Unnatural Theology

The failure of secular modernity to deliver on its promise of progress and enlightenment leaves a void that religion is rushing to fill. Yet what kind of religious thinking and doing can be adequate to our posthuman condition? And how can we avoid either embracing religious fundamentalism and fantasy or remaining mired in hopeless atheistic nihilism? In Unnatural Theology Charlie Gere provides ways of thinking about the possibilities of religion and theology in the context of our highly technologized postmodernity. Taking its cue from a wide range of thinkers, from John Ruskin and Alfred North Whitehead, to Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, Simon Critchley, Catherine Keller, Bruno Latour, and Timothy Morton, and artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Richard Hamilton, and films including The Incredible Shrinking Man, the book seeks the remnants of theology and religion in the realms of technology and media, and also art, as the basis of potential new religious thinking. Through an interdisciplinary engagement with these thinkers and artists it develops the notion of an unnatural theology as the basis of a new kind of religious thought that does not insult our intelligence.

An examination of the cognitive foundations of intuitions about the existence and attributes of God. Questions about the existence and attributes of God form the subject matter of natural theology, which seeks to gain knowledge of the divine by relying on reason and experience of the world. Arguments in natural theology rely largely on intuitions and inferences that seem natural to us, occurring spontaneously—at the sight of a beautiful landscape, perhaps, or in wonderment at the complexity of the cosmos—even to a nonphilosopher. In this book, Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt examine the cognitive origins of arguments in natural theology. They find that although natural theological arguments can be very sophisticated, they are rooted in everyday intuitions about purpose, causation, agency, and morality. Using evidence and theories from disciplines including the cognitive science of religion, evolutionary ethics, evolutionary aesthetics, and the cognitive science of testimony, they show that these intuitions emerge early in development and are a stable part of human cognition. De Cruz and De Smedt analyze the cognitive underpinnings of five well-known arguments for the existence of God: the argument from design, the cosmological argument, the moral argument, the argument from beauty, and the argument from miracles. Finally, they consider whether the cognitive origins of these natural theological arguments should affect their rationality.

First published in 1998. This collection of original essays identifies and analyzes 19th-century women's theological thought in all its diversity, demonstrating the ways that women revised, subverted, or rejected elements of masculine theology in creating theologies of their own. While women's religion has been widely studied, this is the only collection of essays that examines 19th-century women's theology as such A substantial introduction clarifies the relationships between religion and theology and discusses the barriers to women's participation in theological discourse as well as the ways women overcame or avoided these barriers. The essays analyze theological ideas in a variety of genres. The first group of essays discusses women's nonfiction prose, including women's devotional writings on the Apocalypse; devotional prose by Christina Rossetti and its similarities to the work of Hildegard von Bingen; periodical prose by Anna Jameson and Julia Wedgwood; and the letters of Harriet and Jemima Newman, sisters of John Henry Newman. Other essays examine the novel, presenting analysis of the theologies of novelists Emma Jane Worboise, Charlotte M. Yonge, and Mary Arnold Ward. Further essays discuss the theological ideas of two purity reformers, Josephine Butler and Ellice Hopkins, while the final essays move beyond Victorian Christianity to examine spiritualist and Buddhist theology by women This collection will be important to students and scholars interested in Victorian culture and ideas-literary critics, historians, and theologians-and particularly to those in women's studies and religious studies.

One of Professor Lash's great gifts is that of asking awkward questions and not allowing solutions of theological problems to pass as accepted answers simply because they sound plausible and are passed on without rigorous examination. This collection of recent studies, some previously unpublished, is eloquent testimony to that gift, but without ever losing sight of the fact that theology is not only on the way, but on the way to the consummation of the experience of Easter. Of the book Professor Lash writes: The story of the disciples on the way to Emmaus can serve as a parable for the task of Christian interpretation. Those disciples, like the rest of us, had some difficulty in 'reading' their history and the context of 'recognition', the occasion on which things began to make sense, was not some 'religious' event in a sacred space, but an act of human hospitality. The first two essays treat problems which confront all current theology: the tension between the constructive and critical responsibilities of the theologian, and the relationship between the theological diversity and the unity of faith. There then follows a group of four essays dealing with aspects of the relationship between scripture, theology, and the problems of Christian living, that is to say, of 'hermeneutics' or 'fundamental theology'. The next pair, which complement each other, are rather more philosophical or theoretical in character, and the final group considers more directly doctrinal questions concerning (respectively) religious experience and the doctrine of God, christology, resurrection, ecclesiology, and Christian hope.

The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology and Religion offers a comprehensive and compelling review of research in religious beliefs and practices from an evolutionary perspective on human psychology. The chapters, written by renowned experts on human behavior and religion, explore a number of subtopics within one of three themes: (1) the psychological mechanisms of religion, (2) evolutionary perspectives on the functionality of religion, and (3) evolutionary perspectives on religion and group living. This handbook unites the theoretical and empirical work of leading scholars in the evolutionary, cognitive, and anthropological sciences to produce an extensive and authoritative review of this literature. Its interdisciplinary approach makes it an important resource for a broad spectrum of researchers, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates who are interested in studying the factors and mechanisms that underlie and/or affect religious beliefs and behaviors.