Academic literature on the topic 'Religious tolerance – history – 17th century'

This paper traces the history of the philosophical and political justification of religious tolerance from the late 17th century to modern times. In the Anglo-Saxon world, John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) gave birth to the doctrine of the separation of Church and State and to what is now called secularization. In France, Pierre Bayle refuted, in his Philosophical Commentary (1685), the justification of intolerance taken from Saint Augustine. Following him, Voltaire campaigned for tolerance following the Calas affair (1763), and the Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) imposed religious freedom which, a century later, resulted in the uniquely French notion of laïcité, which denies religion any supremacy, and any right to organize life in its name. Equality before the law takes precedence over freedom: the fact of being a believer does not give rise to the right to special statutes or to exceptions to the law.

The relation ship of the state to the Church in the course of history has always been problematic. This is true especially in Eastern Europe. This article presents the most significant historical events which influenced the relations between the state and the churches in Russia from Russia’s baptism in 10th century till the October Revolution of 1917. The text reveals the gradual emergence of cesaropapism, imported from Byzance and aiming at the full subordination of the churches to the state authorities. Several historical periods can be traced to this development. The first period begins at the end of the first millennium when Russia of Kiev was baptized, and lasts till the 14th century when Russia of Moscow arose. This time is marked by the building up of the church organization and its laws which developed from the beginning in close connection with the state law. The second period embraces the church history in the Moscow Russia, i.e. under Russia tsars, from the 14th till the 17th century. The state authority and the church authority seem to have a certain tendency to be balanced. Later on, however, as the Russian state is strengthened, the tsar began to have a decisive voice as well in church and religions matters. In the third period (18th cent. - 1903) there exists a system of severe control and supervision over the churches in Russia by the absolutist monarchy. The Russian imperium devided all confessions into three categories: the orthodox one, dominant and looked upon as loyal to the state; foreign confessions, Christian including (catholic and protestant) or non-Christian were tolerated. But sects of the orthodox origin were persecuted. The law regarded these sects as dangerous and harmful and a betrayal of the orthodox faith, and prohibited public worship, the faithful were deprived of their civil rights. As late as the end of 19th century, the idea of religious tolerance and freedom was unknown in the Russian law. At the beginning of the 20th century, Russian confessional law made a great step forward when acts guaranteeing religious freedom appeared. This development during the years 1903-1917 is characteristic of the fourth period. For the first time in Russia’s history, freedom of conscience and freedom of confession were stated by the law. The intolerance which ruled in the 17th – 19th centuries was transformed into tolerance of all confessions; even of those which were earlier persecuted. Nevertheless, the Temporary Government of Russia supported the dominant position and privileges of the Russian Orthodox Church.

The relevance of the study is due to the current active functioning of religious chapels at medical institutions, in particular, in Ukraine. Against the background of such tendentiousness, the attention of scientists is attracted by the features of the integration of religious practices into the processes of interaction with traditional medicine. In the course of the study, the origins of the beginning of the work of hospital chapels in Ukraine are analyzed, starting with samples such as a stone hospital for veterans in the Lviv region of the 17th century, in parallel with modern examples. In the course of the study, the processes of the emergence of the most famous hospital chapels in Lviv, Kharkov, Odessa, Nikolaev and Kyiv regions were considered. For objectivity, photographs of the first Murovany Hospital for Veterans (XVII century), the Alexander Hospital and the Mikhailovskaya Church attached to it (1901), the Mikhailovskaya Church at the beginning of the 20th century, compared with its current state are given. The history of the beginning of more than ten religious chapels at hospitals is analyzed. The connection between the programmed goals of the beginning of the chapels and their current mission and functionality is determined. The history of the creation and sustainable functioning of hospital religious chapels in Ukraine is viewed through the prism, against the background of the functioning of architectural objects, mutual tolerance and reasonable interaction between medical institutions and religious denominations. An analysis of the stated problems will allow a better understanding of the features of the current functioning of hospital chapels. The characteristics of the stated issues will help to expand the understanding of the features of the interaction between religion and medicine in modern times.

