Terry Lectures – serie

One of our most influential literary critics challenges those who too easily dismiss religion and faithTerry Eagleton’s witty and polemical Reason, Faith, and Revolution is bound to cause a stir among scientists, theologians, people of faith and people of no faith, as well as general readers eager to understand the God Debate. On the one hand, Eagleton demolishes what he calls the “superstitious” view of God held by most atheists and agnostics and offers in its place a revolutionary account of the Christian Gospel. On the other hand, he launches a stinging assault on the betrayal of this revolution by institutional Christianity.There is little joy here, then, either for the anti-God brigade—Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens in particular—nor for many conventional believers. Instead, Eagleton offers his own vibrant account of religion and politics in a book that ranges from the Holy Spirit to the recent history of the Middle East, from Thomas Aquinas to the Twin Towers.

Selected as one of the Books of the Century by the New York Public Library  “The brilliance, the wealth of illustration, and the aptness of personal application . . . make the reading of these chapters an exciting experience.”—W. Norman Pittenger, New York Times Book Review  “The Courage to Be changed my life. It also profoundly impacted the lives of many others from my generation. Now Harvey Cox’s fresh introduction helps to open up this powerful reading experience to the current generation.”—Robert N. Bellah, University of California, Berkeley  Originally published in 1952, The Courage to Be has become a classic of twentieth-century religious and philosophical thought. The great Christian existentialist thinker Paul Tillich describes the dilemma of modern humankind and points a way to the conquest of the problem of anxiety. This edition includes a new introduction by Harvey Cox that situates the book within the theological conversation into which it first appeared and conveys its continued relevance in the current century.

“A daring book to have cast into the midst of the world’s excitements, for it will itself breed new excitements. . . . It is not a book to be missed by those interested in man’s spiritual growth.”—New York TimesA noted psychoanalyst assesses the modern issue between traditional religion and a philosophy that takes as the sole aim in life the satisfaction of instinctive and material values.

“These compact vigorous essays constitute Dr. Jung’s most sustained interpretation of the religious function in individual experience.”—Journal of Social Philosophy  “This psychological study of religion is particularly interesting in the light of current social and political movements throughout the world.”—The Personalist  Dr. Carl Gustav Jung, author of some of the most provocative hypotheses in modern psychology, in this volume describes what he regards as an authentic religious function in the unconscious mind. Using a wealth of material from ancient and medieval gnostic, alchemistic, and occultistic literature, he discusses the religious symbolism of unconscious processes and the possible continuity of religious forms that have appeared and reappeared through the centuries.

"A document of first-rate importance. . . . Sheer informed common sense. . . . This volume should be compulsory reading for all, whatever their religious beliefs or disbeliefs, who want light on the nature and place of education in our democratic society."—The Yale Review One of the most eminent Catholic philosophers of our time explores the American system of education. Jacques Maritain believes that education must be based on the Christian idea of the individual being “more a whole than a part, and more independent than servile.”  In his view education is concerned with “making a man”—a person with “deep-rooted independence with regard to common opinion.”  This book is devoted to discovering how that can come about.

A world-famous scientist answers the fundamental questions concerning the changes in the course of the history of life and considers human aims, values, and duties in the light of the nature of man and his place in the history of life."The clearest and soundest exposition of the meaning of evolution that has yet been written."—Ashley Montagu, Isis

Riding with patrol cars in four major northern cities, walking with policemen on the beat, observing what goes on in police stations, analyzing who telephones the police, what crimes are reported, who reports them, and why, Albert J. Reiss, Jr., seeks to understand the ways in which we can make our society more civil, our police more humane, our population more responsible. Reiss devotes most of his first chapter to describing the experiences of two police officers during an ordinary night in a patrol car.  He then considers the many ways in which police and public interact – and how and why they often do not.  In a chapter entitled “Police Manners and Morals,” the author investigates situations where policemen may themselves break the law – and how such actions relate to the subculture of an individual neighborhood or beat.  Finally, Reiss outlines his understanding of how we may become a more civil society, presenting his view that the morality of the public and the morality of the police are intimately related, that one cannot be expected to improve unless the other does.

