Religious Skepticism Research Articles

„Ich kannte euch nicht – Juden”: Der jüdische Aufstand und die Figur des Barchob in Cyprian Norwids epischer Dichtung „Quidam” (1857/1863)1

Summary The action of Quidam is set in Hadrian's Rome. Public and private hysteria rises due to the Jewish war 132-135 p. Chr., but also to a conflict between Hadrian's religion policy and its Greek, Jewish and Christian opponents. The Jewish uprising is confronted to Greek non opposition and to the Christian way of opposition by public faith witnesses. It is raised to the role of a ‘motor’ in a ruined epic machine, and hints to modern Polish (or other nations') uprisings. Barchob (Bar-Kokhba?) is shown as a Roman Jew's disciple, secret admirer of Christian courage, friend of Alexander, the poem's main person; as a messianic fighter in Judea; and finally as an advocate of interreligious solidarity. “Quidam” is a “przypowieść”, a “para-novel” with a ruined narrative time structure, and a “parable” which answers strangely to Chateaubriand's demand for Christianity epics, forming an allegory also of modern civilisation, police state, public opinion, modern conflictual cultural and religious pluralism, modern individualism, scepticism and altruism.

The New encyclopedia of unbelief

Successor to the highly acclaimed of Unbelief (1985), edited by the late Gordon Stein, the New Encyclopedia of Unbelief is a comprehensive reference work on the history, beliefs, and thinking of America's fastest growing minority: those who live without religion. All-new articles by the field's foremost scholars describe and explain every aspect of atheism, agnosticism, secular humanism, secularism, and religious scepticism. The topics include morality without religion, unbelief in the historicity of Jesus, critiques of intelligent design theory, unbelief and sexual values, and summaries of the state of unbelief around the world. Over 130 respected scholars and activists world-wide served on the editorial advisory board and over 100 authoritative contributors have written in excess of 500 entries. In addition to covering developments since the publication of the original edition, the New Encyclopedia of Unbelief includes a larger number of biographical entries and much-expanded coverage of the linkages between unbelief and social reform movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, including the labour movement, woman suffrage, anarchism, sex radicalism, and second-wave feminism. The distinguished contributors are philosophers, scientists, scholars, and Nobel Prize laureates. With a foreword by evolutionary biologist and best-selling author Richard Dawkins, this unparalleled reference work provides comprehensive knowledge about unbelief in its many varieties and manifestations.

Family Love in Confucius and Mencius

Most thinkers both in Confucianism and in Christianity agree that love is the most fundamental feeling, on which humans set up their system of moral values. They further concur that love roots in or originates from “family” or “family life.” However, there is a crucial difference in the family patterns that the two traditions respectively hold. In Christianity, God is conceived as the Father. He is a “Supreme Being” or an “anthropomorphic deity,” creating or fathering all humans. He loves humans universally, simply because they are all his children, and all have divine souls. In recent centuries, some Christian thinkers have added that humans should treat each other equally, for they are all brothers and sisters from the same family; they all enjoy the same glory brought to them by the Father. There is no doubt that they viewed this idea as providing a solid religious foundation for the Western idea of equal treatment of people in public life. In parallel, Confucius believes that the acquisition of love completes a natural process; love begins with the love between “father” (a gender-biased way of referring to parents) and his children. It occurs from the first eye contact between father and his baby. Looked at from the baby’s side, this brings to it a sense of warmth, safety, and pleasure. As the child grows, this sense is internalized as a feeling of love that, in turn, leads to the concept of love. For the Chinese nation, mainly composed of atheists and religious skeptics, this discovery presents a truth, simple and convincing. In addition to their emphasis on the naturalness of love, Confucius and Mencius developed, on the basis of family love, a coherent system of ethics and a consistent theory of politics and government. This is the most fundamental contribution that the Confucianism made to the Chinese nation, and to peoples who do not accept the doctrine of God as the only Father. This helps to account for its survival and long-lasting influence in human history. The universality of Confucian Love is based on an empirical fact that every human being has a father, and all fathers presumably love their sons and daughters. This provides a possibility that all humans can naturally experience from family life a similar feeling of love, and can naturally understand a variety of moral virtues related to love. At the same Dao (2008) 7:51–55 DOI 10.1007/s11712-008-9041-5

