography and collective biographies become important: Rational Dissenters come to rely on shared allusions and narratives to bind them together, such as the memory of Black Bartholomew’s Day, the Great Ejection of 1662. The essay traces such allusions through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to explore the enduring collective concerns of a community—and to show how, in the hands of Gaskell, these might make their way into a larger literary dialogue.

Rational Dissent, Unitarianism, and the Closure of the Northampton Academy in 1798

The decision by the Coward Trustees to close their academy at Northampton in June 1798 has generally been attributed to the prevalence of Unitarianism amongst the students. The reasons are more complex. Neither John Horsey, the theological tutor, nor the students at the time of the closure were Unitarian, though the latter were probably not Calvinists either. The appointment of David Savile, a zealous Calvinist, as assistant tutor by the trustees was a poor choice and led directly to the end of the academy. Closer investigation shows that the trustees differed little in their religious opinions from either Horsey or the students. The closure of the academy at Northampton can be used to identify the growing tensions within rational dissent as a result of the emergence of a more militant Unitarianism. It also proved to have extremely serious consequences for the future training of ministers for liberal dissent

Gases, God and the balance of nature: a commentary on Priestley (1772) ‘Observations on different kinds of air’

Historians of chemistry usually associate the eighteenth century with the Chemical Revolution, but it could just as readily be called ‘the century of gases’ (or ‘airs’, as they were called in the eighteenth century). In the early part of the century, the British pneumatic chemists struggled to replace the traditional notion ‘Air’, understood as an inert chemical element, with the concept of ‘air’, regarded as the third state of matter, encompassing a wide variety of chemical species. These developments constituted a necessary condition for the Chemical Revolution, which occurred in the latter part of the century. In ‘Observations’, Priestley took pneumatic chemistry to a new level, with the discovery of eight simple inorganic gases. Motivated by his belief in a benevolent God and a pious utilitarianism, Priestly explored the role of the atmosphere in the balance of nature and the politics of the state, which he linked to the movement of Rational Dissent. He styled himself an ‘aerial philosopher’ to signal the interdisciplinary nature of his inquiries, which he regarded not as a branch of ordinary chemistry, but as a mode of thought that encompassed physics, chemistry and natural theology. Priestley saw it as a source of principles and secrets of nature more extensive than that of ‘gravity itself’. This commentary was written to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Amelia and John Opie: Conjugal Sociability and Romanticism’s Professional Arts

ROXANNE EBERLE Amelia andJohn Opie: Conjugal Sociability and Romanticism’s Professional Arts t('T'O-7-HAT DIFFERENCE DOES GENDER MAKE TO OUR UNDERSTANDING OF W British literary Romanticism?”1 In posing that question, Anne Mellor added her voice to other feminist scholars interested in exploring not only the work of women writers but also the significance of gender to Romanticism’s long-standing characterizations of the imagination, literary endeavor, and the natural world. Twenty years later, Mellor prompts us to go further, asking, “So what comes next?” She calls for “editions of letters and journals, as well as modern editions, densely annotated. . . . We also need full-scale biographies [and] good single-author studies of the entire literary careers of almost all the leading women writers of the Romantic period.”2 The question for biographers working within the field, and one I pose here, rephrases Mellor’s query to: “What difference did gender make to the ways in which authors lived their lives and constructed their careers during the British Romantic period?” My work contributes to sociability studies by detailing an important aspect of Romanticism that is urban, public, and deliberately engaged with the marketplace.3 In the essay that follows, I ex­ plore Amelia and John Opie’s negotiation of courtship and married life during the vexed mid 1790s, when it still seemed possible to imagine alter­ native social conventions in literature and to enact them within the public 1. Romanticism & Gender, i. 2. “Romanticism, History, Historicism: A Conversation,” 156. See also Roxanne Eberle, ed., “Interview with Anne Mellor,” Romantic Circles: Praxis Series, January 2014, http://www .rc.umd.edu/praxis/mcllor_mterview/index.html. 3. See Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) and Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, eds. Romantic Sociability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). SiR, 53 (Fall 2014) 319 320 ROXANNE EBERLE and private spaces ofLondon. Although historical hindsight has led scholars and historians to chart the falling fortunes of progressive politics after the beginning of hostilities with France in 1793 and the Treason Trials of 1794, the rest of the decade saw the publication of texts willing to challenge both social and narrative conventions, including William Godwin’s PoliticalJus­ tice (1793) and Caleb Williams (1794), Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796), and Mary Hays’s Memoirs oj Emma Courtney (1796). A poet, novelist, and essayist, Amelia Alderson Opie was born in 1769 and lived long enough to visit the Crystal Palace when she was in her eighties.4 Throughout that long life, she consistently sought out the most exciting conversations of her day. Her childhood and young adulthood was spent in Norwich, among rational dissenters, Warrington Academy tu­ tors, and political radicals. Amelia began corresponding with Godwin in 1794, and whenever in London she was an active member of progressive sociable circles. In 1796 Godwin introduced her to Hays and Wollstonecraft and she cultivated a friendship with the latter, who quite possibly in­ troduced her to the portrait painter John Opie. John had first painted Wollstonecraft in 1790/91, and quickly become one of Godwin’s friends in the mid 1790s. Any consideration of the courtship and marriage of the Opies necessarily engages with these intersecting circles of professional arts sociability, encompassing the Godwin-Wollstonecraft circle, the theater world of Thomas Holcroft, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Sarah Siddons, and the Royal Academy Exhibition Halls frequented by John. In marrying John, Amelia found new opportunities within London’s professional arts community, even as many of her former associates strug­ gled to sustain careers, and their marriage has sometimes been characterized as symptomatic of the failure of 1790s political idealism.5 6 Kenneth Johnston invites biographers to reconsider the narrative of progressive retreat so dominant in Romantic studies, which for a long time led to an exclusive focus on those writers who successfully negotiated literary careers despite harboring radical sympathies in the 1790s, William Wordsworth and Sam­ uel Taylor Coleridge most notably/’ Johnston redirects attention to the “almost famous,” including Amelia. But she was actually quite “famous” 4. Throughout the rest ofthe essay I refer to Amelia andjohn Opie by their first names in order to avoid...