If Paul Ricoeur is correct in seeing the various currents of contemporary philosophy all converging on the problem of a "grand philosophy of language," then the first sixty pages of this absorbing study of Freud may become the rallying point from which future work can begin.This first part of Freud and Philosophy, "Problematic," presents a profound and clear theory of signification, symbol, and interpretation. The second part, "A Reading of Freud," is required reading for anyone seriously interested in psychoanalysis. The third section interpretation of Ricoeur's own theory of symbol—particularly religious symbol—which places this study at the center of contemporary debate over the sense of myth.In this book are revealed Ricoeur the philosopher of language; Ricoeur the critic of Freud; and Ricoeur the theologian of religious symbol. The author is outstanding in all three roles, and the book that emerges is of rare profundity, enormous scope, and complete timeliness.Paul Ricoeur is professor of philosophy at the University of Paris. “Paul Ricouer…has done a study that is all too rare these days, in which one intellect comes to grips with another, in which a scholar devotes himself to a thoughtful, searching, and comprehensive study of a genius…The final result is a unique survey of the panorama of Freudian thought by an observer who, although starting from outside, succeeds in penetrating to its core.” –American Journal of Psychiatry“Primarily an inquiry into the foundations of language and hermeneutics…[Ricoeur uses] the Freudian ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ as a corrective and counter-balance for phenomenology and create a ‘new phenomenology’…This important work…should have an impact upon serious thinking in philosophy, theology, psychology, and other areas which have been affected by Freud studies.”—International Philosophical Quarterly“A stimulating tour de force that allows us to envisage both the psychoanalytic body of knowledge and the psychoanalytic movement in a broad perspective within the framework of its links to culture, history and the evolution of Western intellectual thought.” – Psychoanalytic Quarterly Paul Ricoeur is a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and the University of Paris.

Charles Hartshorne has set himself the task of formulating the idea of deity "to preserve perhaps even increase, its religious value, while yet avoiding the contradictions which seem inseparable from the idea of customarily defined." This is a brilliant attempt to redefine problems that have long challenged the Western world in its search for understanding both God and man. “The compact, closely reasoned book employs a skill in logic reminiscent of scholasticism at its best to refute traditional notions, scholastic and otherwise, of divine absoluteness, and to expound a conception of God which is both free of contradiction and religiously adequate. The position taken is described by Professor Hartshorne as surrelativism, or panentheism, and these terms indicate the two major emphases of the volume….He who follows its precise logic with the alertness it demands will have a clarifying and enriching experience.”—S. Paul Schiling, Journal of Bible and Religion“In what respects is God absolute and in what respects relative? Or is it meaningless to say that he is both? In a rigorously analytical study Professor Hartshorne explains why he thinks both statements are necessary….One comes from this book with new confidence in the ability of philosophy to attack religious problems and, through careful analysis, to reveal what as alone conceivable must be true.”—J.S. Bixler, Review of Religion“Hartshorne’s work is a major achievement in religious thought because it strives to clear away errors that have been insuperable obstacles to religious search.”—Henry N. Wieman, The Philosophical Review“This book is not merely theoretical, as might be supposed; it has its practical application to the larger social issues of our time, including the problem of democracy.”—Jay William Hudson, Christian Register

This provocative exploration of the nature and history of the word in some of its social, psychological, literary, phenomenological, and religious dimensions argues that the word is initially aural and in the last analysis always remains sound; it cannot be reduced to any other category. Father Ong contends that sound is essentially an event manifesting power and personal presence, and his descriptive analysis of the development of the media of verbal expression, from their oral sources through the laborious transfer to the visual world and then to contemporary means of electronic communication, shows that the predicament of the human word is the predicament of man himself. Examining the close alliance of the spoken word with the sense of the sacred, particularly in the Hebreo-Christian tradition, he reveals that in a world where presence has penetrated time and space as never before, modern man must find the God who has given himself in the Word which brings man more into the world of sound than of sight.

