The Long Truce
How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit
By A. J. Conyers
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Subjects: All Philosophy, All Religious Studies, All Theology |
The political dogma of toleration is little more than a tool of the modern state in its drive for power and wealth. In The Long Truce, A. J. Conyers shows that by banishing questions of ultimate meaning from public life, the modern version of toleration has debased our politics and undermined social cohesion. He argues provocatively for a return to the authentic toleration found in pre-Reformation Christianity.
Preface
1. The Cunning of History
2. The Ecumenical Impulse
3. A Feeling of Uncertainty
4. Thomas Hobbes and the Fears of Modernity
5. Pierre Bayle and the Modern Sanctity of the Individual
6. John Locke and the Politics of Toleration
7. The Triumph of Toleration
8. The Shadow Leviathan
9. Nihilism and the Catholic Vision
10. High Tolerance
Notes
Index
Conyers’s book launches an engaging assault on one of the great sacred cows of modern political science and religious studies, the doctrine of toleration. ...this is a provocative work that ought to be read widely by undergraduates as well as graduate students in ethics and political science, not only for the genealogy of toleration that it offers but also for its constructive proposal.
—Religious Studies Review 35.4 (Dec 2009)
The Long Truce is a book to read and reread.
—Donald Livingston, Professor of Philosophy, Emory University
A book to be read and reread. Through keen philosophical and historical analysis, Conyers shows how the cry and command for ‘toleration’ has actually drained the life out of traditional cultures, confused the moral life, and been prodigal of blood and human distress.
—William M. Wilson, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Virginia
A. J. Conyers (1946-2004) was Professor of Theology at the George W. Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor University. His previous books include the award-winning The Listening Heart: Vocations and the Crisis of Modern Culture (2006), The Eclipse of Heaven: The Loss of Transcendence and its Effect on Modern Life (1999), and The End: What the Gospels Say About the Last Things (1995).
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