Brett McInelly

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2018

The Enlightenment, an eighteenth-century philosophical and cultural movement that swept through Western Europe, has often been characterized as a mostly secular phenomenon that ultimately undermined religious authority and belief, and eventually gave way to the secularization of Western society and to modernity. To whatever extent the Enlightenment can be credited with giving birth to modern Western culture, historians in more recent years have aptly demonstrated that the Enlightenment hardly singled the death knell of religion. Not only did religion continue to occupy a central pace in political, social, and private life throughout the eighteenth century, but it shaped the Enlightenment project itself in significant and meaningful ways. The thinkers and philosophers normally associated with the Enlightenment, to be sure, challenged state-sponsored church authority and what they perceived as superstitious forms of belief and practice, but they did not mount a campaign to undermine religion generally. A more productive approach to understanding religion in the age of Enlightenment, then, is to examine the ways the Enlightenment informed religious belief and practice during the period as well as the ways religion influenced the Enlightenment and to do so from a range of disciplinary perspectives, which is the goal of this collection. The chapters document the intersections of religious and Enlightenment ideas in such areas as theology, the natural sciences, politics, the law, art, philosophy, and literature.

Review by Nick Mason presented at Faculty Book Lunch

After serving for six years as founding editor of the scholarly annual Religion in the Age of Enlightenment, Brett McInelly was left in the awkward position of having solicited and accepted a year’s worth of essays but suddenly lacking a publisher. This unwelcome turn came when AMS Press – the long-established home of influential eighteenth-century studies journals like Professor McInelly’s – immediately closed shop after the unexpected passing of its owner-director. Rather than leaving his contributors in the lurch, Dr. McInelly scrambled to find a new home for their orphaned essays. Ultimately, with the help of Paul Kerry of BYU’s History Dept., (who signed on as a co-editor), he landed a contract with Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, which last fall published the essays McInelly had gathered in a book collection titled New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment. As he explains in his introduction, “this volume is not oriented toward a relatively narrow topic; rather, it demonstrates a breadth of disciplinary perspectives on and approaches to the study of religion during the age of Enlightenment.” As such, this welcome collection captures the remarkable range of religious discourse – whether philosophical, literary, evangelical, of political – characteristic of the eighteenth century. Largely, but not exclusively, rooted in European Christianity, the volume spans such genres as popular novels, missionary narratives, ecclesiastical histories, and lesser-known essays by Goethe and Schiller. All told, then, this collection is a testament both to McInelly’s prominence among scholars of eighteenth-century religion and his perseverance in shepherding a valuable new volume to press.