Book Description

Half a century ago, friends and foes of the Enlightenment were at least agreed that this phenomenon in European history was characterised by anti-clericalism and to some degree by assuming critical distance from religion. Today, many scholars are defending an Enlightenment that was, if not a religious movement, at least intimately intertwined with religion. Much of the work that has been done consists of using the relationship between Enlightenment and religion to re-define the concept of either or both. Behind the set of related problems lurk the big questions: whether it makes sense to talk of a coherent European Christianity as an object of ‘the’ Enlightenment’s attention, and whether the issue of Enlightenment in a secularised culture presents us with a European ‘Sonderweg’, rather than the mother of all modernity.