Carson traces the subtle but enormous shift in the way we have come to understand tolerance over recent years--from defending the rights of those who hold different beliefs to affirming all beliefs as equally valid and correct. He looks back at the history of this shift and discusses its implications for culture today, especially its bearing on democracy, discussions about good and evil, and Christian truth claims. --from publisher description

Across European societies, pluralism is experienced in new and challenging ways. Our understanding of what it means for societies to be accepting of diversity has to therefore be revisited. This volume seeks to meet this challenge with perspectives that consider new dynamics towards tolerance, intolerance and respect.

In many ways, religion was the United States' first prejudice—both an early source of bigotry and the object of the first sustained efforts to limit its effects. Spanning more than two centuries across colonial British America and the United States, The First Prejudice offers a groundbreaking exploration of the early history of persecution and toleration. The twelve essays in this volume were composed by leading historians with an eye to the larger significance of religious tolerance and intolerance. Individual chapters examine the prosecution of religious crimes, the biblical sources of tolerance and intolerance, the British imperial context of toleration, the bounds of Native American spiritual independence, the nuances of anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, the resilience of African American faiths, and the challenges confronted by skeptics and freethinkers. The First Prejudice presents a revealing portrait of the rhetoric, regulations, and customs that shaped the relationships between people of different faiths in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. It relates changes in law and language to the lived experience of religious conflict and religious cooperation, highlighting the crucial ways in which they molded U.S. culture and politics. By incorporating a broad range of groups and religious differences in its accounts of tolerance and intolerance, The First Prejudice opens a significant new vista on the understanding of America's long experience with diversity.

Today's message of cultural acceptance is dangerously distorted and deceptive. In a world that shouts: 'If you truly care about other people, you must agree that their beliefs, values, lifestyle, and truth claims are equal and as valid as yours!' it's no wonder our youth are confused. The Beauty of Intolerance-brand-new from Josh McDowell with son Sean McDowell-cuts through the confusion and points readers back to the place where the only truth resides...Jesus Christ. Tied directly to the Heroic Truth initiative launched by the Josh McDowell Ministry, the McDowells will share how a biblical view of truth can counter cultural tolerance and encourage a love and acceptance of others apart from their actions with a heart of Christlike compassion.

An expert re-interpretation of how religious toleration and conflict developed in early modern Europe.

This collection of essays investigates signs of toleration, recognition, respect and other positive forms of interaction between and within religious groups of late antiquity. At the same time, it acknowledges that examples of tolerance are significantly fewer in ancient sources than examples of intolerance and are often limited to insiders, while outsiders often met with contempt, or even outright violence. The essays take both perspectives seriously by analysing the complexity pertaining to these encounters. Religious concerns, ethnicity, gender and other social factors central to identity formation were often intertwined and they yielded different ways of drawing the limits of tolerance and intolerance. This book enhances our understanding of the formative centuries of Jewish and Christian religious traditions. It also brings the results of historical inquiry into dialogue with present-day questions of religious tolerance.

Topographies of Tolerance and Intolerance challenges the narrative of a simple progression of tolerance and the establishment of confessional identity during the early modern period. These essays explore the lived experiences of religious plurality, providing insights into the developments and drawbacks of religious coexistence in this turbulent period. The essays examine three main groups of actors—the laity, parish clergy, and unacknowledged religious minorities—in pre- and post-Westphalian Europe. Throughout this period, the laity navigated their own often-fluid religious beliefs, the expectations of conformity held by their religious and political leaders, and the complex realities of life that involved interactions with co-religious and non-co-religious family, neighbors, and business associates on a daily basis. Contributors are: James Blakeley, Amy Nelson Burnett, Victoria Christman, Geoffrey Dipple, Timothy G. Fehler, Emily Fisher Gray, Benjamin J. Kaplan, David M. Luebke, David Mayes, Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, William Bradford Smith, and Shira Weidenbaum.

It seems more urgent than ever before to fend off the rising wave of intolerance and at the same time determine the nature of tolerance and its limits. As Ricoeur says in his Foreword: "Tolerance is a tricky subject: too easy or too difficult. It is indeed too easy to deplore intolerance, without putting oneself into question, oneself and the different allegiances with which each person identifies." In order to explore these complexities, he has gathered together a number of prominent thinkers from various parts of the world and areas of activity and invited them to reflect on the "obstacles and limits to tolerance." The Declaration of Principles on Tolerance, issued by the United Nations in 1995, rounds up this remarkable collection of essays. Contributors: Norberto Bobbio, Vaclav Havel, Jeanne Hersch, Bernard Williams, Octavio Paz, Ghislain Waterlot, Antoine Garapon, Mario Bettati, Yehudi Menuhin, Ramin Jahanbegloo, Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, Hans Küng, Wole Soyinka, Ionna Kuçuradi, Monique Canto-Sperber, Paul Ricoeur, Desmond Tutu. DIOGENES LIBRARY

This collection provides important insights into the relationships among diverse groups in the period from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries.

Outwardly, we live in an era that appears more open-minded, non-judgemental and tolerant than in any time in human history. The very term intolerant invokes moral condemnation. We are constantly reminded to understand the importance of respecting different cultures and diversities. In this pugnacious new book, Frank Furedi argues that despite the democratisation of public life and the expansion of freedom, society is dominated by a culture that not only tolerates but often encourages intolerance. Often the intolerance is directed at people who refuse to accept the conventional wisdom and who are stigmatised as 'deniers'. Frequently intolerance comes into its own in clashes over cultural values and lifestyles. People are condemned for the food they eat, how they parent and for wearing religious symbols in public. This book challenges the 'quiet mood of tolerance' towards morally stigmatised forms of behaviour. The author examines recent forms of 'unacceptable behaviour'. It will tease out the real motives and drivers of intolerance.