A corrective to the much-discussed Victorian `crisis of faith', this study focuses upon several prominent individuals who experienced a `crisis of doubt' and made the reverse journey, abandoning secularism to defend Christianity. Their stories demonstrate the intellectual strength of faith in the nineteenth century.

The Victorian era was the first great ";Age of Doubt"; and a critical moment in the history of Western ideas. Leading nineteenth-century intellectuals battled the Church and struggled to absorb radical scientific discoveries that upended everything the Bible had taught them about the world. In "The Age of Doubt," distinguished scholar Christopher Lane tells the fascinating story of a society under strain as virtually all aspects of life changed abruptly. In deft portraits of scientific, literary, and intellectual icons who challenged the prevailing religious orthodoxy, from Robert Chambers and Anne Bronte; to Charles Darwin and Thomas H. Huxley, Lane demonstrates how they and other Victorians succeeded in turning doubt from a religious sin into an ethical necessity. The dramatic adjustment of Victorian society has echoes today as technology, science, and religion grapple with moral issues that seemed unimaginable even a decade ago. Yet the Victorians'; crisis of faith generated a far more searching engagement with religious belief than the ";new atheism"; that has evolved today. More profoundly than any generation before them, the Victorians came to view doubt as inseparable from belief, thought, and debate, as well as a much-needed antidote to fanaticism and unbridled certainty. By contrast, a look at today';s extremes-;from the biblical literalists behind the Creation Museum to the dogmatic rigidity of Richard Dawkins';s atheism-;highlights our modern-day inability to embrace doubt."

One striking weaknesses of our financial architecture, which helped bring on and perhaps deepen the Panic of 2008, is an inadequate appreciation of the past. Information about how the system functioned and the reliability of organizations and institutional controls were drawn from a relatively narrow group of recent examples. History and Financial Crisis: Lessons from the 20th Century is an attempt to broaden the range of historical sources used by policy makers to understand and treat financial crises. Many recent discussions of the 2008 panic and the economic turmoil have found the situation to either be unprecedented or greatly similar to that of 1931. However, the book's wide range of contributors suggest that the economic crisis of 2008 cannot be categorised in this way. This book was originally published as a special issue of Business History.

As humans charge up the steep slope of technological innovation, digital age media increasingly shapes our perception of everything--even spiritual matters. The next stage of spiritual development may be the product of a digital interface between our own image of the divine, virtual reality technology that produces real perceptions, and with devices that stimulate areas of the brain associated with spiritual experience. This book explores the influence of digital media on spirituality and the impact of the digital environment on our experience of the spiritual world. The author predicts a future in which digital technology and neuroscience will combine to create a new understanding of the divine. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

The revised edition of Southeast Asia provides a grounded account of how people in the region are responding to - and being affected by - the changes sweeping through the region.

It is widely assumed that science is the enemy of religious faith. The idea is so pervasive that entire industries of religious apologetics converge around the challenge of Darwin, evolution, and the "secular worldview." This book challenges such assumptions by proposing a different cause of unbelief in the West: the Christian conscience. Tracing a history of doubt and unbelief from the Reformation to the age of Darwin and Karl Marx, Dominic Erdozain argues that the most powerful solvents of religious orthodoxy have been concepts of moral equity and personal freedom generated by Christianity itself. Revealing links between the radical Reformation and early modern philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza and Pierre Bayle, Erdozain demonstrates that the dynamism of the Enlightenment, including the very concept of "natural reason" espoused by philosophers such as Voltaire, was rooted in Christian ethics and spirituality. The final chapters explore similar themes in the era of Darwin and Marx, showing how moral revolt preceded and transcended the challenges of evolution and "scientific materialism" in the unseating of religious belief. The picture that emerges is not of a secular challenge to religious faith, but a series of theological insurrections against divisive accounts of Christian orthodoxy.

"This book examines the emergence of modern consciousness as consciousness develops historically in one cultural form: prose fiction narrative. The book represents a critical history of crisis, arguably the most characterizing single word in the modern world and a major figuration or trope. Eugene Hollahan has studied the history of this important word within the development of the English-language novel, from Samuel Richardson to Saul Bellow. After establishing a heuristic model for such a critical history, Hollahan tracks the word (characterized by George Eliot in Felix Holt, the Radical as a "great noun") through two-and-a-half centuries of narratives by major novelists, with contextualizing excursions into discourses in related fields such as autobiography, philosophy, theology, and social science." "Hollahan contextualizes his study of English-language narrative fiction by examining the writings of crisis-rhetoricians in the eighteenth century (Thomas Paine), nineteenth century (Thomas Carlyle, J. S. Mill, and J. H. Newman), and twentieth century (Karl Barth, Edmund Husserl, T. S. Kuhn, and Richard M. Nixon). Such varied and powerful crisis-rhetorics establish a matrix of language and ideas for the crisis-centered novels Hollahan surveys. These novels include major works by Samuel Richardson, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, George Eliot, George Meredith, George Gissing, George Moore, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Lawrence Durrell, Robert Coover, and Saul Bellow." "Hollahan's description of the crisis-trope interfaces with various critical issues such as canonical inclusion, reader response, and deconstruction. On the whole, his book acknowledges current critical issues but endeavors to remain basically a critical history. It attempts to demonstrate that the crisis-riddled modern world and the crisis-conscious novel are analogous and coeval." "Crisis begins as Aristotle's term for logical plot structuring, becomes Longinus's term for emotional exacerbation, and eventually enters into a variety of critical and narrative formulations: Matthew Arnold's cultural centrality, Henry James's existential aestheticism, Lawrence's self-defining sexuality, Marshall Brown's revolutionary turning point, Paul de Man's error-ridden criticism, Floyd Merrell's cut into the primordial flux, Durrell's reborn self, and Bellow's analysis of hysterical escapism. Broadly speaking, Hollahan argues that any crisis-trope will enable or even necessitate a unique confluence of writerly and readerly skills." "In Louis Lambert, Balzac urged: "What a wonderful book one would write by narrating the life and adventures of a word." The story Hollahan narrates fulfills Balzac's expectations as it depicts writer after writer working out influential representations of human life in terms of crisis-consciousness centering upon George Eliot's "great noun" crisis. Historically, Hollahan demonstrates, such consciousness comes to define modern humanity."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved