Religion and the Human Future: An Essay on Theological Humanism

Ours is a time when cultures and religions creatively interact but also often collide, and human power increasingly endangers forms of life even while great technological advances enable us to better relieve suffering and want. It is a time of great uncertainty, unrest, but also creativity, which reveals a profound quest to understand the meaning and responsibility of our shared and yet divided humanity. It is this religious quest for humanity that authors David E. Klemm and William Schweiker address in this Blackwell Manifesto.

The authors outline a vision called theological humanism based on the idea that neither God′s will nor human flourishing alone provide an adequate measure and orientation for human life. The task of human life is responsibility for the integrity of life, the measure of human action. Yet more than that, the idea of theological humanism articulates a profound and ancient insight too often lost in the current debate between theologians and humanists – that human beings are mixed creatures striving for wholeness and integrity.

This powerful manifesto sets forth a dynamic and robust vision of human life beyond the divisions that haunt the humanities, social sciences, theology, and religious studies. It announces a way of thinking about and living out the quest for our humanity and thus the task of religion and the human future.

Acknowledgments.

Introduction.

Part I The Shape of Theological Humanism.

1. Ideas and Challenges.

2. The Humanist Imagination.

3. Thinking of God.

4. The Logic of Christian Humanism.

5. On the Integrity of Life.

Part II The Task of Theological Humanism.

6. Our Endangered Garden.

7. A School for Conscience.

8. Masks of Mind.

9. Religion and Spiritual Integrity.

10. Living Theological Humanism.

Notes.

Index

David E. Klemm is a Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at The University of Iowa. He is the author of a number of books, including Hermeneutical Inquiry, volumes I and II (1986), The Hermeneutical Theory of Paul Ricoeur: A Constructive Analysis (1983), and is co–editor of Figuring the Self: Subject, Absolute, and Others in Classical German Philosophy (1997), and Meanings in Texts and Actions: Questioning Paul Ricoeur (1993).

William Schweiker is Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of Theological Ethics at the University of Chicago and Director of the Martin Marty Center. He is the author of numerous books, articles and essays, including Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics: In the Time of Many Worlds, and editor of The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics (both Wiley–Blackwell, 2004).

" Religion and the Human Future provides an excellent, well thought–out and well documented analysis of the current dilemma facing religions and religious people: the human dangers and inadequacies of hypertheism, with its exaggerated response to the challenge of modernity and over humanization, with its overly unreflective veneration for modernity." ( Ethical Perspectives, July 2010)

"This text sounds a clarion call to change the debate about the role of religion in human life. ... With limited endnotes and an engaging style, this carefully argued text mostly succeeds in its attempt to be accessible to a wider audience that could include upperlevel undergraduates." ( Religious Studies Review, September 2009)