Blake, Joseph Johnson, and "The Gates of Paradise"

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Wordsworth-Coleridge Association, 2013: Ed. Toby BenisBlake, Joseph Johnson, and "The Gates of Paradise"Joseph ByrneJoseph Byrne Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 44, Number 2-3Spring-Summer 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24044236 Views: 12Total views on this site © 2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Dissenting Patriots: Anna Barbauld, John Aikin, and the Discourse of Eighteenth-Century Republicanism in Rational Dissent

Summary Sister and brother Anna Letitia Barbauld (née Aikin; 1743–1825) and John Aikin (1747–1822) are two famous Rational Dissenting writers who strategically appropriated republican discourse to advance the Dissenting cause. Both make the case that, far from being subversive, Rational Dissent actually granted its adherents the independence that, from a republican perspective, was considered essential to true patriotism. In a fresh formulation of republican discourse, they present the strength of the Rational Dissenting commitment to ‘free inquiry’ as security for continuing independence, enabling liberal Dissenters to act as patriotic guardians of British virtue and liberty against the dangerous effects of luxury, even as they continued to contribute towards the development of the British commercial economy and to promote the benefits of commerce, traditionally regarded with hostility by classical republicans. Effectively exploiting the classical republican belief in the central role of education, Barbauld and Aikin particularly sought to publicize the role that the Dissenting academies had played in producing patriots by making ‘free inquiry’ the basis of their pedagogical philosophy and practice.

Ideal Justice and Rational Dissent. A Critique of Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice

Abstract In The Idea of Justice Amartya Sen criticises ‘transcendental institutionalism’ for entertaining notions of ‘ideal justice’ that, are neither necessary nor sufficient for the advancement of justice in the real world. Sen argues in favor of a ‘realization- focused’ and ‘comparative’ understanding of justice that he associates with the names of Adam Smith, Marx, and J. S. Mill. Conceptions of ideal justice. Sen believes, are useless since in practice we do not need them to advance justice. And they are ‘infeasible’ because all conceptions of ideal justice can be reasonably rejected for one reason or other. I shall address both complaints in turn and maintain that Sen’s rigid contra-position of ideal and comparative justice is overstated. It will also be discussed how the institutional focus of ‘transcendental institutionalism’ links up with the need for an ideal conception of justice. Finally, some implications of rational dissent about justice and two common strategies to deal with it will be discussed.

RATIONAL DISSENT, ENLIGHTENMENT, AND ABOLITION OF THE BRITISH SLAVE TRADE

ABSTRACTFollowing British abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the origins and nature of popular abolitionism have been much debated among historians. Traditionally, religion was seen as the driving force, with an emphasis on the role of Quakers and evangelicals, whilst in the twentieth century social historians began to stress the importance of economic and social change. This article revises both interpretations by helping to recover and analyse the abolitionism of enlightened Rational Dissenters. Legal inequality and their ‘rational piety’ encouraged heterodox Dissenters to become active in a wide range of reformist causes. Owing to evangelical dominance in the nineteenth century, however, the role of Rational Dissenters was marginalized in histories of abolitionism. Recovering Rational Dissenting abolitionism underlines the importance of religion in the campaign against the slave trade. Since Rational Dissent was to a large extent a religion of the commercial classes, this article also sheds light on the hotly debated relationship between capitalism and abolition.

‘A Species of Slavery’: Richard Price's Rational Dissent and Antislavery

Revd Richard Price was one of the leading intellectual lights of Rational Dissent in late eighteenth-century Britain and was prominent in campaigns for religious and parliamentary reform. Hailed as an ‘Apostle of Liberty’ by the American and French Revolutionaries, Price was also an early subscriber to the Abolition Society in London. While prominent among British Enlightenment figures he had, however, a low profile as an abolitionist and is seldom mentioned in scholarship on abolition. This study discusses the nature of Price's antislavery and his relationship with Americans such as Thomas Jefferson. It sheds more light on the degree to which the emergence of abolitionism depended upon circumstances and how well it combined with other aims and priorities.