A R Murphy
Biographic Data
| ID | 150503 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A R Murphy |
| GIVEN NAMES | A R |
| FAMILY NAME | Murphy |
| SIGNATURE | MURPHY A R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5569-6098 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 58 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The Deaths and Afterlives of George Floyd and Ashli Babbitt
In this paper, I explore how two recent politically charged deaths—those of George Floyd and Ashli Babbitt—illuminate the broader dynamics inherent in the concept of political martyrdom and its relationship to American democracy. Political martyrdom (as distinct from that associated with religious communities) offers martyrs a life beyond the grave, not by promising eternal life or paradise, but by ensuring them a role in a community’s collective…
Anticlerical legacies
Moderation, Toleration, and Revolution
In this article, I explore the relationship between moderation and toleration in early modern England by focusing on William Penn’s 1685 A Perswasive to Moderation. This work, published by Penn in support of James II’s campaign to implement toleration in England by royal decree, explicitly linked moderation and the campaign for liberty of conscience in which Penn had participated for nearly two decades, in both England and America. More broadly, …
Theorizing Political Martyrdom
From its emergence in early Christianity to its invocation in twenty-first century debates, martyrdom has always highlighted the complex relationship between politics, religion, death, and memory. A specifically political notion of martyrdom beyond the world's faith traditions would facilitate the concept’s more capacious application and analysis. Political martyrdom, I argue, consists of several components: (1) a death, occurring in what we migh…
Making America Exceptional Again
Donald Trump's campaign slogan to “Make America Great Again” captivated the imagination of millions of Americans by contextualizing disparate sources of social resentment as emblematic of a broader story of American decline. Employing a “traditionalist civil religious jeremiad,” Trump called for a reassertion of American exceptionalism, and extolled a romanticized golden age predating transformative social changes (e.g., sexuality, gender roles, …
George Richardson Lecture
2018 marked the 300th anniversary of the death of William Penn, and offered an ideal opportunity to revisit the life and career of this paradoxical figure. I argue that, over the course of his long career, Penn accomplished all that he did not only through his considerable skills (political, oratorical, intellectual) but also because he spent that career at the intersection of an extraordinary number of social networks in early modern England, Eu…
The Past and Present (and Future?) Politics of Religious Liberty
Thomas S. Kidd. Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin is endlessly fascinating. His outsized role in Philadelphia’s civic life, his extensive public service during the revolutionary and founding eras, his celebrated scientific accomplishments, and his personal acquaintance with leading Enlightenment figures like David Hume, Adam Smith, and Joseph Priestley (to say nothing of his decades-long friendship with evangelist George Whitefield)—all these facets of Franklin’s career make hi…
Violence and the World’s Religious Traditions
Violence and the World’s Religious Traditions brings together nine essays from The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence, by an accomplished roster of scholars, into one convenient volume. The range of traditions represented in these pages is broad, encompassing not merely the major monotheistic (Islam, Judaism, Christianity) and South Asian (Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism) traditions, but also indigenous and popular religions from Africa, the Pa…
Response to Teresa M. Bejan’s review of Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Skeletal Lead Burden of the British Royal Navy in Colonial Antigua
Lead (Pb) has been known to be a cause of human poisoning since ancient times, but despite this, it was a widely used metal in the European colonial period. In this study, the relationship between Pb exposure and the demographic variables ancestry and age was explored by comparing the bone Pb levels of individuals that were of either African or European ancestry, excavated from a British Royal Navy hospital cemetery (1793-1822 CE) at English Harb…
From practice to theory to practice
Recent scholarship on religious toleration has been marked by a keen interest in the relationship between theory and practice. This essay takes up the genesis of William Penn’s theorizing about toleration in his experience of imprisonment, focusing on four particular episodes during his early years as a Quaker (between 1667 and 1671). These years were formative for Penn as a young man as well as for the increasingly sophisticated movement for tol…
Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration
This book argues that despite widespread scholarly neglect, William Penn (1644–1718) was a sophisticated political thinker who contributed in important ways to the theory and practice of religious liberty in the early modern Atlantic world. Penn's political thinking unfolded over nearly a half century and was shaped by four concrete political episodes: (1) the controversy over the Second Conventicle Act (1668–1670); (2) the Popish Plot and Exclus…
Tocqueville, Democracy, and Religion
One might be forgiven a sense of wariness (or weariness) when confronted with another book on Tocqueville: what more can be said about the young Frenchman and his nine-month American sojourn that has not already been said? Yet Alan S. Kahan argues that scholars continue to understate the importance of Tocqueville’s views on religion, and that an inordinate focus on Democracy in America has led them to overlook a much broader range of insights. Ul…