The wisdom to doubt: a justification of religious skepticism

The wisdom to doubt: a justification of religious skepticism

The Wisdom to Doubt: a Justifation of Religious Skepticism – By J. L. Schellenberg

The Wisdom to Doubt: a Justifation of Religious Skepticism – By J. L. Schellenberg

Shadows on the Hudson: Isaac Bashevis Singer on the Prospects for Faith and Virtue in Modern America

Isaac Bashevis Singer's posthumously published novel Shadows on the Hudson contains his deepest, most sustained reflections on the moral and religious character of modernity. Using America as his paradigm, Singer argues that modern religious skepticism has destroyed the moral authority of the Ten Commandments. This depletion of moral capital has led to the growth of a powerful “underworld” culture that fosters the idolatrous worship of material well-being, reason, and Eros. Singer believes that ultra-orthodox Judaism is the only religion now able to check this evil in principle. Yet he fears that this religion can do little more in our post-biblical world than to highlight modernity's moral flaws. Thus, he offers an uncommonly bleak prognosis for the future unless modern poets can create a new religion that better meets the needs of our time.

Miracles in Enlightenment England

Miracles in Enlightenment England. By Jane Shaw. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006, Pp. x, 244. $45.00.) The conventional wisdom on the eighteenth-century English miracles runs something like this. The new learning of the seventeenth made belief in an interventionist God problematic at best, implausible at worst. That, combined with the relative freedom to publish which followed in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, opened up miracles to intense public scrutiny from religious skeptics. The great debate concerning miracles, which began in earnest during the 1690s, drew into the fray most of the best minds of the day until David Hume put the matter to rest with the tenth chapter (Of Miracles) of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (HAS). Many now concede that Hume's argument against miracles was often derivative; John Earman even goes so far as to describe it as an abject failure from a philosophical point of view. Nevertheless, insofar as most historians are concerned, Hume's intervention brought an effective close to a that had run for the last seven decades. Miracles henceforth became a non-subject. Jane Shaw's Miracles in Enlightenment England challenges nearly every aspect of the conventional wisdom. To begin with, she cautions against taking an overly-restricted view of what constituted the miraculous, for, in the minds of early moderns, wonders, miracles, and providence were phenomena which were not always easily distinguishable. In addition, Shaw's a study of lived religion, rather than an intellectual history of the miracles debate. She gives primacy of place, in other words, to practice, not to ideas, so that doctrine is understood to emerge from and, in turn, inform particular practices (10). The premise that the primary lines of historical causation lead from action to intellection means that her starting point and her cast of characters differs markedly from more traditional studies of miracles. Where John Toland, Thomas Chubb, Peter Annet, Thomas Woolston, and others received the lion's chare of attention in previous accounts of the miracles debate, they are largely secondary figures in Shaw's study. Her story begins in the 1650s, during England's first sustained experiments with republicanism and with a less constrained market in religion. While traditional Protestant doctrine insisted that miracles had ceased sometime not long after Christ's life, there nevertheless were those, especially among those outside the Church of England, who claimed to be acting under divine inspiration or authority; indeed, Shaw shows quite convincingly that the number of people claiming to be miracle-workers increased rather than declined in the second half of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century (97). …

ATHEIST PROPHECY: MATHILDE BLIND, CONSTANCE NADEN, AND THE VICTORIAN POETESS

Scholars of nineteenth-century women's poetry often recount that the sentimental piety – indeed, the quasi-religiosity – of the Victorian “poetess” disappears from women's poetry in the mordant irony of thefin de siècle.Virginia Blain, for instance, has recently identified Mathilde Blind and Constance Naden as representatives of “the new breed of post-Darwinian atheists” that comes to replace an earlier, implicitly Christian feminine tradition associated with Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Blain 332). On a related note, I have recently proposed that George Eliot'sLegend of Jubalcollections (1874, 1878) present a rather late instance of this poetess tradition (LaPorte 159–61). In what follows, I would like to argue thatfin-de-siècleiconoclasts such as Blind and Naden actually work hard to reclaim and redeem some of the prominent religious elements of the mid-century poetess tradition, and that Eliot's unusual combination of sentimental piety and religious skepticism gives them a particularly useful model for doing so.

