Unbelievers : An Emotional History of Doubt - Alec Ryrie

Unbelievers

An Emotional History of Doubt

By: Alec Ryrie

Paperback | 18 February 2021

At a Glance

Paperback


$28.25

or 4 interest-free payments of $7.06 with

Aims to ship in 15 to 25 business days

Why have Western societies that were once overwhelmingly Christian become so secular? Looking to the feelings and faith of ordinary people, the award-winning author of Protestants Alec Ryrie offers a bold new history of atheism. We think we know the history of faith: how the ratio of Christian believers has declined and a secular age dawned. In this startlingly original history, Alex Ryrie puts faith in the dock to explore how religious belief didn’t just fade away. Rather, atheism bloomed as a belief system in its own right.

Unbelievers looks back to the middle ages when it seemed impossible not to subscribe to Christianity, through the crisis of the Reformation and to the powerful, challenging cultural currents of the centuries since. As this history shows, the religious journey of the Western world was lived and steered not just by published philosophy and the celebrated thinkers of the day – the Machiavellis and Michel de Montaignes – but by men and women at every level of society. Their voices and feelings permeate this book in the form of diaries, letters and court records.

Tracing the roots of atheism, Ryrie shows that our emotional responses to the times can lead faith to wax and wane: anger at a corrupt priest or anxiety in a turbulent moment spark religious doubt as powerfully as any intellectual revolution. With Christianity under contest and ethical redefinitions becoming more and more significant, Unbelievers shows that to understand how something as intuitive as belief is shaped over time, we must look to an emotional history – one with potent lessons for our still angry and anxious age.

About the Author

Alec Ryrie was born in London. He studied History and Theology at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford and is now Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University. A specialist on the Reformation, he is the author of ‘The Sorcerer's Tale: Faith and Fraud in Tudor England', the prize-winning ‘Being Protestant in Reformation Britain', and is the co-editor of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History.

More in Social & Cultural History

Dark Emu : Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture - Bruce Pascoe
Night : Penguin Modern Classics - Elie Wiesel

RRP $22.99

$17.75

23%
OFF
The Origins of Totalitarianism : Penguin Modern Classics - Hannah Arendt
Old Vintage Melbourne, 1960-1990 - Chris Macheras

RRP $55.00

$39.90

27%
OFF
The Dawn of Everything : A New History of Humanity - David Graeber
The End of Everything : How Wars Descend into Annihilation - Victor D Hanson
Normal Women : 900 Years Of Making History - Philippa Gregory
Homo Deus : A Brief History of Tomorrow - Yuval Noah Harari

RRP $24.99

$23.75

Blitzed : Drugs in Nazi Germany - Norman Ohler

RRP $22.99

$21.90

The Voynich Manuscript - Raymond Clemens

RRP $82.95

$55.00

34%
OFF
The Secret Lives of Colour - Kassia St Clair

RRP $45.00

$37.25

17%
OFF
The Bush - Don Watson

Paperback

RRP $24.99

$23.75

Listen In : How Radio Changed the Home - Beaty Rubens

RRP $59.99

$43.25

28%
OFF