On Religious Liberty: Selections from the Works of Roger Williams »

James Calvin Davis is Associate Professor of Religion, Middlebury College.

Banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his refusal to conform to Puritan religious and social standards, Roger Williams established a haven in Rhode Island for those persecuted in the name of the religious establishment. He conducted a lifelong debate over religious freedom with distinguished figures of the seventeenth century, including Puritan minister John Cotton, Massachusetts governor John Endicott, and the English Parliament.

James Calvin Davis gathers together important selections from Williams's public and private writings on religious liberty, illustrating how this renegade Puritan radically reinterpreted Christian moral theology and the events of his day in a powerful argument for freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state. For Williams, the enforcement of religious uniformity violated the basic values of Calvinist Christianity and presumed upon God's authority to speak to the individual conscience. He argued that state coercion was rarely effective, often causing more harm to the church and strife to the social order than did religious pluralism.

This is the first collection of Williams's writings in forty years reaching beyond his major work, The Bloody Tenent, to include other selections from his public and private writings. This carefully annotated book introduces Williams to a new generation of readers.

Martha Nussbaum - New Republic

Williams's writings have long been virtually unavailable to the general public. Now Harvard University Press has published On Religious Liberty: Selections From the Works of Roger Williams, edited by scholar James Calvin Davis. Davis provides around three hundred pages of Williams's writings...Davis has a keen eye for the telling passage, and he arranges the extracts helpfully, adding a lucid introduction. His fine volume will be especially useful for purposes of teaching, and it will sustain us while we await a more complete re-issue of the major works and letters.

Acknowledgments     ix
Editorial Method     xi
Introduction: Roger Williams and the Birth of an American Ideal     1
Mr. Cotton's Letter Lately Printed, Examined, and Answered     46
Queries of Highest Consideration     73
The Bloody Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience     85
Christenings Make Not Christians     157
The Bloody Tenent Yet More Bloody     167
The Fourth Paper Presented by Major Butler     227
The Examiner Defended in a Fair and Sober Answer     237
The Hireling Ministry None of Christ's     249
George Fox Digg'd out of His Burrowes     261
Selected Letters     270
Index     285