Pierre Simon Laplace, 1749-1827: a determined scientist

Often referred to as the Newton of France, Pierre Simon Laplace has been called the greatest scientist of the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. He affirmed the stability of the solar system and offered a powerful hypothesis about its origins. A skilful mathematician and popular philosopher, Laplace also did pioneering work on probability theory, in devising a method of inverse probabilities associated with his classic formulation of physical determinism in the universe. With Lavoisier and several younger disciples, he also made decisive advances in chemistry and mathematical physics. Roger Hahn, who has devoted years to researching Laplace's life, has compiled a rich archive of his scientific correspondence. In this compact biography, also based in part on unpublished private papers, Hahn follows Laplace's journey from would-be priest in the provinces to Parisian academician, populariser of science during the French Revolution, religious sceptic and supporter of Napoleon. By the end of his life, Laplace had become a well-rewarded dean of French science. In this first full-length biography, Hahn illuminates the man in his historical setting. Elegantly written, Pierre Simon Laplace reflects a lifetime of thinking and research by a distinguished historian of science on the fortunes of a singularly important figure in the annals of Enlightenment science.

Religious Scepticism and its Social Context: An Analysis of Iban Shamanism

In recent years, anthropological studies of religion have increasingly touched on the importance of religious scepticism, often within the context of modernity or cultural and political change (e.g...

A Theology of Illness: Franz Kafka's "A Country Doctor"

Franz Kafka's "A Country Doctor,"the story of a physician whose life is predicated on duty and responsibility, and yet who ultimately fails as healer and physician, is one of the first modernist stories about doctoring. In this perplexing story Kafka struggles to find the meaning of "duty" in a doctor's life as well as the relationship of "duty" to Kafka's concept of "faith." Kafka may have borrowed many of the concepts and images in his story from Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. But unlike Nietzsche, who was an atheist, Kafka was a religious skeptic. This story reflects his ambivalence toward his Jewish faith. He argues for the importance of faith by confronting its absence: How are we to live without it? Without faith, can physicians perform their duty to heal? Kafka believes that illness is fundamentally spiritual in origin, that physicians need moral knowledge to truly heal, and that the practice of medicine should be an act of faith.

The Pluralistic Foundations of the Religion Clauses

Contemporary Supreme Court interpretations suggest that the religion clauses are primarily rooted in the value of equality. In interpreting the Free Exercise clause the United States Supreme Court has argued that in the absence of discrimination against religion or in the presence of other constitutional values, there is no violation of the Constitution when a statute inadvertently burdens religion. Similarly, equality values have played a strong role in the Court's Establishment Clause jurisprudence. Many distinguished commentators have pointed to the equality focus and have argued that it gives insufficient attention to the value of religious liberty. Professor Shiffrin argues that these commentators are right in contending that an equality emphasis misses much of importance in religion clause jurisprudence, but their emphasis on liberty or equal liberty is too narrow. Instead, he suggests an understanding of the proper place of equality in religion clause jurisprudence requires an appreciation of a wider range of values. Professor Shiffrin recognizes that the equality value is important, but shows that many deviations from religious equality are deeply embedded in the framework of government operations. It will not work to maintain that our Constitution regards religion and non-religion as equal. Indeed, the religion clauses are best interpreted to protect religion not just because of values like autonomy, equality, community, and religious peace, but because religion is regarded as important. This, he suggests, is a regrettable interpretation. It obviously is a bitter pill for religious skeptics to swallow, and it should even be a source of regret for most religious believers. Nonetheless, it is the best reading of our evolving Constitution. The foundational view that religion is important, however, does not flirt with theocracy. Far from it. The Constitution forbids coercion and, with exceptions, the favoring of one religion over another. Even more important, with some exceptions, the Constitution is best interpreted to curb government intervention to favor religion, not because religion is a constitutional stepchild, but because the seductions of governmental dependence are great and because government is not to be trusted. In applying his analysis, Professor Shiffrin explores many examples including (1) the ingestion of peyote; (2) animal sacrifice; (3) the government's use of religious symbols; (4) government's involvement with monotheistic prayer, including the Pledge of Allegiance; (5) the teaching of evolution in the public schools; (6) government protection of conscientious objectors and those who refuse to work on the Sabbath; and (7) voucher programs together with government support for religion within the public schools. Given the pluralistic character of the values underlying the religion clauses and the variety of contexts in which questions about the legal status of religion arise, he concludes, that equality can best be seen as one important value in a rich and evolving tradition. This tradition, he argues, is misunderstood by both the secular left and the religious right. The secular left does not understand the importance of religion in our constitutional tradition, and the religious right does not understand that government harms religion when it tries to help. Neither the secular left, nor the religious right understands the complex dimensions of religious equality.

