<<<The most powerful argument of Liberty of Conscience lies in Nussbaum's careful reconstruction of Williams as a thinker at least as important to the tradition of liberty of conscience--the term she prefers to religion--as Locke and all the founders who followed. "We should not focus only on the eighteenth-century arguments of the framers," she writes, "ignoring this prior, and distinctly American, tradition, quintessentially embodied in Williams' The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution," a 1644 text that was remarkable for the empathy it extended to persecutors and persecuted alike and its call for government to refrain from enforcing orthodoxy. Recognition of good-faith differences of conviction...

<<<The most powerful argument of Liberty of Conscience lies in Nussbaum's careful reconstruction of Williams as a thinker at least as important to the tradition of liberty of conscience--the term she prefers to religion--as Locke and all the founders who followed. "We should not focus only on the eighteenth-century arguments of the framers," she writes, "ignoring this prior, and distinctly American, tradition, quintessentially embodied in Williams' The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution," a 1644 text that was remarkable for the empathy it extended to persecutors and persecuted alike and its call for government to refrain from enforcing orthodoxy. Recognition of good-faith differences of conviction, he believed, revealed a surer path to civil peace and liberty of conscience. The two values, so often seen as pitted against each other, were in Williams's account intertwined.>>>