Faith Journey (theological and philosophical companions)

Here’s a snapshot of some reading that I’ve resonated with over the past few years, part of my winding path of faith and thought.

Radical, progressive or disaffected Christian scholars and authors, many of whom have abandoned traditional dogma altogether:

Richard Holloway

   Doubts and Loves: what is left of Christianity

   Godless Morality: keeping religion out of ethics

Don Cupitt 

   Taking Leave of God

   Emptiness & Brightness

   The Way to Happiness: a theory of religion

Lloyd Geering 

   Re-imagining God: the faith journey of a modern heretic

   Christianity without God

   Tomorrow’s God: how we create our worlds

Thom Stark

    The Human Faces of God: what Scripture reveals when it gets God wrong, and why inerrancy tries to hide     it

John Spong

   Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism

Harvey Cox

   The Future of Faith

John McQuiston 

   Christianity without Superstition

Critical biblical scholars, some who have remained in the church while others have left:

Dale Allison Jr

   The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus   

   Jesus of Nazareth: millenarian prophet

   Constructing Jesus: meaning, imagination, and history

   Resurrecting Jesus: the earliest Christian tradition and its interpreters

Marcus Borg 

   Putting Away Childish Things: a tale of modern faith

   The First Christmas; The Meaning of Jesus: two visions (together with N.T.Wright)

   The Heart of Christianity: rediscovering a life of faith

   Jesus: uncovering the life, teachings, and relevance of a religious revolutionary

Bart Ehrman

   How Jesus Became God: the exaltation of a Jewish preacher from Galilee

   Jesus: apocalyptic prophet of the new millennium

   Did Jesus Exist? The historical argument for Jesus of Nazareth

   Forged: writing in the name of God-why the bible’s authors are not who we think they are

Peter Enns

   The Evolution of Adam: what the bible does and doesn’t say about human origins

   The Bible Tells Me So: why defending Scripture has made us unable to read it

Contemporary 20^th century theologians:

Paul Tillich 

   Systematic Theology, Vols. 1-3

   Dynamics of Faith

John Macquarrie 

   Principles of Christian Theology

Maurice Wiles 

   Faith and the Mystery of God

   A Shared Search: doing theology with one’s friends

Garrett Green 

   Theology, Hermeneutics and Imagination

   Imagining God: theology and the religious imagination

Roger Haight 

   Dynamics of Theology

   The Future of Christology

   Jesus: symbol of God)

Ted Peters 

   God: the world’s future

Scholars and philosophers of religion:

Wilfred Cantwell Smith 

   What is Scripture? A comparative approach

   Towards a World Theology; Faith and Belief

John Hick 

   The Fifth Dimension: an exploration of the spiritual realm

   The Metaphor of God incarnate: Christology in a pluralistic age

Karen Armstrong 

   The Case for God

   A History of God

Loyal Rue 

   Religion is Not about God: how spiritual traditions nurture biological nature and what to expect when they      fail

   Nature is Enough: religious naturalism and the meaning of life

   Everybody’s Story: wising up to the story of evolution

Robert Bellah

   Religion in Human Evolution: from the Paleolithic to the axial age

Daphne Hampson 

   After Christianity
Terry Eagleton
   Culture and the Death of God
   Hope without Optimism

Ex-clergy:

John Loftus 
   Why I Became an Atheist: a former preacher rejects Christianity
   The Christian Delusion: why faith fails

Kenneth W. Daniels
   Why I Believed: reflections of a former missionary

Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola 
   Caught in the Pulpit: leaving belief behind

Atheists – some popular or notorious, others thoughtful and generous:

Friedrich Nietzsche 

   Human, All Too Human

Robert Price 

   The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man

   The Reason Driven Life

Walter Kaufmann 

   The Faith of a Heretic

   Critique of Religion and Philosophy

Andre Comte-Sponville 

   The Book of Atheist Spirituality

   A Little Treatise on the Great Virtues

Thomas Nagel 

   Mind & Cosmos: why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false

Eric Maisel 

   The Atheist’s Way: living well without gods

And of course, many works by Ricoeur and about Ricoeur, of which I’ll only mention a few:

Paul Ricoeur 

   The Symbolism of Evil

   The Conflict of Interpretations

   Freud & Philosophy: an essay on interpretation

   From Text to Action

   Time and Narrative, Vol.1-3

   Oneself as Another

   Interpretation Theory: discourse and the surplus of meaning

   Figuring the Sacred: religion, narrative and the imagination)

Dan Stivers 

   Theology after Ricoeur: new directions in hermeneutical theology

   Ricoeur and Theology

Richard Kearney 

   Anatheism: returning to God after God

Kevin J. Vanhoozer 

   Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: a study in hermeneutics and theology