Persecution, Toleration, Co-Existence: Early Modern Responses to Religious Pluralism
FAIN: FS-50308-12
Calvin College (Grand Rapids, MI 49546-4301)
Karin Yvonne Maag (Project Director: March 2012 to May 2017)
A four-week seminar for sixteen college and university faculty on the varied responses to religious pluralism in the early modern era.
This four-week seminar for college and university teachers (July 15-August 9, 2013) assesses how early modern Europeans dealt with competing truth claims upheld by rival believers, whether Catholics, Lutherans, Reformed, Anabaptists, Jews, or Muslims. Seminar participants will begin with an overview of religious pluralism in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. They will then consider three possible reactions: persecution, in which believers from one group tried to suppress other views; toleration, which allowed for limited legal recognition of religious minorities under restricted conditions; and co-existence, which often took root informally within communities where no single faith group was predominant. By the end of the seminar, through reading and discussing key texts and researching the issues, participants will be better equipped to address the history of responses to religious pluralism and bring this training to bear in their classrooms, scholarship and public discourse.