Overview

In the secular, contemporary world, many people question the relevance of religion. Many also wonder whether religiously-informed speech and beliefs should be tolerated in the public square, and whether religions hinder freedom. In this volume, Wendell Bird reminds us that our basic freedoms are the important legacies of religious speech arising from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Bird demonstrates that religious speech, rather than secular or irreligious speech based on other belief systems, historically made the demands and justifications for at least six critical freedoms: speech and press, rights for the criminally accused, higher education, emancipation from slavery, and freedom from discrimination. Bringing an historically-informed approach to the development of some of the most important freedoms in the Anglo-American world, this volume provides a new framework for our understanding of the origins of crucial freedoms. It also serves as a powerful reminder of an aspect of history that is steadily being forgotten or overlooked-that many of our basic freedoms are the historical legacies of religious speech arising from Judeo-Christian faiths.

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9781316514733

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Wendell Bird is the author of three other books on freedoms of speech and press: Press and Speech under Assault: The Early Supreme Court Justices, the Sedition Act of 1798, and the Campaign against Dissent (Oxford University Press, 2016); Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 (Harvard University Press, 2020); and The Revolution in Freedoms of Press and Speech: From Blackstone to the First Amendment and Fox's Libel Act (Oxford University Press, 2020). He earned a D.Phil. in legal history from the University of Oxford, and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He is a Visiting Scholar at Emory University School of Law.

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