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The Founding Fathers and the Debate over Religion in Revolutionary America

A History in Documents

Matthew Harris editor Thomas Kidd editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc

Published:15th Dec '11

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The Founding Fathers and the Debate over Religion in Revolutionary America cover

Whether America was founded as a Christian nation or as a secular republic is one of the most fiercely debated questions in American history. Historians Matthew Harris and Thomas Kidd offer an authoritative examination of the essential documents needed to understand this debate. The texts included in this volume - writings and speeches from both well-known and obscure early American thinkers - show that religion played a prominent yet fractious role in the era of the American Revolution. In their personal beliefs, the Founders ranged from profound skeptics like Thomas Paine to traditional Christians like Patrick Henry. Nevertheless, most of the Founding Fathers rallied around certain crucial religious principles, including the idea that people were "created " equal, the belief that religious freedom required the disestablishment of state-backed denominations, the necessity of virtue in a republic, and the role of Providence in guiding the affairs of nations. Harris and Kidd show that through the struggles of war and the framing of the Constitution, Americans sought to reconcile their dedication to religious vitality with their commitment to religious freedom.

Matthew L. Harris and Thomas S. Kidd have assembled a fine collection of primary documents that will serve as a useful guide for scholars, teachers, and students interested in the Christian America debate. * John Fea, author of Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction *
Harris and Kidd have crafted a work that is at once readable and informative. Indeed, even non-specialists who read their book will be able to comprehend the key questions about the place of religion in American life without feeling overwhelmed. * Renewing Minds *
The social epistemology developed in recent decades represents a welcome advance on the dead-end of Cartesian individualism. But the social has too often been conceived of without centering social oppression, and all the noetic complexities that come with it. In this richly detailed and wide-ranging text, Jose Medina locates the epistemological project squarely where it belongs: in societies of privilege, subordination, and radical group differentiation. Drawing on feminism, critical race theory, and queer theory, he shows with unprecedented thoroughness that we need to develop the cognitive virtues necessary to overcome active ignorance, epistemic injustice, and structural group insensitivity in sum, the problems not of a conveniently sanitized epistemic 'Twin-Earth' but the disordered world in which we all actually live. * Charles Mills, John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy. Department of Philosophy, Northwestern University *

ISBN: 9780195326499

Dimensions: 145mm x 213mm x 20mm

Weight: 318g

206 pages