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Religion: Faith in the Age of Reason
Author(s) -
GREGORY JEREMY
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
journal for eighteenth‐century studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.129
H-Index - 11
eISSN - 1754-0208
pISSN - 1754-0194
DOI - 10.1111/j.1754-0208.2011.00440.x
Subject(s) - enlightenment , faith , age of enlightenment , politics , identity (music) , sociology , key (lock) , aesthetics , epistemology , religious studies , history , social science , philosophy , law , political science , ecology , biology
This essay reviews some of the key developments in research into religion since JECS was founded in 1978. In the late 1970s the dominant paradigm was to view the eighteenth century as the Age of Reason, whose principal characteristic was a secularising Enlightenment. Since then the Enlightenment itself has been reconceptualised, and scholars are more alive to the positive relationship between the Enlightenment and religion. Moreover, religion is now viewed as being crucial to politics, questions of national identity and cultural matters – in short, as being more vital to the eighteenth century in 2011 than it was in 1978.