In a simple story that we now tell ourselves about secularization, the European Enlightenment plays a key role: It’s the period when scientific inquiry and rational thought became ascendent, while religious practice receded to a more limited private sphere, a shift that coincided with new paradigms of toleration and liberty. The truth is of course more complicated, as theologians from various religious communities reimagined both religious practice and belief in dialogue with the philosophical and political trends of the moment. Along with their neighbors from other religious communities, how did participants in the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah, come to view the new distractions, technological transformations, and dream of universal knowledge that characterized modern life before the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?
Topics at the intersection of religion, culture, and public life have taken on special urgency in our current moment of social and political upheaval. Join us for an online conversation with recent IRCPL list authors to reflect on what scholarship has looked like in recent years, and to think together about where it could or should head in the future.
With the sense of possibility occasioned by each new technology of the written word, the aspiration to know all that there is to know takes on new life. But even as the printing press or the e-book have at the moment of their invention promised to increase access, they also have led to an exponential increase in new texts. Moreover, although strategies of information management have shifted over time, the feeling of information overload is recurrent and transhistorical. It certainly is not unique to the age of print culture or the internet era. Medieval and early modern Islamic scholars, working with manuscripts and pursuing research across a range of interrelated encyclopedic genres, honed myriad techniques for organizing and retrieving knowledge. How might we weave together these histories of information management and the religious sciences?
