Goldwin Smith (1823-1910) was a celebrated, transatlantic writer on current events, politics, religion, history, and literature. While he made his academic mark teaching at Oxford, Cornell, and later as a resident guru at Toronto, his facile pen earned him a far greater reputation with general readers throughout the English-speaking world. Determined to rouse concern over issues that he deemed to be important to the advancement of humanity, Smith was deemed the controversialist by the Dictionary of National Biography. A study of his life and his writings provides new insight into liberalism, anti-semitism, the role of the journalist, and other aspects of life in late 19th century North America and Britain. As a public intellectual, Goldwin Smith spoke out on a variety of issues, frequently provoking intense debate. Phillips argues that the core of Smith's thought and the driving force behind his role as a controversialist lay in his moral philosophy, which provided a sense of direction to Smith's many and sometimes disparate writings and activities. This study will also probe the serious dilemma posed by Smith's path to agnosticism in the last decades of his life. By moving to a position of virtual unbelief, Smith risked damage not only to his carefully-crafted public persona, but also to a life's work as an impassioned moralist.

Featured in the Wall Street Journal From his deep involvement in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s to his almost forty years at the head of the New Republic, Martin Peretz traces his personal history alongside those of the cultural and political centers—Harvard, Wall Street, Washington—in which he was a key player for decades. From 1974 to 2012, during his years as publisher and editor-in-chief of the New Republic, Martin Peretz was a familiar presence on the political scene. In its time under his leadership, the magazine was always fresh, erudite, contrarian, and brave. Anyone interested in finding out the most distinctive expert takes on the issues that mattered—whether they be domestic or international, cultural or political—knew that the New Republic was required reading. The Controversialist begins in a vibrant but tragedy-stricken community of Yiddish Jews in his native Bronx and takes Peretz, blessed with that rare trait of always being in the right place at the right time, into the same rooms as some of the most prominent writers, thinkers, businessmen, activists, and politicians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Peretz’s insights into his relationships with these men and women—many of them his students, teachers, colleagues, friends, and, of course, enemies—are both original and illuminating. Through his examination of the personalities, not least his own, at the center of the events that have defined the postwar and neoliberal decades, Peretz makes a rich and compelling argument for the ideals that have been the focus of his life: liberalism, democracy, and Zionism. In revisiting this rich life, he considers, too, what will come next now that those ideals are no longer assured.

Reconstructs the life of the French literary genius whose writing changed opinions and fueled fierce debate on both sides of the Atlantic during the period of the American and French revolutions.

“We are a much-lectured people,” wrote Robert Spence Watson in 1897. Beginning at mid-century, cities and towns across England used the popular lecture for purposes ranging from serious education to effervescent entertainment and from regional pride to imperial belonging. Over time, the popular lecture became the quintessential embodiment of Victorian knowledge-based culture, which itself ranged from the production of new knowledge in the most elite of learned societies to the consumption of established knowledge in middle-class clubs and the hundreds of humble mechanics' institutions initially founded to provide scientific instruction to workers. What did the “average” Victorian talk and think about? How did the knowledge-based culture of lecture and debate enable men and women to demonstrate both civic engagement and cultural competence? How does this knowledge-based culture and its changing expression give us ways to look at Victorian citizenship long before the extension of the franchise? With engaging and accessible prose Anne Rodrick draws from a variety of primary sources to provide fascinating answers to these pertinent questions. Based on the analysis of several thousand lectures and debates delivered over more than 50 years, this book digs deeply into what those individuals below the most elite levels thought, heard, debated, and claimed as a badge of cultural competence. By the turn of the 20th century, the popular lecture was competing for attention with new institutions of leisure and of higher education, and the discourse surrounding its place in contemporary England helps illuminate important debates over access to and deployment of knowledge and culture.

Carson traces the subtle but enormous shift in the way we have come to understand tolerance over recent years--from defending the rights of those who hold different beliefs to affirming all beliefs as equally valid and correct. He looks back at the history of this shift and discusses its implications for culture today, especially its bearing on democracy, discussions about good and evil, and Christian truth claims. --from publisher description

Papers presented at the Fifteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford 2007 (sse also Studia Patristica 44, 45, 46, 47 and 48). The successive sets of Studia Patristica contain papers delivered at the International Conferences on Patristic Studies, which meet for a week once every four years in Oxford; they are held under the aegis of the Theology Faculty of the University. Members of these conferences come from all over the world and most offer papers. These range over the whole field, both East and West, from the second century to a section on the Nachleben of the Fathers. The majority are short papers dealing with some small and manageable point; they raise and sometimes resolve questions about the authenticity of documents, dates of events, and such like, and some unveil new texts. The smaller number of longer papers put such matters into context and indicate wider trends. The whole reflects the state of Patristic scholarship and demonstrates the vigour and popularity of the subject.