The Religion of Democracy
Journal Article The Religion of Democracy: Seven Liberals and the American Moral Tradition Get access By Amy Kittelstrom. (New York: Penguin, 2015. 432 pp. $32.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 103, Issue 1, June 2016, Pages 162–163, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaw027 Published: 01 June 2016
The Emergence of William Penn, 1668-1671
William Penn is a figure whom many scholars know casually, but few know well. Where Penn is known, it is often for one of three things: his 1670 trial, in which he stands up for English liberties and jury independence; as founder of Pennsylvania; or as an apologist for James II's tolerationist agenda, where he often appears as a bit of a royal lackey. Judgments about Penn have ranged widely, from Mabel Brailsford's 1930 hailing of him as “the gre…
An Introduction to Religion and Politics
"An Introduction to Religion and Politics: Theory and Practice." The European Legacy, 20(6), pp. 680–681
The “Ground Zero mosque”
For much of 2010, plans to develop a multipurpose Islamic center near the site of the 9/11 attacks in Lower Manhattan occasioned an intense nationwide debate. In this study of the “Ground Zero mosque” controversy, we focus on questions of identity and the sacred in the contemporary USA. We argue that the response to the “Ground Zero mosque” illuminates three important phenomena. First, it reveals the dynamics of cultural guardianship among those …
Complicating Covenantalism
Making Toleration
Scott Sowerby. Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution. Harvard Historical Studies 181. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. vii + 404 pp. $49.95. ISBN: 978–0–674–07309–8. - Volume 66 Issue 4
Trial Transcript as Political Theory
Political theorists can at times forget that the origins of political theory lie in the struggles of concrete political life. This paper focuses on one arena of political contestation: the collision between dissenters and their communities’ legal systems. It focuses on The Peoples Ancient and Just Liberties Asserted (1670), a purported transcript of the trial of William Penn and William Mead for disturbance of the peace. The trial plays an import…
Religion, Civil Religion, and Civil War
Abraham Lincoln's reverence for the Union and its preservation took on religious significance. Though Lincoln's personal religious convictions are difficult to discern, his presidency was marked by a sacralizing public rhetoric on national identity and the struggle against slavery. The mystical reverence Lincoln displayed for the Union, and the principles of equality on which it was founded, comprised a meaningful civil religion that finds its gr…
Longing, Nostalgia, and Golden Age Politics
I assess several politically powerful ways of drawing on the past in the search for solutions to problems in the present. To probe these dynamics, I turn to the American jeremiad, a longstanding form of political rhetoric that explicitly invokes the past and laments the nation's falling-away from its virtuous foundations. I begin by focusing on the Christian Right's traditionalist jeremiad, which offers both nostalgic and Golden Age rhetoric in i…
The InternetImaginaire- By Patrice Flichy
Damned Nation
"Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction." American Nineteenth Century History, 20(3), pp. 320–321
Tolerance, Toleration, and the Liberal Tradition
The tendency to use tolerance and toleration as roughly interchangable terms has encouraged misunderstanding of the liberal legacy and impeded efforts to improve upon it. We can improve our understanding by defining "toleration" as a set of social or political practices and "tolerance" as a set of attitudes. This distinction reveals the possibility of four clusters of attitudes: tolerant toleration, exemplified by John Locke; intolerant antitoler…
Longing, Nostalgia, and Golden Age Politics
I assess several politically powerful ways of drawing on the past in the search for solutions to problems in the present. To probe these dynamics, I turn to the American jeremiad, a longstanding form of political rhetoric that explicitly invokes the past and laments the nation's falling-away from its virtuous foundations. I begin by focusing on the Christian Right's traditionalist jeremiad, which offers both nostalgic and Golden Age rhetoric in i…
Theorizing Political Martyrdom
From its emergence in early Christianity to its invocation in twenty-first century debates, martyrdom has always highlighted the complex relationship between politics, religion, death, and memory. A specifically political notion of martyrdom beyond the world's faith traditions would facilitate the concept’s more capacious application and analysis. Political martyrdom, I argue, consists of several components: (1) a death, occurring in what we migh…
Rawls and a Shrinking Liberty of Conscience
John Rawls claims that his system of political liberalism represents the “completion and extension” of liberty of conscience, a grand solution to the problem of religious diversity that accompanied liberalism's emergence in the early modern world. I argue that such a claim cannot withstand historical scrutiny, that Rawlsian liberalism instead represents aretreatfrom the commitments that drove liberal tolerationists. Rawls's political liberalism f…
The Uneasy Relationship between Social Contract Theory and Religious Toleration
This essay examines two ideas central to the liberal tradition and commonly associated in American political thought: social contract theory and religious toleration. Through the examination of four important cases-the religious establishments in early Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, and the thought of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke-I suggest that historically and conceptually these two ideas have little to do with each other and may be fundamental…
