The introduction describes the manuscript treatise, providing detailed arguments as to its date and authorship. It highlights the treatise’s relationship to Scot’s Discoverie, showing that the treatise is a response to a draft version of that book, and that it was written by a personal friend of Scot’s. It goes on to discuss the significance of the treatise in relation to the witchcraft debate that began at this time, and shows that the treatise reveals a more complex and nuanced view of witchcraft than the views typically expressed in printed works on the subject.

Pentecost marks the birth of a people through the restoration of communication between people of different languages and stories. Pentecost has restored Babel by creating a people who have learned how to be at peace in a world of impatient violence. It was at Babel that people, seduced by the technological breakthrough of learning to make bricks, concluded that they had become god-like because they were now free from the limitations of nature and their particular histories. For after Babel, God, who had first made a covenant with all creation, chooses to call out one people that they might be a witness to God's will. If the church is rightly understood to be God's new language it is crucial that it not displace our particular languages. But learning the languages of peace cannot, in the name of universality, require that Jonathan Sacks forfeit the particularity of his tradition's memory.

This chapter discusses the understanding of human rights in the Roman Catholic tradition. It was only at the Second Vatican Council in 1965 that the Roman Catholic Church finally accepted the right to religious freedom for all human beings. The chapter focuses on the official teaching of the hierarchical magisterium. It develops three major points: the dramatic change that occurred with the Catholic acceptance of human rights in the latter part of the twentieth century. Other major points include the basis and grounding of human rights in contemporary Catholic thought and a somewhat troubling development in the teaching of Pope John Paul II. In his moral and political writing, John Paul II insisted on the primacy of truth in his understanding of democracy and human rights. Democracy for many is based on agnosticism and sceptical relativism with regard to truth.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book shows how biblical inspiration (both Old and New Testament) fuelled the anti-slavery protests and later the civil rights movement in the United States. The best guarantee for rights in relation to religion must be effective social spaces opening up, both for theoretical reflections on ideological argument, and for pragmatic actions in creating human agreement. The book sketches the widening horizons of freedom and the promise of redemption fostered in the world of the Spirituals and multiple religious revivals. It suggests that over time, the vision of American democracy has fed into the mainstream, informing the oratory of Barack Obama himself. The book illustrates that many states do associate their core citizenship with one or other 'Religion', and difference can make citizens the target of abuse.

This chapter examines Oxford Amnesty Lectures from the following angle: can human rights accommodate pluralism. It addresses the two questions: do human rights transcend cultural and religious differences and what does the answer to this question imply for our understanding of democracy in a global context. The chapter discusses by examining the supposedly universal relevance of the notion of human rights, a notion that lies at the heart of the Western conception of democracy. It considers how it is possible to reformulate that notion in a way that will make it compatible with a pluralist perspective. A pluralistic world order is the only way to avoid the predicted clash of civilisations. Raimundo Panikkar argues that, in order to understand the meaning of human rights, it is necessary to scrutinise the function played by the notion 'Is the notion of human rights a Western concept' in our culture.

Every internationally agreed human rights convention contains a clause protecting freedom of belief and conscience. Religious intolerance is not limited to any region nor is it exclusively practised by followers of any single religion or belief. The tolerance policy can neither afford to find an easy way out by resorting to the norms of injustice, intolerance and discrimination employed by the forces of terrorism. Nor can compromises be made that will eventually dilute the universal standards of human rights. Current debates about the value of religious belief for society often turn on unexamined and parochial notions of what religion is and mistaken assumptions about the causes of religious thinking and behaviour. In Christian theology, God gives Creation freedom to be itself; from that freedom every other freedom flows, in particular the freedom to love and be loved.