(DOWNLOAD) "Colin Jager. The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (Book Review)" by Studies in Romanticism " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Colin Jager. The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (Book Review)
- Author : Studies in Romanticism
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 184 KB
Description
Colin Jager. The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Pp. 274. $59.95. Taking his title from the traditional notion that Nature as "the Book of God" was designed to be read in parallel to the revelations of scripture, Colin Jager argues that such an equivalence dominated English mainstream theology from 1675 to 1850, and continues to have a cultural foothold as evidenced by debates concerning "intelligent design." Nevertheless, as Jager persuasively demonstrates, profound shifts occur to "the argument from design" within the Romantic Age, shifts related to a secularization that "blurs the very words of the Book of God" (ix). Of course, critics have long associated Romanticism with secularization, with M. H. Abrams's Natural Supernaturalism being a paradigmatic example. But for many scholars Abrams's account of how the Romantics attempted to save traditional concepts for a modern world by engaging in a kind of grand translation process that reformulated religious ideas into secular and philosophical language, with its underlying assumption that traditional religion would decline as a result, has become increasingly untenable. Jager advocates that we abandon reading secularization as a progressive narrative about the loss of belief or as the translation of religious concepts and ideas into modernized equivalents. Instead, building upon the work of Jose Casanova, Jager argues that by recognizing the way in which secularization manifests itself in those processes by which cultural, bureaucratic, and epistemological roles that were once monopolized by religious institutions become differentiated into a variety of distinct and often competing spheres--including both literature and its study--then, and only then, can we "start to analyze our own investment in secularization as that which underwrites and legitimates Romanticism" (1).
 "Colin Jager. The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (Book Review)" by Studies in Romanticism " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}