What is empiricism and what could it be? Bas C. van Fraassen, one of the world’s foremost contributors to philosophical logic and the philosophy of science, here undertakes a fresh consideration of these questions and offers a program for renewal of the empiricist tradition. The empiricist tradition is not and could not be defined by common doctrines, but embodies a certain stance in philosophy, van Fraassen says. This stance is displayed first of all in a searing, recurrent critique of metaphysics, and second in a focus on experience that requires a voluntarist view of belief and opinion. Van Fraassen focuses on the philosophical problems of scientific and conceptual revolutions and on the not unrelated ruptures between religious and secular ways of seeing or conceiving of ourselves. He explores what it is to be or not be secular and points the way toward a new relationship between secularism and science within philosophy.

In the late eighteenth century, Catholic priest Johann Joseph Gassner (1727–1779) discovered that he had extraordinary powers of exorcism. Deciding that demons were responsible for most human ailments, he healed thousands, rich and poor, Protestant and Catholic. In this book H. C. Erik Midelfort delves deeply into records of the time to explore Gassner’s remarkable exorcising campaign, chronicle the official efforts to curb him, and reconstruct the sufferings of the afflicted.Gassner’s activities triggered a Catholic religious revival as well as a noisy skeptical reaction. In response to those who doubted that he was really casting out demons, Gassner marshaled hundreds of eyewitness reports that seemed to prove his exorcisms really worked. Midelfort describes the enormous public controversy that resulted, and he demonstrates that the Gassner episode yields important insights into the German Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, the limitations of eighteenth-century debate, and the ongoing role of magic and belief in an age of scientific enlightenment.

This volume is based upon the seventeenth series of lectures delivered at Yale University on the Foundation established by the late Dwight H. Terry of Plymouth, Connecticut, through his gift of an endowment fund for the delivery and subsequent publication of "Lectures on Religion in the Light of Science and Philosophy." The deed of gift declares that "the object of this Foundation is not the promotion of scientific investigation and discovery, but rather the assimilation and interpretation of that which has been or shall be hereafter discovered, and its application to human welfare, especially by the building of the truths of science and philosophy into the structure of a broadened and purified religion.Dr. Millikan believes “modern science of the real sort is slowly learning to walk humbly with its God.”

This volume is based upon the seventh series of lectures delivered at Yale University on the Foundation established by the late Dwight H. Terry of Plymouth, Connecticut, through his gift of an endowment fund for the delivery and subsequent publication of “Lectures on Religion in the Light of Science and Philosophy.”   The deed of gift declares that “the object of this Foundation is not the promotion of scientific investigation and discovery, but rather the assimilation and interpretation of that which has been or shall be hereafter discovered, and its application to human welfare, especially by the building of the truths of science and philosophy into the structure of a broadened and purified religion.   The beliefs of men in the past, the author makes clear, were inevitably inspired by their fears of an incomprehensible universe and were derived from their ideas of the supernatural.  Science has gradually created a new set of sanctions; and the religion of today, freed from the dread of the unknown, must be formed on this new foundation.  Professor Montague proceeds to outline the basis of a philosophy of life reconceived from this point of view, applying to it the term Promethean Religion.  It is a volume which will stimulate new thought and discussion, a distinguished addition to the important volumes already published on the Dwight Harrington Terry Foundation.

In this important and original book, eminent scholar Barbara Herrnstein Smith describes, assesses, and reflects upon a set of contemporary intellectual projects involving science, religion, and human cognition. One, which Smith calls “the New Naturalism,” is the effort to explain religion on the basis of cognitive science. Another, which she calls “the New Natural Theology,” is the attempt to reconcile natural-scientific accounts of the world with traditional religious belief. These two projects, she suggests, are in many ways mirror images—or “natural reflections”—of each other.  Examining these and related efforts from the perspective of a constructivist-pragmatist epistemology, Smith argues that crucial aspects of belief—religious and other—that remain elusive or invisible under dominant rationalist and computational models are illuminated by views of human cognition that stress its dynamic, embodied, and interactive features. She also demonstrates how constructivist understandings of the formation and stabilization of knowledge—scientific and other—alert us to similarities in the springs of science and religion that are elsewhere seen largely in terms of difference and contrast.  In Natural Reflections, Smith develops a sophisticated approach to issues often framed only polemically. Recognizing science and religion as complex, distinct domains of human practice, she also insists on their significant historical connections and cognitive continuities and offers important new modes of engagement with each of them.

