The Victorian age was a period in which Christian Orthodoxy was undermined by new and emerging forms of reasoned inquiry. The commonly-held view amongst historians is that the intellectual life in the era was composed of two hostile camps; those who defended Christian Orthodoxy and those who championed the new sciences. The received view is that, when faced by the new fields of reasoned inquiry, Christianity’s prominence within British intellectual life and discourse went into terminal decline. The intention of this (...) article is to demonstrate that there was a middle ground between the two camps. In particular, this article aims to demonstrate that attempts were made to reconcile Christianity with the findings of the emerging forms of reasoned inquiry. This will be achieved through providing an examination of T. H. Green’s theory of Human Agency. Green he was one of the most prominent philosophers of the Victorian age. Through his theory of human agency, Green consciously engaged in the debate that existed between theistic Christianity and the emerging forms of reason inquiry of the time. (shrink)

Philosophers have made numerous and varied attempts to analyse the concept of a miracle. To the end, an assortment of necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth an instantiation of a miracle have been offered. In this paper we discuss one of the most common of these conditions - the violation restriction. This restriction holds that all miracles involve a violation of a law of nature.

Ideas about biology, race, and theology were bound up together in nineteenth‐century scholarship, although they are rarely, if ever, considered together today. Nevertheless, the new genealogical way of thinking about the history of life arose alongside a new way of thinking about the Bible, and a new way of thinking about people. They connected with one another in subtle ways, and modern scholarly boundaries do not map well on to nineteenth‐century scholarship.

Stephen Carter argues that biblical literalism is predicated on an epistemological position drastically different than that maintained by mainstream scientists inasmuch as it operates on the basis of a “hermeneutic of inerrancy” with respect to the ideas laid out in the Bible. By relying on considerations offered by Charles Taylor and recent sociological studies, I contend that Carter’s thesis is incorrect. The divide between proponents and opponents of biblical literalism is ethical rather than epistemological. Beyond the philosophical implications of my (...) contention, this displays that deliberative engagement between these parties—which depends on shared epistemological norms—is possible in principle. (shrink)

This article claims Virginia Woolf as a historian of the period 1880–1937 in Britain. In her 1937 novel The Years, Woolf employed the religious and cultural history of Ernest Renan, most likely his Vie de Jésus (1863), to produce her own. By unravelling what Renan wrote, what Woolf read and wrote, and what Renan meant, in his own terms and to a contemporary British audience, we can begin to consider the role of religious criticism in the making of historical and (...) literary modernity. (shrink)