Abstract
I USED TO BE A PRIEST. I trained for three years at an Anglican theological college. It was a dysfunctional institution that inspired and dismayed in turn. We excused it by saying that at least it was never lukewarm. Then, I worked as a clergyman in a high Church of England parish in the North East of England. It was a role with a clear sense of purpose being situated in a working-class community where, if much else had departed, the Church remained.
Our doubt is our passion.
Henry James
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Further Reading and References
Friedrich Schleiermacher discusses his religious sensibility in On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. Paul Tillich presents his ontology in Volume I, Part II of his Systematic Theology. Accessible sermons are also available in collections.
Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God comes in The Gay Science, Book 3, 125, translated by Walter Kaufman and published by Vintage Books (1974).
True Religion, by Graham Ward, published by Blackwell (2003), examines why the emergence of the scientific worldview is not the end of religion but the remaking of it.
Karen Armstrong discusses the birth of American fundamentalism and figures like A. C. Dixon in The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, published by Harper Collins (2000), see page 178–9.
T. H. Huxley’s essay ‘Agnosticism’ can be found in the misleadingly entitled Atheism: a Reader, edited by S. T. Joshi, published by Prometheus Books (2000), see page 33 for the quote.
God’s Funeral, by A. N. Wilson, published by Abacus (1999), sets Victorian agnosticism in a wider historical context.
Scholarly studies on Victorian agnosticism include:
The Unbelievers: English Agnostic Thought, by A. O. J. Cockshutt (Collins: 1964) — a good survey of players.
The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge, by Bernard Lightman (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) — good on agnosticism’s relationship to the philosophy of Kant and why Victorian agnosticism as a movement died.
Søren Kierekegaard’s Fear and Trembling is a Penguin Classic, translated by Alastair Hannay (1985): see page 62 for the quote.
All the quotes from Plato are taken from Plato Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, published by Hackett Publishing Company (1997). The quote from the Phaedrus is at 278d.
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© 2007 Mark Vernon
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Vernon, M. (2007). Introduction. In: After Atheism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-28903-1_1
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