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God and Government: John Cotton, Letter to Lord Say and Sele (1636). John Winthrop, Essay Against the Power of the Church To Sit in Judgement on the Civil Magistracy (1637) Samuel Willard, The Character of […]

We have become accustomed to thinking that science and religion are fundamentally at odds. Debates over school science curricula—to pick one recent example—play out in the mass media as if only two polar positions were […]

Crispin Sartwell has launched the Josiah Warren Project, an archive and collection of resources by and about Warren. There are some very rare items already in the archive, including material from the Peaceful Revolutionist and […]

I’ve now worked through six of the first eight volumes of the free religionist paper, The Index, and it strikes me that we’re going to have to revise somewhat our sense of what the important […]

Monday morning, as I was getting ready to head out the door to campus, NPR’s Morning Edition aired a story about Wikipedia–mostly positive. The next day, the Wall Street Journal hosted one of their mini-debates, […]

It’s a good week for currency cranks. I was working through some microfiched pamphlets from John Zube’s Libertarian Microfiche Project, trying to work my way through this “roll call” phase of my researches on mutual […]

I know a few folks are following this who don’t have access to the syllabus, so here are the relevant readings for the last two weeks: A Model of Christian Charity (1630) The Simple Cobbler […]

At its limits, tolerance can be explosive, deadly. In our readings about religious conflicts in colonial New England, we’ve seen that the stakes of differences of opinion could be raised to the point where those […]

This is the third in a series of explorations of the mutualist tradition—or, perhaps more appropriately, traditions. The particular perspective they present is, as I’ve said, somewhat revisionist. It has been some time since I’ve […]

The materials we are looking at this week all revolve around questions of religious tolerance, and the more extreme consequences of stepping “outside the envelope” of what could be tolerated in Puritan Massachusetts. The Simple […]