Christian contributions to the development of rights and liberties in the Western legal tradition -- Magna Cartas old and new : rights and liberties in the Anglo-American common law -- Natural law and natural rights in the early Protestant tradition -- "A most mild and equitable establishment of religion" : religious freedom in Massachusetts, 1780-1833 -- Historical foundations and enduring fundamentals of American religious freedom -- Balancing the guarantees of no establishment and free exercise of religion in American education -- Tax exemption of religious property : historical anomaly or valid constitutional practice? -- Faith in Strasbourg? religious freedom in the European Court of Human Rights -- Meet the new boss of religious freedom : the new cases of the Court of Justice of the European Union -- Concluding reflections : toward a Christian defense of human rights and religious freedom today.
Summary:
"Christian Contributions to the Development of Rights and Liberties in the Western Legal Tradition It will come as a surprise to some human rights lawyers to learn that Christianity was a deep and enduring source of human rights and liberties in the Western legal tradition. Our elementary textbooks have long taught us that the history of human rights began in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Human rights, many of us were taught, were products of the Western Enlightenment - creations of Grotius and Pufendorf, Locke and Rousseau, Montesquieu and Voltaire, Hume and Smith, Jefferson and Madison. Rights were the mighty new weapons forged by American and French revolutionaries who fought in the name of political democracy, personal autonomy, and religious freedom against outmoded Christian conceptions of absolute monarchy, aristocratic privilege, and religious establishment. Rights were the keys forged by Western liberals to unchain society from the shackles of a millennium of the church's oppression of society and domination of the state"-- Provided by publisher.
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