Why Philosophy Matters for the Study of Religion--and Vice Versa

By Thomas A. Lewis

2016

First Published

3.75

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188

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5H42M

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Work in philosophy of religion is still strongly marked by an excessive focus on Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Judaism—almost to the exclusion of other religious traditions. Moreover, in many cases it has been confined to a narrow set of intellectual problems, without embedding these in their larger social, historical, and practical contexts. Why Philosophy Matters for the Study of Religion—and Vice Versa addresses this situation through a seriesof interventions intended to work against the gap that exists between much scholarship in philosophy of religion and important recent developments that speak to religious studies as a whole.This volume takes up what, in recent years, has often been seen as a fundamental reason for excluding religious ethics and philosophy of religion from religious their explicit normativity. Against this presupposition, Thomas A. Lewis argues that normativity is pervasive—not unique to ethics and philosophy of religion—and therefore not a reason to exclude them from religious studies. Lewis bridges more philosophical and historical subfields by arguing for the importance ofhistory to the philosophy of religion. He considers the future of religious ethics, explaining that the field as whole should learn from the methodological developments associated with recent work in comparative religious ethics and 'comparative religious ethics' should no longer be conceived as a distinctsubfield. The concluding chapter engages broader, post-9/11 arguments about the importance of studying religion arguing, that prominent contemporary notions of 'religious literacy' actually hinder our ability to grasp religion's significance and impact in the world today.

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Author

Thomas A. Lewis

Author · 5 books

Thomas A. Lewis is a veteran journalist (National Wildlife, Smithsonian magazines) and broadcaster (Voice of America) who has written six non-fiction books, two of which received favorable critical attention nationwide. He became alarmed about the state of the environment while working as the executive editor of the Time-Life Books 16-volume series on the earth sciences, “Planet Earth,” and later when, as roving editor for National Wildlife Magazine, he traveled from Alaska to Costa Rica to chronicle the distress of animals and their ecosystems. It was while writing “EQ Index,” an annual assessment of the state of the US environment for National Wildlife and The World Almanac, that he began to suspect that pollution and exploitation of natural resources had reached a point of no return. That conviction led to his latest non-fiction work, Brace for Impact: Surviving the Crash of the Industrial Age—and to the present work of fiction, which imagines how that crash might happen, and how an American family might deal with it. He lives on a “sustainable-ready” farm in West Virginia where he has learned, he says, that “if my life depended on sustainable living I’d be dead now.”