Mansfield Prize Award 2017 – Dominic Erdozain

Mansfield Prize Award 2017 – Dominic Erdozain
The Mansfield Prize for the best article published in the Journal of Religious History in 2017 is awarded to:

Dominic Erdozain ‘Jesus and Augustine: The God of Terror and the Origins of European Doubt’, Journal of Religious History 41/ 4 (2017) 476-504

 

 

 

In this paper Erdozain offers a bold and wide-ranging analysis of religious thought and scepticism between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, questioning the conventional narrative of secularization. He explores how appeals to divine love and the ethical example of Jesus have been used to question Augustine’s understanding of capricious divine omnipotence, in a range of thinkers, including Sebastian Castellio, Spinoza, Voltaire and Feuerbach. Erdozain suggests that their reflections are shaped by criticism of specific theological assumptions rather than by rejecting religious concepts as a whole. Erdozain shows that it is possible for a scholarly article to provoke big-picture questions about religious thought and the history of ideas.

Prof. Constant Mews (Monash University), President, Religious History Association, on behalf of the Mansfield Prize Adjudication Committee.