136 research outputs found
Evangelicals, Islamists and the globalisation of apocalyptic discourse
After 9/11, it has become increasingly obvious that strongly held religious convictions about the end of the world cannot be dismissed as the predictable consequences of deprivation, as several generations of social scientists once claimed. Instead, it has become clear that these kinds of ideas, having a life of their own, may establish discourses which may have extraordinary capacity to cross nations, cultures and even religions, encouraging passive withdrawal from the political world as well as inspiring vicious and sometimes violent attempts at its subjugation, underwriting the ‘war on terror’ as well as inspiring some of those intent on the destruction of the United States. This article describes one of Ireland’s most successful intellectual exports – a very specific system of thinking about the end of the world known as ‘dispensational premillennialism.’ And the article will move from county Wicklow in the early nineteenth century, through the troubled decades of American modernity, to arrive, perhaps unexpectedly, in the company of the soldiers of radical jihad. The article will describe the globalisation of a discourse which was developed among the most privileged classes of early nineteenth-century Ireland to explain and justify their attempt to withdraw from the world, and which has more recently been used to explain and justify sometimes violent political interventions by both prominent Western politicians and some of the most marginalised and desperate inhabitants of our broken twenty-first century
Afterword: Finding Religion in Scottish Literary History
Looks back at the author\u27s original article on the marginalization of Calvinist beliefs in earlier Scottish literature and comments on issues raised by the contributors to the SSL symposium
James Robinson, Pentecostal Origins: Early Pentecostalism in Ireland in the Context of the British Isles, Studies in Evangelical History and Thought (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005).
“John N. Darby, dispensational eschatology, and the formation of trans-Atlantic evangelicalism"
Polemic and apocalyptic in the Cromwellian invasion of Scotland
This article describes the culture of print and polemic associated with the Cromwellian invasion of Scotland and the resistance of the Church of Scotland. It argues that print solidified Parliamentary ideas during the invasion but that it did not continue to do so after English dominance had been established. These texts illustrate the divisions between the mentalité of the Cromwellian rank-and-file and that of the rather small and probably unrepresentative body of opinion formers who sought to control and represent it. </jats:p
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