This is thinking in public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about front-line

theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I'm Albert Moller, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville,

Kentucky.

Amy Kittelstrom is associate professor of history at Sonoma State University.

Her specialization is 19th century American thinkers and their

sociopolitical context.

She has served in the past as fellow with a Center for Religion and American Life at Yale,

the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, and the Center for

the Study of Religion at Princeton.

Her newest book, The Religion of Democracy, Seven Liberals, and the American Moral

Tradition.

I'm glad to welcome Professor Amy Kittlstrom today to thinking in public.

Professor Kittlstrom, every book has a story, and this particular book has to have an interesting

story behind it. How did you come to do this

research and to produce this particular volume?

Well, it's a long story, right? Because it took a long time to get all the way to this book and it

started with a question that I thought was relatively modest because I was

reading William James, the philosopher whose book The Varieties of Religious Experience, a lot of people continue to read,

both within religious context and without them.

And so I was reading William James and wondering just what kind of religion he was

talking about. He was so clearly engaged with a question of how a person could hold a religious belief

sincerely and also sincerely respect other people who held different beliefs.

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