faith and place an essay in embodied religious epistemology jun 2009

[...]... Secular Analogues for Religious Knowledge 2 Friendship and Relationship to Place 3 The Supra-individuality of God and Place 4 The Grounding of Human Agency and Identity in God and Place 5 Knowledge of Place 6 Pilgrimage and the DiVerentiated Religious SigniWcance of Space 7 The Religious SigniWcance of Some Built and Natural Environments 8 Knowledge of Place and the Aesthetic Dimension of Religious. .. Hedley’s instructive defence of a contemporary form of Christian Platonism in Living Forms of the Imagination (London, 2008) 11 Peter Winch, ‘Meaning and Religious Language’ in Stuart Brown, ed., Reason and Religion (Ithaca, NY, 1977), pp 207 8 10 Faith and Place a change in the practice to count as a consequence, rather than simply an ‘aspect’, of a change in belief.12 This issue is connected with another... relevant to the epistemology of religious belief, and his related suggestion that religious belief can be grounded in the recognition of moral and aesthetic ‘traces’ of God, rather than in some supra sensory experience: The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge, 2005), Chapter 7 For a further perspective which also stands in distinction from Alstonian and Swinburnean kinds... earlier work In God and Goodness: A Natural Theological Perspective,16 I tried to show how the argument from design can be rooted in a distinctive evaluative stance towards the world, and how it can be connected 15 Kallistos Ware, ‘God Immanent yet Transcendent: The Divine Energies accord ing to Saint Gregory Palamas’, in P Clayton and A Peacocke, eds., In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic... the 15 January, 2007, at the age of 44 Edmund was a close friend of mine of many years’ standing, and when I learnt of his illness and impending death I found myself thinking over the things we had said and done together As I did so, I came to see that, at root, our friendship consisted in a shared sensibility for certain places I also realized that my interest in the religious signiWcance of place must... derive in large part from our shared encounter with certain places, especially in the early years of our friendship Edmund was later to become a poet, and I like to think that the sensitivity for particular places which is displayed in his writings also has its origins, in some degree, in those times So this 17 Emotional Experience and Religious Understanding: Integrating Perception, Conception and Feeling... us, very often anyway, that we should be physically alongside the remains of the dead person – and there is more to standing in this relationship than simply thinking certain thoughts or undergoing certain experiences So in this connection, and in other, more explicitly religious contexts, I shall argue, location matters independently of its implications for our mental life Another kind of account... of Place, and the Aesthetic Dimension of Religious Understanding’, The Australian Ejournal of Theology 11 (2008), http://www.acu.edu.au/faculties-schools/schools/ theology/ejournal ‘Knowledge of God, Knowledge of Place, and the Method and Practice of the Philosophy of Religion’, in D Cheetham and R King, eds., Contemporary Practice and Methods in the Philosophy of Religion: New Essays (London: Continuum,... OF PLACE For this purpose, I am going to rely upon another secular analogy – by thinking of knowledge of God as analogous to knowledge of place Knowledge of place consists, at least in part, in an embodied, practical and, very often, theoretically inarticulate responsiveness to a given region of space So to this extent, knowledge of place will of course form a more promising starting point for an account... of life to come in and through bodily sensations In each of these areas, it was the body as a sensing and sensory entity that mattered (Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination, 2006, p 223) 1 The DiVerentiated Religious SigniWcance of Space and Some Secular Analogues for Religious Knowledge T HE D I FFEREN TIATED RELIG IOUS SIGNIFICANCE OF SPAC E . continued support – especially Mum and Dad, Rob and Sarah, Gerard and Vania, Mark and Sue, together with John and Margaret and the Australian wing of the family. Acknowledgements ix This page intentionally. Supra-individuality of God and Place 44 4. The Grounding of Human Agency and Identity in God and Place 71 5. Knowledge of Place 101 6. Pilgrimage and the DiVerentiated Religious SigniWcance of. often anyway, that we should be physically alongside the remains of the dead person – and there is more to standing in this relationship than simply thinking certain thoughts or undergoing certain