Chris Beneke ��Tom Paine��s Return: Free Exercise, Free Enquiry, and the Fate of Irreligious Expression in the New Nation�� Friday, Apr. 5, 2:00 �C 4:00pm Room K262, CGIS Knafel Building, 1737 Cambridge St. After decades of distant, ominous rumbling, irreligion and radical deism made a blustery entrance into American public life at the end of the eighteenth century. The ensuing reaction reshaped both the new nation��s religious culture and contemporary understandings of rights to speech, press, and conscience. This paper sets Thomas Paine��s Age of Reason and his controversial 1802 return to the U.S. within the broader arena of early national civil and religious liberties. Contrasting the wide latitude allowed to the exercise of religion with the more constricted scope permitted to free enquiry and critical expression, it maintains that a sharp religious and legal rift opened in the 1790s. This heaving cultural fracture was both unanticipated by the Constitution��s framers and many years prior to the consolidation of an evangelical moral establishment. Find link to paper here<http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k40327&tabgroupid=…115841>. Chris Beneke is Associate Professor of History at Bentley University. He is author of Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism (New York: Oxford UP, 2006) and co-editor of The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (UPenn, 2011). He is currently coediting a volume of essays on blasphemy across the globe, titled Profane: Sacrilegious Expression in a Multicultural Age (forthcoming with the University of California Press). His current research, from which this paper is drawn, focuses on the history of the First Amendment's religious clauses. A book on the subject, tentatively titledFree Exercise, is forthcoming with Cornell University Press. - Prof. Beneke��s paper can be accessed from the CAPS website<http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k40327&tabgroup… and copies will be available outside of the CAPS offices and at the talk. For up to date information about CAPS Seminars and other events please visit the CAPS website: caps.gov.harvard.edu<http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k40327…194046>. ##### Center for American Political Studies-CAPS Harvard University CGIS Knafel Building, 4th floor 1737 Cambridge Street Cambridge, MA 02138 Phone: 617-384-9810 Fax: 617-496-1832 Email: caps@gov.harvard.edu<mailto:caps@gov.harvard.edu> Web: http://caps.gov.harvard.edu