Reasonable Faith for a Post-Secular Age: Open Christian Spirituality and Ethics

by William Greenway

Overview

Our global community desperately needs overt awakening to an age of reason and faith. Reasonable Faith for a Post-Secular Age meets this need by interpreting faith not in terms of belief in propositions but in terms of living surrender to having been seized by agape for every Face, including one's own. Virtually all faith traditions, from Buddhism to Humanism to Wiccan, are rooted in agape and therefore share considerable spiritual and ethical common ground (a truth long veiled). In contrast to ethically feckless secular rationality--over which a devastating, global social Darwinism currently runs roughshod--faith qua living surrender to agape grounds moral realism, awakens us to love for all creatures, and inspires struggles for justice. Inspired by the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and Christian spirituality, Greenway engages, on the one hand, intellectuals like Stanley Hauerwas, Richard Rorty, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jeffery Stout, Charles Taylor, and Bernard Williams, and, on the other, contemporary debates over consciousness, free will, evil, and metaethics. He details the character of secular rationality's devastating scission from moral reality and clarifies the promise of understanding faith and spirituality in terms of agape.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781725270466
Publisher:	Cascade Books
Publication date:	12/16/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	228
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

William Greenway is Professor of Philosophical Theology at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. He is the author of A Reasonable Belief: Why God and Faith Make Sense (2015), For the Love of All Creatures: The Story of Grace in Genesis (2015), The Challenge of Evil: Grace and the Problem of Suffering (2016), and Agape Ethics: Moral Realism and Love for All Life (Cascade, 2016).


William Greenway is professor of philosophical theology at Austin Seminary. Here and in A Reasonable Belief (2015), For the Love of All Creatures (2015), The Challenge of Evil (2016), Agape Ethics (2016), and Reasonable Faith for a Post-Secular Age (2020), he defends Moral Realism Theory, contending reality has an inherent moral dimension, the force signified by “agape,” requiring utilization of three discrete families of vocabularies, those of 1) modern science, 2) free will, and 3) agape.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This set of essays is a penetrating philosophical critique of philosophical naturalism, and a defense of a more open concept of rationality, that is able to take religion seriously. A very important contribution to debates about philosophy, metaphysics, and faith.”

—Keith Ward, former Regius Professor of Divinity and Canon, Oxford University



“In these fascinating and provocative essays, Bill Greenway argues that we are entering a post-secular world of reasonable faiths. Exploring the convergence of religious traditions in their practical commitment to agape, he contests the assumptions of secular intellectuals who too readily occupy a default skepticism. Wide-ranging, observant, and philosophically astute, this is an apologetics for our times.”

—David Fergusson, Professor of Divinity, University of Edinburgh

Editorial Reviews

This set of essays is a penetrating philosophical critique of philosophical naturalism, and a defense of a more open concept of rationality, that is able to take religion seriously. A very important contribution to debates about philosophy, metaphysics, and faith.”

—Keith Ward, former Regius Professor of Divinity and Canon, Oxford University



“In these fascinating and provocative essays, Bill Greenway argues that we are entering a post-secular world of reasonable faiths. Exploring the convergence of religious traditions in their practical commitment to agape, he contests the assumptions of secular intellectuals who too readily occupy a default skepticism. Wide-ranging, observant, and philosophically astute, this is an apologetics for our times.”

—David Fergusson, Professor of Divinity, University of Edinburgh

From the Publisher