American Heretics

American Heretics PDF Author: Peter Gottschalk
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1137278293
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
A journey through American history that reveals an unsettling pattern of religious intolerance, from colonial anti-Quaker sentiment to modern-day Islamophobia

American Heretics

American Heretics PDF Author: Peter Gottschalk
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1137401311
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
In the middle of the nineteenth century a group of political activists in New York City joined together to challenge a religious group they believed were hostile to the American values of liberty and freedom. Called the Know Nothings, they started riots during elections, tarred and feathered their political enemies, and barred men from employment based on their religion. The group that caused this uproar?: Irish and German Catholics—then known as the most villainous religious group in America, and widely believed to be loyal only to the Pope. It would take another hundred years before Catholics threw off these xenophobic accusations and joined the American mainstream. The idea that the United States is a stronghold of religious freedom is central to our identity as a nation—and utterly at odds with the historical record. In American Heretics, historian Peter Gottschalk traces the arc of American religious discrimination and shows that, far from the dominant protestant religions being kept in check by the separation between church and state, religious groups from Quakers to Judaism have been subjected to similar patterns of persecution. Today, many of these same religious groups that were once regarded as anti-thetical to American values are embraced as evidence of our strong religious heritage—giving hope to today's Muslims, Sikhs, and other religious groups now under fire.

American Heretics

American Heretics PDF Author: Peter Gottschalk
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1137278293
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
A journey through American history that reveals an unsettling pattern of religious intolerance, from colonial anti-Quaker sentiment to modern-day Islamophobia

American Heretics

American Heretics PDF Author: Jerome E. Copulsky
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300241305
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
A penetrating account of the religious critics of American liberalism, pluralism, and democracy--from the Revolution until today "A chilling consideration of persistent mutations of American thought still threatening our pluralist democracy."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review) The conversation about the proper role of religion in American public life often revolves around what kind of polity the Founders of the United States envisioned. Advocates of a "Christian America" claim that the Framers intended a nation whose political values and institutions were shaped by Christianity; secularists argue that they designed an enlightened republic where church and state were kept separate. Both sides appeal to the Founding to justify their beliefs about the kind of nation the United States was meant to be or should become. In this book, Jerome E. Copulsky complicates this ongoing public argument by examining a collection of thinkers who, on religious grounds, considered the nation's political ideas illegitimate, its institutions flawed, and its church-state arrangement defective. Beholden to visions of cosmic order and social hierarchy, rejecting the increasing pluralism and secularism of American society, they predicted the collapse of an unrighteous nation and the emergence of a new Christian commonwealth in its stead. By engaging their challenges and interpreting their visions we can better appreciate the perennial temptations of religious illiberalism--as well as the virtues and fragilities of America's liberal democracy.

Bad Religion

Bad Religion PDF Author: Ross Douthat
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 143917833X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Traces the decline of Christianity in America since the 1950s, posing controversial arguments about the role of heresy in the nation's downfall while calling for a revival of traditional Christian practices.

American Heretic

American Heretic PDF Author: Dean Grodzins
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807862045
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 658

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Book Description
Theodore Parker (1810-1860) was a powerful preacher who rejected the authority of the Bible and of Jesus, a brilliant scholar who became a popular agitator for the abolition of slavery and for women's rights, and a political theorist who defined democracy as "government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people--words that inspired Abraham Lincoln. Parker had more influence than anyone except Ralph Waldo Emerson in shaping Transcendentalism in America. In American Heretic, Dean Grodzins offers a compelling account of the remarkable first phase of Parker's career, when this complex man--charismatic yet awkward, brave yet insecure--rose from poverty and obscurity to fame and notoriety as a Transcendentalist prophet. Grodzins reveals hitherto hidden facets of Parker's life, including his love for a woman who was not his wife, and presents fresh perspectives on Transcendentalism. Grodzins explores Transcendentalism's religious roots, shows the profound religious and political issues at stake in the "Transcendentalist controversy," and offers new insights into Parker's Transcendentalist colleagues, including Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott. He traces, too, the intellectual origins of Parker's epochal definition of democracy as government of, by, and for the people. The manuscript of this book was awarded the Allan Nevins Prize by the Society of American Historians.

Calhoun

Calhoun PDF Author: Robert Elder
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780465096442
Category : Calhoun Family
Languages : en
Pages : 656

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Book Description
John C. Calhoun's ghost still haunts America today. First elected to congress in 1810, Calhoun served as secretary of war during the war of 1812, and then as vice-president under two very different presidents, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. It was during his time as Jackson's vice president that he crafted his famous doctrine of "state interposition," which laid the groundwork for the south to secede from the union -- and arguably set the nation on course for civil war. Other accounts of Calhoun have portrayed him as a backward-looking traditionalist -- he was, after all, an outspoken apologist for slavery, which he defended as a "positive good." But he was also an extremely complex thinker, and thoroughly engaged in the modern world. He espoused many ideas that resonate strongly with popular currents today: an impatience for the spectacle and shallowness of politics, a concern about the alliance between wealth and power in government, and a skepticism about the United States' ability to spread its style of democracy throughout the world. Calhoun has catapulted back into the public eye in recent years, as the tensions he navigated and inflamed in his own time have surfaced once again. In 2015, a monument to him in Charleston, South Carolina became a flashpoint after a white supremacist murdered nine African-Americans in a nearby church. And numerous commentators have since argued that Calhoun's retrograde ideas are at the root of the modern GOP's problems with race. Bringing together Calhoun's life, his intellectual contributions -- both good and bad -- and his legacy, Robert Elder's book is a revelatory reconsideration of the antebellum South we thought we knew.

