Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America

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Penn State Press, 2010 - 718 pages

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.

 

Contents

A Theological ScareCrow or The Inward Persuasion of the Mind? Conscience and Toleration in Historical Philosophical and Political Perspective
1
REVISITING EARLY MODERN TOLERATION AND RELIGIOUS DISSENT
25
Massachusetts Bay Puritanism and the Politics of Religious Dissent
27
The English Civil War Commonwealth and Protectorate Unintentional Unintended Toleration
75
The Glorious Revolution The 1640s All Over Again?
123
Prosecution or Persecution? Quakers Toleration and Schism in Early Pennsylvania
165
Revisiting Early Modern Toleration and Religious Dissent
209
TOLERATION ACROSS TIME CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN THEORY AND PRACTICE
245
Toleration and Political Liberalism John Rawls Shrinking Liberty of Conscience
247
The Politics of Conscience and the Politics of Identity The Limits and Promise of Liberal Toleration
271
Bibliography
295
Index
329
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About the author (2010)

Andrew R. Murphy is Assistant Professor of Political Philosophy and Humanities in Christ College, the honors college of Valparaiso University.

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