Whose Freedoms? Which Religions

Being Asked to participate in this roundtable gave me a welcome opportunity to see how a very fine scholar—one whose training is quite different from my own—approaches an issue (religious freedom) in which I’ve long been interested. Nelson Tebbe is a skillful writer, and the arguments he makes in Religious Freedom in an Egalitarian Age are well thought out and carefully explained. Reading Tebbe’s book afforded me a great deal of pleasure. My interest in religious freedom stems in part from my research on fundamentalism. Fundamentalists often claim that their right to practice their faith is under assault. Fundamentalists are, in turn, routinely described as fanatics who pose a terrible threat to the religious freedom of others. My interest in the topic is also the result of my working in a field—North American religion—in which issues connected to religious freedom hold center stage. In recent years, North American religion has been decisively influenced by books such as Winnifred Sullivan’s The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (2005), Tisa Wenger’s We Have a Religion (2009), Isaac Weiner’s Religion Out Loud (2013), Finbarr Curtis’s Production of American Religious Freedom (2016), and The FBI and Religion (2017), edited by Sylvester Johnson and Steven Weitzman, that have presented bracing reinterpretations of the history of religious freedom in the United States.

Economic freedom · Epistemology · Faith · Freedom of Religion · Fundamentalism · Impossibility · Pleasure · Political science · Politics · Religious freedom · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious studies

• Love the Sin

  Ann Pellegrini, Janet R Jakobsen•Love the Sin•2004

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• We Have a Religion

  Tisa Wenger•We Have a Religion•2009

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