Hidden Heretics

Hidden Heretics PDF Author: Ayala Fader
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691234485
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
"This book concerns a cohort of ultra-orthodox Jews based in the greater New York area who, while retaining membership and close familial and other ties with their strictly observant communities, seek out secular knowledge about the world on the down low (so to speak), both online and via in-person encounters. Ayala Fader conducted her ethnographic research in these rarified social circles for years, developing relationships of trust with the mostly young married men and women who have taken to clandestine methods to find alternative social spaces in which to question what it means to be ethical and what a life of self-fulfillment looks like. Fader's book reveals the stresses and strains that such "double-lifers" experience, including the difficulty these life choices inject into relationships with wives, husbands, and one's children. Not all of these "double-lifers" become atheists. Fader's interlocutors can be placed on a broad spectrum ranging from religiously observant but open-minded at one end to atheism on the other. The rabbinical leadership of these ultra-orthodox communities are well aware of this phenomenon and of how unfiltered internet access makes such alternative forms of seeking an ever-present temptation. (Some ultra-orthodox rabbis have been sounding the alarm for years, claiming that the internet represents more of a threat to community survival today than the Holocaust did in the last century.) Fader's book examines the institutional responses of ultra-orthodox communities to the double-lifers. These include what is typically referred to as a Torah-based type of "religious therapy" conducted by trained members of these communities who as therapists and "life coaches" blend elements of modern psychiatry with ultra-orthodoxy and "treat" troubling, potentially life-altering doubt and skepticism as symptoms of underlying emotional pathology"--

Imagining Judeo-Christian America

Imagining Judeo-Christian America PDF Author: K. Healan Gaston
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022666385X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
“Judeo-Christian” is a remarkably easy term to look right through. Judaism and Christianity obviously share tenets, texts, and beliefs that have strongly influenced American democracy. In this ambitious book, however, K. Healan Gaston challenges the myth of a monolithic Judeo-Christian America. She demonstrates that the idea is not only a recent and deliberate construct, but also a potentially dangerous one. From the time of its widespread adoption in the 1930s, the ostensible inclusiveness of Judeo-Christian terminology concealed efforts to promote particular conceptions of religion, secularism, and politics. Gaston also shows that this new language, originally rooted in arguments over the nature of democracy that intensified in the early Cold War years, later became a marker in the culture wars that continue today. She argues that the debate on what constituted Judeo-Christian—and American—identity has shaped the country’s religious and political culture much more extensively than previously recognized.

The Age of Heretics

The Age of Heretics PDF Author: Art Kleiner
Publisher: Broadway Business
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
A magisterial cultural history, this book tells the story of the sixties revolution for freedom, self-expression, and high ideals--as it occurred not in the streets, but in business. Through a series of compelling stories, most never before told, Kleiner introduces readers to the visionary people who believed passionately that corporations could be the center not only of power, but of truth, freedom, and equality.

Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right

Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right PDF Author: Seth Dowland
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812291913
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
During the last three decades of the twentieth century, evangelical leaders and conservative politicians developed a political agenda that thrust "family values" onto the nation's consciousness. Ministers, legislators, and laypeople came together to fight abortion, gay rights, and major feminist objectives. They supported private Christian schools, home schooling, and a strong military. Family values leaders like Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly, Anita Bryant, and James Dobson became increasingly supportive of the Republican Party, which accommodated the language of family values in its platforms and campaigns. The family values agenda created a bond between evangelicalism and political conservatism. Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right chronicles how the family values agenda became so powerful in American political life and why it appealed to conservative evangelical Christians. Conservative evangelicals saw traditional gender norms as crucial in cultivating morality. They thought these gender norms would reaffirm the importance of clear lines of authority that the social revolutions of the 1960s had undermined. In the 1970s and 1980s, then, evangelicals founded Christian academies and developed homeschooling curricula that put conservative ideas about gender and authority front and center. Campaigns against abortion and feminism coalesced around a belief that God created women as wives and mothers—a belief that conservative evangelicals thought feminists and pro-choice advocates threatened. Likewise, Christian right leaders championed a particular vision of masculinity in their campaigns against gay rights and nuclear disarmament. Movements like the Promise Keepers called men to take responsibility for leading their families. Christian right political campaigns and pro-family organizations drew on conservative evangelical beliefs about men, women, children, and authority. These beliefs—known collectively as family values—became the most important religious agenda in late twentieth-century American politics.