The blessings of liberty : human rights and religious freedom in the western legal tradition / John Witte, Jr.

Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2022.

©2022.

xv, 316 pages ; 24 cm.

"Christian Contributions to the Development of Rights and Liberties in the Western Legal Tradition It will come as a surprise to some human rights lawyers to learn that Christianity was a deep and enduring source of human rights and liberties in the Western legal tradition. Our elementary textbooks have long taught us that the history of human rights began in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Human rights, many of us were taught, were products of the Western Enlightenment - creations of Grotius and Pufendorf, Locke and Rousseau, Montesquieu and Voltaire, Hume and Smith, Jefferson and Madison. Rights were the mighty new weapons forged by American and French revolutionaries who fought in the name of political democracy, personal autonomy, and religious freedom against outmoded Christian conceptions of absolute monarchy, aristocratic privilege, and religious establishment. Rights were the keys forged by Western liberals to unchain society from the shackles of a millennium of the church's oppression of society and domination of the state"-- Provided by publisher.

Online version: Witte, John, Jr., 1959- The blessings of liberty 1. Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2021.

English

January 05, 2022

Law and Christianity.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

History.