Race, Culture, Nation: Edith Wharton and Ernest Renan

An avid reader, Edith Wharton devoured volumes of philosophy and religion. As R. W. B. Lewis observes in his biography, she owned more books on religion than any other subject (510). (1) At every stage of life, Wharton searched in religion and philosophy for answers to pressing metaphysical and ontological questions. Among other things, she used these insights to intensify her already complex social and moral portraits of fictional characters. It is not surprising, then, that she would have read one of her age's most highly esteemed historians and philosophers, Ernest Renan (1823-92), especially since she shared with him standpoint of rationalism and religious skepticism, sense of irony and the ironic play of ideas, of life as an amusing ideological spectacle (Chadbourne 104), high regard for French criticism, (2) and an esteem for France as the epitome of civilization and culture, able to weather any series of disasters. Wharton is on record for praising not only Renan but also SainteBeuve, Anatole France, and Matthew Arnold, all of whom were influenced by Renan. (3) Renan affected Wharton in two major ways. His rational positivism fueled her developing skepticism about the role of faith in post-Darwinian world increasingly based on science and empiricism. And his ideas about nation and nationhood helped her come to terms with her own expatriation and questions about the preservation and dissemination of cultural value in the early twentieth century. Wharton read Renan on at least two occasions, one in 1911 and the other in 1917. A catalog of her library indicates that she owned six books by Renan, some annotated, as well as book about him written by William Barry. (4) Although no record of her opinion of Renan exists, one might speculate how the French thinker affected Wharton personally and influenced her work. It is clear that Wharton appreciated and even propounded many of the ideas with which Renan is identified. He was certainly read and discussed in Wharton's circle. Morton Fullerton, for example, in an essay about Henry James--a piece Wharton admits to having had a hand in creating (Letter to William Brownell, qtd. in Wegener, Uncollected Critical Writings 300)--favorably compares James's and Renan's standards of probity and faithfulness to their own principles (Fullerton 306). It is likely in particular that Renan's ideas helped Wharton grapple with monumental issue in the nineteenth century: the balance between faith and reason; or, in the case of Renan, between faith and history. Renan mapped theory of history, science, and religion that Wharton could apply not only to personal questions of faith but also to her understanding of the larger workings of culture. A skeptic with keen ironic wit, he also provided Wharton with literary outlook and mode of execution compatible with her own. Born in 1823 in Brittany, Ernest Renan was raised Roman Catholic and educated in seminaries. At age 22 he left the seminary and the church in order to pursue science. In 1848 he wrote The Future of Science (L'avenir de la science), in which he introduced ideas that he would develop all his life. Science, by which he meant rational inquiry, would eventually supplant religion, he maintained, and guide the direction of human progress. Renan's thinking epitomized the positivism and rationalism in vogue during Wharton's time and mirrored in the progression of her ideas. As Lewis remarks, Wharton's childhood passion for sermon reading and stray wonderings about the vagaries of religious doctrines (510) were supplanted by the rational positivism taught to her by her mentor, family friend Egerton Winthrop. The effect of this body of thought was imposing during Wharton's agnostic years. Although Wharton did not follow in Renan's footsteps--she toyed with the idea of converting to Catholicism at the end of her life--she did find reassuring his suspicion of blind faith, his notion of religion as way to strive for perfection, and his view that this perfection actually existed in the Greek civilization that created art, science, and philosophy. …

Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference: Politics and Generations

The proportion of Americans who reported no religious preference doubled from 7 percent to 14 percent in the 1990s. This dramatic change may have resulted from demographic shifts, increasing religious skepticism, or the mix of politics and religion that characterized the 1990s. One demographic factor is the succession of generations; the percentage of adults who had been raised with no religion increased from 2 percent to 6 percent. Delayed marriage and parenthood also contributed to the increase. Religious skepticism proved to be an unlikely explanation: Most people with no preference hold conventional religious beliefs, despite their alienation from organized religion. In fact, these “unchurched believers” made up most of the increase in the “no religion” preferences. Politics, too, was a significant factor. The increase in “no religion “ responses was confined to political moderates and liberals; the religious preferences of political conservatives did not change. This political part of the increase in “nones” can be viewed as a symbolic statement against the Religious Right.

Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference: Politics and Generations

The proportion of Americans who reported no religious preference doubled from 7 percent to 14 percent in the 1990s. This dramatic change may have resulted from demographic shifts, increasing religious skepticism, or the mix of politics and religion that characterized the 1990s. One demographic factor is the succession of generations; the percentage of adults who had been raised with no religion increased from 2 percent to 6 percent. Delayed marriage and parenthood also contributed to the increase. Religious skepticism proved to be an unlikely explanation: Most people with no preference hold conventional religious beliefs, despite their alienation from organized religion. In fact, these “unchurched believers” made up most of the increase in the “no religion” preferences. Politics, too, was a significant factor. The increase in “no religion” responses was confined to political moderates and liberals; the religious preferences of political conservatives did not change. This political part of the increase in “nones” can be viewed as a symbolic statement against the Religious Right.

Skepticism and American Faith: Infidels, Converts, and Religious Doubt in the Early Nineteenth Century

In the spring of 1839, Abner Kneeland left Boston for good. The infamous freethinker, a former Baptist and then Universalist minister who had renounced Christianity, had spent sixty days in jail for blasphemy the previous summer. In that same year William Miller, formerly a skeptical deist and now a Baptist preacher, gave his first Boston lecture, arguing that Christ would return to earth in 1843. As Kneeland shook the dust of Boston from his shoes and Miller proclaimed that the end was near, Boston lawyer and politician Horace Mann extended his public crusade for education reform and struggled privately with religious doubt. By 1839, another Bostonian, Orestes Brownson, had already been a Presbyterian, a Universalist, and a freethinking socialist. The thirty-six-year-old editor of the Boston Quarterly Review was by now a staunch Democrat in a Whig city and a Unitarian in the orbit of New England Transcendentalism. Few writers of the period wrote with more sustained attention to the problem that concerned all four men: the challenge of religious skepticism to the grounds of American faith.1 In an era we have come to associate with evangelical revivalism, religious reformers, Emersonian optimism, and the consolidation of the Bible belt, Brownson argued that is not much open skepticism, not much avowed infidelity, but there is a vast amount of concealed doubt, and untold difficulty. Those religious doubts have remained hidden because of the stories we tell about the country's religious past. Scholars who have applied the secularization thesis to American religious history, a model that often assumes a waning significance of religion in the modern world, have always struggled with the American case, where religious affiliation and belief in God have remained very high compared to other industrialized nations. Secularization in the United States, some scholars explain, has been structural rather than psychological. Non-religious institutions and discourses have taken over functions once performed by churches and God talk, but this has not been accompanied by a significant rise in the proportion of the population that doubts or rejects religious truth claims. According to this modification of the secularization thesis, religious belief and practice have not withered away in the face of modem rationality and secular agnosticism; religion instead has been privatized. Structural change, not religious skepticism, is at the center of this story.2 Since the early 1980s, other scholars have moved from the secularization model to narratives stressing American religious vitality. The religious doubts of people like Brownson, Miller, Kneeland, and Mann are not especially important to these interpretations either. By the 1830s, most religious histories tell us, the radical implications of Enlightenment thought had been discredited by the French Revolution, David Hume's skepticism had been answered by Scottish Common Sense Realism, and the popular religious infidelity of rabble-rousers like Ethan Allen, Thomas Paine, and Elihu Palmer had been crushed by Christian polemics and evangelical activism. Visionary freethought reformers like Robert Owen and Frances Wright were foreign hothouse plants unable to bear fruit in God's American Canaan. If the origins of later unbelief can be found in some of the religious debates of this period, the great age of religious doubt lay ahead, in the post-Darwinian era of William James and Henry Adams. From this perspective too, it is not surprising that the few skeptics and freethinkers who did speak out earlier in the nineteenth century are consigned to the footnotes in studies of revival and reform.3 To pay more attention to both open infidelity and concealed doubt is not to argue that either is more important than the surging, protean religiosity in early nineteenth-century American life. Perhaps critical deists like the early Miller, closet skeptics like Mann, and vocal freethinkers like Kneeland and (briefly) Brownson do not deserve more space in surveys of American religious history. …

Honest to God and the Discourse on Patriarchy in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain

