Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
Summary
Not the beginning or the end of faith, or hope, or charity. Not the beginning or the end of prayer or proclamation, of the duty laid upon all humankind to work for peace, and justice, and the integrity of God's creation. But the view that ‘religion’ is the name of one particular district which we may inhabit if we feel so inclined, a region of diminishing plausibility and significance, a territory quite distinct from those we know as ‘politics’ and ‘art’, as ‘science’ and ‘law’ and ‘economies’; this view of things, peculiar to modern Western culture, had a beginning, in the seventeenth century, and (if ‘post-modern’ means anything at all) is now coming to an end.
The essays and lectures collected here explore this suggestion and its implications in four main directions. Whereas, however, the chapters in Part Two consider, in broad and general terms, questions concerning the relations between theology and the sciences (Chapters 4, 5, 6), the secularity of modern Western culture (Chapters 7, 8, 9, 10) and issues of hope or eschatology (Chapters 11, 12, 13, 14), Part One, consisting of the Teape Lectures that I gave in India in 1994, has a somewhat more specific focus, arising from the conditions of that lectureship.That modern Western concepts of ‘religion’ are ill fitted to describe the traditions of the ‘East’ – of India, China, and Japan – is something of a commonplace by now.
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- Information
- The Beginning and the End of 'Religion' , pp. ix - xPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996