Rarely in modern times has religion been associated with empiricism except to its own peril. This book represents a comprehensive and systematic effort to retrieve and develop the tradition of American religious empiricism for religious inquiry. Religion and Radical Empiricism offers a challenging account of how and why reflection on religious truth-claims must seek justification of those claims finally in terms of empirical criteria. Ranging through many of the major questions in philosophy of religion, the author weaves together a study (...) of the varieties of empiricism in all its historical forms from Hume to Quine. She finds in James and Dewey; in Wieman, Meland, and Loomer of the Chicago School; in Whitehead; and in Abhidharma Buddhism constructive elements of a radically empirical approach to the controversial topic of religious experience. This work provides a strong counter-argument to critics of "revisionary theism," to caricatures of philosophy as "conversation," and to any collapse of the category of experience into its linguistic forms. (shrink)

One could not ask for two more rigorous readers than Robert Neville and Terry Godlove, both brilliant scholars in their own right. I am very honored by the attention they have given to my work, and challenged by their various proposals to relieve me of my errors. My reply to their searching questions will consider seven topics, which I will take up in the form of further questions. Each topic has proven to be fairly enduring in the modern philosophy of (...) religion. In conclusion, I will briefly consider the topic of the future of philosophy of religion. Neville thinks contingency does not go all the way down like the tortoises in the fable about what holds the world up. (There’s another version that uses.. (shrink)

One of the enduring questions in the study of religion is how to define the object of our study. I would like to offer a definition, as an opening move in any discussion of religion, not because I think definitions settle anything by themselves, but because very different definitions of religion are at stake in contemporary debates in the academy, particularly in the hyphenated areas such as science and religion, or religion and politics, or religion and gender studies, and I (...) think it is important to see how they are related. I will begin, then, with the definitional problem, which I will take as twofold and as susceptible to analysis along the lines of what we know from semantic holism. I will then turn to the .. (shrink)

The history of Christian theology since the Enlightenment has been a series of unsuccessful attempts to evade a stark dilemma: either fundamentalism or atheism. Contemporary liberal theologians have argued that this dilemma is entirely too stark, too eliminative of the creative possibilities of revisionism. Liberal theology has wanted to revise and reinterpret Christian faith in conformity with history, reason, a scientific worldview, and a sophisticated grasp of the significance of symbol, analogy, and metaphor in the lives of religious practitioners. Eliminating (...) both supernaturalism and anthropomorphism, liberal theology would make Christianity more intellectually tenable, rescuing it from the literalist hands... (shrink)

This landmark interdisciplinary volume presents methodological options for the study of religion in the twenty-first century. Ten distinguished scholars offer radical interpretations of religious belief and language from a variety of perspectives: anthropology of religion, ritual studies, cognitive psychology, semantics, post-analytic philosophy, history of religions, and philosophy of religion. For the first time, a collection of original essays explores the significance of Donald Davidson's 'radical interpretation', Robert Brandom's 'inferentialism', and Richard Rorty's pragmatism for issues in the study of religion. Related (...) topics include cultural variations in belief from Madagascar to China, experimental research from cognitive science, and the semantics of myth, metaphor, mana and manna. Radical Interpretation in Religion will be of interest to both general readers and specialists seeking a deeper understanding of new directions in the study of religion. (shrink)

What good is divinity if it can come only in dreams and shadows…? It is a well-known and rarely challenged assumption that one of the chief merits of Whitehead's cosmology is that it enables religious thinkers to come at the problem of God in relation to the presence of evil in an entirely new way. Among the virtues most commonly appealed to in praise of the Whiteheadian theodicy are its emphasis on God's persuasive, rather than controlling power; its defence of (...) the moral goodness of the God whose nature is reconceived in the light of the problem of evil; and its provision for a realistic hope in the redemptive processes operative in divine and human history. However, none of these aspects of process theodicy is without serious problems. In what follows I will present certain reasons why I do not believe process theism has made good its claim to have solved, with the help of Whitehead's philosophy, the problem of evil. Rather, I will suggest that like the story of what happened to the donkey laden with salt, who took to the water, process theology's ‘solution’ to the problem of evil dissolves in the dialectic river of life, until nothing is left but the verbal sack in which it is contained. Much of the force of this critique will hinge on recognizing the systematic implications of the role of ambiguity in a processive-relational universe, a position I will summarize in conclusion. (shrink)

_Distinguished scholars provide the first book-length consideration of the work of philosopher and theologian Robert Cummings Neville, including a response from Neville himself._.

Distinguished scholars provide the first book-length consideration of the work of philosopher and theologian Robert Cummings Neville, including a response from Neville himself.

Robert Cummings Neville1 first came to my attention when I was a senior in college. "Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now," as Bob Dylan crooned at the time. Serious and studious, I was reading scholarly journals in the stacks one Saturday night. Among them was the journal Theological Studies, and in the March 1969 issue was the most effusive book review I had ever read. It was of Neville's very first book, God the (...) Creator: On the Transcendence and Presence of God. The Dominican reviewer was suitably impressed by the "brilliant" argument, but more than that, he was astonished to think that "Neville, at the time of publication, was twenty-eight."2 Curious about a brilliant author who was still... (shrink)

The philosophical question Nunez raises is whether we can have, as he thinks we need, a theoretical grounding for appeal to the intrinsic value of nature. This article examines the neopragmatist reasons for repudiating metaphysical realism's notions of intrinsicality and subject-independent reality. Following the holism of Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty rather than the epistemological premises of Holmes Rolston and Bernard Lonergan, the author concludes that coping with the ecological crisis does not require conjuring an epistemic crisis. Environmental ethics in (...) neopragmatist hands would seek procedures for bringing about agreement in improving our practices, not our epistemology. (shrink)

The philosophical question Nunez raises is whether we can have, as he thinks we need, a theoretical grounding for appeal to the intrinsic value of nature. This article examines the neopragmatist reasons for repudiating metaphysical realism's notions of intrinsicality and subject-independent reality. Following the holism of Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty rather than the epistemological premises of Holmes Rolston and Bernard Lonergan, the author concludes that coping with the ecological crisis does not require conjuring an epistemic crisis. Environmental ethics in (...) neopragmatist hands would seek procedures for bringing about agreement in improving our practices, not our epistemology. (shrink)