Download or read book Beyond Toleration written by Chris Beneke and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-08-29 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Accidental Pluralism written by Evan Haefeli and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-04-15 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States has long been defined by its religious diversity and recurrent public debates over the religious and political values that define it. In Accidental Pluralism, Evan Haefeli argues that America did not begin as a religiously diverse and tolerant society. It became so only because England’s religious unity collapsed just as America was being colonized. By tying the emergence of American religious toleration to global events, Haefeli creates a true transnationalist history that links developing American realities to political and social conflicts and resolutions in Europe, showing how the relationships among states, churches, and publics were contested from the beginning of the colonial era and produced a society that no one had anticipated. Accidental Pluralism is an ambitious and comprehensive new account of the origins of American religious life that compels us to refine our narratives about what came to be seen as American values and their distinct relationship to religion and politics.
Download or read book Religious Pluralism in America written by William R. Hutchison and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious toleration is enshrined as an ideal in our Constitution, but religious diversity has had a complicated history in the United States. Although Americans have taken justifiable pride in the rich array of religious faiths that help define our nation, for two centuries we have been grappling with the question of how we can coexist. In this ambitious reappraisal of American religious history, William Hutchison chronicles the country’s struggle to fulfill the promise of its founding ideals. In 1800 the United States was an overwhelmingly Protestant nation. Over the next two centuries, Catholics, Mormons, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and others would emerge to challenge the Protestant mainstream. Although their demands were often met with resistance, Hutchison demonstrates that as a result of these conflicts we have expanded our understanding of what it means to be a religiously diverse country. No longer satisfied with mere legal toleration, we now expect that all religious groups will share in creating our national agenda. This book offers a groundbreaking and timely history of our efforts to become one nation under multiple gods.
Download or read book British North America in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries written by Stephen Foster and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-10 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until relatively recently, the connection between British imperial history and the history of early America was taken for granted. In recent times, however, early American historiography has begun to suffer from a loss of coherent definition as competing manifestos demand various reorderings of the subject in order to combine time periods and geographical areas in ways that would have previously seemed anomalous. It has also become common place to announce that the history of America is best accounted for in America itself in a three-way melee between "settlers", the indigenous populations, and the forcibly transported African slaves and their creole descendants. The contributions to British North America in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries acknowledge the value of the historiographic work done under this new dispensation in the last two decades and incorporate its insights. However, the volume advocates a pluralistic approach to the subject generally, and attempts to demonstrate that the metropolitan power was of more than secondary importance to America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The central theme of this volume is the question "to what extent did it make a difference to those living in the colonies that made up British North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that they were part of an empire and that the empire in question was British?" The contributors, some of the leading scholars in their respective fields, strive to answer this question in various social, political, religious, and historical contexts.
Download or read book Religious Otherness and National Identity in Scandinavia c 1790 1960 written by Frode Ulvund and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-12-16 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author discusses how religious groups, especially Jews, Mormons and Jesuits, were labeled as foreign and constructed as political, moral and national threats in Scandinavia in different periods between c. 1790 and 1960. Key questions are who articulated such opinions, how was the threat depicted, and to what extent did it influence state policies towards these groups. A special focus is given to Norway, because the Constitution of 1814 included a ban against Jews (repelled in 1851) and Jesuits (repelled in 1956), and because Mormons were denied the status of a legal religion until freedom of religion was codified in the Constitution in 1964. The author emphasizes how the construction of religious minorities as perils of society influenced the definition of national identities in all Scandinavia, from the late 18th Century until well after WWII. The argument is that Jews, Mormons and Jesuits all were constructed as "anti-citizens", as opposites of what it meant to be "good" citizens of the nation. The discourse that framed the need for national protection against foreign religious groups was transboundary. Consequently, transnational stereotypes contributed significantly in defining national identities.
