Religious Toleration

Author(s):  
Perez Zagorin

The fullest development of the concept of religious toleration in the West occurred in Christian Europe between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The emergence and establishment of religious pluralism in modern societies, and most notably in the Western world, has been very largely the result of the evolution and gradual victory of the principle of religious toleration on a variety of grounds. Among the world's great monotheistic religions, Christianity has been the most intolerant. Early Christianity was intolerant of Judaism, from which it had to separate itself, and of ancient paganism, whose suppression it demanded. The New Testament recognized heresy as a danger to religious truth and the Christian communities. Heresy entailed the existence of its opposite, orthodoxy, which meant right thinking and true belief. Following World War II, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 named freedom of religion, conscience, and thought as basic human rights.

1988 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-241
Author(s):  
David Crowe

The Soviet absorption of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania during World War II caused hundreds of thousands of Baltic immigrants to come to the West, where they established strong, viable ethnic communities, often in league with groups that had left the region earlier. At first, Baltic publishing and publications centered almost exclusively on nationalistic themes that decried the loss of Baltic independence and attacked the Soviet Union for its role in this matter. In time, however, serious scholarship began to replace some of the passionate outpourings, and a strong, academic field of Baltic scholarship emerged in the West that dealt with all aspects of Baltic history, politics, culture, language, and other matters, regardless of its political or nationalistic implications. Over the past sixteen years, these efforts have produced a new body of Baltic publishing that has revived a strong interest in Baltic studies and has insured that regardless of the continued Soviet-domination of the region, the study of the culture and history of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania will remain a set fixture in Western scholarship on Eastern Europe.


2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-90
Author(s):  
Titus Presler

Western world mission initiatives since World War II have become captive to a dominant emphasis on socioeconomic amelioration. The Poverty Captivity of Mission departs from the economically multivalent mission patterns of Jesus, early Christian communities, and the medieval church. It typically recapitulates assumptions of Western and white superiority embedded in colonial emphases on “civilizing” mission. Strategies for its liberation include learning from the Majority World, reaching middle and elite classes as well as the poor, developing relationships of companionship and friendship, and employing asset-based community development.


1957 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-236
Author(s):  
Franklyn D. Holzman

The Mongolian People's Republic, or Outer Mongolia as it is more commonly known, is a country of some 600,000 square mile area which is bounded on the north by Soviet Siberia, on the south by China, with Manchuria to the east and Sinkiang to the west. Many centuries ago, the western world lived in fear of the Mongol hordes which swept westward as far as the Danube laying waste to all which lay before them. Over the years, the power and importance of Mongolia declined and it fell, at different times, under Russian and Chinese influence respectively. More recently it was under Chinese domination in the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1911, as a result of internal disorders within China, the Mongolians were able to break loose and set themselves up as an autonomous nation. This so-called period of autonomy lasted until 1921 at which time the Soviets gained de facto control of the government. Actual power still resided legally in the hands of a local theocratic ruler. Upon his death in 1924, the present government was established. Since 1924, Outer Mongolia has been a Soviet satellite in the same sense that the eastern European nations have been since the end of World War II. In fact, Outer Mongolia has the dubious distinction of having been the first “People's Republic” to survive as an “independent” nation. Recently, this small nation has been in the public eye as a result of the Soviet Union's unsuccessful attempt to secure for it UN status.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lívia Gažová

Architectural journals were, for their readers, architects and planners in the former Czechoslovakia, one of the few means of gaining information about Western planning in the post-war period. Despite the Iron Curtain, Czechoslovak planners were significantly influenced by contemporary discussions in the West. Analysis of the content of five major architectural journals from the period 1945–1970 proves that Czechoslovak urban planning discourse was not fully separated from the Western world, but was largely developed in contact with the West. The architectural magazines presented Western content in different genres. In the first years after World War II, the magazines used comprehensive studies based on Western projects and materials obtained mainly from organized excursions abroad. Later, with the introduction of the communist regime, the magazines included social critique, critique of cosmopolitanism, and brief articles based on selections from the foreign press. In the early nineteen-fifties, Soviet ideologybased parodies of Western planning appeared. After the rejection of socialist realism in the mid-fifties, the magazines included regular sections from the Western press and even reportage from abroad.