This study describes the history of Islam in Australia, highlighting the influx of Muslims and depicting the development of Islam in the country. This research employs the historical method, comprising four stages: heuristics for source collection, source verification or criticism, interpretation or analysis, and historiography for historical writing. The results of this study demonstrate that Islam began to spread to Australia in the early 17th century, primarily due to the regular presence of Makassar fishermen and traders searching for tripang. The next wave of Muslims who came and settled in Australia were Afghan Muslims, Malay Muslims, Indians, Albanians, Lebanese, Indonesians, and so on. The presence of Islam encourages Islamic education in the country, starting with non-formal Islamic education centered in mosques, homes, or offices of Islamic organizations. Various Muslim communities conduct studies and seminars on weekends, commonly known as 'Saturday or Sunday School.' The 1970s saw the establishment of formal Islamic schools in response to the growing Muslim population. The development of Islamic education in Australia gained momentum in the mid-1990s. Privately run Islamic schools adopt the entire local education system, with an additional six hours per week for religious content. As Islamic schools have developed, they have expanded to various states in Australia. The attitude of tolerance and openness that Islamic schools in Australia cultivate supports this

The 21st century is characterized as the century of globalization, the integration of cultures, which, of course, leaves its mark on the development of cognitive linguistics. Linguistics as a science of language, reflects all the changes that occur in the thinking and speech behavior of modern society. Cognitive linguistics makes it possible to identify and trace the logical foundations of the emergence and development of the human language as a general cultural phenomenon of human life and its features within the framework of a national culture. Cognitive studies in the language bring people together with different levels of development, culture and religious affiliation, which is necessary in the high-tech age, as they promote tolerance, religious tolerance and mutual respect. The article analyzes the mythological and religious texts of different peoples and faiths in order to identify one of C. Jung’s archetypes. It is a collective unconscious modeling function of certain words. Three centuries ago R. Descartes called such archetypes “the alphabet of human thoughts”. Then this expression was partially used in the late 1650s by the mathematician Blaise Pascal, and later applied in the works of G. Leibniz at the end of the 17th century. It is noteworthy that Descartes, Pascal, C. Jung and some other famous scholars were among the first in linguistics and the history of philosophical teachings to point out the importance of studying the symbolic primitives of thought in linguistic culture. They believed that such archetypes, thanks to symbolism, are part of the general linguistic picture of the world. At the same time the analysis was carried out, confirming one of the main provisions of modern cognitive linguistics about the interplay of language and culture, the originality of the linguistic picture of the world put forward in the Middle Ages by E. B. de Condillac, later proclaimed by W. von Humbolt, and underlying Sapir-Wharf’s theory of linguistic relativity.Not trying to “grasp the immensity”, the author of the article did not set a goal to indicate the use of the tokens “bull” and “cow” in different ancient languages. For example, in Asia and the East they acquire individual meaning in the group of Semitic languages (Arabic, etc.) or Turkic-speaking (Turkish, etc.). They are beyond the scope of our study. Comparisons and comparisons of these lexemes only in Russian and Hindi and a group of Indonesian languages come into view. Some other isolated parallels relate to the so-called “background information”. The study relies on a systematic analysis of the famous anthropologist K. Levy-Strauss and on the analogy method, widely used by linguists, culturologists, and anthropologists.

This article discusses the involvement of Malay ulama in the production of religious books or also known as kitab kuning, especially fiqh books in the 17th century. This century, as stated by some local historians, is the beginning of the development of classical Malay books in various fields including religion. The discussion in this article is focused on two things namely the development of writing religious books, focused on fiqh books in the 17th century, while the second case reviews two sample books that have been written in the 17th century namely (1) the Sirat al-Mustaqim and (2) the Mir'ah al-Tullab fi Tashil Ma'rifah Ahkam al-Shari'ah li Mulk al-Wahhab. From the discussion of the above, it can be concluded that the activity of writing classical Malay religious works developed along with the activity of writing in other fields including the fields of Malay literature, Sufism, Malay and Islamic history, Quran and Islamic medicine.

