Download or read book The Tactics of Toleration written by Jesse Spohnholz and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2011 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction : religious toleration and the Reformation of the refugees -- Religious refugees and the rise of confessional tensions -- Calvinist discipline and the boundaries of religious toleration -- The strained hospitality of the Lutheran community -- Surviving dissent : Mennonites and Catholics in Wesel -- The practice of toleration : religious life in Reformation-era Wesel.
Download or read book How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West written by Perez Zagorin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-03 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Our Dear Bought Liberty written by Michael D. Breidenbach and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
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 320 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 Paradoxes of Religious Toleration in Early Modern Political Thought written by John Christian Laursen and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012-06-21 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In today’s developed world, much of what people believe about religious toleration has evolved from crucial innovations in toleration theory developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thinkers from that period have been rightly celebrated for creating influential, liberating concepts and ideas that have enabled many of us to live in peace. However, their work was certainly not perfect. In this enlightening volume, John Christian Laursen and María José Villaverde have gathered contributors to focus on the paradoxes, blindspots, unexpected flaws, or ambiguities in early modern toleration theories and practices. Each chapter explores the complexities, complications, and inconsistencies that came up in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as people grappled with the idea of toleration. In understanding the weaknesses, contradictions, and ambivalences in other theories, they hope to provoke thought about the defects in ways of thinking about toleration in order to help in overcoming similar problems in contemporary toleration theories.
Download or read book Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration written by Gary Remer and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious toleration is much discussed these days. But where did the Western notion of toleration come from? In this thought-provoking book Gary Remer traces arguments for religious toleration back to the Renaissance, demonstrating how humanist thinkers initiated an intellectual tradition that has persisted even to our present day. Although toleration has long been recognized as an important theme in Renaissance humanist thinking, many scholars have mistakenly portrayed the humanists as proto-Englightenment rationalists and nascent liberals. Remer, however, offers the surprising conclusion that humanist thinking on toleration was actually founded on the classical tradition of rhetoric. It was the rhetorician's commitment to decorum, the ability to argue both sides of an issue, and the search for an acceptable epistemological standard in probability and consensus that grounded humanist arguments for toleration. Remer also finds that the primary humanist model for a full-fledged theory of toleration was the Ciceronian rhetorical category of sermo (conversation). The historical scope of this book is wide-ranging. Remer begins by focusing on the works of four humanists: Desiderius Erasmus, Jacobus Acontius, William Chillingworth, and Jean Bodin. Then he considers the challenge posed to the humanist defense of toleration by Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Bayle. Finally, he shows how humanist ideas have continued to influence arguments for toleration even after the passing of humanism&—from John Locke to contemporary American discussions of freedom of speech.
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 Persecution Toleration written by Noel D. Johnson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-14 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Noel D. Johnson and Mark Koyama tackle the question: how does religious liberty develop?
Download or read book Divided by Faith written by Benjamin J. Kaplan and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-30 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As religious violence flares around the world, we are confronted with an acute dilemma: Can people coexist in peace when their basic beliefs are irreconcilable? Benjamin Kaplan responds by taking us back to early modern Europe, when the issue of religious toleration was no less pressing than it is today. Divided by Faith begins in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, when the unity of western Christendom was shattered, and takes us on a panoramic tour of Europe's religious landscape--and its deep fault lines--over the next three centuries. Kaplan's grand canvas reveals the patterns of conflict and toleration among Christians, Jews, and Muslims across the continent, from the British Isles to Poland. It lays bare the complex realities of day-to-day interactions and calls into question the received wisdom that toleration underwent an evolutionary rise as Europe grew more "enlightened." We are given vivid examples of the improvised arrangements that made peaceful coexistence possible, and shown how common folk contributed to toleration as significantly as did intellectuals and rulers. Bloodshed was prevented not by the high ideals of tolerance and individual rights upheld today, but by the pragmatism, charity, and social ties that continued to bind people divided by faith. Divided by Faith is both history from the bottom up and a much-needed challenge to our belief in the triumph of reason over faith. This compelling story reveals that toleration has taken many guises in the past and suggests that it may well do the same in the future.
