Banished by his fellow colonists in the dead of winter, Roger Williams endured years of exile among the Narragansett Indians and narrates this tumultuous tale in the peaceful last years of his life. In this panorama of war and love, the reader finds the freedom of conscience is an idea worth dying for. A "Los Angeles Times" Best Book of 2001.

A revisionist study of Williams' discourse artistry that analyzes Williams (1603-1683) as skillful, rational, and effective in the public forum, a conclusion based on: examination of Williams' spoken and written rhetoric; an analysis of the repressive circumstances of the era; and an evaluation of the rhetorical context of Williams' discourses. The text includes research evidence including data from manuscript collections, from the Bodleian Library at Oxford and the Pembroke Library at Cambridge, and from the Folger Library in Washington, D.C. The study also contains illustrations, including several woodcuts.

In Roger Williams’s Little Book of Virtues, religion writer Becky Garrison delves into the life of her eleventh/twelfth great-grandfather to uncover the untold story behind this forgotten pioneer of religious liberty. Employing a format reminiscent of How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, Garrison examines Roger Williams’s work through the lens of the four classical virtues, which, as she observes, define values that have an almost universal consensus regardless of one’s particular belief system. How can Roger Williams’s life and ministry shed light on the role of the citizens in a global pluralized world? Garrison asks why this conversation focusing on the role of religion in public life got relegated to moralists like William J. Bennett, who crafted a fundamentalist rulebook that views these virtues through a very strict black-and-white lens. In this age of horizontal social media, what prevents people from standing up to these modern-day Goliaths and taking away their media megaphone? Here Garrison sees hope in the rise of the “nones” who, like Williams, follow their own spiritual path and create spaces that embrace women, POC, LGBT folks, and others marginalized by the institutional church.

A revelatory look at how Roger Williams shaped the nature of religion, political power, and individual rights in America. For four hundred years, Americans have wrestled with and fought over two concepts that define the nature of the nation: the proper relation between church and state and between a free individual and the state. These debates began with the extraordinary thought and struggles of Roger Williams, who had an unparalleled understanding of the conflict between a government that justified itself by "reason of state"-i.e. national security-and its perceived "will of God" and the "ancient rights and liberties" of individuals. This is a story of power, set against Puritan America and the English Civil War. Williams's interactions with King James, Francis Bacon, Oliver Cromwell, and his mentor Edward Coke set his course, but his fundamental ideas came to fruition in America, as Williams, though a Puritan, collided with John Winthrop's vision of his "City upon a Hill." Acclaimed historian John M. Barry explores the development of these fundamental ideas through the story of the man who was the first to link religious freedom to individual liberty, and who created in America the first government and society on earth informed by those beliefs. The story is essential to the continuing debate over how we define the role of religion and political power in modern American life.

This is a facsimile reprint of the 1964 edition published in New York by Russell & Russell, Inc., which was itself an enlarged version of the original produced in 1867 by the Narragansett Club Publications, Providence, RI.