Kevin Slack

Thomas More's early writings provide both a defense of his vocation in politics and a political theory for a Christian polity, attempting to harmonize Christendom with the best practicable political order. But More's A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation reflects upon this vocation in light of the anti -Christian political order. He uses the specter of Turkish tyranny sweeping into Hungary to reflect on the open persecution of Christians. Where other scholars have focused on the pedagogy, history, and theology of More's Dialogue , this paper focuses on its political teachings. More shows his readers the essence of political tribulation, the necessity of supplementing pagan philosophy and virtue with a distinctly Christian courage, and how the Christian citizen should behave in the face of death. The Christian's virtue is the source of his comfort and the bulwark for Christendom's final victory. Les premiers écrits de Thomas More offrent à la fois une défense de sa vocation en politique et une théorie politique d’une gestion chrétienne de la vie publique, en proposant d’harmoniser la chrétienté avec le meilleur ordre politique possible. Cependant, le Dialogue du réconfort dans les tribulations de More propose une réflexion sur sa vocation à la lumière d’un ordre politique anti -chrétien. Il utilise le spectre de la tyrannie turque qui a balayé la Hongrie pour réfléchir sur la persécution des chrétiens. Alors que des études antérieures se sont concentrées sur la pédagogie, l’histoire et la théologie du Dialogue de More, cet article s’intéresse à son enseignement politique. More dévoile à ses lecteurs l’essence de la tribulation politique, la nécessité de compléter la philosophie païenne et la vertu par un courage distinctement chrétien. Il montre au citoyen chrétien la bonne attitude à avoir face à la mort. La vertu du chrétien est la source de son réconfort ainsi que le rempart qui assure la victoire finale de la chrétienté.

While much has been written on Benjamin Franklin's view of religion, less has been written on his Christian theology. This article first situates Franklin as an important figure in the religious Enlightenment, connecting his own view of philosophy to his teachings on Christian revelation. Providing historical context on the subscription debates, it then gives a comprehensive treatment of Franklin's Christian theology in the 1735 Hemphill affair. New scholarship on Franklin's transatlantic sources confirms that, far from attempting to undermine Christianity, he appealed to popular European writers in an attempt to bend it to reasonable ends. Moreover, Franklin's own views on church polity and liturgy developed over time. As he rose from a middling artisan to political power, he saw both the need for religious appeals and the threat that competing sects posed to political unity. His focus shifted from religious freedoms in private associations to institutionalizing elements of Christian teachings in education, charity, commerce, and defense. His experiences with rigid Presbyterian orthodoxy and chaotic New Light enthusiasm also awakened him to the need for more reasonable forms of worship, and he set to the task of experimenting with Christian liturgies to achieve both the tranquility of parishioners' minds and social unity.

This article studies sixteenth‐century Spanish colonialism solely through the lens of Foucauldian thought, using his method of genealogy to return to the debate over the indigenous' capacity for reason, and his method of archeology to assess the positive systems of law and economics, particularly the law of nations, that were formulated in response to the problems of conquest and settlement. It also offers an alternative to Foucault's own history of raison d'État, showing that its foundations of Christian pastoral discipline, police, and diplomacy, rather than rising in opposition to the Spanish Crown and the Church, defined Spain's colonial order.

Historians have long rejected Max Weber and D. H. Lawrence's portrayal of Benjamin Franklin as the stuffy architect of a new kind of prudish bourgeois virtue. Recent scholarly work has challenged this notion and has added something more: the idea that Franklin is a serious thinker, even an ironic thinker, in the Western philosophic tradition. Certainly Franklin participated in a vigorous intellectual debate with the greatest minds of his time over the meaning of religion, moral duty, and virtue. In this article I return to Franklin's own writings to provide what I think is a new and hopefully provocative interpretation of Franklin as a philosophic thinker. After briefly recounting the traditional interpretation of Franklin's Autobiography, I present new interpretations of Franklin's metaphysical essays in the context of his orientation to the philosophical schools of his day and argue that Franklin, upon this foundation, constructs his own theory of the philosophical temper.