This is thinking in public a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about

frontline 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.

Robert Louis Wilkin is the William R. Kenan Professor Emeritus of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia.

Dr. Wilkin earned his PhD from the University of Chicago and has taught at the University of Notre Dame,

Fordham, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In addition to his long career as a distinguished teacher, Dr. Wilkin is an elected fellow

of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He's a former president of the American Academy of Religion.

He's a founding member of the North American Patristic Society, and he has also served as

chairman of the Institute on Religion and Public Life.

He's often associated with the intellectual

circle around the American Journal First Things. He's published a host of books on

the history of Christianity including the Christians and the Romans, the spirit of early Christianity, the first thousand years a global history of Christianity, and his most recent book which is what we're going to discuss today.

Liberty and the things of God, the Christian

origins of religious freedom. I'm looking forward to my conversation with

Professor Robert Lewis Wilkin. Professor Wilkin you wrote this book entitled,

Liberty and the Things of God, the Christian origins of religious freedom,

and a time in which the ideas of religious freedom

and religious liberty are essentially contested and so you knew when you wrote

...