Language: English
Published by American Academy of Religion, 1999, 1999
ISBN 10: 0788505408 ISBN 13: 9780788505409
Seller: Virginia Martin, aka bookwitch, Concord, CA, U.S.A.
Soft cover. Condition: Fair. Octavo, softcover, light moisture stain on back endpaper and a few back page corners else VG in beige wraps with blue border. Why do many people think religion is subjective? Or symbolic? Or non-rational? This book brings together eighteen important twentieth-century essaus on these questions, by authors ranging from Ludwig Wittgenstein to Richard Rorty and Clifford Geertz. The editors show that such questions are both quite modern and powerfully influential in our Western thinking about religious belief. Moreover, they lead directly into the three most popular theories that attempt to make sense of religion: positivism, functionalism, and relativism. Selecting essays that represent each of these three theoretical positions, Frankenberry and Penner trace their incoherence and argue for a new method and theory for understanding religious beliefs. 532 pp.