Religious Liberty in Western Thought

In this volume, ten leading scholars harvest the best of Western thinking on religious liberty. An opening chapter shows how religious liberty emerged slowly in the West through centuries of cruel experience and growing enlightenment. Separate chapters thereafter take up the unique roles of such titans as Marsilius, Luther, Calvin, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Burke, Tocqueville, and the American framers in the Western drama of religious liberty. From widely divergent experiences, these titans discovered the cardinal principles of religious liberty--religious pluralism and toleration, religious equality and non-discrimination, liberty of conscience and association, freedom of expression and exercise. From widely discordant convictions, they distilled the most enduring models of church and state and of religion and law in the West--from the organic models of earlier centuries to the dualistic models of more recent times.