This article explores the religious response of one neglected writer to the evolutionary philosophy of Herbert Spencer. William Todd Martin was a minister of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and in 1887 published The Evolution Hypothesis: A Criticism of the New Cosmic Philosophy. The work demonstrates the essentially contested nature of “evolution” and “creation” by showing how a self-confessed creationist could affirm an evolutionary understanding of the natural world and species transformation. Martin's approach reflected a transatlantic Presbyterian worldview that saw the harmony of science and religion on the basis of Calvinism, Baconianism and Scottish Common Sense philosophy. Martin's critique is also relevant to issues that continue to animate philosophers of science and religion, including the connections between mind and matter, morality and consciousness in a Darwinian framework, and the relationship between subjective conscious experience and evolutionary physicalism. Martin was able to anticipate these debates because his critique was essentially philosophical and theological rather than biological and biblicist.

Anthropological inquiry has often been considered an agent of intellectual secularization. Not least is this so in the sphere of religion, where anthropological accounts have often been taken to represent the triumph of naturalism. This metanarrative, however, fails to recognize that naturalistic explanations could sometimes be espoused for religious purposes and in defence of confessional creeds. This essay examines two late nineteenth-century figures – Alexander Winchell in the United States and William Robertson Smith in Britain – who found in anthropological analysis resources to bolster rather than undermine faith. In both cases these individuals found themselves on the receiving end of ecclesiastical censure and were dismissed from their positions at church-governed institutions. But their motivation was to vindicate divine revelation, in Winchell's case from the physical anthropology of human origins and in Smith's from the cultural anthropology of Semitic ritual.

A surge of spatial imagery is sweeping across wide stretches of the academy. Spheres of scholarly endeavour hitherto seemingly immune to matters of space and place have been exploiting the geographical lexicon and appending to it ever more imaginative adjectives. Thus literary critics, cultural historians, psychologists, poets and many others have been uncovering geographies that are variously depicted as ‘tender’, ‘neural’, ‘fabulous’, ‘romantic’ and ‘distracted’. Geographers too have added to this adjectival efflorescence with their staging of ‘hybrid’, ‘malevolent’, ‘phobic’ and ‘sensuous’ geographies – to name but a very few. The analytic power of geographical readings has thus been felt across a broad terrain. Thomas Kaufmann, for instance, has recently developed a ‘historical geography of art’ – or what he calls a ‘geohistory of art’ – in which he mobilizes geographical motifs to explore artistic identity, diffusion, circulation and transculturation. Steven Harris, Peter Burke and many others now routinely speak of the ‘geography of knowledge’. And in her recent account of nineteenth-century American expansionism along the western frontier, Amy DeRogatis has found inspiration in the idea of ‘moral geography’ to throw light on the means by which New England ways of life were transferred to the Western Reserve.