Abstract
Although the philosophy of religion is finally on its way to becoming religiously diversified, such diversification is only half the battle: injustices of creed have been addressed while injustices of class remain. If philosophy of religion is to be the philosophy of all religion, not just the philosophy of theism or of literate elites, then philosophy of religion needs to pay attention to the religious reasons and ideas of all religions and all classes, and to pay attention to those reasons and ideas as they live in the lives of these individuals and communities. This is what I call philosophy of lived religion: the philosophical study of all acts of religious reason-giving, privileging contemporary, ordinary, and spoken acts of religious reason-giving over past, elite, and written ones. In this essay I sketch the concept of philosophy of lived religion, focusing on the basic questions that humans typically ask (what, who, when, where, how, why), and responding to anticipated questions and issues along the way.
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Notes
- 1.
There are currently two components to The Comparison Project’s programming. Its core programing, which stretches back to the fall of 2012, consists of a biennial series of scholar lectures, practitioner dialogues, and comparative panels, together which address a core set of topics and problematics in the philosophy of religion. Our scholar lectures are now published (as academic essays), along with comparative philosophical conclusions, through our book-series contract with the international publisher Springer. Our first volume, Ineffability: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion (Knepper and Kalmanson 2017), which is based on our 2013–15 lecture and dialogue series, was published in late 2017. In 2013 The Comparison Project began supplementing this core programming with an initiative in the “Religions of Des Moines.” Drake’s religion faculty teach a series of Religions of Des Moines courses, each of which introduces students to a religious tradition as it is practiced locally in some community. Students not only attend services at the community but also facilitate the creation of digital stories by and about members of the community. These stories are housed on The Comparison Project website, along with guides to the religious communities of Des Moines. We have also recently published a student-written, photo-illustrated book entitled A Spectrum of Faith: Religions of the World in the Heartland of America (2017), and we have begun a monthly open-houses series at local places of worship as well as an annual interfaith camp for local high-school students.
- 2.
I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the five-year (2015–19), American Academy of Religion seminar that Gereon Kopf and I are directing: Global-Critical Philosophy of Religion. The seminar is devoted to developing and writing an undergraduate textbook in globally diverse and critically informed philosophy of religion.
- 3.
- 4.
I did turn up a short essay by Ivan Strenski entitled “Philosophy of (Lived) Religion” (Strenski 2012), which was originally delivered as part of a panel session on “Possible Futures for Philosophy of Religion” at the 2010 meeting of the International Association for the History of Religion (and later published in a special edition of Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses). Strenski argues that whereas the term philosophy should retain its dominant meaning of analysis (as in analytic philosophy of religion), the term religion should be widened to include more than just the cognitive/intellectual aspects of religion. In the way of examples, Strenski lists concepts such as affiliation, cultures and communities, materiality, practices, emotional life, and bodies. For Strenski, philosophy of (lived) religion involves critical analysis of such second-order concepts and the questions that attend them. As will become clearer below, this is not what I have in mind by philosophy of lived religion. Note that Roberts 2013 also devotes considerable attention to the notion of lived religion, but his philosophy of religion is more of a lived philosophy of religion than a philosophy of lived religion, at least I develop the notion of philosophy of lived religion here. For a little more on this distinction, see Sect. 5.6.
- 5.
This is not to say that there is no value in generalities. As an undergraduate professor of religion, I certainly appreciate their utility. And as a scholar of religion, I am particularly interested in understanding how traditions are formed and sustained, as well they inform individuals and get modified by them.
- 6.
I try to avoid entanglement in the semantic thickets of “religion,” since I do not believe it matters much for philosophy of religion (as I understand it) how some instance of reason-giving gets labeled. What matters is that there are instances of reason-giving regarding similar topics in different cultural-historical forms. True, I believe that these topics are religious or quasi-religious ones, concerning those practices and beliefs that structure the orientation of some community around its ultimate problems and solutions, paths and destinations, realities and truths. (Please allow the full semantic resonances of ultimate to ring out, not just the Tillichian ones.) But it is these topics (qua comparative categories), not “religion,” about which the philosopher of religion needs to be most critically mindful. Thus, I am inclined to think that philosophers of religion might largely dispense with the category of religion at the beginning of their inquiry. For more on this see chap. 4 of Knepper (2013) as well as my forthcoming essay (Knepper forthcoming) “Why Philosophers of Religion Don’t Need ‘Religion.’”
- 7.
- 8.
Just about any introductory textbook in the philosophy of religion will show just this. I myself have used Curd and Cover’s Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues (1998).
- 9.
I suppose it is also possible for the philosopher of religion to read the transcriptions of observations and interviews that were conducted elsewhere in space or time. There is, however, a degree of connection that is lost; moreover, in such cases the philosopher of religion loses the opportunity to encounter and be responsive to religious reason-giving in her local community. For more on this, see Sect. 5.5 below.
- 10.
See especially Knepper (2013). Note that I now think of explanation as a step unto its own rather than just a facet of comparison. Whereas the goal of comparison is that of identifying important and interesting similarities and differences, explanation seeks to give reasons for these similarities and differences.
- 11.
In principle, I am therefore in agreement with the Comparative Religious Ideas Project’s effort to utilize “vague” categories in which different and even contradictory objects can be compared without any appearing inferior or bizarre; see Neville and Wildman’s essays “On Comparing Religious Ideas” in The Human Condition (2001a) and Ultimate Realities (2001b). Ideally, these categories will come from discourses either that are not proprietary to any particular religious tradition or that have some measure of quasi-universality. I myself have been intrigued with looking to the fields of metaphor theory or semantic universals for such categories. For the former, see Lakoff and Johnson (1980 and 1999), as well as my forthcoming “Philosophy of Religion as Journey: How Metaphor Theory Can Reshape Global-Critical Philosophy of Religion.” For the latter see, Paden (2001 and 2006), as well as Chap. 5 of my own The Ends of Philosophy of Religion (2013).
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Knepper, T.D. (2021). Philosophy of Lived Religion: The Next Revolution?. In: Eckel, M.D., Speight, C.A., DuJardin, T. (eds) The Future of the Philosophy of Religion. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44606-2_5
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