Description:
"Sorkin is right to argue that enlightenment and faith went together for most participants in the Enlightenment, and that this is a major topic that has been relatively neglected. He has written an outstanding and eminently accessible book bringing the whole question centrally to scholars' attention. He skillfully demonstrates that all confessions and religious traditions found themselves very much in a common predicament and sought similar solutions."--Jonathan Israel, Institute for Advanced Study
"Powerfully cogent. Sorkin seeks to show that the 'religious Enlightenment' was not a contradiction in terms but was an integral and central part of the Enlightenment. Anyone interested in the history of the Enlightenment in particular or the eighteenth century in general will want to read this book. Sorkin is one of the leading scholars working in the field. His scholarship is as wide as it is deep."--Tim Blanning, University of Cambridge
Review Quotes: "Why can't religion and the Enlightenment be friends? What's that, you say? They were friends? Why didn't anyone tell us? Well, David Sorkin has. A professor of history and Jewish studies at the University of Wisconsin, he argues in a new study that religion and the Enlightenment were even more than friends. . . . The French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath not only destroyed the religious Enlightenment in practice; it also created, as Dr. Sorkin notes, a 'religious-secular dichotomy' that condemned this side of the Enlightenment to historical obscurity. Rescuing it from that obscurity, he insists, is of much more than academic interest."---Peter Steinfels, New York Times