Sacred Liberty

Sacred Liberty PDF Author: Steven Waldman
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062743163
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 565

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Book Description
Sacred Liberty offers a dramatic, sweeping survey of how America built a unique model of religious freedom, perhaps the nation’s “greatest invention.” Steven Waldman, the bestselling author of Founding Faith, shows how early ideas about religious liberty were tested and refined amidst the brutal persecution of Catholics, Baptists, Mormons, Quakers, African slaves, Native Americans, Muslims, Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses. American leaders drove religious freedom forward--figures like James Madison, George Washington, the World War II presidents (Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower) and even George W. Bush. But the biggest heroes were the regular Americans – people like Mary Dyer, Marie Barnett and W.D. Mohammed -- who risked their lives or reputations by demanding to practice their faiths freely. Just as the documentary Eyes on the Prize captured the rich drama of the civil rights movement, Sacred Liberty brings to life the remarkable story of how America became one of the few nations in world history that has religious freedom, diversity and high levels of piety at the same time. Finally, Sacred Liberty provides a roadmap for how, in the face of modern threats to religious freedom, this great achievement can be preserved.

Sacred Liberty

Sacred Liberty PDF Author: Steven Waldman
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062743163
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 565

Get Book

Book Description
Sacred Liberty offers a dramatic, sweeping survey of how America built a unique model of religious freedom, perhaps the nation’s “greatest invention.” Steven Waldman, the bestselling author of Founding Faith, shows how early ideas about religious liberty were tested and refined amidst the brutal persecution of Catholics, Baptists, Mormons, Quakers, African slaves, Native Americans, Muslims, Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses. American leaders drove religious freedom forward--figures like James Madison, George Washington, the World War II presidents (Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower) and even George W. Bush. But the biggest heroes were the regular Americans – people like Mary Dyer, Marie Barnett and W.D. Mohammed -- who risked their lives or reputations by demanding to practice their faiths freely. Just as the documentary Eyes on the Prize captured the rich drama of the civil rights movement, Sacred Liberty brings to life the remarkable story of how America became one of the few nations in world history that has religious freedom, diversity and high levels of piety at the same time. Finally, Sacred Liberty provides a roadmap for how, in the face of modern threats to religious freedom, this great achievement can be preserved.

The Sacred Rights of Conscience

The Sacred Rights of Conscience PDF Author: Daniel L. Dreisbach
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 720

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Book Description
This compilation of primary documents provides a thorough and balanced examination of the evolving relationship between public religion and American culture, from pre-colonial biblical and European sources to the early nineteenth century, to allow the reader to explore the social and political forces that defined the concept of religious liberty and shaped American church-state relations. --from publisher description.

The Most Sacred Freedom

The Most Sacred Freedom PDF Author: Will R. Jordan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780881465631
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Most Sacred Freedom includes eight essays that were first presented at the 2014 A. V. Elliott Conference on Great Books and Ideas, the seventh annual conference sponsored by Mercer University's Thomas C. and Ramona E. McDonald Center for America's Founding principles. Together, these essays explore the great principle of religious liberty by charting its development in the Western tradition and reconsidering its place at America's founding. The book begins with a comparison between the flood accounts in Genesis and the Mesopotamian Atra-Hasis and advances all the way to the 2014 Supreme Court case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. The intervening chapters examine the contributions of figures such as Emperor Julian, Roger Williams, Cecilius Calvert, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the American Founders. The major themes addressed include the theological and epistemological preconditions of religious liberty, the chief challenges to securing this liberty, the problematic but necessary role of religion in a free society, and the constitutional framework that has been handed down to us to help preserve this most sacred freedom. Book jacket.

The Myth of American Religious Freedom

The Myth of American Religious Freedom PDF Author: David Sehat
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199793112
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
In the battles over religion and politics in America, both liberals and conservatives often appeal to history. Liberals claim that the Founders separated church and state. But for much of American history, David Sehat writes, Protestant Christianity was intimately intertwined with the state. Yet the past was not the Christian utopia that conservatives imagine either. Instead, a Protestant moral establishment prevailed, using government power to punish free thinkers and religious dissidents. In The Myth of American Religious Freedom, Sehat provides an eye-opening history of religion in public life, overturning our most cherished myths. Originally, the First Amendment applied only to the federal government, which had limited authority. The Protestant moral establishment ruled on the state level. Using moral laws to uphold religious power, religious partisans enforced a moral and religious orthodoxy against Catholics, Jews, Mormons, agnostics, and others. Not until 1940 did the U.S. Supreme Court extend the First Amendment to the states. As the Supreme Court began to dismantle the connections between religion and government, Sehat argues, religious conservatives mobilized to maintain their power and began the culture wars of the last fifty years. To trace the rise and fall of this Protestant establishment, Sehat focuses on a series of dissenters--abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, socialist Eugene V. Debs, and many others. Shattering myths held by both the left and right, David Sehat forces us to rethink some of our most deeply held beliefs. By showing the bad history used on both sides, he denies partisans a safe refuge with the Founders.

