Nussbaum's Liberty of Conscience

Nussbaum’s contribution is to show vividly how the equality tradition leads the court, and the rest of us, to ask the right questions. As she understands, this is what we can ask of the law. -- Emily Bazelon, Good Faith, New York Times Book Review (March 23, 2008).

Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality
by Martha C. Nussbaum

List Price: $28.95
Hardcover: 406 pages
Publisher: Basic Books (February 4, 2008)
ISBN-10: 0465051642
ISBN-13: 978-0465051649

Related New Titles (featured below the fold)

Steven Goldberg's Bleached Faith: The Tragic Cost When Religion Is Forced into the Public Square Forrest Church's So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle over Church and State Garry Wills' Head and Heart: American Christianities Mark Lilla's The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, named one of the 100 "Notable Books of 2007" by The New York Times.

Book Description: From one of America's most distinguished moral philosophers, a sweeping historically based argument that equal respect for all citizens is the bedrock of America's tradition of religious freedom. In one of the great triumphs of the colonial and Revolutionary periods, the founders of the future United States overcame religious intolerance in favor of a constitutional order dedicated to fair treatment for people's deeply held conscientious beliefs. It granted equal liberty of conscience to all and took a firm stand against religious establishment. This respect for religious difference, acclaimed scholar Martha Nussbaum writes, formed our democracy.

Yet today there are signs that this legacy is misunderstood. The prominence of a particular type of Christianity in our public life suggests the unequal worth of citizens who hold different religious beliefs, or no beliefs. Other people, meanwhile, seek to curtail the influence of religion in public life in a way that is itself unbalanced and unfair. Such partisan efforts, Nussbaum argues, violate the spirit of our Constitution.

Liberty of Conscience is a historical and conceptual study of the American tradition of religious freedom. Weaving together political history, philosophical ideas, and key constitutional cases, this is a rich chronicle of an ideal of equality that has always been central to our history but is now in serious danger.

About the Author: Martha C. Nussbaum holds appointments in the Philosophy Department, Law School, and Divinity School at the University of Chicago. She is the author of thirteen previous books. Her Cultivating Humanity won the 2002 Grawemeyer Award for Education.

Bleached Faith:The Tragic Cost When Religion Is Forced into the Public Square
by Steven Goldberg

List Price: $24.95
Cloth: 176 pages
Publisher: Stanford UP, 2008
ISBN-10: 0804758611
ISBN-13: 9780804758611

Book Description: Along the lines of other incredulous "neo-Enlightenment" books, Bleached Faith makes a forceful case that the gravest threat to real faith comes from those who would water down religion in order to win the dubious honor of forcing it into public buildings and classrooms.

The freedom of religion we enjoy in the United States, both as a matter of law and practice, is extraordinary by any measure. However, when American courts allow the government to insert religious symbolism in public spaces, real religion is the loser. Goldberg argues that people on both sides of this debate should resist this corruption of religion. The book provides a survey of the legal and political environment in which battles over the public display of the Ten Commandments, the teaching of intelligent design in our schools, and the celebration of religious holidays take place.

Goldberg firmly maintains that, "if American religion becomes a watered-down broth that is indistinguishable from consumerism and science, we will have no one to blame but ourselves. My opposition to pushing religion into the courthouse and the biology classroom does not stem from hostility to religion. I am opposed to bleached faith—the empty symbolism that diminishes the power of real belief."

So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle over Church and State
by Forrest Church

List Price: $28.00 
Hardcover: 544 pages
Publisher: Harcourt; 1 edition (September 10, 2007)
ISBN-10: 0151011850
ISBN-13: 978-0151011858

Book Description: Today’s dispute over the line between church and state (or the lack thereof) is neither the first nor the fiercest in our history. In a powerful retelling of the birth of the American body politic, religious historian Forrest Church describes our first great culture war—a tumultuous yet nearly forgotten conflict that raged from George Washington’s presidency to James Monroe’s. On one side of the battle, the proponents of order—Federalists, Congregationalists, New Englanders—believed that the only legitimate ruler of men is God. On the other side, the defenders of liberty—republicans, Baptists, Virginians—cheered the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and believed that only the separation of church and state would preserve man’s freedom. Would we be a nation under God, or with liberty for all? In this vigorous history, Forrest Church offers a new vision of our earliest presidents’ beliefs, reshaping assumptions about the debates that still reverberate across our land.

