Aug 10
4
southern intellectual history
Brian Griffith’s review for A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada:
User Rating:
This excellent, detailed history shows what was new about Christianity in the New World. It portrays the dramatic contrasts between official colonial churches and various refugee sects, with their different visions of how they might relate to each other. Where the first colonies, provinces or states usually had official state churches, Noll documents the issues of church relations on the borders or frontiers between these domains. Into these zones, dissidents of all stripes fled from state-backed religion. And in areas where no religious group had a majority, Noll records how people learned to meet their community needs and get along: “The result was a degree of interdenominational tolerance probably unknown anywhere else in the world at that time”. (p. 89) Noll’s statement may overlook the religious diversity of India or China, but for the Christian world it applied.
Of course Noll’s book holds far more, and is of interest to people of every denomination in Canada and the USA. I was just most impressed by the explanation of how religion in North America escaped state control.
-author of Correcting Jesus
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Product DescriptionThe first Caribbean intellectual history written by a top scholar of Caribbean studies, this book examines both writings written by natives of the region as well as a set of interpretative texts of the region produced by Western authors. Emphasizing the particularity of cultural experience and the Caribbean, the study considers four major questions: What art, literature or thought can come from the minds of people who have undergone a catastrophic history? What makes the conceptual paradigms fashionable Western intellectual industry capable of illuminating the distinct experience of West Indians, but not vice versa? No West Indians lack the necessary mental framework for interpretation of culture, Whether. . . More>>
An Intellectual History of the Caribbean
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