In the article, the author reveals fragments of the study about repressions of the 1920s and 1930s against the churches, as an institution of society, against the clergy, church services, active parishioners of one of the settlements in Sumy Region(Dubovichi village). Self-identification and peaceful living under the laws of honor in the socialist regime led to the destruction of employed citizens and clergy who lived by vocation and by traditional moral principles. After all, it was they - conscious citizens, intellectuals, who "threaten" the terrorist plot of the Bolshevik authorities on the territory of Ukraine. Special attention was to the citizens who supported Tikhonovsk and Ukrainian autocephalous Orthodox churches. The parishioners of these churches were in principle affirmative. "Tikhonovtsi" decided religious uncompromising, "autocephalous" were nationalistic. Those and others did not perceive the Bolsheviks. Both opposed the political regime. Everyone who was in contact or was attached to these groups was prosecuted and arrested with special severity. Under the repressions were relatives and neighbors. Blackmail of single persons and family, voluminous and falsification documents, taking hostages. That was happening with all who was not controlled during the formation of the Soviet power. Over the 50 people from Dubovichi village and their families fell under the pressure of repressions. Most of them were sentenced to death. Just few of them returned from exile and settled in distant places from their native village. Dubovichi village has a centuries-long history. Best known it is in the religious environment through the icon of Dubovytsi's Mother of God. The miraculous image of the Virgin was discovered in the middle of the 17th century. And the glory about it spread far beyond the then Russian empire. Church leaders from Kiev, from Chernigov gathered at the procession during the celebrations of 1861. The pilgrimage to the icon in Dubovich was round-the-year. Copies from the list of the Virgin Mary Dubovitskaya were in the St. Sophia Cathedral of Kyiv. Information about the icon was printed in church calendars and metropolitan directories of pilgrims. The grand stone church of the Nativity of the Virgin in 1777 in the center of the village, it was the pease of architectural art that was rare in the countryside. As evidenced by foreign sources, the parish church was kind of fortress. It was surrounded by a brick fence with four towers in corners. The entrance to the churchyard was through the gates that were under the bell. There were burials around the temple. Marble monuments were raised on the graves. Icons in the temple were in different kyots, precious stones. Church property included a number of priest clothing, silverware. In the village there were three temples. This provided the opportunity for the parish to have six priests, several clerks and psalms in the state. All were destroyed until 1940, despite the architectural value of the builders and the ancients. Dubovichi parish numbered more than three thousand people at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was glorified by the numerous, beautiful choir, active citizens. The church library was more than 2000 volumes. The priests performed not only the need. Archpriest Gusakovsky was the head of refuge. The village choir numbered more than 60 people. There was a spiritual orchestra, a theater group, a hut-reading room, a rural school and a parochial school, and a folk school in the village. Also there was paramedic station, veterinarian, pharmacy. The hospital unit numbered up to 10 beds. Tolerance and high moral consciousness were typical for the people of Dubovichi. Not only Orthodox lived in the village . Archival documents indicate that the daughter of the priest was offended with the Catholic. Jews lived in Dubovichi. The social group was represented. There were Gypsies among the participants of the school. Those were posterity of that who survived and took good place in life of theatre. Able to analyze falsifications of the campaign to destroy the Dubovichi parish, the destruction of church buildings- works of architectural art. Information from directories, archival documents and old people's buildings allows us to reconstruct conditionally events of those times. The author for the first time highlights this page of the Dubovichi life. As well as information from recently declassified documents from archives of higher authorities on the repressed residents of Dubovichi village. Human losses, disadvantaged families, tales of reletives about Soviet Union. All this make a mosaic of the historical stratum of our country. The coverage of this problem somehow outlines the massive crimes of Soviet politics in the 1920's and 1930's. It is a tribute to those who sacredly keep memories of the repressed.

Bustān al-Salāṭīn by Nūr al-Dīn al-Ranīrī (d. 1659) is a leading Malay text on Islamic history. Written in the 17th century in Aceh, one chapter of the Bustān was dedicated to the history of Aceh. This paper discusses how the Bustān described the formation of the sultanate, the rulers who were in power, their political behaviour, and the methods of statecraft they tried to establish. The text shared the emerging intellectual discourse in 17th Century Aceh, in which al-Ranīrī’s reform of Muslims’ religious practices to uphold sharī‘ah-based principles gained its prominence. With the support of his patron, Iskandar Thani (1636-1641), al-Ranīrī’s Islamizing efforts for Aceh are reflected in the Bustān. This paper argues that the Islamic ideals and terms found in the Bustān signify the history of Aceh and profile the patron, which sets Bustān apart from previous Malay texts of historical writing.

This thesis demonstrates the importance of scholastic philosophy and natural law to the theory of religious uniformity and toleration in Seventeenth-Century England. Some of the most influential apologetic tracts produced by the Church of England, including Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Robert Sanderson's Ten lectures on humane conscience and Samuel Parker A discourse of ecclesiastical politie are examined and are shown to belong to a common Anglican tradition which emphasized aspects of scholastic natural law theory in order to refute pleas for ceremonial diversity and liberty of conscience. The relationship of these ideas to those of Hobbes and Locke are also explored. Studies of Seventeenth-Century ideas about conformity and toleration have often stressed the reverence people showed the individual conscience, and the weight they attributed to the examples of the magistrates of Israel and Judah. Yet arguments for and against uniformity and toleration might instead resolve themselves into disputes about the role of natural law within society, or the power of human laws over the conscience. In this the debate about religious uniformity could acquire a very philosophical and sometimes theological tone. Important but technical questions about moral obligation, metaphysics and theology are demonstrated to have played an important role in shaping perceptions of magisterial power over religion. These ideas are traced back to their roots in scholastic philosophy and the Summa of Aquinas. Scholastic theories about conscience, law, the virtues, human action and the distinction between nature and grace are shown to have animated certain of the Church's more influential apologists and their dissenting opponents. The kind of discourse surrounding toleration and liberty of conscience is thus shown to be very different than sometimes supposed. Perceptions of civil and ecclesiastical power were governed by a set of ideas and concerns that have hitherto not featured prominently in the literature about the development of religious toleration.