Six acclaimed scholars—including a biologist, a sociologist, a historian, a philosopher, and a physicist—examine the evolution debate.Eighty-one years after America witnessed the Scopes trial over the teaching of evolution in public schools, the debate between science and religion continues. In this book scholars from a variety of disciplines—sociology, history, science, and theology—provide new insights into the contemporary dialogue as well as some perspective suggestions for delineating the responsibilities of both the scientific and religious spheres.Why does the tension between science and religion continue? How have those tensions changed during the past one hundred years? How have those tensions impacted the public debate about so-called “intelligent design” as a scientific alternative to evolution? With wit and wisdom the authors address the conflict from its philosophical roots to its manifestations within American culture. In doing so, they take an important step toward creating a society that reconciles scientific inquiry with the human spirit. This book, which marks the one hundredth anniversary of The Terry Lecture Series, offers a unique perspective for anyone interested in the debate between science and religion in America.

One of our best contemporary writers explores the tension between science and religion and reveals how our concept of mind determines how we understand and value human nature and human civilization  “These impassioned pages require and reward very close attention.”—Michael Dirda, Washington Post  In this ambitious book, acclaimed writer Marilynne Robinson applies her astute intellect to some of the most vexing topics in the history of human thought—science, religion, and consciousness. Crafted with the same care and insight as her award-winning novels, Absence of Mind challenges postmodern atheists who crusade against religion under the banner of science. In Robinson’s view, scientific reasoning does not denote a sense of logical infallibility, as thinkers like Richard Dawkins might suggest. Instead, in its purest form, science represents a search for answers. It engages the problem of knowledge, an aspect of the mystery of consciousness, rather than providing a simple and final model of reality.  By defending the importance of individual reflection, Robinson celebrates the power and variety of human consciousness in the tradition of William James. She explores the nature of subjectivity and considers the culture in which Sigmund Freud was situated and its influence on his model of self and civilization. Through keen interpretations of language, emotion, science, and poetry, Absence of Mind restores human consciousness to its central place in the religion-science debate.

An acclaimed scholar provides the most comprehensive examination available of the Islamic scientific tradition and its relationship to religion and philosophyIn this wide-ranging and masterful work, Ahmad Dallal examines the significance of scientific knowledge and situates the culture of science in relation to other cultural forces in Muslim societies. He traces the ways in which the realms of scientific knowledge and religious authority were delineated historically. The realization of a discrepancy between tradition and science often led to demolition and rebuilding and, most important, to questioning whether scientific knowledge should take precedence over religious authority in a matter where their realms clearly overlap.Dallal frames his inquiry around three concerns: What cultural forces provided the conditions for debate over the primacy of religion or science? How did these debates emerge? And how were they sustained? His primary objectives are to study science in Muslim societies within its larger cultural context and to trace the epistemological distinctions between science and philosophy, on the one hand, and science and religion, on the other. He looks at religious and scientific texts and situates them in the contexts of religion, philosophy, and science. Finally, Dallal describes the relationship negotiated in the classical (medieval) period between the religious, scientific, and philosophical systems of knowledge that is central to the Islamic scientific tradition and shows how this relationship has changed radically in modern times.

In this powerful book one of the most important Jewish thinkers in the world today grapples with issues that increasingly divide Israel’s secular Jewish community from its religious Zionists. Addressing the concerns of both communities from the point of view of one who is deeply committed to religious pluralism, David Hartman suggests a more inclusive and inviting framework for the modern Israeli engagement of the Jewish tradition. He offers a new understanding of what it means to be Jewish—one which is neither assimilationist nor backward-looking, and one that enables different Jewish groups to celebrate their own traditions without demonizing or patronizing others. In a world polarized between religious and secular and caught within a sectarian denominationalism, Hartman shows the way to build bridges of understanding.The book explores the philosophies of two major Jewish thinkers of the Middle Ages, Yehuda Halevi and Moses Maimonides. A careful analysis of Maimonides’ approach to Judaism shows that messianism is not the predominant organizing principle that makes Judaism intelligible and significant, Hartman contends. He argues against Halevi’s triumphalism and in favor of using the Sinai covenant for evaluating the religious significance of Israel, for this approach gives meaning to Zionists’ religious commitments while also empowering secular Israelis to reengage with the Jewish tradition.