Download or read book Religion Toleration and British Writing 1790 1830 written by Mark Canuel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-10-17 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830, Mark Canuel examines the way that Romantic poets, novelists and political writers criticized the traditional grounding of British political unity in religious conformity. Canuel shows how a wide range of writers including Jeremy Bentham, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Lord Byron not only undermined the validity of religion in the British state, but also imagined a new, tolerant and more organized mode of social inclusion. To argue against the authority of religion, Canuel claims, was to argue for a thoroughly revised form of tolerant yet highly organized government, in other words, a mode of political authority that provided unprecedented levels of inclusion and protection. Canuel argues that these writers saw their works as political and literary commentaries on the extent and limits of religious toleration. His study throws light on political history as well as the literature of the Romantic period.
Download or read book The Limits of Tolerance written by Denis Lacorne and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Beyond the Persecuting Society written by John Christian Laursen and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-07-18 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a myth—easily shattered—that Western societies since the Enlightenment have been dedicated to the ideal of protecting the differences between individuals and groups, and another—too readily accepted—that before the rise of secularism in the modern period, intolerance and persecution held sway throughout Europe. In Beyond the Persecuting Society John Christian Laursen, Cary J. Nederman, and nine other scholars dismantle this second generalization. If intolerance and religious persecution have been at the root of some of the greatest suffering in human history, it is nevertheless the case that toleration was practiced and theorized in medieval and early modern Europe on a scale few have realized: Christians and Jews, the English, French, Germans, Dutch, Swiss, Italians, and Spanish had their proponents of and experiments with tolerance well before John Locke penned his famous Letter Concerning Toleration. Moving from Abelard to Aphra Behn, from the apology for the gentiles of the fourteenth-century Talmudic scholar, Menahem ben Solomon Ha-MeIiri, to the rejection of intolerance in the "New Israel" of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Beyond the Persecuting Society offers a detailed and decisive correction to a vision of the past as any less complex in its embrace and abhorrence of diversity than the present.
Download or read book Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age written by R. Po-Chia Hsia and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-08-01 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dutch society has enjoyed a reputation, or notoriety, for permissiveness from the sixteenth century to present times. The Dutch Republic in the Golden Age was the only society that tolerated religious dissenters of all persuasions in early modern Europe, despite being committed to a strictly Calvinist public Church. Professors R. Po-chia Hsia and Henk van Nierop have brought together a group of leading historians from the US, the UK and the Netherlands to probe the history and myth of this Dutch tradition of religious tolerance. This 2002 collection of outstanding essays reconsiders and revises contemporary views of Dutch tolerance. Taken as a whole, the volume's innovative scholarship offers unexpected insights into this important topic in religious and cultural history.
Download or read book Paradoxes of Religious Toleration in Early Modern Political Thought written by John Christian Laursen and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In today's developed world, much of what people believe about religious toleration has evolved from crucial innovations in toleration theory developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thinkers from that period have been rightly celebrated for creating influential, liberating concepts and ideas that have enabled many of us to live in peace. However, their work was certainly not perfect. In this enlightening volume, John Christian Laursen and Mar a Jos Villaverde have gathered contributors to focus on the paradoxes, blindspots, unexpected flaws, or ambiguities in early modern toleration theories and practices. Each chapter explores the complexities, complications, and inconsistencies that came up in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as people grappled with the idea of toleration. In understanding the weaknesses, contradictions, and ambivalences in other theories, they hope to provoke thought about the defects in ways of thinking about toleration in order to help in overcoming similar problems in contemporary toleration theories.
Download or read book Why Tolerate Religion written by Brian Leiter and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-24 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Religious Tolerance in the Atlantic World written by Eliane Glaser and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-12-03 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Placing topical debates in historical perspective, the essays by leading scholars of history, literature and political science explore issues of difference and diversity, inclusion and exclusion, and faith in relation to a variety of Christian groups, Jews and Muslims in the context of both early modern and contemporary England and America.
Download or read book Conscience and Community written by Andrew R. Murphy and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-11-05 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
