Download or read book The Christian Origins of Tolerance written by Jed W. Atkins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tolerance is usually regarded as a quintessential liberal value. This position is supported by a standard liberal history that views religious toleration as emerging from the post-Reformation wars of religion as the solution to the problem of religious violence. Requiring the separation of church from state, tolerance was secured by giving the state the sole authority to punish religious violence and to protect the individual freedoms of conscience and religion. Commitment to tolerance is independent of judgements about justice and the common good. This standard liberal history exerts a powerful hold on the modern imagination: it undergirds several important recent accounts of liberal tolerance and virtually every major study of tolerance in the ancient world. Nevertheless, this familiar narrative distorts our understanding of tolerance's premodern origins and impoverishes present-day debates when many members of Christianity and Islam, the two largest global religions, have reservations about liberal tolerance. Setting aside the standard liberal history, The Christian Origins of Tolerance recovers tolerance's beginnings in a forgotten tradition forged by North African Christian thinkers of the first five centuries CE in critical conversation with one another, St. Paul, the rival tradition of Stoicism, and the political and legal thought of the wider Roman world. This North African Christian tradition conceives of tolerance as patience within plurality. This tradition does not require the separation of religion and the secular state as a prerequisite for tolerance and embeds individual rights and the freedoms of conscience and religion within a wider theoretical framework that derives accounts of political judgement and patience from theological reflection on God's roles as a patient father and just judge. By recovering this forgotten tradition, we can better understand and assess the choices made by leading theorists of liberal tolerance, and as a result, think better about how to achieve peaceful coexistence within and beyond liberal democracies in a world in which many Christians and Muslims are sceptical of liberalism.
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 2005-10-09 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 The Christian Origins of Tolerance written by E Blake Byrne Associate Professor of Classical Studies and Associate Professor of Philosophy and Political Science Jed W Atkins and published by . This book was released on 2024-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an account of tolerance that differs from the standard liberal narrative. Jed Atkins recovers tolerance's beginnings in a forgotten North African Christian tradition from the first five centuries CE and shows how this bears on questions of political judgment, authority, freedom, rights, religious plurality, and natural law.
Download or read book Tolerance Intolerance and Recognition in Early Christianity and Early Judaism written by Michael Labahn and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-16 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays investigates signs of toleration, recognition, respect and other positive forms of interaction between and within religious groups of late antiquity. At the same time, it acknowledges that examples of tolerance are significantly fewer in ancient sources than examples of intolerance and are often limited to insiders, while outsiders often met with contempt, or even outright violence. The essays take both perspectives seriously by analysing the complexity pertaining to these encounters. Religious concerns, ethnicity, gender and other social factors central to identity formation were often intertwined and they yielded different ways of drawing the limits of tolerance and intolerance. This book enhances our understanding of the formative centuries of Jewish and Christian religious traditions. It also brings the results of historical inquiry into dialogue with present-day questions of religious tolerance.
Download or read book The Intolerance of Tolerance written by D. A. Carson and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carson traces the subtle but enormous shift in the way we have come to understand tolerance over recent years--from defending the rights of those who hold different beliefs to affirming all beliefs as equally valid and correct. He looks back at the history of this shift and discusses its implications for culture today, especially its bearing on democracy, discussions about good and evil, and Christian truth claims. --from publisher description
Download or read book Making Christian History written by Michael Hollerich and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Known as the “Father of Church History,” Eusebius was bishop of Caesarea in Palestine and the leading Christian scholar of his day. His Ecclesiastical History is an irreplaceable chronicle of Christianity’s early development, from its origin in Judaism, through two and a half centuries of illegality and occasional persecution, to a new era of tolerance and favor under the Emperor Constantine. In this book, Michael J. Hollerich recovers the reception of this text across time. As he shows, Eusebius adapted classical historical writing for a new “nation,” the Christians, with a distinctive theo-political vision. Eusebius’s text left its mark on Christian historical writing from late antiquity to the early modern period—across linguistic, cultural, political, and religious boundaries—until its encounter with modern historicism and postmodernism. Making Christian History demonstrates Eusebius’s vast influence throughout history, not simply in shaping Christian culture but also when falling under scrutiny as that culture has been reevaluated, reformed, and resisted over the past 1,700 years.
Download or read book All Can Be Saved written by Stuart B. Schwartz and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It would seem unlikely that one could discover tolerant religious attitudes in Spain, Portugal, and the New World colonies during the era of the Inquisition, when enforcement of Catholic orthodoxy was widespread and brutal. Yet this groundbreaking book does exactly that. Drawing on an enormous body of historical evidence—including records of the Inquisition itself—the historian Stuart Schwartz investigates the idea of religious tolerance and its evolution in the Hispanic world from 1500 to 1820. Focusing on the attitudes and beliefs of common people rather than those of intellectual elites, the author finds that no small segment of the population believed in freedom of conscience and rejected the exclusive validity of the Church. The book explores various sources of tolerant attitudes, the challenges that the New World presented to religious orthodoxy, the complex relations between “popular” and “learned” culture, and many related topics. The volume concludes with a discussion of the relativist ideas that were taking hold elsewhere in Europe during this era.
