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The Church of Saint Thomas Paine - A Religious History of American Secularism (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R586
Discovery Miles 5 860
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The Church of Saint Thomas Paine - A Religious History of American Secularism (Hardcover)
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Loot Price R586
Discovery Miles 5 860
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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The forgotten story of the nineteenth-century freethinkers and
twentieth-century humanists who tried to build their own secular
religion In The Church of Saint Thomas Paine, Leigh Eric Schmidt
tells the surprising story of how freethinking liberals in
nineteenth-century America promoted a secular religion of humanity
centered on the deistic revolutionary Thomas Paine (1737-1809) and
how their descendants eventually became embroiled in the culture
wars of the late twentieth century. After Paine's remains were
stolen from his grave in New Rochelle, New York, and shipped to
England in 1819, the reverence of his American disciples took a
material turn in a long search for his relics. Paine's birthday was
always a red-letter day for these believers in democratic
cosmopolitanism and philanthropic benevolence, but they expanded
their program to include a broader array of rites and ceremonies,
particularly funerals free of Christian supervision. They also
worked to establish their own churches and congregations in which
to practice their religion of secularism. All of these activities
raised serious questions about the very definition of religion and
whether it included nontheistic fellowships and humanistic
associations-a dispute that erupted again in the second half of the
twentieth century. As right-wing Christians came to see secular
humanism as the most dangerous religion imaginable, small
communities of religious humanists, the heirs of Paine's followers,
were swept up in new battles about religion's public contours and
secularism's moral perils. An engrossing account of an important
but little-known chapter in American history, The Church of Saint
Thomas Paine reveals why the lines between religion and secularism
are often much blurrier than we imagine.
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