In this episode, Dan Hugger speaks with John Wilsey, professor of church history and chair of the Department of Church History and Historical Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, about his new book, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer. How have the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty existed harmoniously in the American tradition? What contrasts between French and American society did Alexis de Tocqueville observe in his own day? Has the American experiment failed? How does Peter Viereck’s conservative nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux chart a course distinct from both progressive and reactionary utopian politics? Is religious traditionalism antithetical to dispositional conservativism? Why does the human imagination loom so large in conservative thought? What should secular dispositional conservatives make of religion?

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Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer | John Wilsey

The Man vs. the Myth: Who Was John Foster Dulles? | Acton Line

Democracy in America | Alexis de Tocqueville

The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856) | Alexis de Tocqueville

Conservatism: From John Adams to Churchill | Peter  Viereck

Conservatism Revisited: The Revolt Against Ideology | Peter Viereck

The Leopard | Giuseppe Di Lampedusa

The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education | Robert Maynard Hutchins

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