Redeeming the Enlightenment
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- Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
- https://www.pubmatch.com/Eerdmans.html
More About This Title Redeeming the Enlightenment
- English
English
In this probing book Bruce K. Ward reexamines four of the moral imperatives or "liberal virtues" associated with the Enlightenment -- equality, authenticity, tolerance, and compassion -- and argues that they are, in fact, based on Christian moral ideals. In the current debate surrounding post-Enlightenment secular humanism, Ward contends that we should seek not to reject or reclaim the Enlightenment but to redeem it.
Ward's study largely engages three key modern thinkers -- Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky -- yet also includes such other notables as Kant, Locke, Heidegger, Tolstoy, Kafka, René Girard, Charles Taylor, and Martha Nussbaum. The result is a lively and provocative forum for reconsidering and creatively retrieving what is most valuable in Enlightenment thought.
Ward's study largely engages three key modern thinkers -- Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky -- yet also includes such other notables as Kant, Locke, Heidegger, Tolstoy, Kafka, René Girard, Charles Taylor, and Martha Nussbaum. The result is a lively and provocative forum for reconsidering and creatively retrieving what is most valuable in Enlightenment thought.
- English
English
Bruce Ward is professor in and chair of the Joint Department of Religious Studies at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario.
- English
English
David Lyle Jeffrey
— Baylor University
"An extraordinarily rich, synthetic, and polyphonic reflection on major, sustaining voices of the European Enlightenment. . . With precise definition, careful distinctions, refined intellection, and an exquisite, orderly exposition of foundational texts in both literature and philosophy, Bruce Ward gives us a bracing revision of some of those very Enlightenment thinkers that many of us have come to think of more as burden than as blessing. This is a must-read for intellectual historians, theologians, and students of Enlightenment philosophy alike — a brilliant tour de force in the tradition of George Grant and Charles Taylor."
Choice
"This rich, nuanced book by Ward draws on his previous work on Russian novelist Dostoyevsky, combining that literary analysis with probing explorations of philosophers such as Kant, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Taylor. Ward argues that liberal modernity's ethics and philosophy are distorted reflections of richer Christian notions of the self and ethical existence. In contrast to the growing proliferation of specialized studies, this book offers an expansive tour looking for connections and differences among a host of thinkers — not to argue for a wholesale rejection of the Enlightenment but to show that Christian humanism is a richer philosophy upon which to base human fulfillment. In that project, humanity finds fulfillment in the giving of the self in love, not an endless quest for self-authored authenticity. This volume finds a way into a beyond-current debate about religion's role in a liberal society to show how religion and theology can point the way to a deeper meaning of the liberal project. Philosophically and theologically sophisticated, the book delineates the rich ways in which philosophy and theology can powerfully engage literature."
— Baylor University
"An extraordinarily rich, synthetic, and polyphonic reflection on major, sustaining voices of the European Enlightenment. . . With precise definition, careful distinctions, refined intellection, and an exquisite, orderly exposition of foundational texts in both literature and philosophy, Bruce Ward gives us a bracing revision of some of those very Enlightenment thinkers that many of us have come to think of more as burden than as blessing. This is a must-read for intellectual historians, theologians, and students of Enlightenment philosophy alike — a brilliant tour de force in the tradition of George Grant and Charles Taylor."
Choice
"This rich, nuanced book by Ward draws on his previous work on Russian novelist Dostoyevsky, combining that literary analysis with probing explorations of philosophers such as Kant, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Taylor. Ward argues that liberal modernity's ethics and philosophy are distorted reflections of richer Christian notions of the self and ethical existence. In contrast to the growing proliferation of specialized studies, this book offers an expansive tour looking for connections and differences among a host of thinkers — not to argue for a wholesale rejection of the Enlightenment but to show that Christian humanism is a richer philosophy upon which to base human fulfillment. In that project, humanity finds fulfillment in the giving of the self in love, not an endless quest for self-authored authenticity. This volume finds a way into a beyond-current debate about religion's role in a liberal society to show how religion and theology can point the way to a deeper meaning of the liberal project. Philosophically and theologically sophisticated, the book delineates the rich ways in which philosophy and theology can powerfully engage literature."
