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How the idea of religious toleration came to the West
- "Religious intolerance ... is nothing new. In fact, until after the eighteenth century, Christianity was perhaps the most intolerant of all the great world religions. How Christian Europe and the West went from this extreme to their present universal belief in religious toleration is the momentous story fully told ... in this ... book ... [The author] takes readers to a time when both the Catholic Church and the main new Protestant denominations embraced a policy of endorsing religious persecution, coercing unity, and, with the state's help, mercilessly crushing dissent and heresy. This position had its roots in certain intellectual and religious traditions, which [the author] traces before showing how out of the same traditions came the beginnings of pluralism in the West ... Reading these thinkers - from Erasmus and Sir Thomas More to John Milton and John Locke, among others - [the author] brings to light a common, if unexpected, thread: concern for the spiritual welfare of religion itself weighed more in the defense of toleration than did any secular or pragmatic arguments. [This book] exposes a close connection between toleration and religious freedom.-Dust jacket."
- "How the idea of religious toleration came to the West"