The Sacred Fire of Liberty

The Sacred Fire of Liberty PDF Author: Lance Banning
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801485244
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 566

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Book Description
Lance Banning's powerful and persuasive reexamination of Madison's thought at the critical early and central stages of his career now changes that presumption, and provides a new base from which thinking about Madison and the Founding must start.

These Liberties We Hold Sacred

These Liberties We Hold Sacred PDF Author: Carl Anderson
Publisher: Square One Publishers, Inc.
ISBN: 0757055044
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Early in this nation’s history, America was populated by many different faith-based communities, each in search of a place to practice its religion. Initially, there was conflict, but by the time our Founding Fathers were ready to establish an independent nation, the idea of religious tolerance had become deeply ingrained in this brave new country’s design. So much so that when the United States Constitution was ratified, it contained a document known as The Bill of Rights—ten amendments detailing the rights of this country’s citizens. And the very First Amendment states,“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. . . .” Here lies the foundation of the principle for the separation of state and religion. Over the past few decades, however, the power of the state has usurped a growing number of rights clearly ascribed to those who wish to practice their faith. This has certainly not gone unnoticed by many religious organizations. As the supreme knight of the Knights of Columbus, Carl Anderson has taken an active role in highlighting—and protecting against–this ever-growing governmental infringement over fundamental religious freedom. Here in his latest book, These Liberties We Hold Sacred, New York Times best-selling author Carl Anderson has gathered together many of his most thought-provoking speeches, articles, and essays that lay bare the facts of this unjustified restriction of religious beliefs. The power of his words makes it clear that if nothing is done now, there will continue to be more erosion of these special freedoms set forth by our Founding Fathers. Carl Anderson has a gift for writing eloquently, understandably, and directly. His book These Liberties We Hold Sacred is a call to action to first understand what is happening to our religious and personal freedoms and then do all we can to hold on to these precious rights before more of them slip away.

Liberty in the Things of God

Liberty in the Things of God PDF Author: Robert Louis Wilken
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300226632
Category : Freedom of religion
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
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."

Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor

Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor PDF Author: Richard R. Beeman
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465037828
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 529

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Book Description
In 1768, Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush stood before the empty throne of King George III, overcome with emotion as he gazed at the symbol of America's connection with England. Eight years later, he became one of the fifty-six men to sign the Declaration of Independence, severing America forever from its mother country. Rush was not alone in his radical decision -- many of those casting their votes in favor of independence did so with a combination of fear, reluctance, and even sadness. In Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor, acclaimed historian Richard R. Beeman examines the grueling twenty-two-month period between the meeting of the Continental Congress on September 5, 1774 and the audacious decision for independence in July of 1776. As late as 1774, American independence was hardly inevitable -- indeed, most Americans found it neither desirable nor likely. When delegates from the thirteen colonies gathered in September, they were, in the words of John Adams, "a gathering of strangers." Yet over the next two years, military, political, and diplomatic events catalyzed a change of unprecedented magnitude: the colonists' rejection of their British identities in favor of American ones. In arresting detail, Beeman brings to life a cast of characters, including the relentless and passionate John Adams, Adams' much-misunderstood foil John Dickinson, the fiery political activist Samuel Adams, and the relative political neophyte Thomas Jefferson, and with profound insight reveals their path from subjects of England to citizens of a new nation. A vibrant narrative, Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor tells the remarkable story of how the delegates to the Continental Congress, through courage and compromise, came to dedicate themselves to the forging of American independence.

Liberty, the God That Failed

Liberty, the God That Failed PDF Author: Christopher A. Ferrara
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781621380207
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 726

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Book Description
What has gone wrong with the grand American experiment in "ordered liberty"? The liberal's answer is that America has failed to live up to its full promise of inclusiveness and equality--likely the result of corporate greed and white male ruling elites. The mainstream conservative or libertarian reply points to the Warren Court, the 1960s, or a loss of Constitutional rectitude. Christopher Ferrara, in Liberty, the God That Failed, offers an entirely different answer. In a counter-narrative of unique power and scope, he unmasks the order promised as a sham; the liberty guaranteed, a chimera. In his telling, the false god of a new political order--Liberty--was born in thought long before America's founding, and gained increasing devotion as it slowly amassed power during the first century of the nation's existence. Today it reveals its full might, as we bear the weight of its oppressive decrees, and experience the emptiness of the secular order it imposes upon us. The secular state has constructed a "myth of religious violence" to mask its own violent origins and ongoing displays of force. Ferrara destroys this myth with a relentless uncovering of truths hidden by both liberal and conservative/libertarian accounts of what has gone wrong. In this brilliant retelling of American history and political life, the author asks us to open our eyes to harsh realities, but also to the possibilities for a rightly ordered society and the true liberty that can still be ours.

The Exercise of Reason and Liberty of Conscience the Sacred Right of All Men in Examining and Professing the Christian Truth: a Sermon [on Rom. Xiv. 5].

The Exercise of Reason and Liberty of Conscience the Sacred Right of All Men in Examining and Professing the Christian Truth: a Sermon [on Rom. Xiv. 5]. PDF Author: Richard FRY (Teacher of Languages.)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 44

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Book Description