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 Religious Intolerance America and the World written by John Corrigan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the news shows us every day, contemporary American culture and politics are rife with people who demonize their enemies by projecting their own failings and flaws onto them. But this is no recent development. Rather, as John Corrigan argues here, it’s an expression of a trauma endemic to America’s history, particularly involving our long domestic record of religious conflict and violence. Religious Intolerance, America, and the World spans from Christian colonists’ intolerance of Native Americans and the role of religion in the new republic’s foreign-policy crises to Cold War witch hunts and the persecution complexes that entangle Christians and Muslims today. Corrigan reveals how US churches and institutions have continuously campaigned against intolerance overseas even as they’ve abetted or performed it at home. This selective condemnation of intolerance, he shows, created a legacy of foreign policy interventions promoting religious freedom and human rights that was not reflected within America’s own borders. This timely, captivating book forces America to confront its claims of exceptionalism based on religious liberty—and perhaps begin to break the grotesque cycle of projection and oppression.
Download or read book Tolerance and Intolerance in Early Judaism and Christianity written by Graham Stanton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-05-28 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this book consider issues of tolerance and intolerance faced by Jews and Christians between approximately 200 BCE and 200 CE. Several chapters are concerned with many different aspects of early Jewish-Christian relationships. Five scholars, however, take a difference tack and discuss how Jews and Christians defined themselves against the pagan world. As minority groups, both Jews and Christians had to work out ways of co-existing with their Graeco-Roman neighbours. Relationships with those neighbours were often strained, but even within both Jewish and Christian circles, issues of tolerance and intolerance surfaced regularly. So it is appropriate that some other contributors should consider 'inner-Jewish' relationships, and that some should be concerned with Christian sects.
Download or read book Tolerance in World History written by Peter Stearns and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-06-26 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This relatively short book will work to connect different periods and a number of key regions, to help clarify the record and the relationship between current tolerance patterns and those of the past.
Download or read book Liberty in the Things of God written by Robert Louis Wilken and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the leading historians of Christianity comes this sweeping reassessment of religious freedom, from the church fathers to John Locke In the ancient world Christian apologists wrote in defense of their right to practice their faith in the cities of the Roman Empire. They argued that religious faith is an inward disposition of the mind and heart and cannot be coerced by external force, laying a foundation on which later generations would build. Chronicling the history of the struggle for religious freedom from the early Christian movement through the seventeenth century, Robert Louis Wilken shows that the origins of religious freedom and liberty of conscience are religious, not political, in origin. They took form before the Enlightenment through the labors of men and women of faith who believed there could be no justice in society without liberty in the things of God. This provocative book, drawing on writings from the early Church as well as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reminds us of how "the meditations of the past were fitted to affairs of a later day."
Download or read book A Letter Concerning Toleration By John Locke Esq written by John Locke and published by . This book was released on 1796 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 430 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 Uncommon Decency written by Richard J. Mouw and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2011-08-29 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few if any people in the evangelical world have conversed as widely and sensitively as Richard Mouw. That's why Mouw can write here so wisely and helpfully about what Christians can appreciate about pluralism, the theological basis for civility, and how we can communicate with people who disagree with us on the issues that matter most.
Download or read book The Religious Sense written by Luigi Giussani and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 1997-10-24 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Religious Sense, the fruit of many years of dialogue with students, is an exploration of the search for meaning in life. Luigi Giussani shows that the nature of reason expresses itself in the ultimate need for truth, goodness, and beauty. These needs constitute the fabric of the religious sense, which is evident in every human being everywhere and in all times. So strong is this sense that it leads one to desire that the answer to life's mystery might reveal itself in some way.
Download or read book Toleration and Understanding in Locke written by Nicholas Jolley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite recent advances in Locke scholarship, philosophers and political theorists have paid little attention to the relations among his three greatest works: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Two Treatises of Government, and Epistola de Tolerantia. As a result our picture of Locke's thought is a curiously fragmented one. Toleration and Understanding in Locke argues that these works are unified by a concern to promote the cause of religious toleration. Making extensive use of Locke's neglected replies to Proast, Nicholas Jolley shows how Locke draws on his epistemological principles to criticize religious persecution - for Locke, since revelation is an object of belief, not knowledge, coercion by the state in religious matters is not morally justified. In this volume Jolley also seeks to show how the Two Treatises of Government and the letters for toleration adopt the same contractualist approach to political theory; Locke argues for toleration from the function of the state where this is determined by the decisions of rational contracting parties. Throughout, attention is paid to demonstrating the range of Locke's arguments for toleration and to defending them, where possible, against recent criticisms. The book includes an account of the development of Locke's views about religious toleration from the beginning to the end of his career; it also includes discussions of his individualism about knowledge and belief, his critique of religious enthusiasm, his commitment to the minimal creed, and his teachings about natural law. Locke emerges as a rather systematic thinker whose arguments are highly relevant to modern debates about religious toleration.
