Robert Cummings Neville - Defining Religion: Essays in Philosophy of Religion

DEFINING RELIGION

DEFINING

RELIGION

Essays in Philosophy of Religion

ROBERT CUMMINGS NEVILLE

Cover design of the cosmos by Beth Neville

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

2018 State University of New York

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Neville, Robert Cummings, author

Title: Defining Religion : Essays in Philosophy of Religion

Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: ISBN 9781438469577 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438469591 (e-book)

Further information is available at the Library of Congress.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Dedicated to the memory of Nancy Ellegate,
extraordinary SUNY Press editor

CONTENTS

A Respectful Alternative to Process Theology:
A Letter of Grateful and Affectionate Response to David Ray Griffins
Whiteheads Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy: An Argument for Its Contemporary Relevance

TABLES

PREFACE

For some philosophers, scholars, religious thinkers, and intellectually curious people, defining religion is a gripping topic. For others, it is of little or no interest. In the latter group fall both people who have no interest in religion whatsoever and people whose interest in religion is so great that they are concerned only to become better at being religious, thus finding questions of definition a distraction. Of course, if those with no interest in religion suddenly realized that religion properly defined includes something that does interest them, this book might be of significant help. People who dismiss religion but respect spiritual depth might be among these. And perhaps those sharply focused on becoming better at being religious might find that this book reorients them in profitable ways, especially as it might point out hitherto neglected dimensions of religion.

The controversies about defining religion come from several sources, as will be explored in the first two chapters. One source is that in public discussions everyone knows what religion is at the same time that there is huge disagreement about what it is. Another source is the common postmodern view that religion is a Western category and that its use in understanding other cultures is colonialist. A third source is the practice of the various university disciplines studying religion to define it in terms of their own discipline, reductively leaving out other perspectives.

Yet religion in any of the many ways it is defined seems to be a very potent social and personal force these days for many people and thus worth studying. The essays in this book collectively work at defining religion on many levels and from many angles. Recently, I have completed a very But for many people, system is hard to take. Sometimes, brief essays that come at the topic from different angles and in different genres of conversation are much more effective. Except for the first, all the essays here were written during the years I was working on the Philosophical Theology trilogy. Some of the essays were invited presentations, some conference presentations, some for Festschrifts, and one a long letter. Some have been previously published and some not. Some are formal, whereas others are relaxed and joshing with friends. I have not tried to smooth out these differences.

Nevertheless, I have rewritten most of the essays somewhat to relate them to one another. I have updated many notes, and in some instances, have changed my mind about what I had said earlier. Where possible, I have eliminated repetition, although the coherence of an essay sometimes requires treating topics treated in other essays, hopefully with a new contextualization. I have also inserted some references to Philosophical Theology where that might be helpful.

The essays are grouped into five thematic parts for the sake of focus and continuity. To be sure, the essays relate in many different ways and there could be other ways of grouping them, though this one makes the most sense. The first part, entitled , in part 4) are also friends with whom I have grown for decades, but those chapters are more about specific problems and less about my responses to their overall work.

was delivered at Dartmouth College, at the invitation of Nancy Frankenberry and the Religion Department, in 2010 and is published here for the first time.

was originally presented at a philosophical forum at Dartmouth College on the occasion of the retirement of Nancy Frankenberry in May 2015 and was published as Nancy Frankenberry: Philosopher of Religion, Radical Empiricist, Herald of Contingency, in American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 37/1 (January 2016), 520, reprinted here with modifications by permission.

My debts to people supporting the development of these essays are too numerous to mention. I thank all the inviters, editors, and critics in my community of scholars. Let me mention special thanks here only to those whose work I dialogue with in single essays in this volume: Joseph Bracken, S.J., William Desmond, Nancy Frankenberry, David Ray Griffin, Richard Rorty, and John Edwin Smith.

All quotations from the Hebrew and Christian bibles, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version, copyrighted in 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.

The cover art on this book is by Beth Neville, my wife. This is the twentieth SUNY Press book of mine for which she has designed the cover or created cover art. This one is a freehand, asymmetrical drawing executed with colored pens on Bristol paper. It depicts ontological creativity issuing in four ultimate conditions of the cosmos, all of which is explained in the text. If you buy the book for the cover and do not read it, that is just fine too because art is beauty aimed to be enjoyed for its own sake. I am grateful for decades of collaboration with her and hope for a few more covers to come.

I am grateful also to my new editor at SUNY Press, Christopher Ahn. This book is dedicated to my previous editor at SUNY Press, Nancy Ellegate, whose untimely death saddened a great many SUNY Press authors and staff members. To work with her on many projects over the years has been a high point of my career, and Im sure others feel the same way.

NOTES

. My friend Hans-Guenter Heimbrach, Professor of Practical Theology at Frankfurts Goethe University, had the latter reaction upon hearing an early version of chapter 2 in this book. I hope this book whets his interest in definition.