Offering a new model for the philosophy of religion, John Cottingham combines emotional and intellectual aspects of our human experience, and embraces practical as well as theoretical concerns. Cottingham reveals how a religious worldview is best understood not as an isolated set of doctrines, but as intimately related to spiritual praxis and to the search for self-understanding and moral growth. Touching on many important debates in contemporary philosophy and theology, but accessible to general readers, this book covers a range of central topics in the philosophy of religion.
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"Beautifully written and beautifully produced...Cottingham articulates, in this fine book, a deeply attractive and thoroughly Catholic account of what it is to be a religious person, cultivating a certain affective openness and emotional receptivity without sacrificing intellectual integrity." The Tablet
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Philosophy and religion are often seen as opposed, but this book aims to show how they can be reconciled. It argues that religious belief cannot be evaluated as an isolated set of doctrines, but needs to be understood in relation to the spiritual praxis that gives it life. Accessibly written and wide-ranging in scope, it connects the spiritual search for self-awareness and moral growth with the philosophical quest to understand the cosmos and our relationship to it.
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15 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
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The Most Important Book?,
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This review is from: The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Paperback)
I have read most of this book, and as I read, I repeatedly ask myself: "Is this the most important book I have ever read?" I bow to the Bible. There was "The Return of Sherlock Holmes" when I was ten, and my college text on British Literature when I was 18. Now this.
My forty-year career in psychiatry would have been radically illumined if I had had this book. My fairly lonely (Christian) hesitation about CS Lewis has been explained to me as avoidance of the trap of accepting only the rational as scientifically reasonable discourse, without the "humane." Perhaps the limits in my worldview make me inordinately grateful, but this book feels like a miracle.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Sophisticated Philosophical Defense of Religious Belief,
This review is from: The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Paperback)
I found this to be a very well written and engaging defense of religion from someone who is an authority in modern philosophical academic debates. It expands on his shorter book "The Meaning of Life." For those with an interest and preferably some background in philosophy, Cottingham leads one through what I assume are the best or latest responses of a Christian believer to a variety of critiques that seek to "defeat" the religious viewpoint. The arguments are not only applicable to Christian religion but to all Abrahamic religions (I think).
One of Cottingham's main points, which I found persuasive, is to stress that the validity of the religious perspective is less about intellectual proofs and logical rigor in argumentation and more about what he calls "praxis" by which he means the practice of living a spiritual life. It is more about the heart than about the mind. He draws on Pascal's idea that "belief" comes from practicing a form of life as if it were true. This seems right - also about some other aspects of life, such as marriage is which one learns (hopefully) to love your partner in deeper and profound ways. Faith is to bet on the validity of hope and trust in a ultimately good future and universe. Cottingham also makes a strong case for the non incompatibility of faith and reason, religion and science. But he could have explained (for us non-academics) a little bit more his claim that the standard scientific philosophies (verificationism, empiricism etc) have "self-destructed" and therefore are no longer as authoritative as the popular culture seems still to believe. Also he could have given more everyday examples of why "evidence" is not always necessary for belief since it is counter-intuitive. At points I felt his (Roman Catholic?) philosophical leanings tend to an overly rationalistic formulation obscuring the element of mystery and paradox involved in knowing God's truth. ("My thoughts are not your thoughts"). There is a lot more to this wide-ranging and humble book than I have touched on here. I would highly recommend it.
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Bernard Williams, perhaps the most distinguished analytic moral philosopher writing at the turn of the twentieth century, once speculated that there might be something about ethical understanding that makes it inherently unsuited to be explored through the methods and techniques of analytic philosophy alone. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
spiritual praxis, spiritual askesis, religious praxis, religious adherent, analogical predication Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, David Hume, Andrew Louth, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Aquinas, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alvin Plantinga, Five Ways, Pierre Hadot, Bernard Williams, Compare Kant, Jesus of Nazareth, Karl Rahner, Natural Religion, Simone Weil, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Merton New!
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Bernard Williams, perhaps the most distinguished analytic moral philosopher writing at the turn of the twentieth century, once speculated that there might be something about ethical understanding that makes it inherently unsuited to be explored through the methods and techniques of analytic philosophy alone. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
spiritual praxis, spiritual askesis, religious praxis, religious adherent, analogical predication Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, David Hume, Andrew Louth, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Aquinas, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alvin Plantinga, Five Ways, Pierre Hadot, Bernard Williams, Compare Kant, Jesus of Nazareth, Karl Rahner, Natural Religion, Simone Weil, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Merton New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 100
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cites this book:
- The Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford World's Classics) by Aristotle on 7 pages
- The Critique Of Practical Reason by Immanuel Kant on 5 pages
- On the Meaning of Life (Thinking in Action) by John Cottingham on 5 pages
- The Resurrection of the Son of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, Vol. 3) by N. T. Wright on 4 pages
- Freud and Jung on Religion by Michael Palmer on 4 pages
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