Mid-seventeenth-century England saw numerous religious sects come into existence, one of which was the Calvinistic Baptist group. During the upheaveal of the revolutionary years this group was often accused of heresy by their orthodox/reformed contemporaries. At that time Hanserd Knollys, one of their London pastors, was personally charged with holding heterodox beliefs, in particular, Antinomianism, Anabaptism and Fifth Monarchism. In addition, Knollys has been accused of hyper-Calvinism. This version of Calvinism was held by some eighteenth-century English Calvinistic Baptists. Some Baptist historians have suspected Knollys of holding this teaching in the seventeenth-century, or at least they have felt it necessary to defend him against it. All of these charges are serious, and consequently bring into question Knollys' orthodoxy. This thesis will systematically examine each charge made against Knollys in its context, and comprehensively from Knollys' writings seek to determine if they were valid. Furthermore, this thesis will elucidate Knollys theology, particularly his soteriology, ecclesiology and eschatology.

The eighteenth century in England has long been associated with increasing consumption, trade, luxury, and intellectual exchange. In contrast with the religiously-fueled tumult of the previous century, it is frequently portrayed as a polite, enlightened and even secularising age. This thesis questions this picture. Taking the ambiguous legacies of the so-called "Toleration Act" of 1689 as its starting point, it explores the impact of the complex and uncertain outcomes of the 1689 Act on social relations between Protestant Dissenters and members of the Established Church in England in the first half of the eighteenth century. In connecting broader legislative change with developing social discourses and the practicalities of everyday life, it demonstrates the extent to which the Toleration Act made religious questions integral to the social and cultural development of the period. As a result, it stresses not only that developing modes and norms of sociability were essential to determining the nature of religious coexistence, but also that the changing religious landscape was absolutely integral to the evolution of multiple different social registers in eighteenth-century England. It therefore demonstrates how previously disparate approaches to eighteenth-century England are mutually illuminating, creating an account of the period that is better able to attend to both religious and cultural change. With this in mind this thesis pays particular attention to the language through which contemporaries described their sociability, suggesting that they have great potential to illuminate the nature of religious coexistence in this period. Starting from the premise that the words an individual chooses are in some way both reflective and constitutive of their ways of thinking, several of the chapters that follow draw on and analyse the language contemporaries employed at the intersections between religion and sociability. The thesis as a whole suggests that doing so can give us insight into how their religious lives were socially organised, how groups were formed, bounded, and transgressed, and how that in itself fed back into the structures of sociability.

Hadriaan Beverland (1650-1716) was banished from Holland in 1679. Why did this humanist scholar get into so much trouble in the most tolerant part of Europe in the seventeenth century? In an attempt to answer this question, this thesis places Beverland's writings on sex, sin, Scripture, and scholarship in their historical context for the first time. Beverland argued that lust was the original sin and highlighted the importance of sex in human nature, ancient history, and his own society. His works were characterized by his erudite Latin, satirical style, and disregard for traditional genres and hierarchies in early modern scholarship. Dutch theologians disliked his theology and exegesis, and hated his use of erudition to mock their learning, morality, and authority. Beverland's humanist colleagues did not support his studies either, because they believed that drawing attention to the sexual side of the classics threatened the basis of the humanist enterprise. When theologians asked for his arrest and humanist professors left him to his fate, Dutch magistrates were happy to convict Beverland because he had insolently accused the political and economic, as well as the religious and intellectual elite of the Dutch Republic, of hypocrisy. By restricting sex to marriage, in compliance with Reformed doctrine, secular authorities upheld a sexual morality that was unattainable, Beverland argued. He proposed honest discussion of the problem of sex and suggested that greater sexual liberty for the male elite might be the solution. Beverland's crime was to expose the gap between principle and practice in sexual relations in Dutch society, highlighting the hypocrisy of a deeply conflicted elite at a precarious time. His intervention came at the moment when the uneasy balance struck between Reformed orthodoxy, humanist scholarship, economic prosperity, and patrician politics, which had characterized the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic, was disintegrating, with unsettling consequences for all concerned. Placing Beverland's fate in this context of change provides a fresh perspective on the intellectual environment of the Republic in the last decades of the seventeenth century.

