Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
61
result(s) for
"Liebert, Hugh"
Sort by:
Gibbon’s Christianity
There has never been much doubt about the faith of the \"infidel
historian\" Edward Gibbon. But for all of Gibbon's skepticism
regarding Christianity's central doctrines, the author of The
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire did not
merely seek to oppose Christianity; he confronted it as a
philosophical and historical puzzle. Gibbon's Christianity
tallies the results and conditions of that confrontation.
Using rich correspondence, private journals, early works, and
memoirs that were never completed, Hugh Liebert provides intimate
access to Gibbon's life in order to better understand his complex
relationship with religion. Approaching the Decline and
Fall from the context surrounding its conception, Liebert
shows how Gibbon adapted explanations of the Roman republic's rise
to account for a new spiritual republic and, subsequently, the rise
of modern Europe. Taken together, Liebert's analysis of this
context, including the nuance of Gibbon's relationship to
Christianity, and his readings of Gibbon's better- and lesser-known
texts suggest a historian more eager to comprehend Christianity's
worldly power than to sneer at or dismiss it.
Eminently readable and wholly accessible to anyone interested in
or familiar with the Decline and Fall , this groundbreaking
reassessment of Gibbon's most famous work will appeal especially to
scholars of eighteenth-century studies.
eBook
Midlife Crisis? The All-Volunteer Force at 40
Owing to regional and partisan imbalances, the U.S. military is at greater risk than at any time since the advent of the all-volunteer force of becoming estranged from significant portions of the society it serves. What—if anything—should be done? This article takes three initial steps to address this problem. First, the article examines regional and partisan representation in the U.S. military and suggests that existing imbalances are likely to grow worse over time. The article then argues that the most obvious policy response, a renewed draft, would in fact fail to adequately bridge the gap. Finally, the article outlines one policy response—the reassertion of nonpartisan norms—that would help to mitigate, though not close, the gap.
Journal Article
General Observations
Gibbon dramatized the triumph of Christianity with jarring diptychs. In the third volume of the Decline and Fall he relates the “Fable of the Seven Sleepers,” in which seven young Christians escape the emperor Decius’s persecution by hiding in a cave, where they sleep for 187 years. They wake to a Christian empire that they can scarcely believe to be true. These young men would sense the profundity of historical change, Gibbon says, in a way that men who lived through it and historians accustomed to linking distant revolutions by a “perpetual series of causes and effects” could not. “If
Book Chapter
The Rise of Christianity
“In the second century of the Christian Aera, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.”¹ The first sentence of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire hid the central puzzle of the work under a serene and conventional façade. The period from which Gibbon’s narrative began was the “second century of the Christian Aera” only for Gibbon’s readers. For Gibbon’s Romans, it was the second century since the rise of the Empire, the ninth since the founding of the city. But theirs was not yet Christian time.²
Book Chapter
Religious Controversies and Conversions in the Time of Gibbon
“It was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed fryars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.”¹ In the space of a sentence Gibbon evokes descent and decrepitude—ruins, vespers, the decline and fall of the city—and places in that welter and waste a sudden revelation.² The ancient world as readers of Gibbon’s vast volumes have come to know it comes suddenly into being, along with Gibbon
Book Chapter
Gibbon’s Autobiographies
Edward Gibbon was a consistent counterrevolutionary. Both as an engaged member of London society and then as a Member of Parliament, he supported Lord North’s efforts to put down the American rebellion. Gibbon also opposed the revolution in France. “I am as high an Aristocrat as Burke himself,” he wrote to his friend Lord Sheffield in 1791, and in the penultimate draft of his Memoirs Gibbon would formally “subscribe [his] assent to Mr. Burke’s creed.”¹ Gibbon’s enthusiasm for Burke was such that he presented his own great work, even at its most controversial, as an essentially conservative endeavor. “The primitive
Book Chapter
Essai
Having described some of the contexts surrounding Gibbon as he became “the historian of the Roman Empire,” we turn in the next three chapters to his texts. Gibbon’s account of Christianity in the great work will naturally command most of our attention. But Gibbon’s famously (or infamously) novel narration of Christian history as the effect of “secondary” or secular causes was in fact a return to a theme Gibbon had sounded as a young man in his first book, the Essai sur l’étude de la littérature. Considering the genesis of this early work, the philosophy of religion it
Book Chapter