Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience

Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience PDF Author: Jack N. Rakove
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190086572
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
Today, Americans believe that the early colonists came to the New World in search of religious liberty. What we often forget is that they wanted religious liberty for themselves, not for those who held other views that they rejected and detested. Yet, by the mid-18th century, the colonists agreed that everyone possessed a sovereign right of conscience. How did this change develop? In Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jack Rakove tracks the unique course of religious freedom in America. He finds that, as denominations and sects multiplied, Americans became much more tolerant of the free expression of rival religious beliefs. During the Revolutionary era, he explains, most of the new states moved to disestablish churches and to give constitutional recognition to rights of conscience. These two developments explain why religious freedom originally represented the most radical right of all. No other right placed greater importance on the moral autonomy of individuals, or better illustrated how the authority of government could be limited by denying the state authority to act. Together, these developments made possible the great revival of religion in 19th-century America. As Rakove explains, America's intense religiosity eventually created a new set of problems for mapping the relationship between church and state. He goes on to examine some of our contemporary controversies over church and state not from the vantage point of legal doctrine, but of the deeper history that gave the U.S. its own approach to religious freedom. In this book, he tells the story of how American ideas of religious toleration and free exercise evolved over time, and why questions of church and state still vex us.

Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience

Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience PDF Author: Jack N. Rakove
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190086572
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
Today, Americans believe that the early colonists came to the New World in search of religious liberty. What we often forget is that they wanted religious liberty for themselves, not for those who held other views that they rejected and detested. Yet, by the mid-18th century, the colonists agreed that everyone possessed a sovereign right of conscience. How did this change develop? In Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jack Rakove tracks the unique course of religious freedom in America. He finds that, as denominations and sects multiplied, Americans became much more tolerant of the free expression of rival religious beliefs. During the Revolutionary era, he explains, most of the new states moved to disestablish churches and to give constitutional recognition to rights of conscience. These two developments explain why religious freedom originally represented the most radical right of all. No other right placed greater importance on the moral autonomy of individuals, or better illustrated how the authority of government could be limited by denying the state authority to act. Together, these developments made possible the great revival of religion in 19th-century America. As Rakove explains, America's intense religiosity eventually created a new set of problems for mapping the relationship between church and state. He goes on to examine some of our contemporary controversies over church and state not from the vantage point of legal doctrine, but of the deeper history that gave the U.S. its own approach to religious freedom. In this book, he tells the story of how American ideas of religious toleration and free exercise evolved over time, and why questions of church and state still vex us.

Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience

Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience PDF Author: Jack N. Rakove
Publisher:
ISBN: 0195305817
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jack Rakove makes broad claims about how religious freedom affects us. He contrasts the radical course of American developments with the more complicated ways in which Europeans tried to promote religious tolerance. He argues that both freedom of conscience and disestablishment were critical constitutional principles whose significance we no longer fully appreciate. Rakove explains why Jefferson's and Madison's understanding of these concepts were influential to their constitutional thinking. And he examines some of our contemporary controversies over church and state from the vantage point, not of legal doctrine, but of the deeper history that gave the U.S. its unique approach to religious freedom.

Beyond Belief

Beyond Belief PDF Author: Cami Ostman
Publisher: Seal Press
ISBN: 1580054420
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Get Book Here

Book Description
"With stories by women from a wide range of religious communities--including Evangelical Christian, Catholic, Jewish, Mormon, Muslim, Calvinist, Moonie, the Unification Church, and Jehovah's Witnesses--the writers in Beyond Belief pull back a heavy curtain to reveal what they love about their lives within these communities, along with the pain that comes from the rigid expectations and diminishment of women so often built into religious orthodoxy."--Back cover.

