Curry, Thomas J

The work of a Catholic Bishop who is also an accomplished historian, Farewell te Christendom indulges in no nostalgia for the Constantinian past. The work is a vigorously unconventional approach to the complex problems centered about the First Amendment and religion Arguing that the amendment is a restriction on governmental power, not a charter of individual liberty, Curry offers a fresh perspective with many advantages for analysis and for public agreement. Among its other merits, Farewell so Christendom shows how Catholics provided a Protestant polity with the diversity Madison had posited as the best safeguard of religious freedom"

-John T. Noonan, author of The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom

"Curry advances a radical idea for the reinterpretation of freedom of religion in the First Amendment. He argues that both provisions of the amendment meant the same thing to the framers that the secular state was forbidden to intervene in the free exercise of religion. The state therefore has no competence in religion at all. This position refutes both those who want to use religion to strengthen the moral values of the country and those who want the state to define what is religious and what is not in the name of the wall of separation. Christendom, he says, came to an end with the First Amendment. Both erroneous positions come from a failure to understand that fact."

-Andrew Greeley, Professor of Social Science, The University of Chicago

"Thomas J. Curry's Farewell to Christendom offers provocative and exciting new insights into the original understanding of the religion clauses of the First Amendment. The post-tions advanced in this important work should be carefully considered by all sides in the current debate over the relationship between church and state in contemporary America."

-William P. Marshall, Professor of Law, University of North Carolina

"Farewell to Christendom is a bold and learned book about the meaning of America's tra-dition of religious freedom. Thomas Curry challenges generations of judicial and scholarly assumptions about what the Founders meant in the Free Exercise and No Establishment clauses in the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights. Written with the urgency the subject demands and the clarity citizens require, this work reframes the subjects of Church-State relations, the meaning of religious liberty and the role of religion in public life."

-Robert Dawidoff, John and Lillian Maguire Distinguished Professor of History,

Claremont Graduate University