Prior to his death in 2007, the self-described secular philosopher Richard Rorty began to modify his previous position concerning religion. Moving from "atheism" to "anti-clericalism" Rorty challenges the metaphysical assumptions that lend justification to abuses of power in the name of religion. Instead of dismissing and ignoring Rorty's challenge, the essays in this volume seek to enter into meaningful conversation with Rorty's thought and engage his criticisms in a constructive and serious way. In so doing, one finds promising nuggets within Rorty's thought for addressing particular questions within Christianity. The essays in this volume offer charitable yet fully confessional engagements with an impressive secular thinker.
Jacob L. Goodson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas.
Brad Elliott Stone is Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean in the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California.
Stanley Hauerwas is professor emeritus of ethics at Duke University where he held the Gilbert T. Rowe chair for more than twenty years. Among his numerous publications are Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified (1998) and Living Gently in a Violent World, with Jean Vanier (2008). His latest publication is Fully Alive: The Apocalyptic Humanism of Karl Barth (University of Virginia Press, 2023).
Charles Marsh is the author of
Evangelical Anxiety: A Memoir (2022) and
Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Promise of His Theology and
Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which won the 2015
Christianity Today Book Award in History/Biography and was shortlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
. Marsh teaches in the department of religious studies at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.