{"id":11078,"date":"2011-08-10T08:24:58","date_gmt":"2011-08-10T14:24:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/?p=11078"},"modified":"2016-05-14T09:34:44","modified_gmt":"2016-05-14T15:34:44","slug":"repeal-the-renaissance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/?p=11078","title":{"rendered":"Repeal the Renaissance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Lughnasa\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Honey Extraction Moon<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve found major points of agreement between myself and my congresswoman, she-who-would-be-president <a href=\"http:\/\/www.instapaper.com\/go\/194481476\/text\">Michelle Bachmann<\/a>.\u00a0 She considers the Renaissance a major problem for Christianity.\u00a0 The Enlightenment, too.\u00a0 I see it that way myself.\u00a0 Of course, we do disagree on the significance of these facts.<\/p>\n<p>Yep.\u00a0 Michelle and the Calvinist theologian Franklin Schaeffer along with a Schaefer acolyte &#8220;Nancy Pearcey, a prominent creationist whose recent book is \u201cSaving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning&#8221; have found each other and God is good.&#8221;\u00a0 But the rest of the modern era, unfortunately, isn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>Having attended a liberal Protestant seminary and worked as an ordained Presbyterian for 15 years (a church founded by the Calvin, John), these are waters with which I am very familiar.\u00a0 Schaeffer and Pearcey (maybe the problem is in the way they spell their last names?) have discovered a dark secret in Western history.\u00a0 The Renaissance, taking its cue in part from the Copernican revolution which put paid to the Ptolemaic universe with the earth&#8211;and therefore man (no gender weasling allowed here) and therefore God&#8211;at its center, went on to place increasing emphasis on humans, hence humanists and humanism, and on this world not the next.<\/p>\n<p>This showed up in art which began to veer away from the medieval dominance of the church as patron and in so doing began to look backwards to the ancient Greeks and Romans, too, focusing on the human body and the natural world.\u00a0 These evangelical fundamentalists are not wrong in their history of ideas.\u00a0 This was the point where Western culture began to turn away from medieval scholasticism.\u00a0 It is, too, the field from which the Enlightenment grew, perhaps, from Bachmann&#8217;s point of view, much like the Thebans, a warrior line of thought sprung from the dragon&#8217;s teeth of Renaissance humanists.<\/p>\n<p>The Enlightenment in its turn closed the door for good on the ancien regime, that hold over of papal theocracy, divine right of kings and the <a href=\"http:\/\/academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu\/english\/melani\/cs6\/ren.html\">Great Chain of Being<\/a>.\u00a0 Or at least I hope it did.<\/p>\n<p>The rise and rise of those who would return us to the dark days of Scholastic reasoning (an oxymoron in some ways) and a theocratic view of government with the Bible as the basis for our very own version of the Sharia portends a possible governmental assault on the last 500 years.\u00a0 This is, in its own way, the Christian version of the return to the Caliphate so dear to the hearts of Islamic extremists like Bin Laden.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lughnasa\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Honey Extraction Moon I&#8217;ve found major points of agreement between myself and my congresswoman, she-who-would-be-president Michelle Bachmann.\u00a0 She considers the Renaissance a major problem for Christianity.\u00a0 The Enlightenment, too.\u00a0 I see it that way myself.\u00a0 Of course, we do disagree on the significance of these facts. Yep.\u00a0 Michelle and the Calvinist theologian Franklin &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/?p=11078\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Repeal the Renaissance<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,1450,566,100],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-commentary-on-religion","category-humanities","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11078"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40555,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11078\/revisions\/40555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}