In A Common Faith, eminent American philosopher John Dewey calls for the “emancipation of the true religious quality” from the heritage of dogmatism and supernaturalism that he believes characterizes historical religions. He describes how the depth of religious experience and the creative role of faith in the resources of experience to generate meaning and value can be cultivated without making cognitive claims that compete with or contend with scientific ones. In a new introduction, Dewey scholar Thomas M. Alexander contextualizes the text for students and scholars by providing an overview of Dewey and his philosophy, key concepts in A Common Faith, and reactions to the text.

A distinguished scholar urges scientists and religious thinkers to become colleagues rather than adversaries in areas where their fields overlap  “Refreshingly modest and nondogmatic. . . .  Brims with lively anecdotes.”—John Horgan, Wall Street Journal  Each age has its own crisis—our modern experience of science-religion conflict is not so very different from that experienced by our forebears, Keith Thomson proposes in this thoughtful book. He considers the ideas and writings of Thomas Jefferson and Charles Darwin, two men who struggled mightily to reconcile their religion and their science, then looks to more recent times when scientific challenges to religion (evolutionary theory, for example) have given rise to powerful political responses from religious believers.  Today as in the eighteenth century, there are pressing reasons for members on each side of the religion-science debates to find common ground, Thomson contends. No precedent exists for shaping a response to issues like cloning or stem cell research, unheard of fifty years ago, and thus the opportunity arises for all sides to cooperate in creating a new ethics for the common good.

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah explores how early social scientists developed our modern understandings of society through their theories of religionThe foundations of modern social science were built on the study of religion, the acclaimed thinker Kwame Anthony Appiah argues. Delving into the intellectual currents of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he investigates how formative thinkers—notably Edward Burnett Tylor, Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber—grappled with the concepts of society and religion as interdependent categories. Appiah shows how their efforts to define religion, or evade the task, mark the power and limitations of social thought in ways that persist among theorists today. Religion was not merely an object of study but a framework through which early social scientists established sociology as a discipline.Appiah also examines more recent work in both interpretive sociology and evolutionary and cognitive psychology about the mechanisms through which communities form beliefs and values—while underscoring the enduring significance of these earlier debates for contemporary social thought. Throughout, he intertwines storytelling, historical analysis, and philosophical reflection to show how our ideas about society and culture have been, and continue to be, forged in dialogue with religious questions.

A short, thoughtful introduction to traditional Chinese medicine that looks beyond the conventional boundaries of Western biomedical scienceTraditional Chinese medicine is often viewed as mystical or superstitious, with outcomes requiring naïve faith. Judith Farquhar, drawing on her hard-won knowledge of social, intellectual, and clinical spheres in today’s China, here offers a concise and nuanced treatment that addresses enduring and troublesome ontological, epistemological, and ethical questions. In this work, which is based on her 2017 Terry Lectures, “Reality, Reason, and Action In and Beyond Chinese Medicine,” she considers how the modern, rationalized, and scientific field of traditional Chinese medicine constructs its very real objects (bodies, symptoms, drugs), how experts think through and sort out pathology and health (yinyang, right qi / wrong qi, stasis, flow), and how contemporary doctors act responsibly to “seek out the root” of bodily disorder. Through this refined investigation, East-West contrasts collapse, and systematic Chinese medicine, no longer a mystery or a pseudo-science, can become a philosophical ally and a rich resource for a more capacious science.

