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Ernestine van der Wall

Can You See What I Know? - Opening Talk

Vice President Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences KNAW
Professor History of Modern Christianity
Universiteit Leiden

My inspiration

Religion and Enlightenment: at the beginning of the 21st century, debates about the Western Enlightenment and its impact on culture give rise to specific questions about the relationship between religion and Enlightenment. As this relationship has been a major topic of discussion since the beginning of the Enlightenment itself, there is every reason to look at this issue from a historical perspective. By analysing the impact of the Enlightenment on religion - and vice versa - we get to know the mechanisms which played a role in the discussions between traditionalist and liberal believers, orthodox and modernists, fundamentalists and freethinkers. Not surprisingly, at any given period the question of ‘science and religion’, ‘faith and reason’, was high on the agenda. Though my focus is on the Netherlands, the debate over Enlightenment and religion was a matter which superseded geographical boundaries and therefore it is studied in an international context.

Titles of major publications

(2004) “Ways of Polemicizing: The Power of Tradition in Christian Polemics”, Religious Polemics in Contexts, T.L. Hettema & A. van der Kooij (eds.), Assen, pp. 401-414.
(2003) Is godsdienst schadelijk? De Verlichting en de grenzen van de godsdienstkritiek, Haarlem.
(2000) Socrates in de hemel? Een achttiende-eeuwse prolemiek over deugd, verdraagzaamheid en de vaderlandse kerk, Hilversum.
(2000) “Toleration and Enlightenment in the Dutch Republic”, Toleration in Enlightenment Europe, Ole Peter Greel and Roy Porter (eds.), Cambridge, pp. 114-132.
(1993) “Orthodoxy and Scepticism in the Early Dutch Enlightenment”, Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, R.H. Popkin and A.J. Vanderjagt (eds.), Leiden, pp. 121-141.

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