On Roger Williams and Emmanuel Levinas

In a few hours, I'll be driving to Atlanta for the Baptist History and Heritage Society's Annual Meeting at Mercer University.

I will be presenting a paper on "The Relevance of Roger Williams."

Here's a quote from my paper:

"Three hundred and twenty years before the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas would propound his ethics of asymmetrical face-to-face relations, Roger Williams gives specificity to the eyes observing him and passing judgment on the church. He distinguishes the eyes from one another by identifying the faces that concerned him. He names the faces of Jews, Turks and pagans -- the very people whose eyes held least significance to the aristocratic Winthrop and the closed community that he helped create."

I'll write a little more about this tomorrow.