Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Blasphemy: Verbal Offense Against the Sacred, From Moses to Salman Rushdie

Blasphemy: Verbal Offense Against the Sacred, From Moses to Salman Rushdie

Levy, Leonard W.

Paperback

Religion General General LawGeneral World History

ISBN10: 0807845159
ISBN13: 9780807845158
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: Feb 20 1995
Pages: 704
Weight: 2.27
Height: 1.68 Width: 6.16 Depth: 9.24
Language: English

Socrates, Jesus, Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno, Quakers George Fox and William Penn, Daniel Defoe and Thomas Paine were all condemned for blasphemy. In a tour de force of lively writing and keen historical interpretation, prolific legal historian Levy shows that the charge of blasphemy has served as a means to besmirch opinions or people held objectionable to those in positions of authority. For centuries the Catholic Church persecuted blasphemers and heretics for their divergent views. Protestant reformers adopted the epithet blasphemer to castigate dissidents within their own ranks. Proceeding from fifth century B.C. Athens to medieval persecution of the Jews to the hysteria over Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, this work is both an essential casebook and an outspoken, feisty, important study of the struggle for intellectual and religious liberties.

Leonard Levy traces the varied meanings of blasphemy throughout Western law. He argues that while past sanctions against the crime have inhibited all manner of cultural, political, scientific, and literary expression, we also pay a price for our extraordinary expansion of the scope of permissible speech. We have become, he charges, not only a free society but one that is 'numb' to outrage.

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