Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editorial preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Claims, contexts and contestability
- PART I REASON AND RELIGIOUS PLURALISM
- 2 Thomas Jefferson and the study of religion
- 3 Common ground and defensible difference
- 4 Religions, reasons and gods
- PART II THEISTIC ARGUMENTS IN PRE-MODERN CONTEXTS
- PART III THEISTIC ARGUMENTS IN EARLY-MODERN CONTEXTS
- Appendix: The 1997 Hulsean Sermon
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Thomas Jefferson and the study of religion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editorial preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Claims, contexts and contestability
- PART I REASON AND RELIGIOUS PLURALISM
- 2 Thomas Jefferson and the study of religion
- 3 Common ground and defensible difference
- 4 Religions, reasons and gods
- PART II THEISTIC ARGUMENTS IN PRE-MODERN CONTEXTS
- PART III THEISTIC ARGUMENTS IN EARLY-MODERN CONTEXTS
- Appendix: The 1997 Hulsean Sermon
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Thomas Jefferson is not the most likely name to appear in the title of the inaugural lecture of a Professor of Religious Studies in a British university. Not even when the lecture is scheduled so soon after an American presidential campaign, which in its worst excesses resembled so closely the smear tactics pioneered in the campaign of 1800, when the former Southern governor who eventually won was castigated by the Federalists and their supporters as an atheist and moral deviant, who had learned dangerously un-American ways while living abroad, albeit in Paris rather than Oxford. Just as their fundamentalist counterparts today bought newspaper space to warn the nation that a vote for Clinton would be a sin against all that is sacred, so the righteously religious of Yankee New England distributed pamphlets to warn the land against that ‘French infidel and atheist’ from Virginia who, if elected, would discredit religion, overthrow the church, burn all bibles. After Jefferson's victory, the worried souls of New England actually hid their bibles to save them from impending confiscation.
In placing the name of Thomas Jefferson in the foreground of this inaugural lecture, however, I have both a personal motive and a professional reason.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, a family of my forebears set sail from the then Lancashire port of Liverpool to the Virginia of Thomas Jefferson.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Religions, Reasons and GodsEssays in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Religion, pp. 16 - 57Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006