On 17 March 1963 Observer ran a feature article titled Our Image of Must Go that outlined main ideas of a forthcoming book. Bishop John A. T. Robinson's Honest to was published three days later, its first edition selling out in a week. Within a year it sold over 300,000 copies, within a decade over 1,000,000. No religious publication other than Bible sold as well in Britain. The Bishop of Woolwich became a national celebrity. The BBC devoted radio and television programs to Robinson's ideas; popular press caricatured his theology in its headlines; magazines outlined his life and ideas in feature articles. Thousands of individuals sent letters of approbation and condemnation (Clements 178-79; James Life 115-16). Robinson rejected image of as a patriarch in heaven or, as he put it, Old Man in sky (HG 18). This traditional spatial metaphor survived from an earlier era, he wrote, before modern science exploded three-decker universe of Heaven, Earth, and Hell. Christian theology found itself on defensive as scientific fact overwhelmed traditional religious cosmology. By 1960s satellites and other space probes evacuated concept of God in His Heaven. Now it seems there is no room for him, Robinson wrote of archaic representation of Deity, merely in inn, but in entire universe: for there are no vacant places left (HG 13-14). Modern thought transcended image of as an anthropomorphic projection of Father, paterfamilias of lost childhood. Sigmund Freud demonstrated psychological origins of this archaic Patriarch and, like Friedrich Nietzsche earlier, abandoned it. Inevitably it feels like orphaned, Robinson declared (HG 18). Borrowing from Paul Tillich and Robinson portrayed as of our and Beyond in our Midst (HG 44, 53). Belief in is trust, well-nigh incredible trust, that to give ourselves to uttermost in love is not to be confounded but `accepted,' that Love is ground of our being, to which ultimately we `come home' (HG 49). This Supreme Being was at once personal and abstract: became defined by agapic affiliations that reflected, however imperfectly, a transcendent reality, not unlike a Platonic Form. As Robinson acknowledged, some found such transcendence difficult to grasp. At same time, however, he retained a characteristic Protestant bias by grounding authentic religion in a deeply personal encounter, love of one individual for another or for God. Invoking Martin Buber, subject of his doctoral dissertation at Cambridge, Robinson deemed this encounter an I-Thou relationship (HG 53). How does one pray to `ultimate reality?' The Times asked (qtd. in Edwards 99). Robinson answered this question by transforming prayer into a deflected transaction among humans: My own experience is that I am really praying for people, agonizing with for them, precisely as I meet and really give my soul to them (HG 99). Again Robinson surrounded a secular encounter with traditional religious nomenclature. Heavily influenced by martyred German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Robinson suggested that worldly holiness removed barriers between religious and secular world. Whatever revivified Love, Ground of our Being, ought to be considered worship: Anything that fails to do this is not Christian worship, be it ever so `religious' (HG 88). Within this theology Jesus became a man for others, the one in whom Love has completely taken over, one who is utterly open to, and united with, Ground of his being (HG 76). Jesus embodied Unconditional in Conditional, Transcendent Love of in an individual who walked on earth. He was self-emptying (HG 74), surrendering himself to others completely and accepting fallen humanity in Grace. Honest to provoked enormous controversy. Typical of book's harshest critics, Alasdair MacIntyre argued that Robinson's muddled theology too easily assimilated destructive arguments of religious skeptics. …

A Brother in Arms: Benjamin Tappan and the Antislavery Democracy

In 1847 Benjamin Tappan, an Ohio politician and former United States senator, tried to persuade his younger brother Lewis Tappan to give up abolitionism and join Democratic party. Fifteen years Lewis's senior, Benjamin had been his childhood companion and tutor, and bond between them held even as their adult careers and convictions took divergent paths. Benjamin had become a lawyer, politician, scientist, and religious skeptic; Lewis an evangelical Christian merchant, philanthropist, and abolitionist. Yet despite what Benjamin called our totally different modes of thinking, they remained not only loving brothers but best friends. For forty years they had discussed their differences with a candor born of deep affection. Now Benjamin took up a question that had long divided them-how best to eliminate national scourge of slavery.1 You will find, he warned, if you live 40 years longer than I have, that there can be but two parties in this country, 'Aristocratic' & 'Democratic.' All factions and divisions must merge into them in end. The history of all republicks ancient & modern proves very clearly to my mind constant existence & antagonism of these two parties, one conservative other progressive. His own party, Democrats, were true antislavery party, for the Democratic principle is one of progressive improvement in condition of human race, while slavery is conservative & opposed to progress. You belong to progressives, Benjamin Tappan told his brother, for the natural equallity of man is a leading article in your creed. I belong to same party but while we

