The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, released the same year as his friend John Milton's defense of the free press, Areopagitica, argued for 'soul liberty' for all people, 'paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or anti-christian.' Such ideas were far ahead of their time - perhaps even our time... Williams' ideas infused the charters of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and other colonies with protections for religious freedom. And his notions of a fully secular state found their way into the writings of John Locke, who would have a seminal influence on Jefferson, Madison, and other Founders. One wishes that America had taken even more from Williams and what Gaustad calls his 'bequest...of liberty, responsibility, and civility.'

Williams' life and major works - the 1643 bestseller A Key Into the Language of America and the 1644 treatise The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution - inspire nothin…

The English... justified their grabbing of Indian land by claiming that these simple folk did not really believe in property rights. On the contrary, Williams …

'The most fascinating figure of America's formative seventeenth century,' Roger Williams has now gained general acceptance as a symbol of a critical turning po…

Himmler hated the church. He and Bormann were the two people who influenced Hitler most. When I spoke to Hitler in the beginning he agreed with me and said tha…

The Puritans nobly fled from a land of despotism to a land of freedim, where they could not only enjoy their own religion, but could prevent everybody else fro…

While I concur with the Synod in the efficacy of prayer, and in the hope that our country may be preserved from the attacks of pestilence 'and that the judgmen…