The Christian Roots of Religious Freedom, by Robert Louis Wilken
ISBN-13: 978-1-62600-500-6. Hardcover. 55 pages. 4.5 X 7.5. LIST PRICE: $15.00
The Père Marquette Lecture in Theology 2014
Robert Louis Wilken is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the History of Christianity Emeritus, The University of Virgina, where he taught from 1985 to 2009. He was born in New Orleans in 1936. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1963, specializing in the History of Christianity. Prior to accepting his appointment at The University of Virginia, he taught at University of Notre Dame from 1979 to 1985 and before that at Fordham University from 1967 to 1971. In 1982 he was Lady Davis Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; in 1996, 1999, and 2002, he was Visiting Professor at the Institutum Patristicum ‘Augustinianum,’ Rome; and in 2003 he was McCarthy Professor at the Gregorian University, Rome. He was President of the American Academy of Religion, 1988-1989, President of the North American Patristic Society, 1985-1986, and President of the Academy of Catholic Theology, 2012-2013.
His publications include Judaism and the Early Christian Mind (Yale University Press, 1971), The Myth of Christian Beginnings (Doubleday, 1971), John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late Fourth Century (University of California Press, 1983), Remembering the Christian Past (Eerdmans, 1995), the Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (Yale University Press, 2003), and The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity (Yale University Press, 2012).
In the present lecture he is concerned with making the case that the roots of religious freedom are to be found, not in the Enlightenment as is often thought, but centuries earlier in the writings of Christian apologists defending their right to practice their religion without coercion.
Marquette University Press
