Sunday 7 August 2016

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 20th 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

1 comment:

  1. It seems I'll need a steamer trunk on wheels for the next leg of my faith journey! Thanks very much for this -- it's tremendously helpful.

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