Rorty and the Religious

by Goodson, Jacob L.; Stone, Brad Elliott; Hauerwas, Stanley; Marsh, Charles (AFT)

• ISBN13: 9781610974288
• ISBN10: 161097428X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-08-14
• Publisher: Cascade Books

Summary

Prior to his death in 2007, the self-described secular philosopher Richard Rorty began to modify his previous position concerning religion. Moving from atheism to anti-clericalism, Rorty challenges the metaphysical assumptions that lend justification to abuses of power in the name of religion. Instead of dismissing and ignoring Rorty's challenge, the essays in this volume seek to enter into meaningful conversation with Rorty's thought and engage his criticisms in a constructive and serious way. In so doing, one finds promising nuggets within Rorty's thought for addressing particular questions within Christianity. The essays in this volume offer charitable yet fully confessional engagements with an impressive secular thinker.

Author Biography

Jacob L. Goodson (PhD, University of Virginia) is Visiting Professor of Religious Ethics in the Department of Religious Studies at the College of William Mary. He has published scholarly essays in The American Journal of Theology and Philosophy and Contemporary Pragmatism. Brad Elliott Stone is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the University Honors Program at Loyola Marymount University. He has published several essays and book chapters in pragmatism, continental philosophy, and Spanish philosophy.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
List of Contributors	p. xiii
Introduction	p. xvii
Reflections in Rorty's Mirrors
The Priority of Democracy: The Public, the Private, and the Primitive	p. 3
Therapy to Apocalypse: Encountering the Abyss of Epistemology in James and Rorty	p. 14
Can (Analytic) Philosophers Tell Theologians the Truth? Richard Rorty and Methodological Nominalism	p. 23
For and Against Richard Rorty: Christian Convictions, Liberal Democracy, and the Christenfrage	p. 46
Moral Dispositions and Religious Belief
What the Apostles Will Let Us Get Away with Saying: Plantinga and Rorty on the Social Establishment of Religious Belief	p. 71
Pragmatic Charity: A Synthesis of Rorty and Milbank	p. 91
Contingency, Irony, and Vulnerability: Richard Rorty and Scriptural Reasoning	p. 119
The Philosophy and Theology of Social Hope
Rorty's Religion	p. 141
Can There Be Hope without Prophecy? Richard Rorty as Prophetic Pragmatist	p. 153
The Difficulty of Imagining Other Persons, Reimagined: Rorty on Moral Imagination and the Transformation of Conflict	p. 173
Afterword	p. 197
Bibliography	p. 211
Subject Index	p. 221
Name Index	p. 223
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