God in Freedom

To believe and to know, faith and science; only liberty can co rdinate these two supreme ideas, destined to diverge, to meet, to contradict each other, ideas which on account of this very divergence, this contradiction and this agreement, underlie the organic evolution of progress and civilization. -from God in Freedom LUIGI LUZZATTI; ALFONSO ARBIB-COSTA (TRANSLATOR) (1841-1927) was a scholar of tremendous erudition and authority; an expert in economics, law, and politics; a champion of religious freedom in Italy-and a triumphant one: he was the nation's first Jewish prime minister, serving from 1910 to 1911. Just before that groundbreaking civil victory, though, in 1909, he achieved his other great success: the publication of his God in Freedom. Greatly expanded for its first English-language edition (of which this volume is a replica) God in Freedom is one of the most comprehensive and historically important discourses on religious liberty ever written. Luzzatti explores the battle for intellectual and philosophical independence from its pre-Christian proponents in the Far East to the movements in his day to keep civic life free of pious influence in the United Kingdom, Europe, and America. Saint Francis of Assisi and the Ku Klux Klan, the Buddha and Darwin...all are present here, and others; too, whose thoughts and actions have tested the boundaries between civic and religious life. This is a history of faith and freedom that is itself a cry for tolerance, openness, and careful separation of the secular and the sacred.