Courtenay raia biography of christopher

In The New Prometheans: Faith, Science, and the Supernatural Mind in the Victorian Fin de Siècle, a densely packed, methodologically sophisticated, and interpretively challenging work on the rise of psychical research and its premier institutional expression, the British Society for Psychical Research (SPR) and its key figures, Courtenay Raia has made a major contribution.

To carry forth her argument, Raia establishes firm ground in her introduction and first chapter entitled “The Culture of Proof and the Crisis of Faith.” In this section she incisively and effortlessly dispatches the perennial dichotomies of faith versus reason, science versus religion, and other variations of such facile, unidimensional arguments.

Instead, she offers a solidly grounded, well-articulated call for reexamining the efforts of a group of Victorians to create a fusion of these disparate perspectives in the form of a new and unifying understanding of reality and the potential for t