William Greenway: Reasonable Faith for a Post-Secular Age

Dr. William Greenway returns to the podcast to talk about his most recent book, Reasonable Faith for a Post-Secular Age: Open Christian Spirituality and Ethics. Bill is Professor of Philosophical Theology at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. I absolutely loved the book and had a complete blast in this conversation. If you missed it you will want to go back and check out his first visit to the podcast on The Challenge of Evil.

About the book… Our global community desperately needs an overt awakening to an age of reason and faith. Reasonable Faith for a Post-Secular Age meets this need by interpreting faith not in terms of belief in propositions but in terms of living surrender to having been seized by agape for every Face, including one’s own. Virtually all faith traditions, from Buddhism to Humanism to Wiccan, are rooted in agape and therefore share considerable spiritual and ethical common ground (a truth long veiled). In contrast to ethically feckless secular rationality—over which a devastating, global social Darwinism currently runs roughshod—faith qua living surrender to agape grounds moral realism, awakens us to love for all creatures, and inspires struggles for justice. Inspired by the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and Christian spirituality, Greenway engages, on the one hand, intellectuals like Stanley Hauerwas, Richard Rorty, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jeffery Stout, Charles Taylor, and Bernard Williams, and, on the other, contemporary debates over consciousness, free will, evil, and metaethics. He details the character of secular rationality’s devastating scission from moral reality and clarifies the promise of understanding faith and spirituality in terms of agape.

Books from Dr. Greenway

• A Reasonable Belief: Why God and Faith Make Sense
• The Challenge of Evil: Grace and the Problem of Suffering
• Reasonable Faith for a Post-Secular Age: Open Christian Spirituality and Ethics
• For the Love of All Creatures: The Story of Grace in Genesis
• Agape Ethics: Moral Realism and Love for All Life

 

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