About the Author: Forrest Church is minister of All Souls Church in Manhattan. He earned his doctorate in church history at Harvard and has written or edited twenty-two books, including The Separation of Church and State.

Head and Heart: American Christianities
by Garry Wills

List Price: $29.95
Hardcover: 640 pages
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The (October 4, 2007)
ISBN-10: 1594201463
ISBN-13: 978-1594201462

Book Description: A landmark examination of Christianity's place in American life across the broad sweep of this country's history, from the Puritans to the presidential administration of George W. Bush.

The struggle within American Christianity, Garry Wills argues, now and throughout our country's history, is between the head and the heart: between reason and emotion, Enlightenment and Evangelism. Why has this been so? How has the tension between the two poles played out, and with what consequences, over the past 400 years? How "Christian" is America, after all? Garry Wills brings a lifetime's worth of thought about these questions to bear on a magnificent historical reckoning that offers much needed perspective on some of the most contentious issues of our time.

A religious revolution occurred in America in the 18th century, one that saw the emergence of an Enlightenment religious culture whose hallmarks were tolerance for other faiths and a belief that religion was a matter best divorced from political institutions-the proverbial "separation of church and state." Wills shows us just how incredibly radical a departure this separation was: there was simply no precedent for it. To put this leap in perspective, Wills provides a grounding in the pre-Enlightenment religion that preceded it, beginning with the early Puritans. He then provides a thrillingly clear unpacking of the steps, particularly Madison's and Jefferson's, by which church-state separation was enshrined in the Constitution, and reveals the great irony of the efforts of today's Religious Right to blur the lines between the two. In fact, it is precisely that separation that has allowed religion in America to flourish since the disestablishment of religion created a free market, as it were, and competition for souls led to the profusion of denominations across the length and breadth of the land.

As Wills examines the key movements and personalities that have transformed America's religious landscape, we see again and again the same pattern emerge: a cooling of popular religious fervor followed by a grassroots explosion in evangelical activity, generally at a time of great social transformation and anxiety. But such forces inevitably go too far, provoking a backlash as is happening right now with the forces of Creationism and the anti-abortion fundamentalists.

About the Author: Garry Wills has written many acclaimed works, on religion and on American history, including Lincoln at Gettysburg, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment, What Jesus Meant, and What Paul Meant. His works have received many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. He is professor of history emeritus at Northwestern University.

The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West
by Mark Lilla

List Price: $26.00
Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (September 11, 2007)
ISBN-10: 1400043670
ISBN-13: 978-1400043675

Book Description: Religious passions are again driving world politics. The quest to bring political life under God’s authority has been revived, confounding expectations of a secular future. In this major book, Mark Lilla reveals the sources of this age-old quest—and its surprising role in shaping Western thought.

The story could not be more timely. Most civilizations in history have been organized on the basis of a political theology – a myth or revelation about the correct ordering of society. Yet due to a crisis in Western Christendom nearly five hundred years ago, a novel intellectual challenge to political theology arose in Europe. By portraying religion as an expression of human nature, not a divine gift, modern Western thinkers found a way to free politics from God’s authority and build barriers against destructive religious passions.

But the temptations of political theology are always present, even in the West. As Lilla vividly shows, the urge to reconnect politics to religion remained strong and took novel forms in modern European thought. By the Second World War a forceful political messianism had arisen, justifying the most deadly ideologies of the age. Making us question what we thought we knew about religion, politics, and the fate of civilizations, Lilla reminds us of the modern West’s unique trajectory and what is required to remain on it.

About the Author: Mark Lilla is Professor of Humanities and Religion at Columbia University. He was previously Professor at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.