Religion within the Limits of History Alone, livre ebook

Among the greatest challenges facing religious thinkers today is that created by historicism, the notion that human beings and their myriad understandings of reality are utterly historical, conditioned by contingent circumstances and tied to particular contexts. In this book, Demian Wheeler confronts the historicist challenge by delineating and defending a particular trajectory of historicist thought known as pragmatic historicism. Rooted in the German Enlightenment and fully developed within the early Chicago school of theology, pragmatic historicism is a predominantly American tradition that was philosophically nurtured by classical pragmatism and its intellectual siblings, naturalism and radical empiricism. Religion within the Limits of History Alone not only undertakes a detailed genealogy of this pragmatic historicist lineage but also sets forth a constructive program for contemporary theology by charting a path for its future development. Wheeler shows that pragmatic historicism is an underdeveloped resource for contemporary theology since it offers a model for normative religious thought that is theologically compelling yet wholly nonsupernaturalistic, deeply pluralistic, unflinchingly liberal, and radically historicist.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. What Is Historicism? A Multileveled Definition
2. Historical Particularity and the Problem of Insularity: Pragmatic Historicism as a Bigger Historicism
3. Particularist Mutualism: Toward a Pragmatic Historicist Theology of Religions
4. After Incommensurability: Pragmatic Historicism as an Impetus for Meaningful Interreligious Engagement
5. Beyond Amnesia and Nostalgia: Pragmatic Historicism and the Authority of the Past
6. Truth Reconsidered: Building Blocks of a Paleopragmatic Historicism
7. Theological Truth Reconsidered: Four Traits of a Paleopragmatic Historicist Theology
8. Sacred Conventions, Sacred Nature: Toward a Pragmatic Historicist Theology of the Divine
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index