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Religion in Public: Locke's Political Theology

Cultural Memory in the Present

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Religion in Public: Locke's Political Theology

By: Elizabeth Pritchard
Narrated by: Tim Lundeen
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John Locke's theory of toleration is generally seen as advocating the privatization of religion. This interpretation has become conventional wisdom: secularization is widely understood as entailing the privatization of religion, and the separation of religion from power. This audiobook turns that conventional wisdom on its head and argues that Locke secularizes religion, that is, makes it worldly, public, and political. In the name of diverse citizenship, Locke reconstructs religion as persuasion, speech, and fashion. He insists on a consensus that human rights are sacred insofar as humans are the creatures, and thus, the property of God. Drawing on a range of sources beyond Locke's own writings, Pritchard portrays the secular not as religion's separation from power, but rather as its affiliation with subtler, and sometimes insidious, forms of power. As a result, she captures the range of anxieties and conflicts attending religion's secularization: denunciations of promiscuous bodies freed from patriarchal religious and political formations, correlations between secular religion and colonialist education and conversion efforts, and more recently, condemnations of the coercive and injurious force of unrestricted religious speech.

©2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University (P)2014 Redwood Audiobooks
Political Science Politics & Government Religious Studies Human Rights Middle East Wisdom Public Theology

Critic Reviews

"Political theorists, historians, and scholars of religion and culture should all find their views of Locke challenged and enriched in Pritchard's multifaceted reconsideration of this key figure and his legacy." (Andrew R. Murphy, Rutgers University)
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