Author(s):  
Emily Robins Sharpe

The Jewish Canadian writer Miriam Waddington returned repeatedly to the subject of the Spanish Civil War, searching for hope amid the ruins of Spanish democracy. The conflict, a prelude to World War II, inspired an outpouring of literature and volunteerism. My paper argues for Waddington’s unique poetic perspective, in which she represents the Holocaust as the Spanish Civil War’s outgrowth while highlighting the deeply personal repercussions of the war – consequences for women, for the earth, and for community. Waddington’s poetry connects women’s rights to human rights, Canadian peace to European war, and Jewish persecution to Spanish carnage.


Author(s):  
Allen Buchanan

This chapter helps to confirm the explanatory power of the naturalistic theory of moral progress outlined in previous chapters by making two main points. First, it shows that the theory helps to explain how and why the modern human rights movement arose when it did. Second, it shows that the advances in inclusiveness achieved by the modern human rights movement depended upon the fortunate coincidence of a constellation of contingent cultural and economic conditions—and that it is therefore a dangerous mistake to assume that continued progress must occur, or even that the status quo will not substantially deteriorate. This chapter also helps to explain a disturbing period of regression (in terms of the recognition of equal basic status) that occurred between the success of British abolitionism and the founding of the modern human rights movement at the end of World War II.


2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amitav Acharya

While the West woke up to the threat to the liberal international order when Donald Trump was elected U.S. president, its decline was apparent even at the height of the Obama-Clinton era. What follows the end of the U.S.-dominated world order is not a return to multipolarity as many pundits assume. The twenty-first-century world—politically and culturally diverse but economically and institutionally interlinked—is vastly different from the multipolar world that existed prior to World War II. China and India are major powers now; and globalization will not end, but will take on a new form, driven more by the East than the West and more by South-South linkages than North-North ones. The system of global governance will fragment, with new actors and institutions chipping away at the old UN-based system. Liberal values and institutions will not disappear, but will have to coexist and enmesh with the ideas and institutions of others, especially those initiated by China. This “multiplex world” carries both risks and opportunities for managing international stability. Instead of bemoaning the passing of the old liberal order, the West should accept the new realities and search for new ways to ensure peace and stability in partnership with the rising powers.


1953 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-167
Author(s):  
S. Bernard

The advent of a new administration in the United States and the passage of seven years since the end of World War II make it appropriate to review the political situation which has developed in Europe during that period and to ask what choices now are open to the West in its relations with the Soviet Union.The end of World War II found Europe torn between conflicting conceptions of international politics and of the goals that its members should seek. The democratic powers, led by the United States, viewed the world in traditional, Western, terms. The major problem, as they saw it, was one of working out a moral and legal order to which all powers could subscribe, and in which they would live. Quite independently of the environment, they assumed that one political order was both more practicable and more desirable than some other, and that their policies should be directed toward its attainment.


2018 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 567-594 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Jackson

This article examines representations of imperialism, anti-colonial nationalism, and decolonization in US textbooks for American and World History courses between 1930 and 1965. Broadly speaking, 1930s and early 1940s texts lauded imperialism and associated European colonialism with American imperialist activities. Authors extolled the benefits for colonial peoples, including literacy, good government, and peace, and anti-colonial nationalists were caricatured as irrational and ungrateful. US global engagement during and after World War II gradually changed the narrative, particularly following Philippine independence in 1946, as texts subsequently portrayed the US as an enlightened decolonizer. Postwar textbooks tended to argue that nationalism was a product of Western ideas and that anti-colonial nationalism was a triumph for Western civilization. While constructing this narrative of the spread of Western values, textbook authors largely marginalized colonial actors, promoted unflattering and stereotyped views of Africans and Asians, and de-emphasized the extreme violence inherent in the decolonization process.


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