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Our global community desperately needs overt awakening to an age of reason and faith. Reasonable Faith for a Post-Secular Age meets this need by interpreting faith not in terms of belief in propositions but in terms of living surrender to having been seized by agape for every Face, including one's own. Virtually all faith traditions, from Buddhism to Humanism to Wiccan, are rooted in agape and therefore share considerable spiritual and ethical common ground (a truth long veiled). In contrast to ethically feckless secular rationality--over which a devastating, global social Darwinism currently runs roughshod--faith qua living surrender to agape grounds moral realism, awakens us to love for all creatures, and inspires struggles for justice. Inspired by the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and Christian spirituality, Greenway engages, on the one hand, intellectuals like Stanley Hauerwas, Richard Rorty, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jeffery Stout, Charles Taylor, and Bernard Williams, and, on the other, contemporary debates over consciousness, free will, evil, and metaethics. He details the character of secular rationality's devastating scission from moral reality and clarifies the promise of understanding faith and spirituality in terms of agape.
Our global community desperately needs overt awakening to an age of reason and faith. Reasonable Faith for a Post-Secular Age meets this need by interpreting faith not in terms of belief in propositions but in terms of living surrender to having been seized by agape for every Face, including one's own. Virtually all faith traditions, from Buddhism to Humanism to Wiccan, are rooted in agape and therefore share considerable spiritual and ethical common ground (a truth long veiled). In contrast to ethically feckless secular rationality--over which a devastating, global social Darwinism currently runs roughshod--faith qua living surrender to agape grounds moral realism, awakens us to love for all creatures, and inspires struggles for justice. Inspired by the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and Christian spirituality, Greenway engages, on the one hand, intellectuals like Stanley Hauerwas, Richard Rorty, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jeffery Stout, Charles Taylor, and Bernard Williams, and, on the other, contemporary debates over consciousness, free will, evil, and metaethics. He details the character of secular rationality's devastating scission from moral reality and clarifies the promise of understanding faith and spirituality in terms of agape.
"Insofar as the essence of this philosophical spirituality is continuous with the essence of Christian spirituality, I am able to specify how . . . we can be utterly confident that it is wholly reasonable and good to affirm, give thanks for, live, and testify to faith in God."--from the preface While it's clear that a lot of people believe in God, whether they should is a matter of loud debate. Since the Enlightenment, and especially in the last 150 years, a consensus has been building in Western philosophy that belief in a transcendent order--and especially in a supreme being--is unreasonable and should be abandoned. The result of this trend has been to delegitimize religious belief, to claim that those who believe do so against scientific evidence and rational thought. In this confident and sensitive book, William Greenway carefully guides the reader through the developments in Western intellectual life that have led us to assume that belief is irrational. He starts by demonstrating that, along with belief in God, modern definitions of human rationality have also rejected free will and moral agency. He then questions the Cartesian assumption that it is our ability to think that makes us most human and most real. Instead, Greenway explains, it is our capacity to be grasped by the lives and needs of others that forms the heart of who we are. From that vantage point we can see that faith is not a choice we make in spite of evidence to the contrary; it is, rather, wholly rational and in keeping with that which makes us most human. Every person who either has faith or is contemplating faith can be assured that belief in God is both reasonable and good. Greenway embraces both contemporary philosophy and science, inviting readers into a more confident experience of their faith.
In his recent writings on religion and secularization, Habermas has challenged reason to clarify its relation to religious experience and to engage religions in a constructive dialogue. Given the global challenges facing humanity, nothing is more dangerous than the refusal to communicate that we encounter today in different forms of religious and ideological fundamentalism. Habermas argues that in order to engage in this dialogue, two conditions must be met: religion must accept the authority of secular reason as the fallible results of the sciences and the universalistic egalitarianism in law and morality; and conversely, secular reason must not set itself up as the judge concerning truths of faith. This argument was developed in part as a reaction to the conception of the relation between faith and reason formulated by Pope Benedict XVI in his 2006 Regensburg address. In 2007 Habermas conducted a debate, under the title ‘An Awareness of What Is Missing', with philosophers from the Jesuit School for Philosophy in Munich. This volume includes Habermas's essay, the contributions of his interlocutors and Habermas's reply to them. It will be indispensable reading for anyone who wishes to understand one of the most urgent and intractable issues of our time.
This updated edition by one of the world's leading apologists presents a systematic, positive case for Christianity that reflects the latest work in the contemporary hard sciences and humanities. Brilliant and accessible.
Public theology is an increasingly important area of theological discourse with strong global networks of institutions and academics involved in it. Elaine Graham is one of the UK's leading theologians and an established SCM author. In this book, Elaine Graham argues that Western society is entering an unprecedented political and cultural era, in which many of the assumptions of classic sociological theory and of mainstream public theology are being overturned. Whilst many of the features of the trajectory of religious decline, typical of Western modernity, are still apparent, there are compelling and vibrant signs of religious revival, not least in public life and politics - local, national and global. This requires a revision of the classic secularization thesis, as well as much Western liberal political theory, which set out separate or at least demarcated terms of engagement between religion and the public domain. Elaine Graham examines claims that Western societies are moving from 'secular' to 'post-secular' conditions and traces the contours of the 'post-secular': the revival of faith-based engagement in public sphere alongside the continuing - perhaps intensifying - questioning of the legi¬timacy of religion in public life. She argues that public theology must rethink its theological and strategic priorities in order to be convincing in this new 'post-secular' world and makes the case for the renewed prospects for public theology as a form of Christian apologetics, drawing from Biblical, classical and contemporary sources.
What has happened to religion in its present manifestations? Containing contributions from distinguished scholars from disciplines, such as: philosophy, political theory, anthropology, classics, and religious studies, this book seeks to address this question.
When it appeared in 1670, Baruch Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise was denounced as the most dangerous book ever published. Religious and secular authorities saw it as a threat to faith, social and political harmony, and everyday morality, and its author was almost universally regarded as a religious subversive and political radical who sought to spread atheism throughout Europe. Steven Nadler tells the story of this book: its radical claims and their background in the philosophical, religious, and political tensions of the Dutch Golden Age, as well as the vitriolic reaction these ideas inspired. A vivid story of incendiary ideas and vicious backlash, A Book Forged in Hell will interest anyone who is curious about the origin of some of our most cherished modern beliefs--Jacket p. [2].
Excerpt from A Reasonable Faith The Religious Society of Friends has no written creed, and therefore no member is authorized to state its beliefs in a sense that makes the Society responsible. The only statement to be found in the Book of Discipline of Baltimore Yearly Meeting of Friends that directly refers to belief is as follows: It is the belief of the Religious Society of Friends that God manifested himself in Jesus Christ, and that the Spirit which was in Jesus is revealed in the human soul and constitutes the Rock on which the Church is founded. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Belief in God in the face of suffering is one of the most intractable problems of Christian theology. Many respond to the spiritual challenge of evil by ignoring it, blaming God, or insisting on the inherent meaninglessness of life. In this book, William Greenway contends that we don't have to deny our moral selves by either ignoring evil or abandoning our moral sensibilities toward it. We can open our eyes fully to suffering and evil, and our own complicity in them. We can do so because it is only in this full acceptance of the world's guilt and our own that we make ourselves fully open to agape, to being seized by love of others and God. Inspired by the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and the Christian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Challenge of Evil lovingly explains how we can look squarely at the overwhelming suffering in the world and still, by grace, have faith in a good and loving God.