A bold and revelatory exploration of Walter Benjamin’s theory of history alongside experiments in quantum physics, giving us flashes of possibility in this dark moment of dangerWalter Benjamin’s concept of messianic materialism, developed as fascism overtook Europe, has held out hope to thinkers, artists, and activists for nearly a century. Benjamin’s key insight is that the potential for justice exists in the “thick-now” of the present moment, and not in pinning political hope on some future era. In this invigorating and audacious new book, philosopher and physicist Karen River Barad proposes a method to think time anew, one that brings Benjamin’s ideas into conversation with the discoveries of quantum physics and the mystical-materialist insights of Jewish Kabbalah.Arguing that Benjamin was himself a kind of “bench scientist,” Barad demonstrates how Benjamin’s conception of messianic time and the thick-now of the present (flashing through with bolts of eternal time), are material matters to be literally grasped (if you dare!). Diffractively reading each of Benjamin’s key concepts together with natural phenomena (crystals, constellations, lightning), Barad transduces the tangible existence of Benjamin’s revelatory theories. The memory-encrusted world all around us, Barad argues, holds energetic possibilities for remembering past injustices, reckoning with historic violence, and reconfiguring the world in ways that move us toward more just material conditions.

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah explores how early social scientists developed our modern understandings of society through their theories of religionThe foundations of modern social science were built on the study of religion, the acclaimed thinker Kwame Anthony Appiah argues. Delving into the intellectual currents of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he investigates how formative thinkers—notably Edward Burnett Tylor, Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber—grappled with the concepts of society and religion as interdependent categories. Appiah shows how their efforts to define religion, or evade the task, mark the power and limitations of social thought in ways that persist among theorists today. Religion was not merely an object of study but a framework through which early social scientists established sociology as a discipline.Appiah also examines more recent work in both interpretive sociology and evolutionary and cognitive psychology about the mechanisms through which communities form beliefs and values—while underscoring the enduring significance of these earlier debates for contemporary social thought. Throughout, he intertwines storytelling, historical analysis, and philosophical reflection to show how our ideas about society and culture have been, and continue to be, forged in dialogue with religious questions.

John Polkinghorne is a major figure in today’s debates over the compatibility of science and religion. Internationally known as both a theoretical physicist and a theologian—the only ordained member of the Royal Society—Polkinghorne brings unique qualifications to his inquiry into the possibilities of believing in God in an age of science. In this thought-provoking book, the author focuses on the collegiality between science and theology, contending that these "intellectual cousins" are both concerned with interpreted experience and with the quest for truth about reality. He argues eloquently that scientific and theological inquiries are parallel.The book begins with a discussion of what belief in God can mean in our times. Polkinghorne explores a new natural theology and emphasizes the importance of moral and aesthetic experience and the human intuition of value and hope. In other chapters, he compares science’s struggle to understand the nature of light with Christian theology’s struggle to understand the nature of Christ. He addresses the question, Does God act in the physical world? And he extends his ideas about the role of chaos theory, surveys the prospects for future dialogue between scientific and theological thinkers, and defends a critical realist understanding of the activities of both disciplines. Polkinghorne concludes with a consideration of the nature of mathematical truths and the links between the complementary realities of physical and mental experience.Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund

How Western notions of the Buddha have come to misrepresent his teachings and the traditional goals of Buddhist practiceThis book tells the story of the Scientific Buddha, "born" in Europe in the 1800s but commonly confused with the Buddha born in India 2,500 years ago. The Scientific Buddha was sent into battle against Christian missionaries, who were proclaiming across Asia that Buddhism was a form of superstition. He proved the missionaries wrong, teaching a dharma that was in harmony with modern science. And his influence continues. Today his teaching of "mindfulness" is heralded as the cure for all manner of maladies, from depression to high blood pressure.In this potent critique, a well-known chronicler of the West's encounter with Buddhism demonstrates how the Scientific Buddha's teachings deviate in crucial ways from those of the far older Buddha of ancient India. Donald Lopez shows that the Western focus on the Scientific Buddha threatens to bleach Buddhism of its vibrancy, complexity, and power, even as the superficial focus on "mindfulness" turns Buddhism into merely the latest self-help movement. The Scientific Buddha has served his purpose, Lopez argues. It is now time for him to pass into nirvana. This is not to say, however, that the teachings of the ancient Buddha must be dismissed as mere cultural artifacts. They continue to present a potent challenge, even to our modern world.