Hostile Contexts
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I have returned to the life of Edward King as a source of spiritual inspiration. The truth is I haven’t got very far but I did continue reading a bit of Search for a Saint: Edward King by John A. Newton. (Used editions are available on Amazon, by the way.) Chapter Two picks up the context of King’s life which spanned the Victorian period from 1829-1910. He lived through a time of extreme change: huge development in industry and urbanization, the invention and implementation of railways, major upheavals in European capitals such as Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Milan, Cracow and Prague, the rise of the Chartists in England. Intellectually the nineteenth could be seen as the first in which unbelief was widespread. The movement towards atheistic humanism would have been felt by King when he was an undergraduate at Oriel College, Oxford. And, of course, this was the century of Freud, Darwin, Nietzsche and Marx. The Communist Manifesto, perha…
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