This thesis is an examination of the belief and practice of popular magic, specifically related to charmers, in the presbyteries of Haddington and Stirling between the years 1603 and 1688. It is the first study of either locality which concentrates on identifying the difference between charmers and witches, and considers the practice of the former in the broader context of seventeenth-century attitudes towards health and disease of both orthodox medical practitioners and the wider population. The thesis examines charmers and their healing practice in reference to theories of power, popular and elite culture, the church and gender, and reveals new information about seventeenth-century society. The principles and practice of charmers are then compared to orthodox medicine and popular magic, and the recorded healing treatments and rituals have been examined and analysed in close detail. A comparative analysis has been made of the two localities which assesses and contrasts patterns of witchcraft and charming accusation on a parish level. By using evidence contained in kirk records, supplemented by secular court material, it has been shown that all levels of society identified differences between the practice and intent of charmers and witches. Accusation and prosecution of witches was influenced more by local elites, and by elite demonological theories, than accusations of charming. Importantly, the devil was not a feature of charming accusations. Due to the overt nature of charming, differences in its perception and acceptability were highlighted by the less severe penalties which were ordered by the kirk. The dilemma for the church and society was that the church had, to an extent, surrendered its practical healing role with the abandonment of pre-Reformation ritual. The emphasis on personal piety and prayer for the relief of mental and physical suffering did not appear to offer sufficient comfort for the rest of society.

Although seventeenth-century New England has been one of the most heavily studied subjects in American history, women's lived experience of Puritan church membership has been incompletely understood. Histories of New England's Puritan churches have often assumed membership to have had universal implications, and studies of New England women either have focused on dissenting women or have neglected women's religious lives altogether despite the centrality of religion to the structure of New England society and culture. This thesis uses pamphlets, sermons, and church records to demonstrate that women's church membership in Massachusetts's Puritan churches differed from men's because women were prohibited from speaking in church or from voting in church government. Despite the Puritan emphasis on spiritual equality, women experienced a modified form of membership stemming from their subordinate place in the social hierarchy.

AbstractThis chapter offers an interpretation of extended families as communities of experience in a rural area close to the eastern border of the Swedish realm. Through a case study of lower court records, Kuha examines the social and religious life in a 17th-century farm culminating in the crisis of an extended family. The chapter explores how practices of lived religion shaped the relationship of the community and the individual, and how experiences were negotiated within families and local communities. The analysis highlights the importance of protecting the boundaries of the household as well as the meaning of religious practices in creating cohesion within the community.

AbstractIn general, historians of science and historians of ideas do not focus on critical appraisals of scientific ideas such as vitalism and materialism from Catholic intellectuals in eastern and southeastern Europe, nor is there much comparative work available on how significant European ideas in the life sciences such as materialism and vitalism were understood and received outside of France, Germany, Italy and the UK. Insofar as such treatments are available, they focus on the contributions of nineteenth century vitalism and materialism to later twentieth ideologies, as well as trace the interactions of vitalism and various intersections with the development of genetics and evolutionary biology see Mosse (The culture of Western Europe: the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Westview Press, Boulder, 1988, Toward the final solution: a history of European racism. Howard Fertig Publisher, New York, 1978; Turda et al., Crafting