From Toleration to Religious Freedom

From Toleration to Religious Freedom PDF Author: Mariëtta van der Tol
Publisher: Peter Lang Limited, International Academic Publishers
ISBN: 9781789975765
Category : Freedom of religion
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
This volume examines the knotty relationship between toleration and religious freedom. Spanning from the early modern period to the present day, it explores how discourses on toleration impact on current debates about religious freedom, and challenges assumptions about the associations between religious ideas and the law. Bringing together scholarship from the fields of history, law, political science, philosophy, and theology, it throws into sharp relief the disciplinary presuppositions that have--sometimes misleadingly--shaped our understandings of toleration and religious freedom.

From Toleration to Religious Freedom

From Toleration to Religious Freedom PDF Author: Mariëtta van der Tol
Publisher: Peter Lang Limited, International Academic Publishers
ISBN: 9781789975765
Category : Freedom of religion
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume examines the knotty relationship between toleration and religious freedom. Spanning from the early modern period to the present day, it explores how discourses on toleration impact on current debates about religious freedom, and challenges assumptions about the associations between religious ideas and the law. Bringing together scholarship from the fields of history, law, political science, philosophy, and theology, it throws into sharp relief the disciplinary presuppositions that have--sometimes misleadingly--shaped our understandings of toleration and religious freedom.

How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West

How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West PDF Author: Perez Zagorin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691121427
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
Religious intolerance, so terrible and deadly in its recent manifestations, is nothing new. In fact, until after the eighteenth century, Christianity was perhaps the most intolerant of all the great world religions. How Christian Europe and the West went from this extreme to their present universal belief in religious toleration is the momentous story fully told for the first time in this timely and important book by a leading historian of early modern Europe. Perez Zagorin takes readers to a time when both the Catholic Church and the main new Protestant denominations embraced a policy of endorsing religious persecution, coercing unity, and, with the state's help, mercilessly crushing dissent and heresy. This position had its roots in certain intellectual and religious traditions, which Zagorin traces before showing how out of the same traditions came the beginnings of pluralism in the West. Here we see how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers--writing from religious, theological, and philosophical perspectives--contributed far more than did political expediency or the growth of religious skepticism to advance the cause of toleration. Reading these thinkers--from Erasmus and Sir Thomas More to John Milton and John Locke, among others--Zagorin brings to light a common, if unexpected, thread: concern for the spiritual welfare of religion itself weighed more in the defense of toleration than did any secular or pragmatic arguments. His book--which ranges from England through the Netherlands, the post-1685 Huguenot Diaspora, and the American Colonies--also exposes a close connection between toleration and religious freedom. A far-reaching and incisive discussion of the major writers, thinkers, and controversies responsible for the emergence of religious tolerance in Western society--from the Enlightenment through the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights--this original and richly nuanced work constitutes an essential chapter in the intellectual history of the modern world.

Persecution and Toleration

Persecution and Toleration PDF Author: Noel D. Johnson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108441162
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Religious freedom has become an emblematic value in the West. Embedded in constitutions and championed by politicians and thinkers across the political spectrum, it is to many an absolute value, something beyond question. Yet how it emerged, and why, remains widely misunderstood. Tracing the history of religious persecution from the Fall of Rome to the present-day, Noel D. Johnson and Mark Koyama provide a novel explanation of the birth of religious liberty. This book treats the subject in an integrative way by combining economic reasoning with historical evidence from medieval and early modern Europe. The authors elucidate the economic and political incentives that shaped the actions of political leaders during periods of state building and economic growth.

A Letter Concerning Toleration. By John Locke, Esq

A Letter Concerning Toleration. By John Locke, Esq PDF Author: John Locke
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Toleration
Languages : en
Pages : 86

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Book Description


Conscience and Community

Conscience and Community PDF Author: Andrew R. Murphy
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271041377
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Religious toleration appears near the top of any short list of core liberal democratic values. Theorists from John Locke to John Rawls emphasize important interconnections between the principles of toleration, constitutional government, and the rule of law. Conscience and Community revisits the historical emergence of religious liberty in the Anglo-American tradition, looking deeper than the traditional emergence of toleration to find not a series of self-evident or logically connected expansions but instead a far more complex evolution. Murphy argues that contemporary liberal theorists have misunderstood and misconstrued the actual historical development of toleration in theory and practice. Murphy approaches the concept through three "myths" about religious toleration: that it was opposed only by ignorant, narrow-minded persecutors; that it was achieved by skeptical Enlightenment rationalists; and that tolerationist arguments generalize easily from religion to issues such as gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality, providing a basis for identity politics.

