Fencing Bear at Prayer

This is what I would have said back in January if I had had the time to finish the book then.  We're having a discussion about it here on campus this week , if you want to know more.   This is what I'll be saying, more or less. Comment on Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012). This is an intimidating book.  It is also a book that is very difficult to summarize.  Not only does it take on the whole of European history from the high Middle Ages to the present; it also critiques the very historiography upon which our narrative of European (and, by the by, American and, indeed, world) history has tended to depend.  Name something—anything—that you know about the development of the modern world and Prof. Gregory’s book will have something to say about it—and then it will show you how everything that you have ever believed about it is wrong.  The triump...

I can't.  I'm too tired.  I have nothing to say.  No, as usual, that's not quite true.  Thanks to the reading I've been doing these past four or so weeks , I have much, too much to say.  If only I knew where to start.  If only. I am tired.  Truly.  It's the second week of term, and I'm teaching a wholly new course on education in the Middle Ages.  I know, I know, it was the Dark Ages, they didn't have any education.  Which, of course, isn't true.  They had loads.  Only--and here's the embarrassing thing--even we medievalists don't spend enough time thinking about what medieval people (i.e. school children) learned in school.  In particular, we don't spend enough time thinking about grammar.  And logic.  And rhetoric.  A.k.a. the trivium . I know I don't.  I'm embarrassed that my Latin isn't stronger than it is.  Even after almost a full year of working on my translation of John of Garland ....

"Most scientists and other scholars are unfamiliar with the intellectual scaffolding that reveals the compatibility between all scientific findings and a conception of God as radically transcendent creator of all that exists.  In Christianity, this is understood to be the same God who became incarnate in Jesus and worked miracles.  Shielded from having to engage the issues by the specialization of academic disciplines and supersessionist conceptions of history, most secular scholars and scientists seem as well to be unfamiliar with the historical genesis of their own contrary beliefs, which are neither self-evident nor evident.  Hence one reason for this chapter, which has sought to shed light on the historical genealogy of both positions and to note their presence within contemporary Western hyperpluralism.  The chapter has sought to expose the widespread but mistaken assumption that modern science has rendered revealed religion untenable.  What is more, it is...