Andrew R. Murphy Books

Questions of tolerance are as old as human society. In acknowledgment of the crucial importance of tolerance and intolerance in contemporary life, a conference was convened in 2007. The 16 papers included in this volume all have their origins in that conference, which brought together a wide array of over 100 academics from fifteen nations, all interested in furthering discussion on tolerance. The goal of this book is to stimulate further historical and contemporary critical reflection on the foundational philosophical, religious, and cultural value and problematic future of tolerance. The title – Literature, Culture, and Tolerance – emphasizes the interconnections between the social and the artistic, between the political and the literary, in thinking through the phenomena of tolerance and intolerance in the modern world.

It may surprise many that William Penn, who founded one of the thirteen original American colonies, spent just four years on American soil. Even more surprising, though, is Penn's remarkable impact on the fundamental principles of religious freedom on both sides of the Atlantic, especially given his tumultuous life: from his youthful radicalism as leader of the Quaker movement to his role as governor and proprietor of a major American colony; from royal courtier to alleged traitor to the Crown. In the first major biography of this important transatlantic figure in more than forty years, Andrew R. Murphy takes readers through the defiant and complex life of a religious dissenter, political theorist, and social activist.