Skeletal Lead Burden of the British Royal Navy in Colonial Antigua
Lead (Pb) has been known to be a cause of human poisoning since ancient times, but despite this, it was a widely used metal in the European colonial period. In this study, the relationship between Pb exposure and the demographic variables ancestry and age was explored by comparing the bone Pb levels of individuals that were of either African or European ancestry, excavated from a British Royal Navy hospital cemetery (1793-1822 CE) at English Harb…
Trial Transcript as Political Theory
Political theorists can at times forget that the origins of political theory lie in the struggles of concrete political life. This paper focuses on one arena of political contestation: the collision between dissenters and their communities’ legal systems. It focuses on The Peoples Ancient and Just Liberties Asserted (1670), a purported transcript of the trial of William Penn and William Mead for disturbance of the peace. The trial plays an import…
Making America Exceptional Again
Donald Trump's campaign slogan to “Make America Great Again” captivated the imagination of millions of Americans by contextualizing disparate sources of social resentment as emblematic of a broader story of American decline. Employing a “traditionalist civil religious jeremiad,” Trump called for a reassertion of American exceptionalism, and extolled a romanticized golden age predating transformative social changes (e.g., sexuality, gender roles, …
Two American Jeremiads
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
From practice to theory to practice
Recent scholarship on religious toleration has been marked by a keen interest in the relationship between theory and practice. This essay takes up the genesis of William Penn’s theorizing about toleration in his experience of imprisonment, focusing on four particular episodes during his early years as a Quaker (between 1667 and 1671). These years were formative for Penn as a young man as well as for the increasingly sophisticated movement for tol…
The Religion of Democracy
Journal Article The Religion of Democracy: Seven Liberals and the American Moral Tradition Get access By Amy Kittelstrom. (New York: Penguin, 2015. 432 pp. $32.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 103, Issue 1, June 2016, Pages 162–163, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaw027 Published: 01 June 2016
Justice and the Politics of Difference. Iris Marion Young
Justice and the Politics of Difference. Iris Marion Young
The Uneasy Relationship between Social Contract Theory and Religious Toleration
This essay examines two ideas central to the liberal tradition and commonly associated in American political thought: social contract theory and religious toleration. Through the examination of four important cases-the religious establishments in early Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, and the thought of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke-I suggest that historically and conceptually these two ideas have little to do with each other and may be fundamental…
Tolerance, Toleration, and the Liberal Tradition
The tendency to use tolerance and toleration as roughly interchangable terms has encouraged misunderstanding of the liberal legacy and impeded efforts to improve upon it. We can improve our understanding by defining "toleration" as a set of social or political practices and "tolerance" as a set of attitudes. This distinction reveals the possibility of four clusters of attitudes: tolerant toleration, exemplified by John Locke; intolerant antitoler…
Rawls and a Shrinking Liberty of Conscience
John Rawls claims that his system of political liberalism represents the “completion and extension” of liberty of conscience, a grand solution to the problem of religious diversity that accompanied liberalism's emergence in the early modern world. I argue that such a claim cannot withstand historical scrutiny, that Rawlsian liberalism instead represents aretreatfrom the commitments that drove liberal tolerationists. Rawls's political liberalism f…
Conscience and Community
Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham
Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham. By Thomas L. Pangle. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. 285p. $39.95. Thomas Pangle's book begins with a flourish: Taking issue with modern rationalists (e.g., Hobbes, Locke) and their claims that Scripture is wholly amenable to and comprehensible by the tools of rational analysis, Pangle argues that “this contention of theirs is in fact a key dimension of a titanic strategy of propag…
"One Nation under God," September 11 and the Chosen Nation
Although Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell's provocative interpretations of September 11 as divine punishment for decadent American social morality were widely criticized, I argue that their underlying premises are far more "American" than their critics might admit. I make this claim by exploring several historical episodes in which critics have viewed spiritual offenses as threatening the promise of American life: (1) the late-twentieth-century cr…
Prodigal Nation
This book traces the emergence and development of the American jeremiad, a form of political rhetoric that laments the nation's decline from a virtuous past and calls it to repentance and renewal. Employed by Americans of all political persuasions since the earliest days of settlement, the jeremiad has proven to be a powerful way of invoking the American past in order to chart a brighter American future. Part I of the book focuses on three especi…
Two American Jeremiads
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Longing, Nostalgia, and Golden Age Politics
