Gobernar pese a las conciencias. Roger Williams en la frontera entre agustinismo y liberalismo

Roger Williams (1604-1683) es considerado uno de los principales autores que fundamentó el camino para ideas constitutivas de la vida política moderna como la libertad de conciencia, la tolerancia y la neutralidad del Estado en materia religiosa. Varias de ellas quedaron plasmadas en su famosa obra El sangriento dogma de la persecución por causa de conciencia (1644). Sin embargo, lo distintivo de Williams no reside únicamente en el hecho de su modernidad, sino en que sostuvo estas ideas recurriendo a la amplitud de la tradición bíblica como de pensamiento cristiano. Por lo anterior, la propuesta de este ensayo consiste en rescatar la dimensión cristiana de Williams y mostrar su continuidad con el pensamiento político de San Agustín en lo que refiere al orden y paz de la ciudad, mediante un análisis comparado de sus ideas. Para ello, se definirán los contornos de la tolerancia religiosa propuesta por Williams en relación con el problema de la libertad de conciencia en El sangriento dogma, a fin de compararlo con algunos rasgos generales del pensamiento agustiniano contenido en La ciudad de Dios. Por último, se mostrará cómo esta noción de tolerancia puede contrastarse con proposiciones de origen liberal, en específico tomando como ejemplo la Carta sobre la tolerancia de John Locke. Esto permitirá ilustrar la distancia que existe entre la posición cristiana y la liberal.

Roger Williams and the Indian Business

Exploring Roger Williams business on the borderlands of New England is as central to explaining his life as his theological and political debates. As in other corners of Early America, Williams's daily activities involved regular and sustained interactions with his Indigenous neighbors in his home, trading business, and colonial politics.

Mendelssohn, Kant, and Religious Pluralism

Two foremost spokesmen for the German Enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant, continued the defence of the separation of church and state that was at the heart of the Enlightenment in general and advocated by such great predecessors as Roger Williams and John Locke and contemporaries such as James Madison. The difference between Mendelssohn and Kant on which I focus here is that while Mendelssohn argues against his critics that Judaism is the appropriate religion for a specific people without being appropriate for all, thus implying more generally that different religions are appropriate for groups with different histories, Kant argues first that Judaism is not a genuine religion at all, second that Christianity provides the most suitable symbols or aesthetic representations of the core truths of the religion of reason, and finally that in any case all historical religion will ultimately fade away in favour of the pure religion of reason. Kant’s assumptions are tendentious and his conclusion implausible; Mendelssohn’s view that religion and differences of religion are here to stay provides a far stronger basis for genuine toleration and a strict separation of church and state.

Law and Religion in the Liberal State

This contribution reviews the book titled Law and Religion in the Liberal State, and edited by two scholars, namely Md Jahid Hossain Bhuiyan and Darryn Jensen. The book contains a collection of papers dealing with the relationship between law and religion in liberal jurisdictions such as Great Britain, Europe, Italy, the USA, Australia and India. It also contains a few contributions that explore the relationship between religious freedom and certain traditions, such as Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity. It also has a contribution on the theological ideas of Roger Williams, who is regarded as the founder of the Rhode Island's colony.