Template talk:Great awakenings

Few scholars accept the fourth great awakening as having taken place and the fourth great awakening article is terrible. Thus, I removed the link. --Zantastik 08:04, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Besides the fact that I agree that the "4th" has no place here, for some reason this template is transcluding the table of contents on the pages it exists in. Why is this happening; I can find no reason here in the template itself... Thanatosimii 04:44, 30 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed. ∴ Therefore talk 01:49, 28 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Could someone please provide the rationale for ANY of the "great awakenings?" (See my comments on the Second Great Awakening. The sources provided are sparse and dated. How many US historians are using this terminology??? Can anyone help beef this up? Seems worthy of deletion. --Dylanfly 16:58, 28 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The use of the word "Awakening" is clearly from an evangelical point of view. It is inherently biased. The implication is that more secular times were "sleepy" and that evangelical times were "awake." I understand that some people feel this way, but that's not scholarship folks. I don't object to writing about religious movements--quite the contrary. But the word "awakening" implies higher consciousness and Truth. Do you doubt the ideological nature of the phrase? Fundamentalist George W. Bush uses the term himself. [1] Ditto for a right wing, fundamentalist group [2].

More damaging, still, is the academic consensus questioning the very use of the term. [3] I think this "great awakening" stuff is authored mostly by evangelicals. That's fine for their own webpages, but it lacks the scholarly rigor for Wikipedia. --Dylanfly 20:36, 28 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I just checked for scholarly sources: almost nothing has been published with "first great awakening in the title." This really damns the project, so to speak. --Dylanfly 20:52, 28 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I am not a specialist of American religious history; consequently my opinion on the matter is hardly authoritative. That said, I think this conversation has gotten off to a rather unhealthy start. The term "Great awakening" to describe periods of increased Protestant activity is certainly not only used by Evangelicals. Some historians may indeed debate the schematisation of American religious history into a series of "awakenings"; this objection should be noted and discussed in the article(s). As for the putative "first great awakening", if it is not generally accepted by scholars in the field then its article can be about the history of the idea that such an event occured. (The template can be modified to display the "1st grt awakening" in italics, with an *, etc.) That's my perspective, anyway.--Zantastik talk 07:27, 31 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]