Articles

“Skepticism, Criticism, and the Making of the Catholic Enlightenment: Rethinking the Career of Jean Hardouin.” Journal of Jesuit Studies, vol. 6 (2019): pp. 486–504.

“Skepticism, Criticism, and the Making of the Catholic Enlightenment” investigates the tumultuous career of the French Jesuit antiquarian and scholar Jean Hardouin. It argues that Hardouin drove many Jesuits to look to the Enlightenment for new intellectual tools in part because they were searching for ways to combat their colleague’s controversial philosophical and historical arguments. In this way, the story of Hardouin helps reveal that the Enlightenment was not simply a movement that pitted the “religious” against the “a-religious” but also one that divided those within the same intellectual and cultural circles.

“A Suppression Revisited: Jansenism, Conservatism, and the Anti-Jesuit Ordinances of 1828.” In Belief and Politics in Enlightenment France, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment 2019:02, edited by Mita Choudhury and Daniel J. Watkins, pp. 275–294. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019.

“A Suppression Revisited” looks at the making of the Anti-Jesuit Ordinances of 1828 in France, a series of laws that cracked down on the members of the revived Society of Jesus and prevented them from teaching in educational institutions. It argues that the laws were a result of continuing religious tensions within the French Catholic Church between the Jesuits and the Jansenists, tensions that spilled over into the post-revolutionary era.

“An Enlightenment Bible in Catholic France: Isaac-Joseph Berruyer’s Histoire du peuple de Dieu (1728–1758).” In Vernacular Bibles and Religious Reform in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Eras, edited by Wim François and August den Hollander, pp. 273–296. Leuven: Peeters Press, 2017.

“An Enlightenment Bible in Catholic France” makes the simple yet significant argument that Isaac-Joseph Berruyer’s Histoire du peuple de Dieu (History of the People of God) was an “Enlightenment Bible” in the way that historian Jonathan Sheehan once defined it in his The Enlightenment Bible (Princeton University Press, 2005). Sheehan claimed that the phenomenon of the “Enlightenment Bible” — a work that used the scholarly practices of the Enlightenment to translate the Bible into an eighteenth-century vernacular language — was limited to England and Germany. In this essay, I reveal that the Enlightenment Bible spread into Catholic France.

“The Two Conversions of François de La Pillonnière: A Case Study of Rationalism and Religion in the Early Enlightenment.” Eighteenth-Century Thought, vol. 6 (2016): pp. 33–58.

“The Two Conversions of François de La Pillonnière” tells the story of the one-time Jesuit priest turned Protestant, François de La Pillonnière. It argues that La Pillonnière’s conversion had to much do with his engagement with eighteenth-century rational philosophy. The article is the only major scholarly piece on La Pillonnière, and it uses his story to discuss the various and unpredictable ways that encounters with Enlightenment philosophy affected eighteenth-century intellectuals. The case study of La Pillonnière reveals that engagement with the Enlightenment did not necessarily lead one down a path of “secularization”; it could also transport people from one religious confession to another.

“Religion and Trade through Jesuit Eyes: Bringing Early Modern Central Asia into the World History Classroom.” World History Connected, vol. 10, no. 3 (2013).

“Religion and Trade through Jesuit Eyes” looks at three examples of Jesuit missionaries whose travel accounts to what is now modern-day Tibet, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Tajikistan provide useful observations about the societies, economics, and religious cultures of early modern Central Asia. The piece argues that missionary records are useful sources for bringing often over-looked regions of the world such as Central Asia into the world history classroom. In so doing, it makes a case that Central Asian history belongs in and contributes to larger narratives of global history that are standard in introductory-level world history classes.