Liberation Theology is in - should Yi be concerned?

[Capetan Mihali]

I could go for a book recommendation on this topic, too.

[Beenherebefore]

Maybe the "lesser ice age" also played a part with more calamity for what was mostly a rural uneducated (yet educated in Luther's catechism) agrarian people. People started hearing the Bible read in their own language, but by ministers at least up here sorely lacking in education. One notable exception is Peter Dass.

I'd not thought of that but you're probably right. Add in the calamities of war in Britain and Germany and it's easy to understand why you'd want someone to blame.

It does to some extent correlate with the 30 Years War. I recommend "Europe's Tragedy", a splendid little book.

But that doesn't really explain why places like New England went all witch-hunty.

Crop failure, maybe? Due to cold weather, or whatever.
Domestic animal disease.

I am fairly areligious, in that I don't have faith and don't practice, but I do find religion's part of history utterly fascinating.

[Beenherebefore]

I could go for a book recommendation on this topic, too.

The number of books written on Admiral Yi and liberation theology is disappointingly low.

[Capetan Mihali]

I could go for a book recommendation on this topic, too.

The number of books written on Admiral Yi and liberation theology is disappointingly low.

  Too late, you already made an earnest recommendation!

[Sheilbh]

It does to some extent correlate with the 30 Years War. I recommend "Europe's Tragedy", a splendid little book.

I haven't, but I will. I've only read C. V. Wedgwood's 'Thirty Years War' which is beautifully written but probably enormously out of date.

Diarmaid MacCulloch's 'Reformation' is a very good overview of the period. It tries to cover all the regions and different types of Reformation (Protestant, Catholic and the popular), but it also has a very good section on social history which is probably the most interesting.

There's some very good microhistory from this period too. I love Carlos Ginzburg's 'The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller':

The Cheese and the Worms is a study of the popular culture in the sixteenth century as seen through the eyes of one man, a miller brought to trial during the Inquisition. Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records of Domenico Scandella, a miller also known as Menocchio, to show how one person responded to the confusing political and religious conditions of his time.

For a common miller, Menocchio was surprisingly literate. In his trial testimony he made references to more than a dozen books, including the Bible, Boccaccio's Decameron, Mandeville's Travels, and a "mysterious" book that may have been the Koran. And what he read he recast in terms familiar to him, as in his own version of the creation: "All was chaos, that is earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and of that bulk a mass formed—just as cheese is made out of milk—and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels."

Eamon Duffy's great and partisan on the Reformation in England and the transition from Medieval to modern. 'Stripping the Altars' is his big text but 'The Voices of Morebath' is also brilliant, another microhistory from one of his sources for 'Stripping the Altars':

In this text a Reformation historian takes us inside the mind and heart of Morebath, a remote and tiny sheep-farming village where 33 families worked the difficult land on the southern edge of Exmoor. The bulk of Morebath's conventional archives have long since vanished. But from 1520 to 1574, through nearly all the drama of the English Reformation, Morebath's only priest, Sir Christopher Trychay, kept the parish accounts on behalf of the churchwardens. Opinionated, eccentric and talkative, Sir Christopher filled these vivid scripts for parish meetings with the names and doings of his parishioners. Through his eyes we catch a rare glimpse of the life and pre-reformation piety of a 16th-century English village. The work also offers a window into a rural world in crisis as the Reformation progressed. Sir Christopher Trychay's accounts provide direct evidence of the motives which drove hitherto law-abiding West-Country communities to participate in the doomed Prayer-Book Rebellion of 1549 - culminating in the siege of Exeter which ended in bloody defeat and a wave of executions. Its church bells confiscated and silenced, Morebath shared in the punishment imposed on all the towns and villages of Devon and Cornwall. Sir Christopher documents the changes in the community: reluctantly Protestant, no longer focused on the religious life of the parish church, and increasingly preoccupied with the secular demands of the Elizabethan state, the equipping of armies, and the payment of taxes. Morebath's priest, garrulous to the end of his days, describes a rural world irrevocably altered, and enables us to hear the voices of his villagers after 400 years of silence.

[grumbler]

I could go for a book recommendation on this topic, too.

The number of books written on Admiral Yi and liberation theology is disappointingly low.

  Too late, you already made an earnest recommendation!

Earnest Borgnine wrote a book?

Why, so he did! http://www.amazon.com/Ernie-Autobiography-Ernest-Borgnine/dp/0806529423

[Sheilbh]

I am fairly areligious, in that I don't have faith and don't practice, but I do find religion's part of history utterly fascinating.

I think it's especially because so many people are offering religious advice to the Muslim world. 'We need a Muslim Reformation'...to kick off two hundred years of unprecedented sectarian bloodshed etc.

[Beenherebefore]

I am fairly areligious, in that I don't have faith and don't practice, but I do find religion's part of history utterly fascinating.

I think it's especially because so many people are offering religious advice to the Muslim world. 'We need a Muslim Reformation'...to kick off two hundred years of unprecedented sectarian bloodshed etc.

I've found most of the people offering free advice to the Muslim world are either wrong in their assumption that Muslims need it or uncultured female organs of reproduction.

[Viking]

Christ. You burn one scientist...

and Neil Degrasse Tyson is gonna go Enlightenment on your ass.

[Eddie Teach]

What about witches, beer and nurses? And Swedish-made penis-enlarger pumps?

That's not my bag, baby.

[Razgovory]

Christ. You burn one scientist...

and Neil Degrasse Tyson is gonna go Enlightenment on your ass.

