The Women and Men of American Religion. Story 8: Roger Williams

One hears the terms “religious liberty” or “religious freedom” quite often in today’s public square. What does it mean? Where did it come from? Who put it together? In today’s episode we get to know Roger Williams, who is an outsized figure in America’s idea of religious freedom, now established in the Constitution’s Article VI (no religious test for office) and the First Amendment’s religion clauses (free exercise and no establishment).

 

Season 3, Episode 30: The Women and Men of American Religion. Story 8: Roger Williams

 

Guest Bio

Dr. Carrington-Farmer is a Professor of History at Roger Williams University, where she specializes in early American History. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 2010, and she has a keen research interest in dissent in seventeenth-century New England. Her book, Roger Williams and His World, sets Roger Williams in his wider Atlantic world context. She has published book chapters on two seventeenth-century dissenters, see: “Thomas Morton” in: Atlantic Lives: Biographies that Cross the Ocean and “Roger Williams and the Architecture of Religious Liberty,” in Law and Religion and the Liberal State. Building on her interest in Roger Williams, she has published an article on his wife, Mary Williams, entitled: “More than Roger’s Wife: Mary Williams and the Founding of Providence.” In the New England Quarterly.

Listeners are welcome to use the code ROGERWILLIAMS20 for 20% off their purchase from our website. Here is a link to the product page: https://broadviewpress.com/product/roger-williams-and-his-world/

The full interview can be found Full Interview. 

Podcast Support

Scholarly support provided by Dr. Lauren Turek, Associate Professor of History at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

Technical audio and video assistance provided by Dr. Randall Stephens, a Professor of American and British Studies at the University of Oslo.

Religion in the American Experience is a podcast of the National Museum of American Religion, which tells the story of what religion has done to America and what America has done to religion.