Linear Versus Circular Time, from 2008, which not only touches on ancient cultures, but the making of the modern consciousness and explains a good deal of modern Christian worship.
It is a huge philosophical shift to go from the more natural counting of time as a repetition of daily hours, days of the week, and seasons of a year to picturing time as always moving forward. Pearcey & Thaxton claim that the idea of an orderly universe was the single greatest contribution of Christianity to the sciences and philosophy: that the universe made some sort of sense, however elusive, and its order could be discovered. Without this, the scientific viewpoint as we know it cannot exist, and indeed, as noted above, never has existed.
and Types of Liberty, from 2006, which owes a great deal to David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed.
We think we mean the same thing when we use a word, but this is not often so, especially with large abstracts like kindness, or community. While the concepts of liberty converged somewhat leading up to the Revolution, they sprang from at least four different concepts, associated with the four distinct areas of settlement.
1 comment:
Words mean different things in different contexts, and to people who use the same word as you to mean something different. Experienced it once myself when the fellow I was talking with clearly found the word I used meaning something quite different to him.
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