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How can intense religious beliefs coexist with pluralism in America today? Examining the role of the religious imagination in contemporary religious practice and in some of the best-known works of American literature from the past fifty years, Postmodern Belief shows how belief for its own sake--a belief absent of doctrine--has become an answer to pluralism in a secular age. Amy Hungerford reveals how imaginative literature and religious practices together allow novelists, poets, and critics to express the formal elements of language in transcendent terms, conferring upon words a religious value independent of meaning. Hungerford explores the work of major American writers, including Allen Ginsberg, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson, and links their unique visions to the religious worlds they touch. She illustrates how Ginsberg's chant-infused 1960s poetry echoes the tongue-speaking of Charismatic Christians, how DeLillo reimagines the novel and the Latin Mass, why McCarthy's prose imitates the Bible, and why Morrison's fiction needs the supernatural. Uncovering how literature and religion conceive of a world where religious belief can escape confrontations with other worldviews, Hungerford corrects recent efforts to discard the importance of belief in understanding religious life, and argues that belief in belief itself can transform secular reading and writing into a religious act. Honoring the ways in which people talk about and practice religion, Postmodern Belief highlights the claims of the religious imagination in twentieth-century American culture.
This book provides a philosophical argument for the reasonableness of Christian faith in today's world. Diogenes Allen shows how Christian belief is now being supported by scientific and philosophical principles--perhaps for the first time in 300 years.
"The collection further argues that postmodernism offers a useful lens through which to understand the work of WPAs and to examine the discordant cultural and institutional issues that shape their work. Each chapter tackles a problem local to its author's writing program or experience as a WPA, and each responds to existing discord in creative ways that move toward rebuilding and redirection."--Jacket.
In a world marked by relativism, individualism, pluralism, and the transition from a modern to a postmodern worldview, evangelical Christians must find ways to re-present the historic faith. In his provocative new work, Ancient-Future Faith, Robert E. Webber contends that present-day evangelicalism is a product of modernity. Allegiance to modernity, he argues, must be relinquished to free evangelicals to become more consistently historic. Empowerment to function in our changing culture will be found by adapting the classical tradition to our postmodern time. Webber demonstrates the implications in the key areas of church, worship, spirituality, evangelism, nurture, and mission. Webber writes, The fundamental concern of Ancient-Future Faith is to find points of contact between classical Christianity and postmodern thought. Classical Christianity was shaped in a pagan and relativistic society much like our own. Classical Christianity was not an accommodation to paganism but an alternative practice of life. Christians in a postmodern world will succeed, not by watering down the faith, but by being a counter cultural community that invites people to be shaped by the story of Israel and Jesus. A substantial appendix explores the development of authority in the early church, an important issue for evangelicals in a society that shares many features with the Roman world of early Christians. Students, professors, pastors, and laypeople concerned with the churchs effective response to a postmodern world will benefit from this paradigmatic volume. Informative tables and extensive bibliographies enhance the books educational value. - Amazon.
Postmodern philosophy is often dismissed as unintelligible, self-contradictory, and as a passing fad with no contribution to make to the problems faced by philosophers in our time. While this characterization may be true of the type of philosophy labeled postmodern in the 1980s and 1990s, David Ray Griffin argues that Alfred North Whitehead had formulated a radically different type of postmodern philosophy to which these criticisms do not apply. Griffin shows the power of Whitehead's philosophy in dealing with a range of contemporary issues—the mind-body relation, ecological ethics, truth as correspondence, the relation of time in physics to the (irreversible) time of our lives, and the reality of moral norms. He also defends a distinctive dimension of Whitehead's postmodernism, his theism, against various criticisms, including the charge that it is incompatible with relativity theory.
In presenting Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Hartshorne as members of a common and distinctively postmodern trajectory, this book casts the thought of each of them in a new light. It also suggests a new direction for the philosophical community as a whole, now that the various forms of modern philosophy, and even the deconstructive form of postmodern philosophy, are widely perceived to be dead-ends. This new option offers the possibility that philosophy may recover its role as critic and guide within the more general culture, a recovery that is desperately needed in these perilous times.
What can come of a scientific engagement with postmodern philosophy? Some scientists have claimed that the social sciences and humanities have nothing to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Dorothea E. Olkowski shows that the historic link between science and philosophy, mathematics itself, plays a fundamental role in the development of the worldviews that drive both fields. Focusing on language, its expression of worldview and usage, she develops a phenomenological account of human thought and action to explicate the role of philosophy in the sciences. Olkowski proposes a model of phenomenology, both scientific and philosophical, that helps make sense of reality and composes an ethics for dealing with unpredictability in our world.
J. Richard Middleton and Brian J. Walsh offer an introduction, evaluation and response to postmodern culture that comes straight from the heart of the gospel.
Larry A. Hickman presents John Dewey as very much at home in the busy mix of contemporary philosophy—as a thinker whose work now, more than fifty years after his death, still furnishes fresh insights into cutting-edge philosophical debates. Hickman argues that it is precisely the rich, pluralistic mix of contemporary philosophical discourse, with its competing research programs in French-inspired postmodernism, phenomenology, Critical Theory, Heidegger studies, analytic philosophy, and neopragmatism—all busily engaging, challenging, and informing one another—that invites renewed examination of Dewey’s central ideas. Hickman offers a Dewey who both anticipated some of the central insights of French-inspired postmodernism and, if he were alive today, would certainly be one of its most committed critics, a Dewey who foresaw some of the most trenchant problems associated with fostering global citizenship, and a Dewey whose core ideas are often at odds with those of some of his most ardent neopragmatist interpreters. In the trio of essays that launch this book, Dewey is an observer and critic of some of the central features of French-inspired postmodernism and its American cousin, neopragmatism. In the next four, Dewey enters into dialogue with contemporary critics of technology, including Jürgen Habermas, Andrew Feenberg, and Albert Borgmann. The next two essays establish Dewey as an environmental philosopher of the first rank—a worthy conversation partner for Holmes Ralston, III, Baird Callicott, Bryan G. Norton, and Aldo Leopold. The concluding essays provide novel interpretations of Dewey’s views of religious belief, the psychology of habit, philosophical anthropology, and what he termed “the epistemology industry.”