humans: from genesis to eugenics and beyond. V&R Unipress, Goettingen, 2013). English and American eugenicists (such as William Caleb Saleeby), and scores of others underscored the importance of vitalism to the future science of “eugenics” (Saleeby, The progress of eugenics. Cassell, New York, 1914). Little has been written on materialism qua materialism or vitalism qua vitalism in eastern Europe.The Czech and Slovene cases are interesting for comparison insofar as both had national awakenings in the middle of the nineteenth century which were linguistic and scientific, while also being religious in nature (on the Czech case see David, Realism, tolerance, and liberalism in the Czech National awakening: legacies of the Bohemian reformation. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2010; on the Slovene case see Kann and David, Peoples of the Eastern Habsburg Lands, 1526-1918. University of Washington Press, Washington, 2010). In the case of many Catholic writers writing in Moravia, there are not only slight noticeable differences in word-choice and construction but a greater influence of scholastic Latin, all the more so in the works of nineteenth century Czech priests and bishops.In this case, German, Latin and literary Czech coexisted in the same texts. Thus, the presence of these three languages throws caution on the work on the work of Michael Gordin, who argues that scientific language went from Latin to German to vernacular. In Czech, Slovenian and Croatian cases, all three coexisted quite happily until the First World War, with the decades from the 1840s to the 1880s being particularly suited to linguistic flexibility, where oftentimes writers would put in parentheses a Latin or German word to make the meaning clear to the audience. Note however that these multiple paraphrases were often polemical in the case of discussions of materialism and vitalism.In Slovenia Čas (Time or The Times) ran from 1907 to 1942, running under the muscular editorship of Fr. Aleš Ušeničnik (1868–1952) devoted hundreds of pages often penned by Ušeničnik himself or his close collaborators to wide-ranging discussions of vitalism, materialism and its implied social and societal consequences. Like their Czech counterparts Fr. Matěj Procházka (1811–1889) and Fr. Antonín LenzMaterialismMechanismDynamism (1829–1901), materialism was often conjoined with "pantheism" and immorality. In both the Czech and the Slovene cases, materialism was viewed as a deep theological problem, as it made the Catholic account of the transformation of the Eucharistic sacrifice into the real presence untenable. In the Czech case, materialism was often conjoined with “bestiality” (bestialnost) and radical politics, especially agrarianism, while in the case of Ušeničnik and Slovene writers, materialism was conjoined with “parliamentarianism” and “democracy.” There is too an unexamined dialogue on vitalism, materialism and pan-Slavism which needs to be explored.Writing in 1914 in a review of O bistvu življenja (Concerning the essence of life) by the controversial Croatian biologist Boris Zarnik) Ušeničnik underscored that vitalism was an speculative outlook because it left the field of positive science and entered the speculative realm of philosophy. Ušeničnik writes that it was “Too bad” that Zarnik “tackles” the question of vitalism, as his zoological opinions are interesting but his philosophy was not “successful”. Ušeničnik concluded that vitalism was a rather old idea, which belonged more to the realm of philosophy and Thomistic theology then biology. It nonetheless seemed to provide a solution for the particular characteristics of life, especially its individuality. It was certainly preferable to all the dangers that materialism presented. Likewise in the Czech case, Emmanuel Radl (1873–1942) spent much of his life extolling the virtues of vitalism, up until his death in home confinement during the Nazi Protectorate. Vitalism too became bound up in the late nineteenth century rediscovery of early modern philosophy, which became an essential part of the development of new scientific consciousness and linguistic awareness right before the First World War in the Czech lands. Thus, by comparing the reception of these ideas together in two countries separated by ‘nationality’ but bounded by religion and active engagement with French and German ideas (especially Driesch), we can reconstruct not only receptions of vitalism and materialism, but articulate their political and theological valances.

