“Even now it is busy creating a world fit for humanism’s happy heroes: the plucky, self-reliant, cheerful, libidinous, and uninhibited fun-lovers of the future.”
Categories
Category: Theology
Sallie McFague urges us to behave as if the world is God’s body. But doesn’t faith seek some anchor more secure than “as if”?
Categories
The ontological imagination.
William James says that in profound personal experience, compelling ideals become active forces in the world. Religion, he says, can “postulate new facts.”
Categories
The reality of the symbol of God.
Paul Tillich and Gordon Kaufman both argue that God isn’t something that exists, but that God is nonetheless real and profoundly important. What do they mean?
Categories
The object of religion.
G.W.F. Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach each believe that studying human consciousness will tell us something about the nature of God – but Feuerbach says we’ll discover that God is really a projection of human nature.
Friedrich Schleiermacher published his urbane and eloquent book, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, in Berlin in 1799. His fourth speech is addressed not just to the “cultured despisers” of religion, but especially to the despisers of the historic, institutional church. “Your opposition to the church, to every event aimed at the communication of […]
In his only book about religion, John Dewey defines God as the “unity of all ideal ends arousing us to desire and to action.” What does he mean?
A doctrine of the church, refined by theological and historical analysis, helps us identify the purpose and significance of Unitarian Universalist congregations.