Our Dear-Bought Liberty

Our Dear-Bought Liberty PDF Author: Michael D. Breidenbach
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067424723X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
How early American Catholics justified secularism and overcame suspicions of disloyalty, transforming ideas of religious liberty in the process. In colonial America, Catholics were presumed dangerous until proven loyal. Yet Catholics went on to sign the Declaration of Independence and helped to finalize the First Amendment to the Constitution. What explains this remarkable transformation? Michael Breidenbach shows how Catholic leaders emphasized their churchÕs own traditionsÑrather than Enlightenment liberalismÑto secure the religious liberty that enabled their incorporation in American life. Catholics responded to charges of disloyalty by denying papal infallibility and the popeÕs authority to intervene in civil affairs. Rome staunchly rejected such dissent, but reform-minded Catholics justified their stance by looking to conciliarism, an intellectual tradition rooted in medieval Catholic thought yet compatible with a republican view of temporal independence and church-state separation. Drawing on new archival material, Breidenbach finds that early American Catholic leaders, including Maryland founder Cecil Calvert and members of the prominent Carroll family, relied on the conciliarist tradition to help institute religious toleration, including the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649. The critical role of Catholics in establishing American churchÐstate separation enjoins us to revise not only our sense of who the American founders were, but also our understanding of the sources of secularism. ChurchÐstate separation in America, generally understood as the product of a Protestant-driven Enlightenment, was in key respects derived from Catholic thinking. Our Dear-Bought Liberty therefore offers a dramatic departure from received wisdom, suggesting that religious liberty in America was not bestowed by liberal consensus but partly defined through the ingenuity of a persecuted minority.

Why Tolerate Religion?

Why Tolerate Religion? PDF Author: Brian Leiter
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140085234X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Why it's wrong to single out religious liberty for special legal protections This provocative book addresses one of the most enduring puzzles in political philosophy and constitutional theory—why is religion singled out for preferential treatment in both law and public discourse? Why are religious obligations that conflict with the law accorded special toleration while other obligations of conscience are not? In Why Tolerate Religion?, Brian Leiter shows why our reasons for tolerating religion are not specific to religion but apply to all claims of conscience, and why a government committed to liberty of conscience is not required by the principle of toleration to grant exemptions to laws that promote the general welfare.

Beyond Toleration

Beyond Toleration PDF Author: Chris Beneke
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199700001
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
At its founding, the United States was one of the most religiously diverse places in the world. Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Quakers, Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, Lutherans, Huguenots, Dunkers, Jews, Moravians, and Mennonites populated the nations towns and villages. Dozens of new denominations would emerge over the succeeding years. What allowed people of so many different faiths to forge a nation together? In this richly told story of ideas, Chris Beneke demonstrates how the United States managed to overcome the religious violence and bigotry that characterized much of early modern Europe and America. The key, Beneke argues, did not lie solely in the protection of religious freedom. Instead, he reveals how American culture was transformed to accommodate the religious differences within it. The expansion of individual rights, the mixing of believers and churches in the same institutions, and the introduction of more civility into public life all played an instrumental role in creating the religious pluralism for which the United States has become renowned. These changes also established important precedents for future civil rights movements in which dignity, as much as equality, would be at stake. Beyond Toleration is the first book to offer a systematic explanation of how early Americans learned to live with differences in matters of the highest importance to them --and how they found a way to articulate these differences civilly. Today when religious conflicts once again pose a grave danger to democratic experiments across the globe, Beneke's book serves as a timely reminder of how one country moved past toleration and towards religious pluralism.

Politics of Religious Freedom

Politics of Religious Freedom PDF Author: Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022624850X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Religious freedom has achieved broad consensus as a condition for peace. Faced with reports of a rise in religious violence and a host of other social ills, public, and private actors have responded with laws and policies designed to promote freedom of religion. But what precisely is being promoted? What are the assumptions underlying this response? The contributions to this volume unsettle the assumption that religious freedom is a singular achievement and that the problem lies in its incomplete accomplishment. Delineating the different conceptions of religious freedom predominant in the world today, as well as their histories and political contexts, the contributions make clear that the reasons for violence and discrimination are more complex than is widely acknowledged. The promotion of a single legal and cultural tool meant to address conflict across a wide variety of cultures can have the perverse effect of exacerbating the problems that plague the communities often cited as falling short. -- from back cover.

The Limits of Tolerance

The Limits of Tolerance PDF Author: Denis Lacorne
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547048
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
The modern notion of tolerance—the welcoming of diversity as a force for the common good—emerged in the Enlightenment in the wake of centuries of religious wars. First elaborated by philosophers such as John Locke and Voltaire, religious tolerance gradually gained ground in Europe and North America. But with the resurgence of fanaticism and terrorism, religious tolerance is increasingly being challenged by frightened publics. In this book, Denis Lacorne traces the emergence of the modern notion of religious tolerance in order to rethink how we should respond to its contemporary tensions. In a wide-ranging argument that spans the Ottoman Empire, the Venetian republic, and recent controversies such as France’s burqa ban and the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, The Limits of Tolerance probes crucial questions: Should we impose limits on freedom of expression in the name of human dignity or decency? Should we accept religious symbols in the public square? Can we tolerate the intolerant? While acknowledging that tolerance can never be entirely without limits, Lacorne defends the Enlightenment concept against recent attempts to circumscribe it, arguing that without it a pluralistic society cannot survive. Awarded the Prix Montyon by the Académie Française, The Limits of Tolerance is a powerful reflection on twenty-first-century democracy’s most fundamental challenges.