TTEASK024U Religion in Crisis: Philosophy of Religion After the Death of God

In this course, we explore the evolution of religious thinking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, much of which was a response to the Enlightenment demand that religion justify itself in terms of rationality. Our goal is to gain a critical appreciation of the development of religious thought based on a careful study of a handful of highly influential texts by authors such as Kant, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, James, Bultmann, Jaspers, and Ricoeur.  

Questions like these are central: In a contemporary world in which religious myths can no longer pretend to be history or natural scientific explanation, how can religious narrative, doctrine, and experience be understood? How can the modern religious attitude be described? How can religious narratives play an existentially significant role once they have been abandoned as historically true?