You mean pass off a mystic as a martyred scientist?

[Capetan Mihali]

I'm reading Terry Eagleton's new book, "Culture and the Death of God," which has a few relevant comments for this debate concerning the Enlightenment.  He points out that "atheism" as a pejorative preceded the emergence of real atheists by about 100 years.

"It would be curious, then, if the Enlightenment had taken the form of an aggressively secular movement, as some of its modern apologists assume.  When it came to religion, a good deal of this audacious intellectual project landed us back on a spot not far from where we were in the first place, furnished with a new, more plausible set of rationales.  The task was not so much to topple the Supreme Being as to replace a benighted version of religious faith with one that might grace coffee-house conversation in the Strand.  For the most part, it was priestcraft rather than the Almighty that the movement had in its sight."

Quoting Jonathan Israel, the turning point was that it was "by the 1740s, the apparent collapse of all efforts to forge a new general synthesis of theology, philosophy, politics, and science, which destablished religious beliefs and values, causing the wholly unprecedented crisis of faith driving the secularisation of the modern West."

Eagleton says that J. Israel is pointing out that this spiritual crisis "has its roots in a thoroughly material history -- the expansion of European commercialism and imperialism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the rapid growth of international monopolies, the dislocating effects of diaspora, a new social fluidity and diversity, the impact of new technologies, the partial dissolution of traditional social hierarchies and their accompanying symbolic systems and the like."

Just though I'd share, since the book is open to these pages at the moment.

[grumbler]

I'm reading Terry Eagleton's new book, "Culture and the Death of God," which has a few relevant comments for this debate concerning the Enlightenment.  He points out that "atheism" as a pejorative preceded the emergence of real atheists by about 100 years.

"It would be curious, then, if the Enlightenment had taken the form of an aggressively secular movement, as some of its modern apologists assume.  When it came to religion, a good deal of this audacious intellectual project landed us back on a spot not far from where we were in the first place, furnished with a new, more plausible set of rationales.  The task was not so much to topple the Supreme Being as to replace a benighted version of religious faith with one that might grace coffee-house conversation in the Strand.  For the most part, it was priestcraft rather than the Almighty that the movement had in its sight."

Quoting Jonathan Israel, the turning point was that it was "by the 1740s, the apparent collapse of all efforts to forge a new general synthesis of theology, philosophy, politics, and science, which destablished religious beliefs and values, causing the wholly unprecedented crisis of faith driving the secularisation of the modern West."

Eagleton says that J. Israel is pointing out that this spiritual crisis "has its roots in a thoroughly material history -- the expansion of European commercialism and imperialism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the rapid growth of international monopolies, the dislocating effects of diaspora, a new social fluidity and diversity, the impact of new technologies, the partial dissolution of traditional social hierarchies and their accompanying symbolic systems and the like."

Just though I'd share, since the book is open to these pages at the moment.

I am finding it hard to reconcile the 1740s and "the dislocating effects of diaspora, a new social fluidity and diversity, the impact of new technologies."  What diaspora was taking place?  The Enclosure Movement wasn't a diaspora, and the numbers moving to the New World were not, either.  Ditto for the technology and social fluidity.  I can understand the argument about the failure to reach a new general synthesis causing the spiritual crisis of the time, but not the bit in the last quote.  Agree that "for the most part, it was priestcraft rather than the Almighty that the movement had in its sight."

The last quote seems to refer to another spiritual crisis later in European history.

[Viking]

Christ. You burn one scientist...

and Neil Degrasse Tyson is gonna go Enlightenment on your ass.

You mean pass off a mystic as a martyred scientist?

No, by bitch slapping you for murdering a man just for his beliefs while cautiously qualifying that Bruno was guessing and happened to guess good.

[Viking]

I'm reading Terry Eagleton's new book, "Culture and the Death of God," which has a few relevant comments for this debate concerning the Enlightenment.  He points out that "atheism" as a pejorative preceded the emergence of real atheists by about 100 years.

"It would be curious, then, if the Enlightenment had taken the form of an aggressively secular movement, as some of its modern apologists assume.  When it came to religion, a good deal of this audacious intellectual project landed us back on a spot not far from where we were in the first place, furnished with a new, more plausible set of rationales.  The task was not so much to topple the Supreme Being as to replace a benighted version of religious faith with one that might grace coffee-house conversation in the Strand.  For the most part, it was priestcraft rather than the Almighty that the movement had in its sight."

Quoting Jonathan Israel, the turning point was that it was "by the 1740s, the apparent collapse of all efforts to forge a new general synthesis of theology, philosophy, politics, and science, which destablished religious beliefs and values, causing the wholly unprecedented crisis of faith driving the secularisation of the modern West."

Eagleton says that J. Israel is pointing out that this spiritual crisis "has its roots in a thoroughly material history -- the expansion of European commercialism and imperialism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the rapid growth of international monopolies, the dislocating effects of diaspora, a new social fluidity and diversity, the impact of new technologies, the partial dissolution of traditional social hierarchies and their accompanying symbolic systems and the like."

Just though I'd share, since the book is open to these pages at the moment.

I agree with that. Atheists were few and far between in the enlightenment. To be honest, before 1859 knowledge of each branch of science supported theism (you needed to be a polymath to see the inconsistencies, which few people were). It was the philosophical argument against god that caused people to disbelieve. Though, even there the philosophical arguments for the most part demolished religion rather than god. This caused people to abandon their religion and become Deists and Unitarians rather than Atheists. What Darwin did is that he removed the need for God to get life, at that point everything seemed to be explained.