Introduction: Imagining Religious Toleration

In the spring of 2018 I visited the University of York, where I was giving a talk on interfaith marriage, religious toleration, and the eighteenth-century novel. Before delivering my presentation, I met with Matt Matravers, the director of the Morrell Centre for Toleration, who observed that debates about religious toleration seemed to have become stuck, circling back to the same questions over and over again: Should crosses be displayed in government legislatures? Does free speech need to accommodate concerns about blasphemy? And so on. Positions within the toleration debate have hardened. On one side are those providing critiques of toleration