The historiography of church-state relations in America and Europe remains a live cultural, religious, and political issue on both sides of the Atlantic. Even more, current political invocations of history illuminate the need for a thoroughly trans-Atlantic approach to the history of church-state relations in the modern West. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the formative period for modern church-states relations we see vividly the complex interrelationship of developments from...

The often-violent conflicts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were sparked by the pursuit of freedom of thought. In time, this drive led to bitter fighting, including the English Civil War. Then came revolutions in America and France that swept away monarchies for more representative forms of government and making possible the abolition of slavery, the enfranchisement of women, and the idea of universal human rights and freedoms. Each of these struggles was a memorable human drama, ...

Look out for a new book from Garry Wills, What the Qur'an Meant, coming fall 2017.Gary Wills has won significant acclaim for his bestselling works of religion and history. Here, for the first time, he combines both disciplines in a sweeping examination of Christianity in America throughout the last 400 years. Wills argues that the struggle now, as throughout our nation's history, is between the head and the heart, reason and emotion, enlightenment and Evan...

Religious life in early America is often equated with the fire-and-brimstone Puritanism best embodied by the theology of Cotton Mather. Yet, by the nineteenth century, American theology had shifted dramatically away from the severe European traditions directly descended from the Protestant Reformation, of which Puritanism was in the United States the most influential. In its place arose a singularly American set of beliefs. In America's God, Mark Noll has written a biography of this new Am...

How is a free faith expressed, organised and governed? How are diverse spiritualities and theologies made compatible? What might a religion based in reason and democracy offer today's world? This book will help the reader to understand the contemporary liberal religion of Unitarian Universalism in a historical and global context. Andrea Greenwood and Mark W. Harris challenge the view that the Unitarianism of New England is indigenous and the point from which the religion spread. Relationsh...

How did the United States, founded as colonies with explicitly religious aspirations, come to be the first modern state whose commitment to the separation of church and state was reflected in its constitution? Frank Lambert explains why this happened, offering in the process a synthesis of American history from the first British arrivals through Thomas Jefferson's controversial presidency.Lambert recognizes that two sets of spiritual fathers defined the place of religion in early A...

What holds America together? In this classic work, Russell Kirk describes the beliefs and institutions that have nurtured the American soul and commonwealth. Beginning with the Hebrew prophets, Kirk examines in dramatic fashion the sources of American order. His analytical narrative might be called “a tale of five cities”: Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia. For an understanding of the significance of America at the dawn of a new century, Russell Kirk’s masterpiece on the hi...

Traditional understandings of the genesis of the separation of church and state rest on assumptions about "Enlightenment" and the republican ethos of citizenship. In The Religious Roots of the First Amendment, Nicholas P. Miller does not seek to dislodge that interpretation but to augment and enrich it by recovering its cultural and discursive religious contexts--specifically the discourse of Protestant dissent. He argues that commitments by certain dissenting Protestants to the r...

To the original text of what has become a classic of American historical literature, Bernard Bailyn adds a substantial essay, ”Fulfillment,” as a Postscript. Here he discusses the intense, nation-wide debate on the ratification of the Constitution, stressing the continuities between that struggle over the foundations of the national government and the original principles of the Revolution. This detailed study of the persistence of the nation’s ideological origins adds a new dimension to th...

Mark A. Noll presents a fresh and accessible history of Protestantism from the era of Martin Luther to the present day. Beginning with the founding of Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, and Anabaptist churches in the sixteenth-century Reformation, he also considers the rise of other important Christian movements like Methodism and Pentecostalism. Focussing on worldwide developments, rather than just the familiar European and American histories, he considers the recent expansion of Protestant mo...

As the author of The Conservative Mind and other seminal books, Russell Kirk is usually thought of as one of the American conservative political movement’s most important progenitors. But as this collection demonstrates, Kirk was perhaps at his best as an essayist. This volume also confirms that Kirk’s was principally a literary and historical conservatism that refused to fit the irreducible complexity of human experience to the requirements of any ideological straitjacket.

By the mid nineteenth century, anti-Catholicism had become a central conflict in America. Fueling the dissent were Protestant groups dedicated to maintaining what they understood to be the Christian vision and spirit of the "founding fathers." Afraid of the religious and moral impact of Catholics, they advocated for stricter laws in order to maintain the Protestant predominance of America. Of particular concern to some of these native-born citizens, or "nativists," were Roman Catholic immi...