Religious Thought in the Victorian Age: Challenges And Reconceptions - Softcover

"A valuable research tool and an important corrective to several lingering monolithic views of this rich moment in the history of religious and scientific thought." - The Journal of Religion ."..this stimulating study...is a very helpful introduction to this important phase in the history of theological development. He is well read in the published sources, including an impressive survey of keynote lectures, essays, and reviews in nineteenth-century periodicals. He is a shrewd and accurate guide to the nuances of the philosophical arguments, and writes in an attractive style, with no axes to grind. Students of Victorian intellectual history and its theological implications are greatly in his debt." "Oxford"" Journals Clippings: Journal of Theological Studies, vol 60, no 2, October 2009" "In this impressive exposition of late Victorian thought, Livingston deftly analyzes a half century of theological engagement with modern science and secular scholarship...Focusing on the period ranging from the publication of The Origin of the Species to WWI, the book displays the author's deep acquaintance with a host of British theologians who grappled with evolutionary theories in the natural and social sciences that called into question traditional Christian understandings of God, humanity, and nature. The heart and soul of this work is Livingston's nuanced, painstaking recreation of the questions, issues, and controversies that vexed and enlivened British theology as it was transformed by modern thoughtways. Summing Up: Highly Recommended. Lower-level undergraduates through faculty/researchers." - S. Gowler, CHOICE, May 2008--Sanford Lakoff "Religious Thought in the Victorian Age would have profited from some engagement with the ideas of Charles Cashdollar's The Transformation of Theology, 1830-1890 (1989), which covers some of the same ground from a different point of view. The book would also have been enriched by some attention to issues of imperial power and gender...One would never know from reading Livingston that Britain was the center of a world empire or suspect that imperial power might shape British thought about other cultures...I realize how annoying it is for an author who has conducted years of research to read a review suggesting that it would be possible to do even more. That is one of the jobs of reviewer, though. I will end, however, by saying that I learned a lot from Religious Thought in the Victorian Age and that I recommend it to anyone interested in the history of ideas, science, or religion." - Jeffery Cox, Victorian Studies, Spring 2008--Sanford Lakoff "I learned a lot from Religious Thought in the Victorian Age and that I recommend it to anyone interested in the history of ideas, science, or religion." - Jeffery Cox, Victorian Studies, Spring 2008--Sanford Lakoff "Serious 'Religious Thought' in Britain, ca 1860-1910, was by no means confined to theologians and religious writers. The burgeoning natural and human sciences of the time presented the most noted challenges. Scientists were prominent among those who responded. A broader public was not satisfied with compartmentalized studies. The result was an interdisciplinary treatment of theological issues of a scope that has been rarely equaled since. Livingston's study is up to the task of laying it out for us...Livingston, well known for his mastery of the history of modern religious thought in the West, has delved deep into the history of the sciences of biology, archeology, paleontology, physiology and psychology, and of course philosophy, as they impinged upon the history of Christian thought in the Anglo-Saxon world." -Paul Misner, Catholic Books Review, 2009

The central purpose of this book is to offer an account of crucial intellectual challenges to traditional British theology, challenges that provoked wide-ranging discussions and decisively shaped British theology. In several instances, they resulted in rather fundamental reconceptions of traditional doctrine and belief. Not all of the conclusions reached in these debates proved enduring, and some efforts to accomodate theology to advances in the sciences proved spurious or unnecessary. Yet even the ill-fated forays and speculations were efforts to respond to new, genuine questions that required answers.
Livingston, the dean of Victorian religious history, approaches this subject from a new perspective. By 1860, the religious discussion in Britain had broadened signficantly in two ways. First, the examination of critical theological issues had moved outside the bounds of the established Church of England and its three dominant parties. The discussion now engaged highly respected Roman Catholic, Nonconformist, and secular thinkers of impressive range. Second, the deeper and more consequential debates on matters touching on religion were no longer dominated by clerics and theologians. Livingston demonstrates that the late Victorian decades were a time of vitality and creativity in the educated public's discussion of critical religious and theological matters. Livingston reconceptualizes British religious thought in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth.