Creative Faith: Religion as a Way of Worldmaking

At some point very early on in its development, Christianity split between two different pathways: one path stayed with the teaching of Jesus and the primacy of ethics, the other started with the return of Jesus and, therefore, with supernatural belief. Today, ethics has been largely sidelined, viewed as secondary or subservient to belief. Don Cupitt argues that the time has come to give ethics priority in defining and shaping religious life. As he puts it, "No longer should we aim to conserve the self, preparing for eternity: we must simply expend it, by living generously."

Don Cupitt is the former Dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, UK. Ordained in the Church of England in 1959, from 1962 to 1965 he was Vice-Principal of Westcott House, an Anglican theological college in Cambridge, and became Dean of Emmanuel College in 1966. From 1968 to 1996 he also lectured in the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity. He is best known as a teacher and writer. A frequent broadcaster, mainly for the BBC, he has made three TV Series, one of which, The Sea of Faith (1984), also gave rise to a book and to an international network of radical Christians which is still growing. In his writing, and in the various societies he has tried to foster, Don Cupitt attempts to develop new thinking for a new epoch: a new philosophy, a new ethics and a new religious thought.