Dr. Robert G. Ingram
Dr. Robert Ingram, Associate Professor in the History Department, co-edited a volume titled God in the Enlightenment (Oxford University Press).
The volume brings together recent scholarship from distinguished experts in history, theology, and literature to argue that religion thrived within the Enlightenment. For Ingram and co-editor William J. Bulman, the Enlightenment was not a radical break from the past in which Europeans jettisoned their intellectual and institutional inheritance. It was, to be sure, a moment of great change, but one in which the characteristic convictions and traditions of the Renaissance and Reformation were perpetuated to the point of transformation, in the wake of the Wars of Religion and during the early phases of globalization. The Enlightenment’s primary imperatives were not freedom and irreligion but peace and prosperity. As a result, they argue, Enlightenment could be Christian, communitarian, or authoritarian as easily as it could be atheistic, individualistic, or libertarian.
According to Alan Charles Kors, Henry Charles Lea Professor History, University of Pennsylvania:
This work shines with essays from an intellectual diversity of important scholars and often strikingly original perspectives. It not only addresses the increasingly problematic interaction of religion and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in provocative and significant ways, it goes to the underlying issue of the place of God in Enlightenment debate, dilemmas, continuities, and reevaluations. This is a genuinely important collection.
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