AbstractMost of Eriksen’s research over the years has somehow or other dealt with the local implications of globalization. He has looked at ethnic dynamics, the challenges of forging national identities, creolization and cosmopolitanism, the legacies of plantation societies and, more recently, climate change in the era of ‘accelerated acceleration’. Here we want to talk not just about cultural diversity and not just look at biological diversity, but both, because he believes that there are some important pattern resemblances between biological and cultural diversity. And many of the same forces militate against that and threaten to create a flattened world with less diversity, less difference. And, obviously, there is a concern for the future. We need to have an open ended future with different options, maximum flexibility and the current situation with more homogenization. We live in a time when there are important events taking place, too, from climate change to environmental destruction, and we need to do something about that. In order to show options and possibilities for the future, we have to focus on diversity because complex problems need diverse answers.Martina: I would like to start with a passion of mine to get into one of your main research themes: diversity. I’m a Marvel fan and, what is emerging, is a reduction of what Marvel has always been about: diversity in comics. There seems to be a standardization that reduces the specificity of each superhero and so it seems that everyone is the same in a kind of indifference of difference. So in this hyper-diversity, I think there is also a reduction of diversity. Do you see something similar in your studies as well?Thomas: It’s a great example, and it could be useful to look briefly at the history of thought about diversity and the way in which it’s suddenly come onto the agenda in a huge way. If you take a look at the number of journal articles about diversity and related concepts, the result is stunning. Before 1990, the concept was not much used. In the last 30 years or so, it’s positively exploded. You now find massive research on biodiversity, cultural diversity, agro-biodiversity, biocultural diversity, indigenous diversity and so on. You’ll also notice that the growth curve has this ‘overheating shape’ indicating exponential growth in the use of the terms. And why is this? Well, I think this has something to do with what Hegel described when he said that ‘the owl of Minerva flies at dusk,’ which is to say that it is only when a phenomenon is being threatened or even gone that it catches widespread attention. Regarding diversity, we may be witnessing this mechanism. The extreme interest in diversity talk since around 1990 is largely a result of its loss which became increasingly noticeable since the beginning of the overheating years in the early 1990s. So many things happened at the same time, more or less. I was just reminded yesterday of the fact that Nelson Mandela was released almost exactly a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. There were many major events taking place, seemingly independently of each other, in different parts of the world. This has something to do with what you’re talking about, because yes, I think you’re right, there has been a reduction of many kinds of diversity.So when we speak of superdiversity, which we do sometimes in migration studies (Vertovec, 2023), we’re really mainly talking about people who are diverse in the same ways, or rather people who are diverse in compatible ways. They all fit into the template of modernity. So the big paradox here of identity politics is that it expresses similarity more than difference. It’s not really about cultural difference because they rely on a shared language for talking about cultural difference. So in other words, in order to show how different you are from everybody else, you first have to become quite similar. Otherwise, there is a real risk that we’d end up like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s lion. In Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein, 1983), he remarks that if a lion could talk, we wouldn’t understand what it was saying. Lévi-Strauss actually says something similar in Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss, 1976) where he describes meeting an Amazonian people, I think it was the Nambikwara, who are so close that he could touch them, and yet it is as though there were a glass wall between them. That’s real diversity. It’s different in a way that makes translation difficult. And it’s another world. It’s a different ontology.These days, I’m reading a book by Leslie Bank and Nellie Sharpley about the Coronavirus pandemic in South Africa (Bank & Sharpley, 2022), and there are rural communities in the Eastern Cape which don’t trust biomedicine, so many refuse vaccinations. They resist it. They don’t trust it. Perhaps they trust traditional remedies slightly more. This was and is the situation with HIV-AIDS as well. This is a kind of diversity which is understandable and translateable, yet fundamental. You know, there are really different ways in which we see the Cosmos and the universe. So if you take the Marvel films, they’ve really sort of renovated and renewed the superhero phenomenon, which was almost dead when they began to revive it. As a kid around 1970, I was an avid reader of Superman and Batman. I also read a lot of Donald Duck and incidentally, a passion for i paperi and the Donald/Paperino universe is one curious commonality between Italy and Norway. Anyway, with the superheroes, everybody was very white. They represented a the white, conservative version of America. In the renewed Marvel universe, there are lots of literally very strong women, who are independent agents and not just pretty appendages to the men as they had often been in the past. You also had people with different cultural and racial identities. The Black Panther of Wakanda and all the mythology which went with it are very popular in many African countries. It’s huge in Nigeria, for example, and seems to add to the existing diversity. But then again, as we were saying and as you observed, these characters are diverse in comparable within a uniform framework, a pretty rigid cultural grammar which presupposes individualism: there are no very deep cultural differences in the way they see the world. So that’s the new kind of diversity, which really consists more of talking about diversity than being diverse. I should add that the superdiversity perspective is very useful, and I have often drawn on it myself in research on cultural complexity. But it remains framed within the language of modernity.Martina: What you just said makes me think of contradictory dimensions that are, however, held together by the same gaze. How is it that your approach helps hold together processes that nevertheless tell us the same thing about the concept of diversity?Thomas: When we talk about diversity, it may be fruitful to look at it from a different angle. We could look at traditional knowledge and bodily skills among indigenous peoples, for example, and ideas about nature and the afterlife. Typically, some would immediately object that this is wrong and we are right and they should learn science and should go to school, period. But that’s not the point when we approach them as scholars, because then we try to understand their worlds from within and you realize that this world is experienced and perceived in ways which are quite different from ours. One of the big debates in anthropology for a number of years now has concerned the relationship between culture and nature after Lévi-Strauss, the greatest anthropological theorist of the last century. His view was that all cultures have a clear distinction between culture and nature, which is allegedly a universal way of creating order. This view has been challenged by people who have done serious ethnographic work on the issue, from my Oslo colleague Signe Howell’s work in Malaysia to studies in Melanesia, but perhaps mainly in the Amazon, where anthropologists argue that there are many ways of conceptualising the relationship between humans and everything else. Many of these world-views are quite ecological in character. They see us as participants in the same universe as other animals, plants and even rocks and rivers, and might point out that ‘the land does not belong to us – we belong to the land’. That makes for a very different relationship to nature than the predatory, exploitative form typical of capitalist modernity. In other words, in these cultural worlds, there is no clear boundary between us humans and non-humans. If you go in that direction, you will discover that in fact, cultural diversity is about much more than giving rights to minorities and celebrating National Day in different ethnic costumes, or even establishing religious tolerance. That way of talking about diversity is useful, but it should not detract attention from deeper and older forms of diversity.