The Disintegrating Conscience and the Decline of Modernity

The Disintegrating Conscience and the Decline of Modernity PDF Author: Steven D. Smith
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268206902
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 215

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book considers how the modern concept of “conscience” turns the historic commitment on its head, in a way that underlies the decadence of modern society. Steven D. Smith’s books are always anticipated with great interest by scholars, jurists, and citizens who see his work on foundational questions surrounding law and religion as shaping the debate in profound ways. Now, in The Disintegrating Conscience and the Decline of Modernity, Smith takes as his starting point Jacques Barzun’s provocative assertion that “the modern era” is coming to an end. Smith considers the question of decline by focusing on a single theme—conscience—that has been central to much of what has happened in Western politics, law, and religion over the past half-millennium. Rather than attempting to follow that theme step-by-step through five hundred years, the book adopts an episodic and dramatic approach by focusing on three main figures and particularly portentous episodes: first, Thomas More’s execution for his conscientious refusal to take an oath mandated by Henry VIII; second, James Madison’s contribution to Virginia law in removing the proposed requirement of religious toleration in favor of freedom of conscience; and, third, William Brennan’s pledge to separate his religious faith from his performance as a Supreme Court justice. These three episodes, Smith suggests, reflect in microcosm decisive turning points at which Western civilization changed from what it had been in premodern times to what it is today. A commitment to conscience, Smith argues, has been a central and in some ways defining feature of modern Western civilization, and yet in a crucial sense conscience in the time of Brennan and today has come to mean almost the opposite of what it meant to Thomas More. By scrutinizing these men and episodes, the book seeks to illuminate subtle but transformative changes in the commitment to conscience—changes that helped to bring Thomas More’s world to an end and that may also be contributing to the disintegration of (per Barzun) “the modern era.”

The World Reimagined

The World Reimagined PDF Author: Mark Bradley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521829755
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book uncovers how human rights gained meaning and power for Americans in the 1940s, the 1970s and today.

The Religion Clauses

The Religion Clauses PDF Author: Howard Gillman
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190699736
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
In The Religion Clauses, Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman examine the extremely controversial issue of the relationship between religion and government. They argue for a separation of church and state. To the greatest extent possible, the government should remain secular. At the same, time they contend that religion should not provide a basis for an exemptions from general laws, such as those prohibiting discrimination or requiring the provision of services.

Guiding Principles for Life Beyond Victim Consciousness

Guiding Principles for Life Beyond Victim Consciousness PDF Author: Lynne Forrest
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780615401447
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Get Book Here

Book Description
Learn 14 guiding principles to help liberater the mind from victim consciousness, by doing so let go of any resistance to life and stop fighting the future and agonizing over the past.

Beyond Belief

Beyond Belief PDF Author: Samuel M. Stein
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429911394
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book discusses that a science that deals with the immaterial might be more apt for finding out about the immaterial world of God. It asks whether psychotherapy can go beyond belief and gives various answers from a wide variety of people and their differing perspectives.

Follow Your Conscience

Follow Your Conscience PDF Author: Peter Cajka
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022676205X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
Introduction -- The conscience problem and Catholic doctrine -- Political origins : totalitarianism, world war, and mass conscription -- The State's paperwork and the Catholic Peace Fellowship -- Sex, conscience and the American Catholic Church 1968 -- Psychology and the self -- The conscience lobby -- Beyond the Catholic Church.

Beyond Belief

Beyond Belief PDF Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307401456
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 579

Get Book Here

Book Description
Beyond Belief is a book about one of the more important and unsettling issues of our time: the effects of the Islamic conversion of Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia. It is not a book of opinion. It is - in the Naipaul way - a very rich and human book, full of people and stories. Islam is an Arab religion, and it makes imperial Arabizing demands on its converts. In this way it is more than a private faith, and it can become a neurosis. What has this Arab Islam done to the histories of these converted countries? How do the converted peoples, non-Arabs, view their past - and their future? In a follow-up to Among the Believers, his classic account of his travels through these countries, V. S. Naipaul returns after seventeen years to find out how and what the converted preach. In Indonesia he finds a pastoral people who have lost their history through a confluence of Islam and technology. In Iran he discovers a religious tyranny as oppressive as the secular one of the Shah, and he meets people weary of the religious rules that govern every aspect of their lives. Pakistan - in a tragic realization of a Muslim re-creation fantasy - inherited blood feuds, rotting palaces, antique cruelty; then President Zia installed religious terror with $100 million of Saudi money. In Malaysia, the Muslim Youth organization is alive and growing, and the people are mentally, physically, and geographically torn between two worlds, struggling to live the impossible dream of a true faith born out of a spiritual vacancy. A startling and revelatory addition to the Naipaul canon, Beyond Belief confirms the author's reputation as a masterly observer, a "finder-out" of stories, as well as a magnificent teller of them.