09/07/2025 11:00
- 15:00
HALL: Lecture Hall 27
Proponent:
Kerry P.
Chair:
Kerry P.
Speaker:
Bennett J.,
Kerry P.,
Young B.
We explore religious transformation in intellectual history in three episodes. The first is the Victorian cult of personality initiated by Thomas Carlyle when he resolves an existential crisis by his encounter with Goethe's writings. This post-Enlightenment development during Koselleck's Sattelzeit retains religious undertones and illustrates a key moment in the relocation of authority and the redirection of devotional energy. Similarly, we will examine Salamon Reinach's 1909 work, Orpheus, to show a spectrum of critical positions concerning the extent to which anthropology could explain Christian history. It relatedly considers the ways in which anthropology informed a debate about the moral and social authority of Christianity in early-twentieth-century Europe. And we review recent Christian critiques of the Enlightenment project, specifically Humean ethics and secular liberalism, to examine these claims as the 'religious turn' in historical studies seems to be converging with a 'post-secular' moment in social and political theory.