Ethan Allen and His Kin: Correspondendence, 1772-1819, Vol. 1

Ethan Allen and His Kin: Correspondendence, 1772-1819, Vol. 1. Edited by John J. Duffy et al. (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998. Pp. xlviii, 385. Illustrations. $50.00.) Ethan Allen and His Kin: Correspondendence, 1772-1819, Vol. 2. Edited by John J. Duffy et al. (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998. Pp. xx, 432. Illustrations. $50.00.) Almost all readers will know the broad outline of the life of Ethan Allen: leader of Vermont's Green Mountain Boys, hero at the seizure of Fort Ticonderoga from the British, frontier religious skeptic. Fewer will be familiar with the lives of his younger brothers, Ira and Levi, let alone other miscellaneous kin. The editors of these works chose to publish the family's letters as a corpus because the correspondence illustrates the nature of frontier settlement during the early republic. The editors note that very few other large collections of letters or papers by prominent late eighteenthcentury back country figures are available (xxvii). The Allen family arrived in Vermont in the early 1770s, attracted by lands granted under the authority of New Hampshire's colonial governors. When successfully challenged by rival New York patentees, Ethan Allen organized fellow New Hampshire grantees into the Green Mountain Boys and used violence to force New York settlers and civil authorities to vacate the territory. In the meantime, the Allen family began acquiring land in northwestern Vermont along Lake Champlain, amounting to 100 square miles by 1774. When the Revolutionary War began, the Allens mobilized the Green Mountain Boys to seize Fort Ticonderoga from the British, thereby placing themselves in the good graces of New York authorities. This saved Ethan from a New York hangman's noose and secured Vermont a measure of de facto independence. From here the brothers' stories began to diverge. Ethan and Ira Allen became key leaders of the new state of Vermont, using all manner of guile to protect it from dismemberment by more powerful neighboring states and from invasion by the British in Canada. Ira served in the more prominent role, as state treasurer and surveyor; Ethan had to work from the sidelines, as his proclivity for religious skepticism made him politically unpopular. Meanwhile, thanks to their government connections and Vermont's growing population, the two prospered from land speculation. Levi Allen, on the other hand, showed no interest in patriot politics and was accused of loyalism in 1779 by the family patriarch, Ethan. He thereupon decided to become an outright Tory, serving as commissary to the British army in the South, and all the while failing to make much money. The return of peace in 1783 brought the brothers back into a loose partnership for a time. Using his British connections, Levi set up a store in St. John's, Quebec, trading lumber produced by Ira's sawmill to Canadian merchants in exchange for imported English goods. Unfortunately, Levi's perennial poor judgment and bad luck left the brothers deeply in debt to the Canadians. …

National humiliation and the Great Hunger: fast and famine in 1847

On Wednesday 24 March 1847 a national day of fast and humiliation was observed throughout the United Kingdom, imploring, in the words of the royal proclamation, ‘the removal of those heavy judgments which our manifold sins and provocations have most justly deserved’. The fast-day was marked by a general stoppage of work and the opening of places of worship for special services. Substantial collections for the relief of famine distress in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands were made at church and chapel doors as the congregations retired. The effect was, as one Hampshire clergyman observed, dramatic: ‘The whole nation has this day lamented their sins and prayed for pardon; imagination can scarcely picture a more affecting scene than that of millions of people, assembled at the same moment in the presence of the Almighty, imploring his forgiveness, praying for grace to amend their lives, and deprecating the continuance of his displeasure.’What was the meaning of this seemingly archaic reaction to the Irish Famine? Considered through the filter of late twentieth-century religious scepticism, it might appear at best a marginal distraction from the catastrophic drama of the Famine, at worst a cynical attempt by the political establishment to lay a moral smokescreen around the question of responsibility for famine relief by reviving pre-modern conceptions of divine agency. To understand the significance of the fast-day and its repercussions, however, it is necessary to recognise the extent to which a Christian — and more particularly a Protestant evangelical — world-view permeated early Victorian British society.