Overview

"On the north end of London lies an old nonconformist burial ground named Bunhill Fields. Bunhill became the final resting place for some of the most honored names of English Protestantism. Burial outside the city walls symbolized that those interred at Bunhill lived and died outside the English body politic. Bunhill, its location declares, is the proper home for undomesticated dissenters. Among more than 120,000 graves, three monuments stand in the central courtyard: one for John Bunyan (1628-1688), a second for Daniel Defoe (1660?-1731), and a third for William Blake (1757-1827). Undomesticated Dissent asks, """"why these three monuments?"""" The answer, as Curtis Freeman leads readers to discover, is an idea as vital and transformative for public life today as it was unsettling and revolutionary then. To tell the untold tale of the Bunhill graves, Freeman focuses on the three classic texts by Bunyan, Defoe, and Blake - The Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and Jerusalem - as testaments of dissent. Their enduring literary power, as Freeman shows, derives from their original political and religious contexts. But Freeman also traces the abiding prophetic influence of these texts, revealing the confluence of great literature and principled religious nonconformity in the checkered story of democratic political arrangements. Undomesticated Dissent provides a sweeping intellectual history of the public virtue of religiously motivated dissent from the seventeenth century to the present, by carefully comparing, contrasting, and then weighing the various types of dissent - evangelical and spiritual dissent (Bunyan), economic and social dissent (Defoe), radical and apocalyptic dissent (Blake). Freeman offers dissenting imagination as a generative source for democracy, as well as a force for resistance to the coercive powers of domestication. By placing Bunyan, Defoe, and Blake within an extended argument about the nature and ends of democracy, Undomesticated Dissent reveals how these three men transmitted their democratic ideas across the globe, hidden within the text of their stories. Freeman concludes that dissent, so crucial to the establishing of democracy, remains equally essential for its flourishing. Buried deep in their full narrative of religion and resistance, the three monuments at Bunhill together declare that dissent is not disloyalty, and that democracy depends on dissent."

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9781481306881

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Notwithstanding the thorough scholarship that undergirds this book the text is unfailingly accessible and engaging--perhaps one of my most enjoyable reads this year. -- John E. Colwell -- Regent's Reviews Refreshingly informative. -- Choice Curtis Freeman's Undomesticated Dissent is a timely read for Christians of all stripes, not just Baptists and their kin, who are its main audience. It raises fundamental questions about the role of opposition in how we conceive of Christianity, and that is exactly the reason you should read it and discuss it with your friends who care about the unity of the church. -- Lori Branch -- Commentary Magazine When one chooses a topic that is centered around nonconformity, anarchism, resistance, symbolism, and subversion, one runs the risk of a disordered narrative, but also gains the possibility of breaking new ground, of taking the reader into new lands, or new depths. This is the cost-benefit dilemma that Curtis W. Freeman embraces in Undomesticated Dissent, as he presses the tradition of religious dissent in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (and beyond), and offers his provocative and passionate reading of several provocative and passionate writers. -- Michael R. Stevens -- Journal of Markets & Morality Curtis Freeman has written a book as unexpected as it is timely...This book is creative and constructive, instructive and inspiring. It is a book that cannot be merely read but lived. -- Spencer Boersma -- Reading Religion Freemanas compelling narrative bears out the complexity of a religious phenomenon characterized more by existential fortitude and a willingness to challenge authority than a set of fixed principles or doctrines. -- J. Scott Jackson -- The Christian Century Illuminating and thought provoking in its sweeping view of the nonconformist tradition. -- Ian Birch -- Baptist Union of Scotland

Notwithstanding the thorough scholarship that undergirds this book the text is unfailingly accessible and engaging--perhaps one of my most enjoyable reads this year.--John E. Colwell Regent's Reviews

Notwithstanding the thorough scholarship that undergirds this book the text is unfailingly accessible and engaging--perhaps one of my most enjoyable reads this year. --John E. Colwell Regent's Reviews

Notwithstanding the thorough scholarship that undergirds this book the text is unfailingly accessible and engaging--perhaps one of my most enjoyable reads this year. -- John E. Colwell -- Regent's Reviews

Author Information

Curtis W. Freeman is Research Professor of Theology and Director of the Baptist House of Studies at Duke Divinity School. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.

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