Language Truth and Religious Belief

Why do many people think religion is subjective? Or symbolic? Or non-rational? This book brings together eighteen important twentieth-century essaus on these questions by authors ranging from Ludwig Wittgenstein to Richard Rorty and Clifford Geertz. The editors show that such questions are both quite modern and powerfully influential in our Western thinking about religious belief. Moreover they lead directly into the three most popular theories that attempt to make sense of religion: positivism functionalism and relativism. Selecting essays that represent each of these three theoretical positions Frankenberry and Penner trace their incoherence and argue for a new method and theory for understanding religious beliefs.