Monthly Archives: December 2011

The ISSR Library Project

dasThe International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR) is bringing to a close its adventurous Library Project. This amazing venture reviewed all English-language writings in the religion-and-science field to construct a library of about 250 classics. These books were then specially bound and distributed as a complete collection to 150 libraries worldwide. As a member of the editorial board that made the selections, I can attest to how much work was involved in constructing the library. It was a serious re-education in the diversity of work that exists, and it presented a wonderful opportunity to solidify friendships with other board members. But the board’s work was the thin end of the wedge.

Project Director Dr. Pranab Das (right) had to run the entire project, including negotiations with publishers and printers on one end and navigating the wilds of the import-export rules of four dozen separate countries. All this while managing both ISSR and the agency funding the project, The John Templeton Foundation. He also produced the compendium volume explaining the library and reviewing every item within it. This is an amazing feat of administrative genius and everyone interested in religion-and-science scholarship is deeply in Pranab’s debt.

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The Future of the Philosophy of Religion

amesbury

Amesbury

schilbrack

Schilbrack

knepper

Knepper

The Society for Philosophy of Religion, USA is meeting in Savannah, Georgia in February 2012. One of the sessions at that meeting will be a panel on my book, Religious Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry: Envisioning a Future for the Philosophy of Religion. Panel members are Richard Amesbury (Claremont School of Theology), Timothy Knepper (Drake University), and Kevin Schilbrack (Western Carolina University), with me responding.

The point of Religious Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry is to describe philosophy of religion not as a discipline but as a suite of related disciplinary inquiries that work both across cultures and across academic disciplines—thus, multidisciplinary, comparative inquiry. This vision of the philosophy of religion places it squarely in the secular academy rather than as an explicit adjunct or a surreptitious affiliate of any religious institution or movement. Religious philosophy, so conceived, has a future, both conceptually and institutionally, but it is one that needs to be articulated and defended, as well as contrasted with more common but intellectually less reputable forms of philosophy of religion that effectively promote particular institutionally borne religious ideologies without due concern for their rational standing in relation to the wider words of philosophy and religious studies.

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