I assess several politically powerful ways of drawing on the past in the search for solutions to problems in the present. To probe these dynamics, I turn to the American jeremiad, a longstanding form of political rhetoric that explicitly invokes the past and laments the nation's falling-away from its virtuous foundations. I begin by focusing on the Christian Right's traditionalist jeremiad, which offers both nostalgic and Golden Age rhetoric in i…
The InternetImaginaire- By Patrice Flichy
Religion, Civil Religion, and Civil War
Abraham Lincoln's reverence for the Union and its preservation took on religious significance. Though Lincoln's personal religious convictions are difficult to discern, his presidency was marked by a sacralizing public rhetoric on national identity and the struggle against slavery. The mystical reverence Lincoln displayed for the Union, and the principles of equality on which it was founded, comprised a meaningful civil religion that finds its gr…
Making Toleration
Scott Sowerby. Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution. Harvard Historical Studies 181. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. vii + 404 pp. $49.95. ISBN: 978–0–674–07309–8. - Volume 66 Issue 4
Trial Transcript as Political Theory
Political theorists can at times forget that the origins of political theory lie in the struggles of concrete political life. This paper focuses on one arena of political contestation: the collision between dissenters and their communities’ legal systems. It focuses on The Peoples Ancient and Just Liberties Asserted (1670), a purported transcript of the trial of William Penn and William Mead for disturbance of the peace. The trial plays an import…
The “Ground Zero mosque”
For much of 2010, plans to develop a multipurpose Islamic center near the site of the 9/11 attacks in Lower Manhattan occasioned an intense nationwide debate. In this study of the “Ground Zero mosque” controversy, we focus on questions of identity and the sacred in the contemporary USA. We argue that the response to the “Ground Zero mosque” illuminates three important phenomena. First, it reveals the dynamics of cultural guardianship among those …
Complicating Covenantalism
The Emergence of William Penn, 1668-1671
William Penn is a figure whom many scholars know casually, but few know well. Where Penn is known, it is often for one of three things: his 1670 trial, in which he stands up for English liberties and jury independence; as founder of Pennsylvania; or as an apologist for James II's tolerationist agenda, where he often appears as a bit of a royal lackey. Judgments about Penn have ranged widely, from Mabel Brailsford's 1930 hailing of him as “the gre…
An Introduction to Religion and Politics
"An Introduction to Religion and Politics: Theory and Practice." The European Legacy, 20(6), pp. 680–681
Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration
This book argues that despite widespread scholarly neglect, William Penn (1644–1718) was a sophisticated political thinker who contributed in important ways to the theory and practice of religious liberty in the early modern Atlantic world. Penn's political thinking unfolded over nearly a half century and was shaped by four concrete political episodes: (1) the controversy over the Second Conventicle Act (1668–1670); (2) the Popish Plot and Exclus…
Tocqueville, Democracy, and Religion
One might be forgiven a sense of wariness (or weariness) when confronted with another book on Tocqueville: what more can be said about the young Frenchman and his nine-month American sojourn that has not already been said? Yet Alan S. Kahan argues that scholars continue to understate the importance of Tocqueville’s views on religion, and that an inordinate focus on Democracy in America has led them to overlook a much broader range of insights. Ul…
The Religion of Democracy
Journal Article The Religion of Democracy: Seven Liberals and the American Moral Tradition Get access By Amy Kittelstrom. (New York: Penguin, 2015. 432 pp. $32.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 103, Issue 1, June 2016, Pages 162–163, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaw027 Published: 01 June 2016
Skeletal Lead Burden of the British Royal Navy in Colonial Antigua
Lead (Pb) has been known to be a cause of human poisoning since ancient times, but despite this, it was a widely used metal in the European colonial period. In this study, the relationship between Pb exposure and the demographic variables ancestry and age was explored by comparing the bone Pb levels of individuals that were of either African or European ancestry, excavated from a British Royal Navy hospital cemetery (1793-1822 CE) at English Harb…
From practice to theory to practice
Recent scholarship on religious toleration has been marked by a keen interest in the relationship between theory and practice. This essay takes up the genesis of William Penn’s theorizing about toleration in his experience of imprisonment, focusing on four particular episodes during his early years as a Quaker (between 1667 and 1671). These years were formative for Penn as a young man as well as for the increasingly sophisticated movement for tol…
Violence and the World’s Religious Traditions
Violence and the World’s Religious Traditions brings together nine essays from The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence, by an accomplished roster of scholars, into one convenient volume. The range of traditions represented in these pages is broad, encompassing not merely the major monotheistic (Islam, Judaism, Christianity) and South Asian (Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism) traditions, but also indigenous and popular religions from Africa, the Pa…
Response to Teresa M. Bejan’s review of Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Political science (29 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Law (26 works) · Politics (25 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (20 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Law (18 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · History (10 works) · Toleration (10 works)