New approaches to religion and the enlightenment edited by Brett C. McInelly and Paul E. Kerry (Review)

• Main Author: Singh, Brijraj
• Other Authors: School of Humanities
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: Humanities::Literature::English
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/137553
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The twenty-first century has seen the reestablishment of religion at the center of Enlightenment studies. If there was a belief toward the end of the twentieth century that the growing modernization of society in the eighteenth century resulted in a fading of religious influence on people’s lives,1 it is being increasingly asserted now that even this secularization was not free of religious influence.2 As the blurb on the back cover of New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment states, while people still believe that the Enlightenment led to a growing secularization of society, the fact is that religion not only continued to occupy a central position in all aspects of eighteenth-century life but also “shaped the Enlightenment project itself in significant and meaningful ways.” The fourteen essays by as many writers in this book continue the exploration of the interweaving of religious and Enlightenment concepts. They do not all follow the same definition of religion or indeed even of the Enlightenment; in fact, none attempts a definition of these contentious terms. But many exhibit originality of argument as well as deep and thorough scholarship, and all are written in a clear, very readable, sometimes elegant style.