How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the WestReligious 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. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 79
... writings of the American founders like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and in the United States Constitution with its provisions for the toleration of religious differences and the protection of religious freedom. The founders ...
... writings by many different authors exploring the problem of religious toleration from many angles and presenting an array of arguments in behalf of the principles of liberty of conscience, mutual tolerance, and religious coexistence and ...
... writings on toleration, in several different countries where the controversy raged, by thinkers such as Sebastian Franck, Sebastian Castellio, Dirck Coornhert and the Dutch Arminians, Roger Williams, the poet Milton, and xiv PREFACE.
... writings on the subject by philosophers are sometimes not well grounded historically. I have striven in the present book to convey a wide general understanding of the history of the idea of toleration by centering on the succession of ...
... writing in the interests of a dominant religious orthodoxy. Hence the advance of toleration, by helping to weaken such efforts, played a major role over time in widening the scope of freedom of thought and expression in areas other than ...
Contents
1 | |
14 | |
The Advent of Protestantism and the Toleration Problem | 46 |
The First Champion of Religious Toleration Sebastian Castellio | 93 |
The Toleration Controversy in the Netherlands | 145 |
The Great English Toleration Controversy 16401660 | 188 |
John Locke and Pierre Bayle | 240 |
Conclusion The Idea of Religious Toleration in the Enlightenment and After | 289 |
NOTES | 313 |
INDEX | 367 |