This is a paper I delivered at the 12th Annual Philosophy Born of Struggle Conference. It is a paper directed at an audience of professional philosophers. The paper above, Philosophers, Religion and the Dogs of Reason, is a commentary on and clarification of what I was attempting to do in this presentation.
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This essay, written in April of 2005, is a response to a controversy among fellow Unitarian Universalists concerning the religious vocabulary to be used to capture the essence of the spiritual and religious life. However, it is also an explication of the meaning of faith and the place of religion in the modern world.
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This essay was derived from my second Master's thesis, and still holds up pretty well as an exposition of a tenable cosmopolitanism in a world of both growing interdependence and increasing nationalism, tribalism and jingoism. The focus on virtue ethics, sketched, links up with calls by others for the cultivation of the necessary contextual virtues that can help propel us toward the Beloved Community. The essay anticipates the recent work of philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, in his The Ethics of Identity (Princeton University Press, 2005).
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