Download or read book Beyond Belief Beyond Conscience written by Jack N. Rakove and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Yitz Greenberg and Modern Orthodoxy written by Adam Ferziger and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sixteen scholars from around the globe gathered at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in the bucolic Yarnton Manor in the Oxfordshire countryside in June 2014, for the first (now annual) Oxford Summer Institute on Modern and Contemporary Judaism. The current volume is the fruit of this encounter. The goal of the event was to facilitate in-depth engagement with the thought of Rabbi Dr. Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, concentrating particularly on the historical ramifications of his theological and public stances. Consideration was given to his lifelong and complex encounter with the Modern Orthodox stream of American Judaism and the extent to which his teachings functioned as “the road not taken.” This auspicious gathering was most certainly characterized by deep appreciation for Greenberg’s original outlook, which is predicated on his profound dedication to God, Torah, the Jewish people, and humanity. But this was by no means gratuitous homage or naive esteem. On the contrary, those in attendance understood that the most genuine form of admiration for a thinker and leader of his stature—especially one who continues to produce path-breaking writings and speak out publicly—is to examine rigorously and critically his ideas and legacy. We are confident that the creative process that was nurtured has resulted in a substantive contribution to research on the religious, historical, and social trajectories of contemporary Judaism, and, similarly will engender fresh thinking on crucial theological and ideological postures that will ultimately enrich Jewish life. This volume offers readers a critical engagement with the trenchant and candid efforts of one of the most thoughtful and earnest voices to emerge from within American Orthodoxy to address the theological and moral concerns that characterize our times.
Download or read book The Religious Roots of the First Amendment written by Nicholas P. Miller and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2012-06 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing that commitments by certain dissenting Protestants to the right of private judgment in matters of Biblical interpretation helped promote religious liberty and religious disestablishment in the early modern West, this text describes a continuous strand of this religious thought - as well as the thinkers who spread it.
Download or read book Our Savage Neighbours written by Peter Silver and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2008 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "With remarkable literary skill, Peter Silver ... provokes hard thinking about the basic themes of our history." -- Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy Relying on meticulous original archival research, historian Peter Silver uncovers a fearful and vibrant early America in which Lutherans and Presbyterians, Quakers, Catholics and Covenanters, Irish, German, French, and Welsh all sought to lay claim to a daunting countryside. Such groups had rarely intermingled in Europe, and the divisions between them only grew -- until, with the arrival of the Seven Years' War, thousands of country people were forced to flee from Indian attack. Silver reveals in vivid and often chilling detail how easily a rhetoric of fear can incite entire populations to violence. He shows how it was only through the shared experience of fearing and hating Indians that these Europeans, once irreconcilable, were finally united under the ideal of religious and ethnic tolerance that has since defined the best in American life.
Download or read book The Lively Experiment written by Chris Beneke and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-03-19 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with the legacy of Roger Williams, who in 1633 founded the first colony not restricted to people of one faith, The Lively Experiment chronicles how Americans have continually demolished traditional prejudices while at the same time erecting new walls between belief systems. The chapters gathered here reveal how Americans are sensitively attuned to irony and contradiction, to unanticipated eruptions of bigotry and unheralded acts of decency, and to the disruption caused by new movements and the reassurance supplied by old divisions. The authors examine the way ethnicity, race, and imperialism have been woven into the fabric of interreligious relations and highlight how currents of tolerance and intolerance have rippled in multiple directions. Nearly four hundred years after Roger Williams' Rhode Island colony, the "lively experiment" of religious tolerance remains a core tenet of the American way of life. This volume honors this boisterous tradition by offering the first comprehensive account of America’s vibrant and often tumultuous history of interreligious relations.
Download or read book A Divinity for All Persuasions written by T. J. Tomlin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Divinity for All Persuasions uncovers the prevailing religious sensibility at the center of early America's most popular form of print: the almanac. Employing a wealth of archival material, T.J. Tomlin reveals the pan-Protestant sensibility distributed through the almanacs' pages between 1730 and 1820, finding that almanacs played an unparalleled role in reinforcing British North America's "shared religious culture."
Download or read book Religion and the American Revolution written by Katherine Carté and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For most of the eighteenth century, British protestantism was driven neither by the primacy of denominations nor by fundamental discord between them. Instead, it thrived as part of a complex transatlantic system that bound religious institutions to imperial politics. As Katherine Carte argues, British imperial protestantism proved remarkably effective in advancing both the interests of empire and the cause of religion until the war for American independence disrupted it. That Revolution forced a reassessment of the role of religion in public life on both sides of the Atlantic. Religious communities struggled to reorganize within and across new national borders. Religious leaders recalibrated their relationships to government. If these shifts were more pronounced in the United States than in Britain, the loss of a shared system nonetheless mattered to both nations. Sweeping and explicitly transatlantic, Religion and the American Revolution demonstrates that if religion helped set the terms through which Anglo-Americans encountered the imperial crisis and the violence of war, it likewise set the terms through which both nations could imagine the possibilities of a new world.
