Author: Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont File Type: pdf F. M van Helmonts Alphabet of Nature was one of many books published about language in the early modern period. The language debate, as it has come to be called, was a topic of compelling interest to major figures such as Reuchlin, Rabelais, Paracelsus, Agrippa, Postel, Boehme, Kircher, Hobbes, Descartes, Comenius, Spinoza, Locke, Boyle, Newton, and Leibniz. At issue were profound questions about whether language is natural or artificial, ordained by God or created by man. The answers given entailed a web of consequences that could lead to arrest, imprisonment, even execution. It is therefore not surprising that van Helmont wrote his book while imprisoned in the dungeons of the Roman Inquisition.

Author: Andrew Preston File Type: pdf Despite constitutional limitations, the points of contact between religion and politics have deeply affected all aspects of American political development since the founding of the United States. Within partisan politics, federal institutions, and movement activism, religion and politics have rarely been truly separate rather, they are two forms of cultural expression that are continually coevolving and reconfiguring in the face of social change. Faithful Republic explores the dynamics between religion and politics in the United States from the early twentieth century to the present. Rather than focusing on the traditional question of the separation between church and state, this volume touches on many other aspects of American political history, addressing divorce, civil rights, liberalism and conservatism, domestic policy, and economics. Together, the essays blend church history and lived religion to fashion an innovative kind of political history, demonstrating the pervasiveness of religion throughout American political life. Contributors Lila Corwin Berman, Edward J. Blum, Darren Dochuk, Lily Geismer, Alison Collis Greene, Matthew S. Hedstrom, David Mislin, Bethany Moreton, Andrew Preston, Bruce J. Schulman, Molly Worthen, Julian E. Zelizer. **

Author: Kristine Louise Haugen File Type: pdf What made the classical scholar Richard Bentley deserve to be so viciously skewered by two of the literary giants of his dayJonathan Swift in the Battle of the Books and Alexander Pope in the Dunciad? The answer he had the temerity to bring classical study out of the scholars closet and into the drawing rooms of polite society. Kristine Haugens highly engaging biography of a man whom Rhodri Lewis characterized as perhaps the most notableand notoriousscholar ever to have English as a mother tongue affords a fascinating portrait of Bentley and the intellectual turmoil he set in motion. Aiming at a convergence between scholarship and literary culture, the brilliant, caustic, and imperious Bentley revealed to polite readers the doings of professional scholars and induced them to pay attention to classical study. At the same time, Europes most famous classical scholar adapted his own publications to the deficiencies of non-expert readers. Abandoning the church-oriented historical study of his peers, he worked on texts that interested a wider public, with spectacular andin the case of his interventionist edition of Paradise Lostsometimes lamentable results. If the union of worlds Bentley craved was not to be achieved in his lifetime, his provocations show that professional humanism left a deep imprint on the literary world of Englands Enlightenment. **

Author: Rian Malan File Type: epub Here is truth-telling at its most exemplary and courageous. The remorseless exercise of a reporters anguished conscience gives us a South Africa we thought we knew all about but we knew nothing. John le CarreMy Traitors Heart is an astonishing work of reportage, at once beautiful, horrifying, and profounda book unlike any other about South Africa. Rian Malan is an Afrikaner, scion of a centuries-old clan deeply involved in the creation of apartheid. As a young crime reporter, Malan covered the atrocities of an undeclared race war and ultimately fled the country, unhinged by what he had seen. Eight years later, he returns to confront his own demons, and those that are tearing his country apart. Written in the final years of apartheids bloody collapse, My Traitors Heart still resonates, offering a chillingbut ultimately redemptivevision of the darkest recesses of the black and white South African psyches.