Abstract With these words Joseph Priestley, English chemist, Unitarian minister, political philosopher. public intellectual, and educator reemphasized an intellectual attitude that had become fundamental for Rational Dissenters and by extension. their academies of collegiate education.3 Arguably the foremost promoters of Enlightenment ideals of rationalism and religious tolerance in eighteenth-century England, Rational Dissenters had done much to encourage reform in higher education.

This chapter recognizes scholarly debates about the Enlightenment; some indict the movement for failing to live up to its ideals. Nonetheless, the Founding Fathers were traditionally understood to have been shaped by Enlightenment values. These curricula reject that understanding. They repudiate Enlightenment values, including secularism, tolerance, the social sciences, social reform, internationalism, and those values’ possible influence on the new nation. The curricula instead indict the Enlightenment as godless and reject its appreciation of reason and science as threats to the authority of the Bible. The genuine eighteenth-century Enlightenment is, for these curricula, the religious revival known as the Great Awakening. These textbooks also assert that France’s commitment to humanism warranted divine punishment in the French Revolution, and that its reprehensible politics differentiate it from American virtues. This chapter concludes with some implications of what rejecting the Enlightenment entails for modern America culture.

This chapter investigates if System 2 (analytic system) can revise or suppress the negative outputs of System 1 (intuitive system) by natural experiment in history. Two periods are picked up in this chapter: the 17th century when there was a decline in war, torture, cruel punishment, and religious persecution, and the time after World War II when there has been a decline in war, genocide, and violence with growing awareness of human rights. In short, the outputs associated with strong emotion are less likely to be revised, and an effective way for revision is to use a story to trigger the theory of mind in System 1. This is also discussed in the frame of distinction between deontic moral judgment and utilitarian moral judgment. Finally, it is proposed that a good story should be elaborated by System 2 and be prevailed so that it arises emotions (sympathy) of System 1 and drives people for the better-being future.

The Scottish eighteenth-century philosopher and historian David Hume can be considered a pioneer of the “natural history of religion” in the sense of a universal history of religion that is not based on theological presuppositions. This chapter offers a characterization of his methodological achievements and a reevaluation of his empirical claims concerning monotheism, polytheism, religion and tolerance. It also interprets the German reception of Hume in Herder and other eighteenth-century thinkers as a serious critical continuation that is free from Hume’s anti-Christian motives. This continuation opens the perspective of a serious study of the literary character of religious texts, in this case of the Bible. All simple contrasts between Enlightenment and religion are overcome as soon as we take this interaction of thinkers into account.

In the course of a long writing life, Andrew Marvell made few forays into print publication until he penned The Rehearsal Transpros’d in defence of Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence. This publication was one of the most explosive contributions to the print polemics of the late 17th century, offering a landmark argument in the history of religious toleration and almost singlehandedly upending the conventions of learned, albeit vituperative, debates over religious authority in English society. This chapter asks what we can find of animating spiritual belief or religious affiliation when such a highly nuanced and poetical thinker turns to prose to defend the liberty of conscientious belief. Is there a Marvell the believer we can recover from The Rehearsal Transpros’d?

The article discusses the history and activities of the largest orthodox Printing house of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It was organized in 1574 in Vilna at the expense of the wealthy Orthodox merchants of Mamoniches and existed until 1625. For half of a century over 100 different titles were published there: theological and liturgical texts, journalistic works, textbooks, collections of legislation, publications of laws. Among the publications there were several editions of the Statute of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which was printed in thousands of copies. The publications of Mamoniches had a great deal influence on the cultural, political and religious development in the East and South Slavic lands.

This paper intends to highlight the competence of Design to determine productive and creative connections for the creation of a complex instrument such as the violin as an interpreter and precursor of innovation in the processes of sustainability of society.Over time, but particularly from the 17th century onwards, violin production was characterized by a profound relationship between knowledge of materials and experimentation with techniques that, in some cases, have remained practically identical until the days of today. For some researchers (Bonaventura, 1933; Hutchins, 1981; Bonfils et Fabretti, 2019) it seems quite curious to be able to understand how, in the 18th century, some luthiers were able to produce instruments whose sound qualities are still highly appreciated today, considering the little knowledge in the scopes of chemistry, physics and acoustics. The relationship between the construction and the artefact of this instrument has always been characterized by a connection between the mystique and the culture of the place propitiated for the religious cult that characterized the cultural contest and the capacity to benefit from the resources available in the place and that involves the history of some violinists in the construction of the instrument itself. In this sense, in the history of the construction of this instrument, there are religious references such as the Agnus Dei related to the ancient strings in lamb guts or even the Regis Purpura of the varnish that recalls the color of the blood of Christ (Borer, 2006). In this construction process, there is also a coherent use of the material available in the area, such as, for example, red spruce or maple wood. The presence of this material in large quantities in the alpine areas where firewood itself transited (Blom, 2021), argues its use in the violin. Today, the lack and high cost of some resources make a new interpretation of the relationship between design and production necessary, namely, establishing new connections between materials, processes, and the contemplation of the artifact in its production, as well as in its appreciation. The productive analysis carried out today must considerer a new assessment of the relationship between the various forces that constitute the production of the artifact, determining a connection that can improve the result, but always having the classical reference as a starting point.In this sense and referring to the concept of “will-to-power” (Nietzsche, 2008), to design a musical instrument such as a violin becomes liberating from the theological thought of the time. A possibility that allows the individual to base courage on himself and not on a divine reason, allowing courage to be the general condition of practical reason, synonymous with the space-time relationship and the unplanned.With this article, the authors intend to demonstrate that the use of sustainable materials, which make use of traditional lutherie methods, can determine a new mystique that accompanies environmental principles and helps human beings to get closer to nature and the values that intend it to preserve, defend but also venerate.