Jonathan Sheehan
Jonathan Sheehan is associate professor of early modern European history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, 2005), which describes how the Bible survives, even thrives, in the era of its ostensibly secular overcoming. Recent articles include “The Altars of the Idols: Religion, Sacrifice, and the Early Modern Polity,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006), and “Sacred and Profane: Idolatry, Antiquarianism, and the Polemics of Distinction in the Seventeenth Century,” Past and Present 192 (2006). His current attentions are split between a project on sacrifice and theology in the early modern period, and a coauthored book on the systems theories of the Enlightenment, and the transformation of divine providence into worldly complexity.
Posts by Jonathan Sheehan:
Monday, January 14th, 2008
From the opening pages, my historical antennae quickly began to quiver. Taylor’s book works in a space far removed from what I understand (speaking perhaps parochially) as proper historical argument. I say this with due caution: Taylor has always believed in the importance of a historical setting for his arguments. And from the outset of A Secular Age, he specifically addresses the issue of history. “Who needs all this detail, this history?” he asks, to insist that indeed “our past is sedimented in our present.”
Read the rest of Framing the middle.
Posted in A Secular Age | 4 Comments » |
Social Science Research Council
Subscribe to the RSS feed for