PodcastIn this episode you’ll hear Sarah Irving-Stonebraker’s 2020 lecture, Free To Be Me? The Forgotten Story of Religious Liberty.
“Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion”, reads the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But how did we get here?
Freedom of religion – or of no religion – is grounded on liberty of conscience, an idea with a back-story most of us are unaware of. In recovering this story, historian Sarah Irving-Stonebraker takes us all the way back to the ancient Middle East, and on a whirlwind tour through Europe, the Americas, and Australia, and asks: does the notion of religious liberty still have currency today?
Associate Professor Sarah Irving-Stonebraker is an Australian-based academic, focusing on the history of Britain and the colonial world and especially the intersection of religion, science, and politics. Sarah is Senior Lecturer in History at ACU. She was awarded her PhD from the University of Cambridge, after which she was a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford then Assistant Professor at Florida State University. Her book Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire, published in 2008, was awarded The Royal Society of Literature and Jerwood Foundation Award for Non-Fiction.
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker has published a number of books including Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire and her newest release, Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age.