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Joseph Barker was a Methodist New Connexion minister, but his evolving religious journey led him to split the denomination. He moved to America and became a leading popular freethinker and anti-Bible lecturer. On his return to England, he was the co-editor with Charles Bradlaugh of the atheistic paper, the National Reformer. Concerns about morality were one factor in his reconversion.

Perkins was one of the principal English reformers and was instrumental in the shaping of the religious culture of his country. Long misunderstood as having been a Puritan, he was a well known and effective apologist for the English Church as it emerged during the reign of Elizabeth I, a skilled systematic theologian on the contested subject of salvation and predestination, a perceptive and influential guide in cases of conscience, an original writer on preaching who influenced the development of English prose, and a challenging writer and bold prophet on issues of social and economic justice. His legacy was an English Protestantism that survived the religious and political upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century and became an enduring part of English life.

This chapter discusses the challenges to the circumcision of Jewish men in the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries. In the twenty-first century, many contemporary Jews are disturbed by the lack of parity in the treatment Jewish newborns. For them, the absence of any ceremony or ritual marking the birth of a baby girl, the absence of anything equivalent to the berit for boys, is a major problem and a major challenge. However, the war over circumcision was part of the larger war between Reform and Orthodox. There was great variety of opinion within each of those camps, with divisions between radical and moderate Reform, and between radical and moderate Orthodox. The Reformers argue that circumcision cannot be the portal into Jewishness because, if so, how do women become Jews? The non-circumcision of women proves that the circumcision of men cannot have a sacramental function. Furthermore, there is a small but vocal anticircumcision movement in the United States and other western countries, the goal of which is to prohibit all circumcisions except those necessary on medical grounds.

Burke spent the first twenty years of his life in Ireland, dividing his time between Cork, Kildare, and Dublin. These different locations corresponded to distinct cultural environments: his Catholic relations, his Quaker school, and his Church of Ireland upbringing. As a youth he believed that custom could be educated by reason, enabling individuals to transcend their cultural confinement. It was only later, in the 1750s, that he came to contend that our rational faculties could productively be constrained by habit. This chapter discusses the formation of Burke's early prejudices and charts his commitment to the idea that their cruder manifestations could be improved by a process of rational inquiry. By the late 1740s, while editing The Reformer after graduating from Trinity College Dublin, he was campaigning to accelerate that process by contributing to the refinement of national taste.

This chapter examines two ideal types central to Douglass's political philosophy—the Reformer and the Self-Made Man—in order to capture a sense of how he believed individuals ought to behave in order to achieve and maintain a just political community. The Reformer directs individuals to feel a strong sense of responsibility for the realization of justice and fairness in the basic structure of the political community, and the Self-Made Man directs individuals to work hard and behave virtuously in order to achieve personal, familial, and neighborhood well-being. At the center of this view is an emphasis on personal responsibility. The morally responsible actions of individuals have a tangible impact on others and on the moral ecology of the community, which helps to create and maintain the “humanitarian culture” Douglass viewed as essential to a healthy liberal polity.

The Epilogue recounts Rose’s last decade in London, from 1882 to 1892. She received many visitors, both Americans like Stanton and Anthony, and Britons, like Charles Bradlaugh and his daughters, Hypatia and Alice. Unable to walk, she continued to read the weekly Boston Investigator and its English counterpart, the National Reformer. Both newspapers reprinted her major speeches, paid tribute to her, and published her letters. She remained intellectually engaged and donated money both to her causes and to poor people. Most of her friends had died before her death, and she was forgotten by the twentieth century. She deserves to be remembered.