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BY-NC-ND 3.0 license Open Access Published by De Gruyter Open Access April 25, 2016

A ‘No’ at the Core of Life

Doing Transreligious Theology with William James

  • Jonathan Weidenbaum
From the journal Open Theology

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to unpack the relevance of William James for the project of a transreligious theology. While the resources of reason and spiritual experience have long been employed to arbitrate both within and between different spiritual traditions, I argue that James offers a third principle: the encouragement of the morally active life, along with a corresponding depiction of the universe in which our efforts may contribute to the nature of things.



References

James, William. Essays in Radical Empiricism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Search in Google Scholar

James, William. A Pluralistic Universe. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Search in Google Scholar

James, William. Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975. Search in Google Scholar

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Mentor Books, 1958. Search in Google Scholar

James, William. The Will To Believe and other essays in popular philosophy. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1956. Search in Google Scholar

Kazashi, Nobuo. “From James to Nishida: Metamorphoses of the Philosophy of ‘Pure Experience’ in Modern Japanese Thought.” Prepared for the meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP), 2011. Search in Google Scholar

Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York: Schocken Books, 1946. Search in Google Scholar

Truman, Sarah E. Searching for Guan Yin. Buffalo: White Pine Press, 2011. Search in Google Scholar

Received: 2016-1-20
Accepted: 2016-3-21
Published Online: 2016-4-25

©2016 Jonathan Weidenbaum

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

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