Download or read book The G len Hizmet Movement written by Tamer Balci and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-01-03 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume covers the origins, historical development, and ideas of one of the largest and most influential Islamic movements in the world, the Gülen Hizmet Movement (GHM). Founded during the Cold War under the inspiration of M. Fethullah Gülen, the GHM expanded to over 130 countries by the first decade of the twenty first century. The movement’s circumspect activism sheltered it from illiberal secular practices in Turkey and has guided it through the anxious post-Cold War process of globalization. This edited volume covers various characteristics of the movement from Gülen’s unconventional oratory to his educational philosophy. In addition, the book covers Gülen’s ideas on Islam and democracy and the GHM’s indirect political engagement compared to the direct engagement of the Muslim Brotherhood. Other chapters in the book cover the role of women in the movement, the GHM’s creation of an alternative public sphere for pious Muslims, and the tension this creation instills in light of Secularism Theory, which is analyzed comparatively with American religious pluralism. The last two chapters question the effectiveness of interfaith dialogue activities promoted by the movement’s adherents. A concluding section seeks to synthesize this interdisciplinary scholarship in order to assess the GHM’s overall gestalt as a social movement.
Download or read book Crossroads of Empire written by Ned C. Landsman and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work examines colonial New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania as central to both warfare and the emerging British-Atlantic world of culture and trade. In this probing history, Ned C. Landsman demonstrates how the Middle Colonies came to function as a distinct region. He argues that while each territory possessed varying social, religious, and political cultures, the collective lands of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania were unified in their particular history and place in the imperial and Atlantic worlds. Landsman shows that the societal cohesiveness of the three colonies originated in the commercial and military rivalries among Native nations and developed further with the competing involvement of the European powers. They eventually emerged as the focal point in the contest for dominion over North America. In relating this progression, Landsman discusses various factors in the region’s development, including the Enlightenment, evangelical religion, factional politics, religious and ethnic diversity, and distinct systems of Protestant pluralism. Ultimately, he argues, it was within the Middle Colonies that the question was first posed, What is the American?
Download or read book Formed From This Soil written by Thomas S. Bremer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-12-03 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Formed from This Soil offers a complete history of religion in America that centers on the diversity of sacred traditions and practices that have existed in the country from its earliest days. Organized chronologically starting with the earliest Europeans searching for new routes to Asia, through to the global context of post-9/11 America of the 21st century Includes discussion of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic class, political affiliations, and other elements of individual and collective identity Incorporates recent scholarship for a nuanced history that goes beyond simple explanations of America as a Protestant society Discusses diverse beliefs and practices that originated in the Americas as well as those that came from Europe, Asia, and Africa Pedagogical features include numerous visual images; sidebars with specialized topics and interpretive themes; discussion questions for each chapter; a glossary of common terms; and lists of relevant resources to broaden student learning
Download or read book Religion in American Politics written by Frank Lambert and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-21 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed author of The Barbary Wars offers a critical analysis of the often uneasy relationship between religion and politics in the United States from the Founding Fathers to the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Law and Religion in American History written by Mark Douglas McGarvie and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-18 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book furthers dialogue on the separation of church and state with an approach that emphasizes intellectual history and the constitutional theory that underlies American society. Mark Douglas McGarvie explains that the founding fathers of America considered the right of conscience to be an individual right, to be protected against governmental interference. While the religion clauses enunciated this right, its true protection occurred in the creation of separate public and private spheres. Religion and the churches were placed in the private sector. Yet, politically active Christians have intermittently mounted challenges to this bifurcation in calling for a greater public role for Christian faith and morality in American society. Both students and scholars will learn much from this intellectual history of law and religion that contextualizes a four-hundred-year-old ideological struggle.
